Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Presidential Doodles, Kennedy 'Conspiracy', and What is this Nixon doodle?

Presidential Doodles is a collection hundreds of doodles & drawings made by Presidents of the United States. The images were collected by the creators of "Cabinet" magazine and writer/ history professor at Rutgers, David Greenberg. The book was published in 2006.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't feature Barack Obama's famous doodles featuring senators, that was sold at a charity auction circa 2007 or Sarah Palin's vote-for-me type doodles on the back of a sheet of paper for Wasilla's city budget.

The book does feature drawings of weapons and self-portraits by Dwight Eisenhower, horses drawn by Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald Reagan's cowboys and football players and a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem done by John Adams. Oddly enough, a doodle by Richard Nixon is eerily similar to something in my phone book...

One of the most talked about doodles in the book was drawn by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy often enclosed words inside circles and boxes. One of his doodles is of a small circle with the number 9-11 and on the same page he wrote the word "conspiracy" and underlined it. It is said to be the tally of a committee vote, but it still strange to see.