He's Short, Sort Of

I just caught a glimpse of the footage from the all-President lunch and I noticed something aobut Jimmy Carter that I'd never noticed before: he's short. Or at least in the ranks of recent presidents, at 5' 9" he is shorter than anyone in the room. Per Wiki, no president since William McKinley (5'7") has been shorter--Harry S. Truman, at 5' 9" was just Carter's size.

Nineteenth Century presidents appear on the whole to have been shorter--at 5' 4", I believe James Madison was thought small even by his contemporaries. I suppose you could ascribe it in general to nutrition, but I wonder what part might be played by the greater visibility of modern candidates in a newsreel-and-then-TV age. And the Nineteenth Century retains the all-time champ: Abe Lincoln, at 6' 4", which would make him tall in our age, almost a freak in his own. I've long speculated that Lincoln's great (for his time) height may help to account for what seems to me to be his overvaulting self-confidence--his evident assurance, amid all calamaties and perplexities, that he was equal to the job, no matter what anybody else may have thought.

Is it true that the tall guy always loses? Skimming the 20th Century data (but being too lazy to make an actual count), I'd say yes, although it's a close thing: Jimmy Carter himself was, after all, shorter than his adversary, Gerald Ford. John Kerry, at a Lincolnesque 6' 4", bears the dubious disctinction of being the second tallest man ever to lose the race (behind Winfield Scott, who was 6' 5"). DeWitt Clinton seems to do worse on point spread--at 6'3", losing to the warty little James Madison.

One trouble with all this data is that there is a disconnect between appearance and reality. Michael Dukakis (5 ' 6") and Thomas E. Dewey (5' 8") just seem like short guys, whom you couldn't take seriously as leaders. On the other hand, Al Smith always seemed like a force of nature to me, but he measured in at only 5' 6"--tied with Dukakis and the forgettable James M. Cox for shortest in the century.* Meanwhile George W. has always seemed to me shorter than he (at 5'11") really is. For comparison, I offer former Mayor Ed Koch of New York, who has always reminded me a little of the yapping disembodied head in the Monty Python movie. I always thought he was short until he nearly knocked me down in the doorway of the Japonica at 12th and University Place in Manhattan.

==
*One other questionable case: turns out that that man also is (no more than!) 5' 7".