America's First Centenarian Ex-President

Happy birthday, Jimmy Carter!

James Earl Carter, Jr., the 39th President of the United States, is one hundred years old today.  He was already the longest-lived President in American history, so this birthday celebration is a milestone on steroids.

His Presidency was a single term, so he only spent one twenty-fifth of his life as the most powerful person in the world.   And his term in office did yield some unfavorable outcomes - airline deregulation, the Iran hostage crisis and the subsequent failed rescue mission, and the hamfisted and wrongheaded Moscow Olympics boycott.  Also, he was the last President in an era of Democratic politics that had begun in 1933 with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and yielded Democratic victories in eight out of twelve presidential elections and control of 22 out of 24 Congresses - an era that ended with Ronald Reagan's victory over Carter in the presidential election of 1980.

But I come to praise President Carter, not bury him.  He managed to leave a solid legacy for a one-term President who had never served in Washington before, such as a sane energy policy that emphasised conservation and alternative fuels, he kept the nation out of war, and he achieved peace between Israel and Egypt.  Also, when things got tough - specifically in the horrible year of 1979, when gas prices hit a dollar a gallon for the first time (making gasoline more expensive than it is now, when adjusted for inflation), when we had prices rising faster than today, when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy, and when we almost lost Philadelphia to nuclear error at Three Mile Island - President Carter didn't try to sugarcoat anything.  He told us the truth.  Things were bad, they'd get worse in the short term (as anyone who remembers 1980 would attest), and we had to gird our loins, grit our teeth, and bear it.

The election of 1980 proved that Americans don't like to be told the truth.  But Jimmy Carter went on to be the greatest former President since Republican Herbert Hoover (who, coincidentally, was the last President of a political era for his party), serving humanitarian causes such as building houses for the poor, getting fresh water available for Third World countries, and monitoring elections in various nations.  Now that he's a hundred, he can take it easy and look back on his long life with pride.'

Again, happy birthday, Jimmy Carter. 😊

John F. Kennedy - 100 Years

Born one hundred years ago today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy entered the office of President of the United States with a great deal of promise, with only part of it fulfilled.

Kennedy entered office in 1961, at a time of new possibilities, when new nations were forming in the Third World and the Soviet Union was pushing ahead to explore space.  It was also a time when European countries, more than fifteen years after World War II ended, were re-emerging with established democratic governments and re-affirming their places in the world.  The United States, by contrast, had slipped into a period of complacency brought on by a sense of conformity and contentment in the Eisenhower years.  John F. Kennedy came into office declaring that we could do better - but only if Americans were willing to do better.

Kennedy challenged the nation by talking about what he, as President, expected of the American people, not what he would offer them.  In that respect, he got the nation to start thinking about creating a more just society, bearing the burden of preserving liberty, and building a country that would be second to no one.  The success of the Soviets in sending a man in orbit around the earth inspired Kennedy to lead the country toward putting a man on the moon and returning safely to earth before 1970.  He initiated the Peace Corps to foster goodwill among the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia.  He moved forward on civil rights not only from being offended by bigotry but from being appalled by its lack of reason.  "Kennedy was not a bigot," Richard Reeves wrote in 1993.  "In fact, like many of his generation, he thought prejudice was irrational, a waste of emotion and time." 

Unfortunately, the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 left his Presidency as unfinished as a Schubert symphony.  His domestic agenda and his commitment to civil rights - manifested in his June 1963 address on the topic - were stymied in Congress, and the space program was only beginning to move beyond John Glenn's 1962 triple orbit around the earth.  The centerpieces of his domestic agenda would be left to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to push through Congress, and the moon landing would ironically take place six months to the day into the administration of Kennedy's old nemesis, Richard Nixon.  The major question involving Vietnam - would Kennedy have withdrawn American troops and advisers had he lived?  - remains unanswered.  But his cool, deliberative approach to defusing the Cuban missile crisis suggests that he likely would have.

Kennedy's greatest legacy as President was encouraging and inspiring America to do better and not to be satisfied with standing pat.  It is a sentiment has been tapped by JFK wannabes like Gary Hart, a cartoon Kennedy for the cartoon republic that was 1980s America, and sought by politicians too young to remember Kennedy, like former President Barack Obama.  But, in all actuality, no one possessing Kennedy's virtues and values - not even Kennedy himself - could possibly inspire Americans today to pursue public service.  People are too jaded.  Kennedy's questionable personal life would not have survived the scrutiny of today's 24-hour news cycles, and he likely would have withered from relentless criticism on social media.  Indeed, he might have been laughed at by urging Americans to pledge service to country today to provide for a better world tomorrow.  

After all, look what happened to the most Kennedyesque presidential candidate since JFK himself, Martin O'Malley.                      

I supported O'Malley as someone who hoped to see the Kennedy story repeated, but in a more indulgent, more ignorant, and more cynical time, it's hard to imagine anyone repeating the Kennedy story.  The unfinished work he left behind and the squandering in trust in government of Johnson and Nixon left a big hole in this country, but Kennedy's example shows that his faith in public service and what it means to be an American can be revived.

But it's going to take a long time before we regain the ability to revive it.  

