(See prior essay- Jack Benny for President.)
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Let’s pivot. Eisenhower has threatened to stay in office, using allies in the military. Nixon seems to be supportive. Then there is a public revolt and they plummet in the poles. Through odd events the party nominates TS Eliot, Nixon remains the Veep for a third term, and Republicans win the 1960 election.
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That’s wonderful — it has the makings of a darkly comic alternate-history novel in the style of Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Here’s a treatment-length sketch of the world, tone, and logic of it:
Title: “The Waste Land, 1960”
Setting: United States, late 1959—an anxious, tea-colored version of history. Eisenhower, now in his third term, claims that only a “continuity of command” can preserve freedom in the atomic age. The Twenty-Second Amendment is treated as a suggestion. The Pentagon quietly approves “Operation Steady Hand,” a plan to ensure the President’s “temporary continuation” in the event of “civil misunderstanding.”
Nixon, Vice President and ever the loyal lieutenant, calls the move “a prophylactic against chaos.” Behind the scenes he sees himself as Ike’s heir and enforcer—a man destined to keep order among trembling civilians.
The Crisis
The press catches wind of the coup-that-isn’t-a-coup. University students march with banners reading NO THIRD TERM FOR GOD, and a young reporter from The Washington Post wins a Pulitzer for describing the President’s smile as “the most reassuring grimace in history.”
When tanks roll through Detroit “for readiness exercises,” the approval ratings collapse. The Republican Party fractures overnight: the “Steady Hands,” loyal to Eisenhower, and the “Restorationists,” desperate to prove that they still believe in elections.
The Convention of Confusion
The 1960 Republican Convention in Chicago is chaos. Eisenhower refuses to appear, claiming a golf injury. Nixon commands the floor until, one night, in a haze of cigar smoke and bourbon, the poet T.S. Eliot—now 71, pale and tweedy, visiting from London for a lecture series—delivers an impromptu after-dinner address about “restoring measure to a metrically unsound republic.”
Delegates, exhausted and half-mad, are entranced. His speech—half theology, half verse—ends with:
“This is the way the world reforms, not with a bang, but with a ballot.”
Within twenty-four hours, through a combination of irony, procedural errors, and divine boredom, Eliot is nominated.
Campaign of the Hollow Men
Eliot runs a campaign unlike any other. His slogans—“Shantih for America” and “Let us go then, you and I, to the polls”—baffle consultants but enchant the youth. He insists that all speeches be written in blank verse. Debates become salons; rallies resemble revivals. Nixon, furious, becomes his running mate only after being promised “a footnote.”
When asked about domestic policy, Eliot replies, “There will be time, there will be time.” On foreign policy: “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons, and I find Moscow overrated.”
The press dubs him “The Reluctant Modernist.” He tours the country reading fragments of Four Quartets over the national anthem.
Election Day, 1960
Against every prediction, the Eliot-Nixon ticket narrowly defeats the fractured Democrats. Historians later call it the triumph of fatigue. America, sick of generals and slogans, chose a poet who promised nothing except “a pattern amid dissonance.”
The Eliot Administration (1961-63)
Eliot governs like a metaphysical librarian. Cabinet meetings open with readings from Ecclesiastes. Federal buildings are renamed after saints and metaphors. The State of the Union becomes a 45-minute poem broadcast with subtitles.
Foreign leaders, bewildered, admit he’s impossible to dislike—mainly because they can’t follow what he’s saying. The CIA, rebranded “The Secret Chorus,” files all operations under the code name Gerontion.
Nixon resigns in frustration, publishing a bitter memoir titled The Hollow Vice President.
Eliot, serene amid the madness, wins the Nobel Peace Prize “for convincing two nations to pause for reflection.”
Coda
He dies quietly in office in 1963. His last words, recorded by a White House stenographer:
“For history is a pattern / Of timeless moments. Now—please—turn off the tape.”
America drapes itself in black and gray. College students quote him on picket signs; soldiers recite Prufrock in the jungles of Vietnam. The nation remains divided on whether he saved democracy or merely annotated its decline.
