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Marcus Raskin's |
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George Washington (1789-1797) John Adams (1797-1801) Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) James Madison (1809-1817) James Monroe (1817-1825) John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) William Henry Harrison (1841) John Tyler (1841-1845) James Polk (1845-1849) Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) James Buchanan (1857-1861) Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) James A. Garfield (1881) Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885) Grover Cleveland (1885-1889) Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) Grover Cleveland (1893-1897) William McKinley (1897-1901) Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) William H. Taft (1909-1913) Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) Warren Harding (1921-1923) Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) Harry S Truman (1945-1953) Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) Gerald R. Ford (1974-1977) Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) Ronald W. Reagan (1981-1989) George Bush (1989-1993) Bill Clinton (1993-2001) Quotes compiled by Sushila Nayak. Thanks to Andy Plenge and Alex Sushkov for their transcription help. |
Introduction Citizens are prone to stand up when the President enters a room. They may even put on their suit jackets when the president phones, as distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger did when President Kennedy called. However, since the
beginning of the Republic, Americans have made clear to their Presidents
that they should not expect respect.
This despite the best presidential efforts; when President Nixon
sought to foster an imperial aura about himself with an honor guard
dressed in uniforms reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm's escort, there was such
an outcry of laughter, derision and disbelief that he quickly withdrew his
clumsy attempt. As contemporaneous comments about our presidents shows, presidential disrespect is nothing new; each man was disdained by one or more segments of the populace. They were reviled in the press and in the Congress. Their physical attributes were the butt of derision and bad jokes. Many were credited as being philanderers, fools and war mongering cretins. Some were accused of being secret monarchists or preparing the way for monarchy. Others were called totalitarians, Jacobins, drunkards, and communists. Of course, many such claims were born of partisanship. Where some founding fathers claimed that a healthy body politic had to begin to form mutual bonds of affection, the way that these bonds often showed themselves was in the sort of fights one might find among brothers in a very rowdy family. Except for the so-called era of good feeling, the idea of bipartisanship would have been thought absurd to members of the American political class; it is a modern day concoction that has nothing to do with the way American politics really operates. Our politics begins from interest and selfish ambition, is expressed in terms of conflict, and often ends in paranoia. That is why when we want to degrade someone in politics, or when a politician wants to attack another politician he claims that his adversary his being political. Yet our profound disrespect for politics only partially explains our disrespect. Why should Americans treat their leaders with such contempt? There is the Oedipal interpretation, namely that once a man is
elected president he becomes our father, and by so doing he becomes
someone who in a deep unconscious way we want to kill.
But this is not an interpretation I favor.
Americans very seldom have seen a president as their surrogate
father, although this point of view has a certain plausibility in the
cases of Washington and Franklin D Roosevelt, and perhaps Dwight
Eisenhower, who was showered with affection by millions of men who served
under him, and was thought to be “above” politics and political party
struggles. Or
one might conclude that as a nation, we never had good manners –a band
of Indians, slaves, frontiersman and immigrants entirely lacks potential
for couth. But the Federalists, who prided themselves on an economic and
social class bias, with manners of an upper class and customs befitting a
British palace court, had nothing but contempt for their opponents, the
anti-federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, demonstrated in many
disrespectful and indeed vicious ways.
Instead,
the answer is bound up with our very understanding of freedom and the
character of the United States as a nation and civil society, in our very
constitutional foundations. The United States and the American people were born of independence and revolution, both of which are prone to emphasize the sacrifice of the leader – it has been said that the difference between war and revolution is that in war the sovereign sacrifices the people and in revolution it is the people who sacrifice the ruler. We want to constantly remind the president that it is not his province to sacrifice us, the citizenry and that he has no special writ to do so. (Paradoxically, it is usually taken for granted that in the modern
presidency the power of the president has grown weaker as it relates to
domestic matters. Modern
presidents have found it easier to send thousands of troops abroad into
harms way than to pass a health bill.)
