What's in a (Middle) Name?

THOMAS RICHARD HARKIN'S name is Thomas Richard Harkin. But if you call the two-term Iowa senator's campaign office ("Americans for Harkin" in ritzy Bethesda, Maryland--not the most populist location for someone like Harkin), don't ask for Thomas Richard Harkin. Tom Harkin will do just fine, thanks.

"He never uses Richard," a staff member told me. Three times.

Fine. But whatever happened to William Howard Taft? And John Fitzgerald Kennedy? And Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Why doesn't anyone ever use middle names--or at least initials--anymore?

PRESIDENTIAL MIDDLE NAMES used to be really popular. People with three WASPy-sounding names ran for president all the time. It started out of necessity, I assume. John Quincy Adams couldn't be just John Adams--his dad had dibs.

Martin Van Buren doesn't really count either--"Van Buren," of course, was his surname. (He didn't have a middle name.)

Then came William Henry Harrison in the election of 1840. Harvard Professor of History William Gienapp (that's William E. Gienapp) told me he really doesn't know why Harrison chose to use three names, except that it was considered aristocratic--and Harrison was certainly an aristocrat. His dad signed the Declaration of Independence, and Harrison grew up on swanky Berkeley Plantation on the James.

But he ran as a cider-chugging, born-in-a-log-cabin good ol' boy. Sort of like George Bush. Both of them were full of shit.

Gienapp says he may have done it, then, because William Harrison was sort of wimpy-sounding. All the presidents before him (except maybe Van Buren) had been famous for something--like starting the United States (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe), starting the first political machine (Van Buren's Albany Regency) or being an Adams (Adams, Adams).

But then Harrison died. After about 10 minutes of being president. (Okay, so it was actually about 750 hours.)

This scared everyone away from middle names. Zach Taylor, Frank Pierce, Abe Lincoln, Andy Johnson, and some others I can't remember didn't use their second names at all.

Then General U.S. Grant won the Civil War and could do whatever he wanted to. And who wouldn't use U.S. while running for the White House? (The patriotic initials were apparently the result of a bizarre clerical error at West Point, according to amateur historian Barbara Holland, author of Hail to the Chiefs.) Besides, Ulysses was hard to pronounce and harder to spell, and no one had ever heard of anyone named "Hiram" (his real first name).

The middle name trend had thus become a middle initial trend. It lasted until September of 1881, when James A. Garfield got shot and killed by someone he passed over for a job. (Actually, Chester Arthur sometimes used his middle initial--A. for Alan--but he was terribly unpopular and apparently proposed to a 19-year old while in office.)

So then we had Grover Cleveland, Ben Harrison (who technically didn't need a middle name because his grandfather was president) and William McKinley.

McKinley got shot. Nevertheless, Theodore Roosevelt didn't have a middle name. William Howard Taft made up for it, though, and used all three--especially after Teddy got shot, too--during a 1912 Milwaukee speech.

But Taft was wholly unimpressive and didn't even want to be president anyway (he wanted to be on the Supreme Court, where three names were a must--see Charles Evans Hughes and especially Oliver Wendell Holmes). He was also our first Dan Quayle president: Holland says his response to a reporter asking what to do about unemployment was "God knows."

After Taft, the presidency was all business and no one had time for middle names (least of all Warren Harding, who understandably avoided use of "Gamaliel"). Anyway, no one was having much luck with them. William Jennings Bryan was a three-time presidential loser.

Then there was Herbert Hoover. His name was associated with every stinking aspect of the Great Depression. Shantytowns where the unemployed lived were called "Hoovervilles." The newspapers people slept under were "Hoover blankets." The opposums and rabbits vagrants ate in city parks were "Hoover steaks."

SO WHEN Franklin Delano Roosevelt won in 1932, he wasn't messing around with this businesslike two-name stuff. His fifth cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy had called himself TR, and the new Roosevelt thought that would be cool. But FR sounded a lot like "afar" or "fart," and he was an aristocrat, so he kept the "Delano."

When you get elected president four times, people start to imitate you. After FDR, everyone had to have three names. Harry S. Truman holds the distinction of being the only president to go by his middle initial and middle name at the same time. Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard M. Nixon all used one or the other. ("Milhous," Nixon's middle name, sounded like another word for puke and looked misspelled anyway. But he had to be RMN--his autobiography is even called RMN--since FDR, JFK and LBJ had so much fun with their initials.)

Impeachment does not have a nice ring. In fact, people hated Nixon so much that no president has used middle names--or even initials--since. Not Gerry Ford or Jimmy Carter (who actually requested once that history books call him "Jimmy" and not James Earl) or Ronald Wilson Reagan.

And most certainly not George Herbert Walker Bush, whose parents forgot to stop at three.

SOMEHOW, Thomas Richard Harkin hopes to make this into some sort of campaign issue--he never refers to the president by anything short of all four names. (The New Republic joked that Harkin should be "Tom William Jennings Harkin," but I know two people who didn't get it.)

But it's not just Harkin who's being silly. In the anti-Washington, anti-aristocracy populism that defines presidential politics today, none of the candidates uses a middle name. Or an initial. In fact, they've even taken to truncating individual names. Have you ever heard of William Jefferson Clinton? (Or even William Clinton?) How about Joseph Robert Kerrey? Edmund Gerald Brown Jr.? Perhaps, Lawrence Douglas Wilder?

I say we start using middle names again. Let people's policies speak for their populism. Besides, The Crimson uses everybody's middle initial, and The Crimson is really cool.

Well, let's make room for one exception. Paul will do just fine, Paul Efthemios Tsongas.

Please don't make fun of John Ashley Cloud '93.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a great name. Warren Gamaliel Harding is not.