WEAPONS OF MASS CONSUMPTION

GEORGE WASHINGTON

During midday benders, the Father of Our Country regularly downed four glasses of Madeira wine, a sweet and lethal variety that contained 20 percent alcohol.

HERBERT HOOVER

In the first years of Prohibition, when he was a lowly secretary of commerce, Hoover made perfectly legal pit stops at the Belgian embassy at 6 p.m. daily for gin and vermouth, stirred.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

The reviled POTUS found solace in a White House game room he outfitted with chessboards and a billiards table. He pounded port and banked shots every night to escape his hellish presidency.

HARRY S. TRUMAN

Truman knocked back a shot of Old Grand-dad every morning to “get the engine going.” He slowed down his a.m. intake as an 80- year-old retiree after taking a nasty spill onto the bathroom tiles in 1964.