Would you like me to continue this as a mock documentary transcript—interviews with “witnesses” looking back on “The Eliot Presidency” from the 1980s (think Ken Burns meets Dr. Strangelove)?
Y
Excerpt from the PBS Documentary Series: The Eliot Presidency (1961–1963)
Episode 3 — “Measured Out in Coffee Spoons”
Aired November 1987
[Opening narration — over black-and-white footage of Washington in drizzle]
Narrator (David McCullough-type voice):
“He was the poet who never sought power, and the Vice President who couldn’t stop auditioning for it.
Between them, they turned America into a stanza — irregular, rhymed in parts, and somehow still standing.”
Cue montage: the Capitol dome under gray skies, Eliot’s frail hand signing a bill with a fountain pen, Nixon fuming in the background, a jazz version of Ash Wednesday playing faintly.
Interview: Mary Margaret O’Brien — Former White House Secretary
O’Brien:
“He hated memos. Said they broke the rhythm of governance. We had to submit everything in couplets.
I once sent him a report on agriculture subsidies that began, ‘The corn is high, the farmers sigh,’ and he approved $200 million in relief before lunch.”
Interview: Gen. Omar Torrington (Ret.) — Joint Chiefs Liaison
Torrington:
“We’d bring him maps of Cuba, and he’d just stare at them like they were sonnets.
He’d ask, ‘Is this line enjambed?’
I had to look it up. Turns out it wasn’t. So he ordered us not to invade.”
Cut to narrator over archival clip of Eliot in his tweed suit, reading from Four Quartets at the United Nations.
Narrator:
“Historians now agree: what became known as The Pause Doctrine averted nuclear war.
When Kennedy’s advisors were drafting Operation Zapata, Eliot simply said, ‘In my beginning is my end,’ and walked out of the room.”
Interview: Richard Nixon — 1984, from his San Clemente home
Nixon (grim smile):
“He never trusted me. Said I reminded him of an unresolved rhyme.
We’d argue about everything — foreign aid, the length of lines, who got the first parking space.
I told him, ‘Mr. President, poetry doesn’t win elections.’
He said, ‘But it outlasts them.’
I’ll admit — that shut me up for a moment.”
Narrator:
“When the unemployment rate rose in 1962, Eliot responded not with stimulus but with a reading of The Waste Land televised in prime time.
Ratings were low, but so was inflation.”
Cut to silent film of Eliot sitting beside a vase of lilies. Caption: ‘Address to the Nation on the State of Despair’.
Interview: Sylvia Caldwell — Poet Laureate Emerita
Caldwell:
“He created the Federal Bureau of Metaphor. It was supposed to clarify government language.
Instead, it rewrote the tax code in trochaic tetrameter.
When accountants protested, he said, ‘Humor them, for they toil in prose.’”
Narrator:
“Public affection for the President was genuine, if baffled.
Housewives knitted samplers reading Shantih, Y’all.
High-schoolers spray-painted ‘LET US GO THEN’ on overpasses.”
Interview: Former First Lady Valerie Eliot (archival audio, 1971)
Mrs. Eliot:
“Tom was happiest when the government was quiet. He said the nation needed silence more than slogans.
After Cabinet meetings, he’d go upstairs and read The Book of Common Prayer.
He once told me, ‘If I can make bureaucracy contemplative, perhaps it will sin less.’”
Narrator:
“The experiment ended on January 4th, 1963, when President Eliot passed away in his sleep, mid-revision of the Interstate Highway Beautification Act — in which every overpass was to bear a single meaningful word.”
Footage of the funeral: lines of mourners, soft bells, a recording of Eliot’s own voice reading Little Gidding.
Narrator (closing):
“In the years since, scholars have argued whether Eliot saved democracy or merely translated it into another language.
But perhaps his legacy is simpler — that for a brief, improbable moment, America learned to listen to its own silence.”
Fade to black.
