When I was a growing up, we didn't have Presidents' Day. We had George Washington's Birthday. The day was a holiday, and it took place during a weeklong school vacation. There was also Abraham Lincoln's Birthday, on February 12th, which didn't involve a day off of school let alone a week. (Maybe if my parents had stayed put in my mother's hometown of Chicago, we'd have gotten a day off. But then we wouldn't have had our glorious Patriots' Day in April.)
Somewhere along the line, there was a shift to calling it Presidents' Day, and making it a shoutout to all those who have held this office.
On the one hand, that's fair. On the other hand, making it a generic day is a bit like giving everyone a trophy, even if they don't deserve it.
We have had some great presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt. FDR. And some very good ones. (Looking at you, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Barack Obama.) Some presidents that I just plain didn't care for: Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George Bush. Plenty that I know zip about: John Tyler, Zachary Taylor - or is it Zachary Tyler and John Taylor?
Most Presidents are, of course, a mixed bag of good to great and god awful.
Take Lyndon Baines Johnson. Great on civil rights and trying to build the Great Society. And then there was the Vietnam War.
But there's only man among them who was the worst president ever.
And that, of course, would be Donald Trump, a person singularly without redeeming attribute. Devoid of honesty, integrity, intelligence, knowledge, humility, curiosity, empathy, decency. Etc. The only thing he was good at was figuring out the message to market to his followers. I'll give him that rather feral brilliance.
I've lived long enough to have lived through fourteen presidents. Truman. Eisenhower. Kennedy. Johnson. Nixon. Ford. Carter. Reagan. Bush 1. Clinton. Bush 2. Obama. Trump. Biden.
Definitely a mixed bag.
I have no recall of Truman. I had just turned three when the man from Independence went back to Independence.
But I certainly have strong impressions of the rest of them.
Local entertainer Big Brother Bob Emery had a noontime kiddy show that featured a toast (with a glass of milk) to the president of the United States. So I lifted my glass of milk and toasted Ike. My impressions of Eisenhower were largely formed by my reading of his leadership during World War II. Sure that was before my time, but that's mostly what I associate him with. And that association was greatness. Other than that, there was his heart attack his golf game, and his dowdy wife Mamie.
Then there was the glamorous John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I was about to turn 11 when JFK was elected, and you can imagine being a little Irish-Catholic in Massachusetts when that happened. And how it felt to an about-to-turn 14 year old when he was killed. I adored JFK, but from a more mature perspective, I recognize that policy and achievement-wise he was a mixed bag. That he was dog when it came to women. But wit and glamor-wise, he was quite something.
Bringing us to LBJ. As noted: thumbs up on Civil Rights, Medicare, and social consciousness - and his ability to get things through a factious Congress. Thumbs down on the Vietnam War. (Object of a protest chant that I uttered on a few occasions: Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?) And thumbs down to his lifting his beagles by the ears.
And then there was Nixon. I have to give him a nod for opening up China and establishing the EPA. But the rest of it? It was a very good day for the country when he exited the White House for the last time and hopped on the helicopter that whisked him away. At long last, we really didn't have Dick Nixon, with all that paranoia and mendacity, to kick around anymore.
We then had the calming, innocuous presence of Gerry Ford, which was pretty much what we needed at the time. (Impressions: football player, all those blond teenage kids, tripping over his own feet, excellent first lady in Bette Ford.)
I like and admire Jimmy Carter. I can't think of any president who was a better person. Honesty. Integrity. Empathy. Decency. Still building houses with Habitat for Humanity at the age of 98. As president, he was dealt a poor hand: inflation, oil crisis - I remember the long lines at the gas station - the hostages taken in Iraq. He did the best he could, and didn't deserve the vilification he's gotten during and well after the end of his presidency. But maybe not the best man for the job.
Unfortunately, that leads us to Ronald Reagan. If you can't say anything nice about someone...Well, here's the nice: he was charming, handsome, and a masterful communicator. He also stirred up an awful lot of pots with the thinly veiled racism of his "welfare queen" rhetoric and for paving the way for the emergence of the Tea Party anti-government, anti-taxation movement. (Then there were those adoring looks from his wife Nancy...) Even though he didn't seem to have much to do with any of his kids, he did have a daughter named Maureen...
