HOW TO SURVIVE PRESIDENTS' DAY

HOW TO SURVIVE PRESIDENTS' DAY

This coming Monday, February 18, is Presdents' Day, a federal holiday. 

The stock market, banks and all federal offices are closed. 

The holiday was initially a celebration of Washington's birthday and was followed by a celebration later in the month of Lincoln's birthday.  In 1971, however, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed and a single celebratory Monday in February was created to honor both of them.  Meanwhile, some states still wanted  to honor each of them individually and re-established separate holidays.  So now, in order to assuage those recalcitrants, and avoid confusing the rest of us, Presidents' Day has become a holiday celebrating "all U.S. Presidents, past and present" (italics mine).

This year, that creates a problem.

The holiday comes at a time when the current incumbent is disregarding the Constitutional separation of powers.  He is doing so to declare an emergency that doesn't exist . . . to continue a fight he has already lost . . . so he can appease the extremists he listens to during the bulk of his "working" day  . . . which he and his handlers euphemistically call "Executive Time". 

As with all euphemisms, this one is designed to disguise reality.  The reality here is that Donald Trump is lazy, dishonest, not particularly interested in his job . . .

And bad at it.  

So, what's a Presidents' Day celebrant supposed to do?

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The Presidency is a job to which no one comes fully prepared.

To be a good President, let alone a great one,  requires energy, knowledge, competence, compassion and curiosity.  It also requires a paradoxical mixture of humility and self-promotion.

None of this, assuming it is possessed, guarantees historical approbation.  On the one hand, events often out run even the best.  On the other, history itself tends to focus on crisis and in the process often neglects the quotidian.  

There have probably been a number of good Presidents -- those who checked off most or all of my boxes -- wrongly consigned to the more forgotten corners of our past.  

Dwight Eisenhower comes to mind.

So does Ulysses Grant.

The former presided over a cold war and a warm economic peace.  He was careful not to upend the latter, stifling the urge of extremists in his own party who would have repealed all of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  FDR's program had led to the most widely distributed productivity gains in our economic history, and in so doing had created the modern middle class,  all thanks to the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security, and the GI Bill.

Much to the chagrin of the right-wingers, Ike kept all of it.

At the same time, Eisenhower also confronted the Soviet Union rationally.  The General from D-Day did not have to convince anyone that he knew how to fight a war, or that he would do so if necessary.  So, he ended one in Korea that had become a stalemate and did not start one with the Soviets that would have been a mutual holocaust.

Nevertheless, when Eisenhower left the Presidency in 1961, he was known more for his golf than his stewardship.

For his part, Grant too is among our most historically underrated chief executives.

Until recent biographers began to re-assess his administration, Grant was seen mostly as a great military leader who, as President, became  a lax administrator victimized by corrupt appointees.  The gems ignored in this reading included his championing of the 15th Amendment that provided for black suffrage, his successful fight to abolish the first Ku Klux Klan (the second one emerged in the early 20th century long after he was gone), and his condemnation of America's Indian policy as immoral.

Grant also was the author of a number of foreign policy successes orchestrated by his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, the latter of whom is himself an unsung hero in the pantheon of American cabinet secretaries. Among their signal successes was negotiation and passage of the Treaty of Washington with Great Britain. The treaty avoided war with Great Britain over the latter's funding of Confederate privateers during the Civil War and required arbitration of damage claims caused by them.  Though the United States was ultimately awarded $15.5 million in arbitration, the treaty's historic effect was to guarantee Anglo-American peace and allow finance capital (of which Britain then had much more) to fully underwrite American industry.  

But when Grant left office in 1877 his accomplishments quickly faded.

The myth of the Confederate lost cause took hold and discounted his commitment to civil rights, a commitment that would not be equalled until the middle of the next century.  And the still extant British Empire allowed evaluations of his diplomacy to be shoe-horned into, if not irrelevance, at least obscurity, the latter of which is often the cruel fate of those toiling for lesser powers.

In any case, the Presidency is not just about the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lincolns and Roosevelts.  The greats and near greats live in a club that also includes forgotten greats like Eisenhower and Grant. 

And there are many more of the latter than the former.  

Gerald Ford traded a pardon for later electoral defeat in order to save the country from the continued trauma of Watergate.  Bush I traded a tax hike for the same result to help rescue the country from fiscal profligacy.

John Quincy Adams traded the entire office for eighteen later years in the House of Representatives, where he became such a vociferous critic of slavery that Jacksonian Democrats and Southern Whigs passed the notorious gag rule forbidding anti-slavery petitions from being brought before the House.  In 1841, while a sitting Congressman, he appeared before the Supreme Court and won freedom for the slaves on the Spanish ship The Amistad.

His father, John Adams, the first President to lose a bid for re-election, went home after he was defeated, establishing a precedent as important to government of, by and for the people as any other because it made elections, as opposed to insurrections, the only vehicle through which popular discontent could legitimately express itself.

Harry Truman fired a popular General in the middle of a war.

This tanked Truman's poll numbers as two-thirds of those surveyed by Gallup disapproved.

It also saved the principle of civilian control of the military at a point where it arguably most needed saving.  For, had Douglas MacArthur's obdurate opposition-in-uniform succeeded, or even been permitted to exist unchecked, the consequences for civilian control, especially during the cold war when nuclear annihilation was never far from our collective minds, cannot be gainsaid.  There is a reason military leaders who become President are ex-Generals, not serving ones; it stops us from becoming South America. 

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Count 'em.

In addition to Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Jefferson --  the Mount Rushmore plus FDR quintet of heroes -- there are seven forgotten presidential heroes.  Some were forgotten then, some are forgotten now. Still others have been forgotten both then and now.  As a combined group  they are Democrats and Republicans; early, middle and late republic office holders; more than a quarter of the forty-five we have had.

And they amount to a  veritable bi-partisan smorgasbord of reasons to celebrate.

So, this Presidents' Day,  let's . . .

Remember them . . .

And forget Trump.