The Bald Truth

By Steve Rushin

If the 2008 presidential election comes down to a choice between Hillary Clinton and front runner Rudolph Giuliani, Americans will elect a woman before they will elect a bald man. The U.S. has had more than five bald Presidents, but Americans haven't voted one into office in 51 years, when Dwight Eisenhower won a second term over Adlai Stevenson--the second consecutive election in which two bald men went head to glorious head.

That was 1956, when 20th Century Fox released The King and I, starring Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. It was an annus mirabilis for hairless potentates but also the twilight of their brief golden age--the last time heads of state were not synonymous with heads of hair.

When President John F. Kennedy went hatless during his Inauguration speech in 1961, he committed in essence a double homicide: of the hat industry and of the prospect that any bald man would ever have to the nation's highest office.

Since Eisenhower left the White House, voters have carved out a Mount Brushmore of Presidents--Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton--with magnificent hair. What we need is a tonsorial memorial to those giants--Ike, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion--of the World War II era, that one brief and very shining moment in history when baldness was tantamount to greatness.

Today the only thing voters like less than a candidate who gets a $400 haircut is a candidate who doesn't require one at all. Whether or not they realize it, voters think of great leaders as people with haircuts, and really great leaders as people with haircuts named for them. George Clooney once wore a Caesar. It is unlikely that he will ever ask his stylist for a Stevenson.

Or a Giuliani. Indeed, the last time Giuliani was elected to anything (re-elected as mayor of New York City in 1997), he had a scalp full of hair (wink, wink), even if that comb-over was the biggest political cover-up since Watergate.

In the present presidential campaign, some of Giuliani's rivals have receded (John McCain), and some have even reseeded (Joe Biden, whose scalp is less spartan than it used to be), but none are nakedly, unabashedly bald. Not even Homer Simpson, who announced his candidacy to David Letterman and combs his pair of hairs to the right, a two-string comb-over that still leaves him two strings shy of a ukulele.

Hair is, quite literally, political cover. The emperor may have no clothes, but he damn sure better have a comb. Charles the Bald, the 17 century King of France and Holy Roman Emperor, was not bald but fully maned, to judge by the portraits and coins of the day. The nickname was evidently ironic, the way 300-lb. members of Hells Angels frequently answer to "Tiny."

I wish it weren't so. As a bald man, I long for a President who is, in the words of the English poet Matthew Arnold, "bald as the bare mountaintops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." This is the baldness of Sean Connery or Michael Jordan or Buddha.

But as a realist, I know I can never be President, will never be part of the American hairistocracy. The presidency is not one of those high-profile jobs in which you can sneak by with a paisley head scarf (think Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band) or a pompadour wig (think Steven Van Zandt of The Sopranos).

Balder men can be aldermen, even Governors and Senators. We seem to have a competitive advantage as late-night TV sidekicks (Paul Shaffer and Kevin Eubanks) and early-morning TV weathermen (Al Roker and Willard Scott).

But no bald man has been voted into the White House in 12 elections. (Gerald Ford doesn't count. And neither does Dick Cheney.) Before Ike, you have to go all the way back to the election of 1836 and Martin Van Buren. But his white sideburns were so overcompensating--two enormous parentheses bracketing the nonrestrictive clause of his face--that he is seldom thought of as bald.

The country's most prolifically failed presidential candidate, Harold Stassen, ran nine times, and in many of those elections he wore a toupee so alarming that the Washington Post thought it resembled a "sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze."

But Stassen knew that wearing a bronzed possum was safer than hitting the stump with a naked scalp. Why? For the same reason, perhaps, that bald men are icons of evil in the movies, from Lex Luthor to Dr. Evil to Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life. Sometime in our political history, baldness was downgraded from Churchillian to ... Dr. Phil-ian.

Hairless breeds never win the Westminster Dog Show. And they no longer win the dog-and-pony show that is a presidential election, no matter what surveys say about Giuliani as the Republican front runner. Forget the Roper polls. I trust the barber poles.