Favorite Presidents & Would-be Presidents

We were sitting in the living room of my great-grandparents’ home when I asked my great-grandfather, Rollin Horton, who his favorite president was. “Roosevelt,” he replied.

    I nodded, figuring that the New Deal efforts by FDR during the Great Depression would have appealed to a farmer, struggling to eke out a living during those difficult times.“Franklin Roosevelt,” I said aloud as a sort of afterthought.

    “No, Teddy,” he corrected me.

     I was surprised. Then I did some quick mental arithmetic. The year we were having this conversation was 1972, and I had turned 21. My great-grandfather, born in December of 1879, would have still been 21 when the ‘Rough Rider’ assumed the Presidency in 1901 after his predecessor, William McKinley, was assassinated.

    “Teddy was exciting and had a lot of energy,” Grandpa Rollin explained. For a young person, or even older folks for that matter, such qualities are captivating. When I was nine years old I watched the 1960 Democratic Party Convention being held that year in Los Angles. For some reason— and I haven’t a clue what sparked the interest— I latched onto John Kennedy and became a partisan. My mother, years later, recalled how I put handmade signs up on our country road, urging the neighbors to vote for JFK.

     I doubt that many of them were persuaded, including my parents who supported Vice President Nixon. But enough others from around the nation did favor the youthful senator, and he was elected by the slimmest of margins.

     After Kennedy’s assassination (the first presidential murder since McKinley’s) I switched my loyalty to his brother, Robert. At first, like a lot of others, that affection was tied to the romance of Camelot that sprung up after his death; the imagery of lost opportunity and “one brief, shining moment.” But as I grew older matters like the Vietnam War, the draft, civil rights, and all of the unrest and turmoil occurring in the country held a personal interest. As it turned out, Robert Kennedy’s positions on these and other issues both mirrored and informed my own evolving beliefs.

   Back then, in the latter half of the 1960s, the media talked a lot about “gaps.” These gaps included profound differences of opinion between supporters of President Lyndon Johnson’s war policies and those advocating a negotiated peace settlement (“hawks and doves” was the shorthand used) as well as those that existed between blacks and whites, young and old, and rich and poor.

   Bobby Kennedy, with his comments, proposals, and stature, seemed from my standpoint the candidate best able to “bridge those gaps” and to convince people from differing backgrounds and viewpoints to find common ground. He also conveyed an empathy for the underdog. Here was a man with all of the advantages of wealth, upbringing, and political power sticking up for the “little guy” and going face-to-face against those who would use the power of money, position and influence to bully and push aside those less fortunate. When he launched his run for the presidency in early 1968, I watched with eager anticipation.

  TO FIND COMMON GROUND.  Perhaps that was naive on my part. The “gaps” still exist. The differences of outlook and political persuasion, the animosities that spring from them, still overwhelm the landscape.  Candidates of both stripes refer to “the American People” in a manner that implies that they personally hold an inside track on that entity, never mentioning all of the others who oppose them or their positions. I always think, when I hear that phrase being evoked, are their opponents not also part of “the American People?”

    I did not follow up with Grandpa Rollin on whether any of the ensuing presidents had captured his affection. Somehow I suspected that as he grew older, got married and had children, worked his farm, lived through two world wars as well as the Great Depression, and dealt with everything else that came along, that he took what came as far as who was president. Grandpa, no doubt, preferred certain candidates over others, but his life went on regardless of who happened to be occupying the White House.

    I suspect this sentiment existed because it would reflect my own. The bullets that ended Robert Kennedy’s life on June of 1968 also ended my youthful passions for a particular candidate. I’ve preferred certain candidates over others during the years since that fateful night, but I’ve noticed that the Democratic Party did not end when Ronald Regan was elected nor did the Republican Party whither away after Bill Clinton took office. Both parties, and all of their more energetic supporters, were back for the next election cycle “loaded for bear.” Meanwhile, the nation (i.e., the American People) continued, each and all, doing what we do.

    My observation should not imply that I do not think elections matter or that the person who wins office or the party holding the majority are of little importance. Quite the contrary. The specific policies they advocate, their attitude of governance, and all of the decisions that are made within those parameters do possess consequences… direct and indirect, foreseen and unforeseen, for good as well as for ill.

  Bobby Kennedy, like Teddy Roosevelt, was exciting and full of energy. The two of them, it seems to me, conveyed “an aura of possibility”; the idea--impractical or quixotic though it may be--that (as Bobby said), “Each of us can work to change a small portion of events.”  Kennedy noted also that “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

    Or as Teddy Roosevelt said in an earlier era, “Far better is it do dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

   A president or a would-be president can influence us by example. The words he or she chooses to use, the policies and priorities they propose to pursue as well as their overall approach to governance can appeal to our better natures or to our baser instincts. They can inspire us to find that common ground and bridge those inevitable differences that exist, or they can--through insinuation and contrivance--exasperate and further widen and deepen “the gaps.” With their words and actions, they can invoke the image of a table that all are welcome to sit at or one that has room for only a select and chosen few.

    While not commanding the same attention as a president or presidential aspirant, the same would be true of anyone who either holds or seeks to hold an elective position

    Still, as important as elections are since in determining which candidate or political party is handed the levers of power, of greater import are our own words and attitude and initiatives. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself,” Robert Kennedy said, “but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.”

   While the personality of a candidate, the energy and excitement they convey, can captivate our imagination, it only matters if we “spend” ourselves (as Roosevelt urged) “in a worthy cause.” Teddy also noted that, “This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”

    All of us getting a square deal, a fair opportunity, and decent treatment would be such a cause.