There have been thirteen occupants of the oval office since I was born and they fall into the following personal rating categories: liked, ambivalent, disliked, and despised. With the elections looming, I’ve been thinking about them as people, what they accomplished, and the tenor of the country during their administrations. While I firmly believe that we have hit rock bottom as a country during the eight years Trump has been a political figure, this trip down memory lane has taught me that there have been eras that are as bad if not worse (in a different way) than what we have today.
So here is a partial roster. The rest will be shared in Part 2.
1959 – 1960. Dwight D. Eisenhower – Ages 0 to 1 – Ambivalent – Remember nothing: All I know about Eisenhower is from what I’ve read in the history books, most of it as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II than as a President. He’s on the list simply because I came into existence when he was President.
1961 – 1963. John F. Kennedy – Ages 2 to 4- Ambivalent – Remember very little: I was too young to know what was going on in the world, but this is one of the eras where I may have been wondering if we were on the verge of the apocalypse. The Cold War was raging, and the Cuban missile crisis would have been frightening to live through. Given Kennedy was the last President to be assassinated, you’d think that event is what I most remember about him, but you’d be wrong. At that age I LOVED parades. So, my most vivid memory concerns his funeral that was televised nationally. The event was a doozy.
1963 – 1968. Lyndon B. Johnson – Ages 4 to 9 – Ambivalent – He could have been great but wound up dividing the country: From a kid’s perspective, what I remember the most about LBJ was that he had big ears and talked funny. Back then the President was like a God, and I accordingly trusted and believed in them. My Dad used to routinely watch the CBS News with Walter Cronkite, and I started watching it with him in the late 60’s. I formed opinions based on what I heard, none of which were good. Racism in general, and the South in particular, were bad. The riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago were bad. The Vietnam War was bad. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were very, very bad. So based on that nine-year old’s perspective, LBJ would be on the disliked list. Looking back on that time now as an adult, I think LBJ could have gone down as one of the most noteworthy Presidents based his “Great Society” initiatives and our continued race to land on the Moon. But his willingness to allow us to become entrenched in the Vietnam quagmire fucked him and is the reason why he’ll never be considered one of the greats.
In looking back on all the violence and racial strife that occurred at the end of his presidency, I see a lot of similarities to our society today. Racism is rampant, we’ve seen political violence over the last few years, and it feels like more is on the horizon. We seemed to have lost common courtesy and decency, especially in our politics. I’ve asked myself if I were an adult in 1968, would I have been more fearful about our future compared to the night Trump got elected or today when I think about him getting re-elected. It’s a close call, but I think today is worse, primarily because both candidates in 1968 could be trusted to protect our country’s security. The same can’t be said today.
Not to be a complete downer, the LBJ years gave us The Beatles, I fell in love for the first time, and the Red Sox Impossible Dream season of 1967 spawned a life-long passion for baseball and the team. Whether that passion has served me well is debatable.
1969 – 1973. Richard M. Nixon (Tricky Dick) – Ages 10 to 14 – Disliked – A fall from grace and loss of trust: I was glad Nixon won the election in 1968 because he promised to get us out of the war. That is how a ten-year-old thought, because I didn’t know at the time that politicians words were cheap. But I was really into NASA and the space missions back then and was mesmerized by the Apollo 11 moon landing. Science fiction had come to life, and I could not pull myself away from the television. It galvanized the nation and the world unlike anything since, so I gave him credit for that.
I didn’t care about or understand politics. But “Peace with Honor” never materialized and the war in Vietnam had continued through his first term. It didn’t feel like the powder keg of 1968, but protests were still going on and Kent State happened. Agnew resigned in disgrace, becoming the first VP in over 130 years to do so. And to this ten-year-old, Nixon was becoming a guy you had a hard time liking or trusting. But he was the President, and I had not yet come to the point where I thought what a President does should be called into question. That all changed with Watergate. I raptly watched congressional hearings, concluded that Nixon was a bad guy, and was glad that he resigned. I didn’t fully understand the ramifications of it but sensed that something had fundamentally changed because our President was a crook and resigned from office for the first time in our history. His crime seems quaint now.
On a personal level, this period had more bad than good. The Beatles broke up, I discovered what real grief was when my best friend died of cancer, and the Junior High years were awkward at best. I had my first taste of working a job in the tobacco fields of Connecticut when I was 14 and absolutely hated it. I also smoked my first cigarette and experienced my first wet dream. One was a much better experience than the other.
1973 – 1976. Gerald R. Ford, Jr. – Ages 14 to 17 – Ambivalent – A Caretaker:
These were the years when I learned to drive a car and started to think about college. Girls were also becoming more interesting, but I was too shy to do anything about it.
