Taking Notice of POTUS

CONGRESSIONAL hearings and presidential wranglings with a special prosecutor will continue for months over the various issues (campaign finance; Whitewater) that embroil the White House in matters of law, but already the proceedings have brought to light thousands of pages of mundane documents from the executive branch.

One curious revelation concerns the extent to which the acronym POTUS, meaning "President of the United States," has ascended into the realm of the workaday Washington vocabulary. In 1994 the White House deputy chief of staff, Harold M. Ickes, discussed who might be able to persuade Hillary Clinton to accept the need for a special prosecutor: "POTUS can't. Staff can't. Christopher to talk to FLOTUS." FLOTUS, of course, stands for "First Lady of the United States." A subsequent scheduling memorandum read "Requests potus and vpotus to meet with committee of 100 to discuss China relations. Also invites potus to Indonesia Culture Night." "Vpotus," obviously, is the Vice President.

certainly has a contemporary sound. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt (who began signing himself "FDR" at the age of nine) is said to have assumed the designation POTUS in his wartime correspondence with the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. (Churchill, for his part, used the code name "Former Naval Person." Roosevelt and Churchill both jokingly referred to Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, as "UJ," for "Uncle Joe.") POTUS was adopted by the White House staff and the Secret Service; it was creatively employed as the pet name favored by Buffie, the lover of President Ericson, in the 1977 novel by William Safire, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. ("First-naming a President struck her as awkward and their intimacy made 'Mr. President' ludicrous.") In an age that offers an Internet site for almost everything, it should come as no surprise that something called POTUS can today be found on the Web (http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/). It is a database of research on Presidents maintained by the University of Michigan.

Nancy Reagan has been credited with inspiring, if not originating, FLOTUS. In his comic novel (1986) Christopher Buckley, a speechwriter for VPOTUS George Bush, described an analogue to the "POTUS phone" that has existed in the White House since the Johnson Administration: a direct White House telephone link to a somewhat vindictive and domineering FLOTUS. In the novel President Thomas Nelson Tucker refers to his wife as "Flotus Blossom." Remember, it's only fiction.

As for First Lady itself, the term -- inspired by the nonspecific descriptive cliché "the first [that is, the foremost] lady in the land" -- was not a routine synonym for "the President's wife" until well into the current century. The Oxford English Dictionary fails to locate any example of First Lady before the Truman-Dewey campaign of 1948, although a book called by Kathleen Prindiville, about Presidents' wives, appeared in 1932. The term First Family, given wide prominence by the impressionist Vaughn Meader's 1962 comedy album of that name, is probably a contribution of the Kennedy years. Jacqueline Kennedy, an accomplished equestrian, once remarked, "The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse." She was no doubt grateful to have escaped the CB-radio craze of the mid-1970s, which bestowed on Betty Ford, the wife of President Gerald R. Ford, the handle First Mama.

Alben W. Barkley, the Vice President during Harry Truman's second term, was the inaugural recipient of the nickname Veep, a term created perhaps as a conflation of the pedestrian vice-presidential abbreviation VP with VIP, meaning "very important person," the latter a usage that emerged before the Second World War. The passage of Veep into the mainstream of American English was surely eased by the prior existence of Jeep, the popular wartime military vehicle (whose name came from the Popeye comic strip in 1936). At least since 1980 the term Beep has been used in New York City to refer to each of the city's five BPs, or borough presidents. The term isn't quite onomatopoeic (a BP doesn't literally go beep), but it's somehow appropriate that the sound of New York traffic comes through.

There is as yet no acronym designating the Vice President's spouse. By extension, the wife of the Vice President, and therefore the Second Lady, should be known as SLOTUS. Considering that she is only a "heartbeat away from" full FLOTUS status, perhaps a better designation would be HAFFLOTUS.

Illustration by Tom Bloom

Washington's relationship with Seoul makes it a target for the Kim regime.

When South Korea’s President Moon Jae In greets President Donald Trump at the White House today, their warm smiles will do little to mask the fact that they meet at perhaps the most dangerous moment in the six-decade old U.S.-South Korean alliance. The failure of a quarter-century of diplomacy has left the North Korean dictatorship on the cusp of possessing a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile. For the first time since 1953, when the United States committed to protecting the South from another invasion from the North, the American homeland will soon come under direct threat from one of the world’s most ruthless regimes.

Of course, the United States is at loggerheads with the Kim regime because of its commitment to the South—the alliance is not a symptom of today’s crisis between Washington and Pyongyang, but the cause. Not only does the United States station well over 20,000 troops on the Korean peninsula; the two militaries are well-integrated and jointly trained. The United States went so far as to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea until 1991, and continues to extend the so-called “nuclear umbrella” to protect the South. South Korea, in turn, provided the largest contingent of allied troops during the Vietnam War, and 3,000 of its troops fought in Iraq. South Korea also supported Obama-era initiatives such as the G20 and Nuclear Security Summits, and participates in the Proliferation Security Initiative, the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, making it a leader in anti-proliferation activities.