It’s a shame John Steinbeck didn’t live to see Saturday Night Live. The author of Of Mice and Men died in December 1968, six weeks after Richard Nixon was elected President; SNL debuted in 1975, fourteen months after Nixon resigned in disgrace. Much about Nixon’s America depressed Steinbeck, including Nixon’s party, but he kept his sense of humor and he understood the medium of television, Nixon’s undoing against Kennedy in 1960. If Steinbeck had lived longer he might have enjoyed SNL’s blend of comic relief and left-leaning satire, given his preference for politicians like Kennedy and Stevenson, the witty Democrat from Illinois defeated by Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Steinbeck critiqued Eisenhower’s thought (conventional), syntax (chaotic), and reading (cowboy fiction), so it’s easy to predict his reaction today to a worse-than-Eisenhower type like Donald Trump, or Rick Perry—brilliantly impersonated by Bill Hader, riffing on Of Mice and Men in this SNL sketch about the 2012 Republican candidate debate at which the man Trump made Secretary of Energy couldn’t remember the name of the federal department he now heads. If you need comic relief from Trump-induced depression, watch Bill Hader’s Rick Perry channel Lennie, with Mitt Romney as George at his side. Imagine John Steinbeck at your side and you’ll both die laughing.
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I think Adlai Stevenson was great but I admire an awful lot Eisenhower did. But there’s an Eisenhower story I love and is SNL worthy that proves too much power can go to one’s head. Eisenhower was a golfer and member of Augusta National where The Masters is played every April. On one particular hole – I think the first – a tree kept “getting in the way” of Eisenhower’s tee shot. Finally, frustrated, the President went to the golf club’s governing body – not quite the U.S. Senate – and requested the tree be removed. What is now famously known as “The Eisenhower Tree” survived, and as far as I know still stand and grows on Augusta National.