Title card: ‘Next Week on The Eliot Presidency: Vice President Nixon and the Rise of the Hollow Campaign, 1964–1968.’
Would you like me to write that next episode summary — Nixon’s grim, post-poetic campaign to “Make America Rhyme Again”?
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Eliot's diaries from 1960-1963 are found and published. Discuss, with extracts.
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“The Eliot Diaries, 1960–1963” (edited by Valerie Eliot and Lionel Trilling, Faber & Faber, 1989)
Reviewed in The Atlantic, July 1989 issue
By Charles Simic
When The Eliot Diaries surfaced in 1989—discovered, according to the editors, “in a locked drawer of a mahogany bureau mislabeled ‘Misc. Receipts and the Holy Ghost’”—they did more than illuminate the strangest presidency in American history. They revealed a mind struggling to reconcile faith, art, and governance, all while the nuclear age hummed impatiently beyond the window of the Oval Office.
Eliot’s presidency had long been treated as a historical joke that somehow became policy. The diaries, written in the same measured, self-effacing prose as Four Quartets, show us that he took the role with tragic seriousness—and a poet’s sense of futility.
I. “January 1961 — Inauguration Morning”
“The oath is a kind of stanza, each clause a perilous enjambment.
I repeat the words after Chief Justice Warren and feel them slide into meter.
They are not mine until I have rearranged them, yet I must not.
Power is the art of restraint, which is to say: revision.”
Here, the poet-president confronts the impossible: how to “speak prose in a world waiting for poetry.” The entry ends with a marginal note—perhaps written later that night:
“History demands a beginning; poets distrust them.”
II. “March 1961 — The First Budget”
“The Treasury speaks of deficits. I think of waste, land, and men.
One cannot balance numbers that were never in harmony.
Nixon insists upon a surplus of certainty; I prefer a deficit of noise.”
This entry, now widely quoted, shows Eliot’s dry disdain for politics-as-theater. In another passage, he writes:
“The Republic is an unrhymed poem with too many editors.”
Economists have tried for decades to derive meaning—or fiscal strategy—from these lines. The consensus: there wasn’t any.
III. “June 1962 — On the Cuban Crisis”
“They bring me maps of an island trembling with potential.
I stare at them until the room falls silent.
Silence, at times, is the only deterrent worth having.”
Historians credit this “strategic silence” with averting a confrontation that could have dwarfed the Bay of Pigs. Eliot, characteristically, refuses to take credit:
“The world mistook hesitation for wisdom, and I, too frail to argue, allowed it.”
IV. “September 1962 — A Conversation with Nixon”
“The Vice President accuses me of ambiguity.
He says, ‘A nation needs slogans, not metaphors.’
I reply, ‘Slogans are metaphors that have stopped breathing.’
He does not answer. I think I have lost him.”
Scholars point to this as the beginning of the rift that led to Nixon’s resignation the following spring. A penciled note in the margin reads simply, ‘He mistakes certainty for strength.’
V. “December 1962 — Nearing the End”
“My health declines. The physicians speak of the heart,
But they mean the nation. It beats too fast,
consumes its own attention.
I dream of Wastelands filled not with ruins,
but with committees.”
The final entry, dated January 3, 1963—one day before his death—is hauntingly brief:
“There will be time, there will be time —
But perhaps not for me.”
Afterword
Trilling’s introduction argues that the diaries reveal “a poet’s reluctant dialogue with the machinery of modern power.” Valerie Eliot’s annotations, gentler, remind us of the private man who read scripture aloud before Cabinet meetings and insisted on brewing tea for visiting ambassadors.
What emerges is not the portrait of a madman, nor of a saint, but of a man who governed as he wrote—by omission, cadence, and the slow accumulation of quiet.
The book closes with a small note, found folded between the pages of 1962:
“If governance is a poem, it will never scan.”
Would you like me to follow this with a London Review of Books–style essay—a wry academic piece arguing that The Eliot Diaries show the first true “postmodern presidency”?
END