Ronald Reagan's Greatest Hits

Today the nation marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, an undertalented, slick movie actor who played the President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Of course, a lot of people have sound reasons for not wanting to mark the birth anniversary of a man whose policies they saw as inhumane, selfish, intellectually bankrupt, and politically dishonest. Well, I already touched on the specifics of that on this blog in June 2004 (a link to that post is here), less than two weeks after his death. (I came to bury Reagan, not praise him.) Today, I call attention not to his deeds, but his words. Because when Reagan spoke, he proved to be a very gifted comedian, even though he was unintentionally funny. Here, on the day Reagan would have referred to as the sixty-first anniversary of his thirty-ninth birthday, are some laughable lines from the man conservatives have declared the greatest President of our lifetimes:

At the start of his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan charged the Environmental Protection Agency of suppressing information with this bombshell: "The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted . . .. The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees." (No scientific data supports this assertion.)

As President, Ronald Reagan declared in 1981, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."

Both of these quotes were the result of Reagan's confusion of nitrogen oxide, a harmful carbon, with nitrous oxide, a natural by-product of trees. And it probably led him to say this in October 1980: "Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen." In fact, according to Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, industrial sources are responsible for anywhere between 65 and 90 percent of the oxides of nitrogen in the U.S.

In a 1983 speech delivered in Oregon, "There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge." Actually, only 30 percent of the forest that existed in the present-day United States in 1778 was still preserved in 1983.

And passenger rail advocates will love this May 1980 argument against subsidizing Amtrak and other forms of passenger rail transit: "Trains are not any more energy-efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon." However, the U.S. Department of Transportation calculated that a train of fourteen passenger cars traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980-model automobile carrying an average of 2.2 people got 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.

But wait! There's more! How about some of these doozies?

Asked what he learned on a state trip to South America in 1982, President Reagan replied, "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." A White House aide had to go to the press to insist that Reagan didn't mean to suggest that he was surprised by this.

During his 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan declared, "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."

In 1985, President Reagan called the mercenaries in Nicaragua trying to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government there "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers."

"I've been told," President Reagan said that same year, "that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom." The Russian word for freedom is svoboda.

President Reagan once quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. as saying, "Keep the government poor and remain free." The late Supreme Court justice never said that, though he did once say that taxation was necessary for a civilized society.

President Reagan defended his support for the apartheid government in South Africa in 1981 by saying, "Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" Although South Africa, which became an independent country in 1910, fought in both World Wars on the side of the U.S. and Great Britain, the National Party, which developed the apartheid system after coming to power in 1948, had opposed South African participation in both wars. Many National Party members harbored pro-Nazi sympathies in the 1930s.

In 1983, President Reagan spoke to reporters about how "the ten commandments of Nikolai Lenin [are] the guiding principles of communism," among them "that promises are like pie crust, made to be broken." Although scholars pointed out that Lenin's first name was Vladimir, Lenin is sometimes identified as "Nikolai" Lenin, so Reagan can't be faulted for that. However, those same scholars declared that the ten commandments of Lenin that Reagan spoke of do not exist.

In 1985, President Reagan declared that few living Germans remembered World War II, "and certainly none who were adults and participating in any way." A few weeks later, he laid a wreath at Bitburg, a German military cemetery containing the graves of Nazi and American soldiers. Oops! Wait a minute! No Americans are buried there.

And how about this?

Upon declaring his candidacy for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination in 1979, the 68-year-old Reagan told Tom Brokaw that he was "younger than any head of state I would have to deal with except Margaret Thatcher." Not only were several world leaders of the time younger than Reagan, but as prime minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher was the British head of government. (Queen Elizabeth II is the British head of state.)

President Reagan once insisted he had firsthand knowledge of the "bad things" that happened in World War II because, as he explained it, "I was in uniform for four years myself." That was true, but what the former actor didn't mention was that he was in a non-combat unit based in Los Angeles that produced training films.

On the possibility that 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had seen a psychiatrist for depression: "Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid."

Defending his lapsed church attendance (an issue because of his alliances with the Christian right) in a presidential debate with Walter Mondale in October 1984, he talked about how he had started going to church as "here in Washington" as President before logistics forced him to stop. The debate was in Louisville. And if Reagan couldn't attend church due to security concerns, he could have held private services in the White House, as previous Presidents had done. He did not.

In that same debate, President Reagan referred to military uniforms as "wardrobe," as if they were costumes.

President Reagan insisted in a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast on January 15, 1989, just before he left office (and on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday) that black civil rights leaders had done very well for themselves "keeping alive" the idea that blacks were "still the victims of racial prejudice." Jesse Jackson was not amused.

And how about this?

During a White House meeting with Arab leaders in October 1982, President Reagan turned to the Lebanese foreign minister. "You know," he said, "your nose looks just like Danny Thomas's." The Arabs were not re-assured.

And advocates for the homeless were hardly re-assured by this Reagan statement from January 1984: "You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."

I could go on. In fact, I could be here for a whole week.

But while you ponder these pearls of record, ponder also that this man was this vast, diverse, powerful country's leader for eight freakin' years.

Ladies and gentlemen, the fortieth President of the United States!

(Speaking at a White House News Photographers Association dinner in May 1983, President Reagan suddenly stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers. Explained the President, "I've been waiting years to do this." :-O )