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Malice in the MiddleBarack Hussein Obama and the history of bad middle names in politics.

By David Wallis
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2006, at 1:00 PM ET

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Thomas Woodrow Wilson valued the alliteration of his middle name and ditched his first name altogether. According to Rick Potter, curator of collections at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Wilson worried about being cast as "Tommy," which struck him as unstatesmanlike. "Woodrow Wilson knew early on that he wanted to go into public service," said Potter. "The guy was a bit of a dreamer. In college, he had cards made up that said … Senator Woodrow Wilson."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was close to his mother and her family, took pride in the storied Delano name, and, long before he won the White House, newspaper headline writers dubbed him FDR—the gold standard of initialdom.

Harry S Truman's middle initial led to controversy. Truman's parents could not agree on his middle name, so they settled on the letter S, sans period. Some deemed Truman's lack of a longer middle name as emblematic of his slight stature. How could the short, lightly regarded machine politician sit at the great FDR's desk? As Bruce Kuklick recounted in The Good Ruler: From Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon, "one frustrated voter exclaimed, 'They say the S doesn't stand for nothing; the whole god-damn name doesn't stand for nothing.' "

But Truman ultimately achieved HST status, as did Roosevelt's political protégé Lyndon Baines Johnson. His biographer Robert Caro noted that when Johnson came to Washington as a boy-wonder congressman during the New Deal, "He instructed one aide to simply use his initials in press releases: 'FDR—LBJ—do you get it?' " Sandy Cohen, curator of the LBJ Presidential Library, remarked that Johnson revered the ring of LBJ so much that he named his daughters Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson and his dog Little Beagle Johnson.

Richard Milhous Nixon was equally, if not more, concerned with the image his name conveyed. Soon after Nixon finally won the presidency, he announced to his staff that he would no longer use his middle initial. Milhous wasn't merely a dorky name, it also stuck him with a clumsy set of initials, RMN. (Try saying that three times quickly.)

Barack Obama pulled a Nixon, dropping his H. sometime before he ran for a seat in the Illinois State Senate in 1996. There are some branding experts who now urge Obama to again embrace his middle name. "Let the Republicans make the loudest noise about it, then Obama should emphasize why his name is Hussein. He's a product of a multi-cultural family. This man is representative of the 21st Century," said Robert Sawyer, author of Kiss and Sell: Writing for Advertising.

Perhaps Barack Hussein Obama should answer back bigots who try to tie him to terrorists with the flair of Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. During the 1964 campaign, Barry Goldwater's running mate, William Miller, tried to deride his opponent, pronouncing every syllable of "Hor-ay-ti-o." But according to The Mocking of a President: A History of Campaign Humor From Ike to Ronnie, by Gerald C. Gardner, Humphrey effortlessly deflected the brickbat: "[Miller] thinks he has a real issue in my middle name … I must warn him of the hidden middle name vote—all those youngsters blessed with a middle name they choose to convert to a middle initial … Miller should beware of the midlash."

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David Wallis' middle name is Robin. He is the editor of the forthcoming book Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War on Free Expression.
Photograph of Barack Obama on Slate's home page by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
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