George Herbert Walker Bush. The ultimate New England WASP gentleman, weirdly transplanted to Texas - and he just never seemed all that comfortable as a Texan. Much more of a Connecticut cocktail party kind of guy. Speed impressions: "Read my lips: no new taxes." A thousand points of light. Gulf War. Fairly impolite to Geraldine Ferraro when they were both running for VP. (Tsk, tsk. Your mother must have been ashamed of such callow behavior.) Cigarette boat. And an absolutely gorgeous vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine. (Having seen it at a distance a few times, I had serious house envy.) Lots of grandkids - and he seemed to actually know and like all of them. And even though his wife Barbara was, IMHO, a bee-otch, I liked the fact that she didn't seem to give a damn that she was a zaftig middle aged woman.
When I heard Bill Clinton deliver the keynote at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, my first, clearly-erroneous impression was that this guy's political career is done for. He droned on and on, more than doubling the time he'd been allotted. Just dreadful. And then there he was, just four years later, and we weren't going to stop thinking about tomorrow. As a president, he was reasonably good. A bit too Blue Dog Democrat for my liking, but reasonably good. Other than his zipper problem. Oh Bill, Bill, Bill. For all your brilliance, and obvious brilliance as a politician, you didn't have the force of will to not get it on with someone your daughter's age. In the Oval Office. While smoking a cigar. And all your 'depends on what you mean by the word the' parsing. Not to mention your definition of what constitutes sexual relations. Note to Bill Clinton: a BJ counts.
For one brief shining moment or two after 9/11, I think George W. Bush did a good job rallying the nation. And props for his international work on AIDS. Other than that? Meh to god awful, letting Cheney and Rumsfeld - and his own determination to revenge Saddam Hussein's insult to his Daddy - run us into an endless, terrible war. And the way that his minions ran roughshod in Florida during the vote count, and how he snuck in thanks to the Supreme Court. I'd a lot rather have had Al Gore. And, four years later, John Kerry.
Barack Obama was pretty good president, especially when it came to helping get the country out of the economic crisis he inherited. And he was a brilliant communicator, not to mention empathetic, humane, brilliant, and oozing charm. But I found him too timid a negotiator. Often, when seeking a compromise with Congress, I felt that he opened with what he thought was a fair deal - expecting everyone to recognize that what he offered was entirely reasonable - only to have it whittled away. I was always rooting for him to open high, going for something unachievable, and whittling down from there. Alas. Mostly, I think he was great, and I loved having him in office, and his family in the White House.
My hope that at some point before I die, Donald Trump's name will have an asterisk next to it. I'm pretty sure that history will declare him the worst president ever, and he'll end up on the historical dung heap. Where he belongs.
Joe Biden was the right man for the time. He's a good man and has done a very creditable job as president. He knows what he's doing - a wily old pol - even though he may be a bit far gone in his belief that the Republicans actually want to do business with him. Way too much benefit of the doubt given there. While I think he's a good president, and will go down as a consequential one, I want him to be a one-term good, consequential president. He'll be 82 if he runs again; if he wins, he'll be 86 when his second term ends. Not to be agist, but that's way too old. Everyone slows down. The pressures of this job are tremendous. We'd be better served by someone younger and more vigorous. I don't buy the story line that Biden is demented. Still, I don't think he should run. If he declares now that he won't, it will give the Democrats time to figure out who's on the shortlist. Which won't happen as long as Joe says he's running.
This was going to be a short, holiday post. But, like Bill Clinton's convention speech in 1988, I went long. Probably too long.
If you're still reading, I'll leave you with this:
On Washington's birthday, my mother would bake a chocolate sheet cake, frost it with vanilla frosting, and decorate it with maraschino cherries. I won't be doing that, but I cannot tell a lie. I'm thinking of buying a pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia.
Happy Presidents' Day!
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