The seventh president, Tennessean Andrew Jackson, was such a regular user of plug that brass spittoons–now in his Tennessee estate, the Hermitage–were installed at the White House…
The first president to enjoy a “seegar” was James Madison, the country’s fourth leader, who smoked until his death at 85 in 1836…
Between the Civil War and the Second World War, more presidents smoked cigars than did not…
Chester Arthur, a wealthy New York clubman who was the twenty-first U.S. president, from 1881 to 1885, and who was given to lavish midnight suppers, usually concluded his meals with Champagne and expensive imported cigars.
Benjamin Harrison smoked moderately, and during his one term, 1889 to 1893, a tobacconist from his hometown, Indianapolis, supplied the White House with complimentary cigars.
William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, who was assassinated in 1901, neither smoked in public nor permitted himself to be photographed with a cigar, but in private he was nearly obsessive about having his smoke…
Three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft entered his presidency, the twenty-seventh man to hold the position, as a cigar smoker, but he quit while in office. Warren G. Harding, the twenty-ninth U.S. president, was so careful about the aroma of his tobacco that he brought his cigar humidor with him to the White House from his home in Ohio…
No president used the cigar to better advantage than Coolidge, who served from 1923 to 1929. Concious of his parsimonious and taciturn persona, “Silent Cal” manipulated situations with dramatically punctuated use of his cigar…
Coolidge could smoke about three cigars by afternoon. On summer nights, he often sat in a rocking chair on the darkened south portico and smoked quietly while his wife knitted…
Throughout the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, state and private dinners at the White House often concluded with the men and women separating, the women, led by the first lady to the Red Room for coffee and cigarettes, which Eleanor Roosevelt had offered guests two decades earlier. The men would retire to the Green Room for after, dinner drinks and cigars, led by the president…
Gerald Ford, the last U.S. president to use tobacco on a regular basis, is an inveterate pipe smoker. Ike and FDR stuck to cigarettes as did both their wives and several other twentieth-century first ladies including Jacqueline Kennedy…
Richard Nixon, although not a regular smoker, enjoyed ritualistic cigar puffing as a statesmanlike gesture with other leaders. The Nixon administration in the early '70s was the last stand of the cigar at the White House. Besides being the last president to smoke cigars, Nixon’s was the last presidency during which cigars were offered to men after dinner in the Green Room.
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