To me, Ford was more of a caretaker than a President, given how he came into office. He’s the only President during my life that I would term forgettable. The few things I remember are his pardon of Nixon, which I didn’t agree with, our nation’s Bi-Centennial celebration, and the two assassination attempts on his life. Ford seemed so bland and clumsy and uncontroversial that I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to kill him.
1977 – 1980. James E. Carter – Ages 17 to 21 – Disliked – Economic Upheaval:
I had just entered college when Carter came into office and was more concerned about making the baseball team, losing my virginity, and experiencing life away from home than anything else. I didn’t care about what was going on in Washington DC. Having said that, I thought Jimmy Carter was a shitty president. The Israel/Egypt peace agreement was a huge accomplishment in retrospect, although at the time it didn’t mean much to me. But the Beirut hostage situation and the OPEC oil crisis, where we had to endure long lines at the gas pumps, assuming there was any gas, did and were black marks. He was the boss, so who else was there to blame? Maybe he suffered from bad timing and global circumstances he couldn’t control, but I thought a lot more bad than good occurred during his watch. Fast forward to today, and while my view of his presidency haven’t changed much, I think he was a good, decent man and has done as much if not more outside of his presidency than most.
1981 – 1988. Ronald W. Reagan – Ages 21 to 29 – Liked then disliked – The Teflon President.
I had just graduated college and was embarking on a career. At the time I thought Reagan was too old to be President (he was 69) but voted for him anyway because I thought Carter sucked.
I still wasn’t interested in or followed politics, but how could you not like how Reagan presented himself and his public speaking prowess (provided he had a script or teleprompter). He exuded strength and confidence, which was a nice departure from his predecessor, and he was a hawk as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, which I liked. John Hinckley tried to assassinate him, which made Reagan a sympathetic figure. Maybe Gorbachev and “Glastnost” had more to do with this, but our relationship with the Soviets and The Cold War in general got much better, which I gave Reagan credit for. It was certainly better than the “Evil Empire” days.
As the years of his presidency passed, I liked his policies less and less. “Trickle down” economics sounded dubious, and was. I knew a few people that were small business owners and farmers, and they were adamant that Reagan’s policies screwed them. Iran-Contra was shady, and I remember reading how our deficit was exploding. Still, nothing seemed to stick to him or his administration, thus the nickname “The Teflon President” The bottom line is I gave Reagan mixed grades and is a tough one to categorize because while I generally liked his first term, the same can’t be said for the second.
Reagan’s time was a fertile period of personal and professional growth. My career started taking off, I was independent and on my own, and I loved it. But I also suffered a broken and shattered heart as two momentous events occurred. A long-term relationship to someone I was convinced I would marry bit the dust, and the Red Sox snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 1986 World Series against the Mets. I swore, not for the first time, that I would never root for them again.
I got over the relationship angst within a little over a year as I met my soulmate, who ironically was a Mets fan, in late 1985, and we would marry twenty-one months later. I’d continue to suffer with the Sox for another 18 years.
1989 – 1992. George H.W. Bush – Ages 29 to 33 – Disliked, liked, then disliked again when the economy tanked.
Since I wasn’t keen on Reagan towards the end of his Presidency, I wasn’t enamored with the idea of his VP because I suspected he wouldn’t be very different. And after years of watching Reagan make his appearances look flawless, Bush looked like he was uncomfortable in the spotlight, which didn’t endear him to me. This was also the first time I remember (perhaps I was just paying more attention) a campaign being intentionally mean-spirited, with the ads of Dukakis being in a tank (which made him look ridiculous) and the continuous Willie Horton attack ads.
The Berlin Wall came crashing down early in his tenure, then Desert Storm, which he handled in an exemplary fashion. The Soviet Union had fallen apart, and Boris Yeltsin was leading the new Russia. Bush’s popularity meanwhile reached the stratosphere, and I didn’t think there was any way he would not be re-elected. I certainly thought he earned that right.
But…. The economy turned to shit. That and the “read my lips: no new taxes” pledge doomed him. By now I understood how policy decisions affected my pocketbook, and I concluded handling the economy was not his strong suit. Then during one of the Town Hall debates during the 1988 Presidential campaign, the camera caught him glancing at his watch, looking bored and as if he’d rather be anywhere else, and that turned me off. It’s amazing how quickly his fall from grace occurred.
I genuinely liked the man and though he was a decent president, but we bought our first house during a time when interest rates were sky high. The place turned out to be a money-pit to boot so of course I blamed him for our woes and voted for Clinton.
I later learned how lucky I was not to have become involved in the Desert Storm and subsequent Middle East conflicts. I was a member of the Air National Guard from 1983 to 1987 but decided not to re-enlist. Little did I know there was a two-year grace period after my tour ended, where I could be recalled in the event of a national emergency, that ended less than six months before Desert Storm started. Many National Guard personnel in our state were deployed, so perhaps I literally dodged a bullet there.
MSich Chronicles 