What is clear is our deeply held need as free people not to be “taken in” by leaders, or fearful of them; when people are frightened of their leaders, liberty is not present in the law or in the hearts of the people. When we think about our own national beginnings, we see how the nation fought to maintain rights of free speech and press against those who sought to shut down these attributes of a free people. In Europe at the time of the American Revolution, those who
criticized the king and his government could be charged with the crime of
lese majeste. This was a
broad charge that could range from conspiracy and treason to mere
disrespectful words. When the
second president, John Adams, sought to make the Alien and Sedition Acts a
cornerstone of American law, creating a lese majeste-like condition in the
United States, the people would have none of it, with the result that the
Federalists were never able to regain the presidency and soon disappeared
as a political party.
Americans
have a difficult time with authority, sometimes confusing it with
authoritarianism. The
government, when it acts through its police powers, claims authority to
coerce the citizenry to follow the law.
And of course governments, including presidents of both political
parties, have used the FBI and other federal policing institutions to spy
on and harass citizens in order to disrupt and neutralize the political
activities of a dissenting and antagonistic citizenry.
Americans, whether consciously, or not, counter this with their
belief that their liberty and freedom are utterly intertwined with the
right and power to be disrespectful to authority and to invert what other
nations define as authority into
servants of the people. Of course it is not only ordinary citizens who speak ill of a president. From its beginning the United States had political class that might sup with the president, all the while wondering why they weren’t sitting at the head of the table. This wonderment and spite is to be expected in politics and should
be understood as a condition which “goes with the territory.”
These were real battles and they derived from the separation of
powers in the American system of government as they related to palpable
social and political problems that the nation faced.
Even more so, the differences started from the Madisonian principle
that the only way to control one faction was to have a counter faction.
And of course factions give rise to disrespect and conflict. One is then not surprised to that John Marshall, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, saw Thomas Jefferson as “an absolute terrorist,” just as one hundred forty years or so later members of the Supreme Court saw President Franklin Roosevelt as a revolutionary out to destroy the sanctity of the court. It is probably no accident, then, that the Supreme Court has been no help to politicians in protecting them against the rhetorical postulations of the citizenry. Instead, in case after case, the Supreme Court has lent credence to the idea that the purpose of free speech, as political speech, is to allow indeed, encourage disrespect of presidents, and even the flag of the United States. President
Clinton pointed out sardonically after returning from the turbulent Middle
East that it was good to be back in the secure White House.
It was shot upon the day after his return.
But such cases of lone madmen or conspiracies do not go to the
problem of disrespect and bad manners.
In fact the type of disrespect exhibited in these essays may be the
substitute for violence. At least that is an arguable point. Of
course antagonists may disagree as to policy and principle.
It is most likely that antagonists and media will raise the level
of debate by comparing presidents to baboons or venomous snakes and liars,
language we would be very careful about using against our own employers.
In everyday life people are more prone to speak and write badly of
the president than they are of their boss.
There are many cases of people speaking badly of the president
without fear of retribution; there are fewer cases of a journalist
publicly comparing his publisher to a baboon and keeping his job. Meanwhile, thousands line up daily to see the White House, and while each person would be thrilled to shake the hand of a sitting president, this thrill is less related to the office of the President or the person who occupies it than to that very American phenomenon of celebrity worship. Presidents may enjoy four or eight years of fame, considerably exceeding Andy Warhol’s predicted fifteen minutes, afterwards the fame quickly evaporates. Although there were many good citizens who would have wanted to meet them, do we really care, for example, about Franklin Pierce, or James Buchanan or Warren Harding? Whether they were favored over celebrities of their period is not clear. Would you rather shake the hand of Gerry Ford or Madonna? As we sort out our conflicting impulse towards our sitting presidents, we must not be taken in by the modern perks of presidential office, which have grown enormously since the beginning of the Cold War. The fact is that there is profound physical danger that now seems to come with the office, and while the citizenry wishes to protect the president physically, the President knows that it has nothing to do with him as a person. Rather there is fear of instability in the event he is assassinated. The President knows that he is one citizen among many.
Sometimes he is the first citizen and other times he is not; he
knows that politics is conflict and struggle, especially in a democracy.
So,
our freedom and liberty are curious devices.
We want to be united. But
we know that the only way we can be united is by being different.
We want to have respect for authority, but we know that too much
respect for it breeds contempt of the people who become obedient out of
fear. Americans want the
president to know that he is not like some Roman emperor, a god, but
merely a mortal citizen who must struggle, and, almost invariably, lose
the battle in his time to be respected by the citizenry as a whole.
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