Someone then wrote to tell me this was a canard and untrue.

I'm not sure if that means Fillmore didn't, after all, introduce the bathtub to the White House or if there already was a bathtub in the presidential mansion when he got there.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Fillmore, who was born in the Finger Lakes section of upper New York State, was still pretty inept.

I'm not a scholar of presidents and so perhaps I shouldn't even speculate on who was the worst president in our history, present company included.

One could go through a long list, not all of them in another century, but I kind of like thinking Fillmore, partly because he really didn't do much, but also because his single term is now long in the past.

Looking back at Fillmore these days it is easy to see that given the chance at greatness, he muffed it.

Fillmore got into politics like a lot of politicians, through the practice of law, and served for eight years as a member of the House of Representatives and then as controller of New York state.

When Zachary Taylor was nominated for president, Fillmore, in that odd way we have of finding obscure men for obscure jobs, was named his running mate and rode into office as vice president on Taylor's coattails.

He might have stayed there in obscurity. Unfortunately perhaps for Fillmore and certainly for Taylor, the president died suddenly, elevating Fillmore to the presidency in July 1850.

It was a time fraught with dangers and possibilities.

This was a decade before the Civil War started, but slavery already was the burning question in the land.

Fillmore, a Northerner, had to deal with it. He could have perhaps have achieved greatness by dealing with it effectively, and, to be fair, he appears to have tried.

The nation was divided among states that permitted slavery and those that didn't. Or, as some viewed it, some states were "free" and some­the states where slaves were held--weren't.

It also happened that the nation was still expanding and as each new state was admitted to the Union Congress had to decide whether it would be "free" or slave. This produced a flock of compromises, none of them very satisfactory in solving the slavery issue.

Thus, it happened that 1850 was the year when California was proposed as a new state in the Union.

And as it had in the past and would in the future, debate in the country raged over whether California should be admitted as a slave or free state. It resulted in what was called the Compromise of 1850.

California was admitted to the Union as a free state. Texas, which was having trouble settling things up with Mexico over boundaries, got some money from Washington. Federal officers were allowed to help slaveholders look for runaway slaves and the District of Columbia was also declared a free territory.

Slaveholders got something, the United States got California and closed its grip on North America, and the question of slavery was put off for a few years.

Fillmore pushed the compromise, but unfortunately for him, his support of this legislation cost him re-election and he only served a single term.

It also spelled his political demise. Fillmore had been a Whig, and when he didn't get the nomination the Whig party fell apart. He also refused to join the then-new Republican Party, which led it to nominate Abraham Lincoln.

The Compromise of 1850 failed to halt the increasing hostility between slave and free states and the Civil War followed.

Fillmore, alas, opposed Lincoln all through the war and never made it back into the political limelight. He also had the misfortune to back President Andrew Johnson after Lincoln's death. Johnson was the first American president to be impeached.

Fillmore died in 1874.

Fillmore's home near Auburn, N.Y., is now a state park and I once tried to visit it. But like a lot of other things about Fillmore, I fell on bad luck. The only day I could get there it was closed.

And I don't know if it has a bathtub or not.