Read it like you mean it
Last week may wife and I were both had library books about presidents. Hers was volume 1 of Barack Obama’s new memoir, and my bedtime reading was You Never Forget Your First: a Biography of George Washington, by historian Alexis Coe.
Obama’s book is 700-plus pages—not something you can check out from the library when other readers are greedily waiting for it—no renewals. So we will buy a copy to wade through for several months. It’s worth it. Obama is our most literary president. Jimmy Carter has written a couple of dozen books—memoirs, inspiration, even detective novels. JFK wrote a couple of books, most famously Profiles in Courage. An updated version might include Liz Cheney.
The Coe book is only a couple hundred pages, heavily researched and annotated. But—she says from the start, the only book about him not written by a man. Some of this book is a bit snarky, but she uses charts and sidebars to make the book readable. I have read critical biographies of presidents and literary figures and they can be obtuse and repetitive. Coe’s book is an easy, entertaining read.
Washington was revered as a military leader, and thus the nearly unanimous choice to be our first president. He was, as all humans are, tremendously flawed and by the end of his eight-year presidency, judged much lower by his compatriots who once believed he, as John Adams said, should be addressed as “His Excellency.”
Obama is a different story. The first president not to be bear an Anglo-Saxon name like George, John, James, William, Franklin, Rutherford, or a Greek name like Ulysses or Theodore, but an African name!—which made some persons, most notably his successor in the presidency, declare him an impostor.
So here we are in a new decade, of a new century. We got old Uncle Joe, the default Democrat to upend the Trump presidency. And the old guy is working hard to make things happen—who’d a thunk it?
What a relief not to see every headline with the word Trump, illustrated by a photo of his sneering mug and long red necktie! The Donald freely admitted he just wanted front page headlines and high tell-a-vision ratings, whether the news was good or bad. Biden’s name is now splashed everywhere, but it is associated with attempts to control the pandemic and alleviate economic problems—not self-aggrandizement.
The journalist John Dickerson stated that John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 brought on the endless coverage of whomever bears the title of president. Though I was only nine years old, I remember the endless TV coverage, instant replays of that weekend’s horrors and the iconic photos on every newspaper and magazine, burned into our collective memory: the Zapruder film, Jackie Kennedy crawling over the trunk of the limousine; Oswald’s face contorted in pain as Jack Ruby shot a hole in his belly; LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One, with Jackie next to him in her blood-stained pink suit; little John-John saluting his father’s caisson rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue…
Thus ever since, the president is always the headliner. LBJ’s decision not to run again in 1968, Nixon’s resignation and flying out into the sunset, Reagan saying “I should have ducked,” Bush I saying “read my lips,” Clinton’s hiding in a closet to share a cigar with an intern, Bush II standing at the debris from the twin towers, Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral service for Black churchgoers executed by a white supremacist gunman.
So now we’ll get Biden day-and-night, a close up of his socks with doggie prints, a story about his bringing a crib into the White House for a new grandbaby to visit. Why not?
Sometimes our country forgets that the president—called commander-in-chief, leader of the free world, most powerful man on the planet, or that rotten SOB—is himself a mere mortal. Created by myths and legends, anecdotes, admiration, skepticism or disgust, he’s just another guy. (And maybe one day just another gal.)
Let’s give this guy a chance. We’ll get a new one soon enough.