Does the Presidents Day holiday have any meaning to anyone? Or is it just a day for car dealers to put on colonial suits and powdered wigs so they can make their quotas?
I cringe when I see those commercials. I know they’re a part of life, and also a part of modern-day commerce. I guess the sight of a man dressed like George Washington is supposed to entice you to go right out to your nearest dealer and, well, deal.
I guess my mind goes in different directions. From the time I was the littlest kid I was fascinated by our presidents.
Perhaps that came as the result of being 10 years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. From then on, I became more and more curious about studying our presidents.
And in all that time, one thing has become obvious: the best of them — the ones you remember for the most noble reasons — have always transcended politics. They are the ones who stepped up in times of national crises and either said or did things that worked to unite us and maybe even give us hope.
Where would the United States be, for example, had we not had Abraham Lincoln in the White House when the union split apart? Surely there were political and practical reasons why Lincoln did and said some of the things he did. But he also worked diligently to put the nation back together again. And most likely paid for it with his life.
George Washington set the tone. It was Washington who made it known that the president wasn’t a king, and that he (or she) served the people, and not the other way around.
Perhaps that is why, originally, the birthdays of those two presidents were singled out.
But there were so many more who were able to summon the right words, or the right deeds, to soothe a worried nation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at his first inaugural address, in the midst of the Great Depression, said “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Very often, from my point of view, anyway, rallying cries have come from unlikely sources. I never really thought a whole lot of Ronald Reagan, but who didn’t marvel at the words he chose when he addressed a grieving nation after the Challenger space shuttle exploded. Or who didn’t feel some measure of pride, at some level, when he stood up in Berlin and asserted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
His closest advisers were worried that by saying this so pointedly, Reagan would be waving the red flag in front of a bull. But Reagan, actor that he was, knew a good rallying cry when he saw one.
Another president I was at odds with, at least politically, was George W. Bush. But twice, in the days and weeks after 9/11, Bush said and did things that made you thankful you were American. The first was when he said, speaking through a bullhorn to rescue workers at Ground Zero, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
The other was when he walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium during the World Series and threw a perfect first-pitch strike. That was a pretty tidy symbol, right there, of the nation’s determination to get on with life in face of overwhelming tragedy.
The country often seems able to give us the right president at the right time. Gerald R. Ford was an amiable, decent and unassuming person — the perfect antidote after the havoc of the paranoid Richard Nixon’s final days in the White House.
Harry S. Truman, like Ford, had no pretense about who he was — which was a haberdasher from Missouri. But when Roosevelt died, he was thrust into the presidency, and forced to make perhaps the most cataclysmic decision in world history: whether to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
That decision is still hotly debated today. But you can be sure, if you’ve studied anything about Truman at all, that he made it honestly, and for what he felt were the right reasons.
We have also taken great delight in this country of debunking the aura of our presidents. John F. Kennedy didn’t just ask us to put our country before ourselves. He had an affair with Marilyn Monroe (among others). Lyndon Johnson didn’t just use all his political skills to get civil rights legislation passed. He escalated the Vietnam War and pulled his dog up by its ears.
Presidents’ deaths have altered history. Zachary Taylor took a hard line both on the expansion of slavery (dead-set against it) and on repurcussions for states that seceded (he said he’d hang those responsible for it gladly). But he died after eating tainted cherries, and his successor, Millard Fillmore, did not have the same convictions. And another nail was pounded into the coffin that became the Civil War.
Warren G. Harding was a corrupt mess when a heart attack killed him midway through his presidency. Calvin Coolidge famously said “the business of America is business.” Less than a year after leaving office (he did not choose to run) the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.
Our 45 presidents were human beings first. They were/are men (and hopefully, someday soon, women) elevated to an almost impossible job, and who have been asked to do extraordinary things at some of the worst times in our history.
Some succeeded. Some didn’t. But they all did what they thought was their duty when the time came.
Let’s remember them, and their day, for other reasons besides selling cars.
