Presidents Day Holiday

Tomorrow is the President's Day holiday.  Perhaps in a few years, or as early as next year if the 40% aided by foreign interference have their way, it'll be moved to Trump's birthday for the holiday.

But in the meantime, the District is full of reminders of real presidents.  Monuments, memorials, portraits and hidden away statues, like this statue of a kneeling Lincoln in the Washington National Cathedral, tucked away in a little alcove on a stairway.

The Washington Monument is the most significant and noticeable of all the presidential tributes here.  I use it to check on the arrival of bad weather from the west, and to try to orient myself if I'm lost on all the diagonal streets in the District, so long as I can see it.

Sometimes I catch a nice shot of a memorial that is a result of the wet weather in the District, like this photo I snapped of the Jefferson Memorial shrouded in fog from across the expanse of the Tidal Basin, maybe a half mile away.  Tomorrow being a holiday, I'll celebrate by enjoying lunch at the local gourmet pizzeria as usual on holidays and special days and who knows, maybe my oldest child, whom I haven't seen nor heard from since, I think, about 2009, will show up to enjoy sharing the meal with me; after all, he has a birthday a few days later and I'll be there then too, looking forward to seeing him then also, or for the first time in over a decade.  ;-)

41 will be missed

George H.W. Bush, our 41st president who died last week, was a great American. Although I didn't vote for him, he was a strong president too. 

A WW2 hero, he was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific War, who crashed in action and everyone in his crew died but him. Live with that all your life. 

As I reflected on his life, I came to a startling conclusion that he was the last president to project typical American power throughout the world by presiding over the end of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall came down and assembling a coalition to throw Iraq out of Kuwait. He wisely ended the 100-hour war after he destroyed the Iraqi army but before he irrevocably disrupted the fragile status-quo in the Mideast that carried with it an uneasy peace. 

Shockingly, we have been in decline internationally since then for the last 26 years. Clinton foolishly didn't support his Somali mission with armor, whether it was used or not, and when it was desperately needed it wasn't there, and he allowed fatal mission creep.  Dubya Bush was a reckless novice ("Bring 'em on!" " Mission accomplished!"). Obama was weak in allowing his redlines to be crossed and not following up his warning to Putin to stop meddling in our 2016 election with deliverables. Trump is a hopeless, dangerous dotard (I love Kim! You can sleep well at night because I fixed the N. Korean nuclear threat!). None of these served (Dubya was in the National Guard but he was mysteriously AWOL for much of his stateside tour). 

The generation of presidents forged in the crucible of participation in world war (Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41) were respected or at least feared internationally and kept America strong (great). Carter was weak (he should have sent one more helicopter on the abortive Teheran-rescue mission) but he was a one-termer. 

James Polk and George H.W. Bush will be one seen in history as the best one-term presidents. Can America come back from 28 years of steady international decline once Trump is voted or thrown out in 2020?  I hope so!

American military strategists project and plan for our next big war to be with China, in the 2020s. How will we fare, especially if Russia joins in and creates a second front for us?  We have been busy shedding allies under our current president, either deliberately or through insult, like Germany, Japan, S. Korea, Poland, France, the UK, Australia, and Canada, terming them deadbeats who don't pay us. These nations will seek strength through their own coalitions or militarization, perhaps even becoming potential adversaries to us. Will we have to go it alone the next time?

Worst to First

DC has plenty of free expansive memorials like the Washington Monument, dedicated walkways like the Tidal Basin and museums like the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery.  It has a permanent presidential portrait gallery with one or more painted picture of every past president except Obama (it's coming), so to get an image of the current and worst president by far already, you have to go to the Smithsonian gift shop and buy a postcard.

But on the west end of the third floor of the old converted Patent Office building, you can see plenty of images of the best president, Lincoln, including busts, a life mask and a cast of his hands.  In contrast to the current era of divisiveness fostered by the current White House occupant, Lincoln kept our nation together, ended the intractable problem of slavery, reinvented American liberty with his Gettysburg Address and showed a way to the future with his astonishing 2d Inaugural Address.

You can find a portrait of the worst president, until Trump, Dubya; his "W" moniker stood for Worst.  He had all the worst impulses of a miscreant schoolboy, flippant ("Bring 'em on!"), irreverent (Doin' a heckuva job, Brownie"), intellectually lazy (he depended on Cheney's viewpoint of the world) and totally unprepared, in his own way, for the demands of the office ("Mission accomplished!"), his unfunded tax cuts and endless wars has impoverished the country but in contrast to the abysmal "presidential" performance we've seen this year, Bush the Second now seems positively presidential in comparison.

But then you can pause in the marble hallways to linger over several likenesses of the Father of our Country.  Washington won a guerrilla war against the greatest power on Earth, gave up the mantle of military power voluntarily, took on the country's first presidency under its new constitution and established many important protocols for the office and then retired after two terms, setting yet another lasting standard for the peaceful transfer of power.

More books

The year is slipping away! A blue funk, since November 9th last year.  Way back in May I posted that last year I read 14 books, two of which were entirely inconsequential (light reading by the same historian on the history of World War One and World War Two using the same minimal outline for both), and listed the six most significant (to me) works in ascending order (Oswald's Tale, Silas Mariner, Death of a Salesman, Jane Eyre, True Grit, Agnes Grey).

I've been trying to get away in the last couple of years from reading recent history almost exclusively and get back into literature.  So now that I have listed the six most impressive (to me) books I read last year, here are the next half dozen:

Case Closed-Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner (1993).  Yep, Lee Harvey Oswald did it.  I've visited the sniper's perch on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository and that street below where the presidential motorcade was crawling away below the sniper-scoped viewpoint of the assassin is a killing zone.  Couldn't miss.  That, of course, doesn't explain how the perfect storm of events came together that led this derelict of history at that moment to be there ready to kill this historical figure.  I'll note that his Russian wife Marina was probably a KGB operative, and Kruschev was humiliated by Kennedy in the Cuba showdown that threatened to eradicate all human life on the planet.  I read this tome while recovering from double hernia surgery.

Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era 1910-1917 by Arthur Link (1954).  Woodrow Wilson was a near near-great American president, who accomplished many things, many of which were good.  He was also a racist.  I have learned not to comment on the Internet about presidents who owned slaves or were clearly racists.  So...Zip the Lip.

Yoni: Hero of Entebbe by Max Hastings (1979).  Don't know what Entebbe was?  Look it up.  Yoni was the revered older brother of the current Israeli prime minister, and he died at Entebbe and his nation mourned.

The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede (2002).  A heart-tugging book about how the inbound travelers to the USA from overseas had to scramble on September 11, 2001 and in the week that followed, when US airspace was closed on that tragic day.  The eastern-most international airport in North America, in Canada, which had been relegated to backwater status after the Cold War (the US basically built it so its forces could quickly deploy to Europe) and the town reverted to about 2,000 close-knit residents who mostly maintained this world-class airport.  About 120 jumbo jets landed there on September 11th and 12,000 refugees overran the isolated town's resources immediately.  You think the Canadians didn't cope, take care of and welcome these confused, fearful travelers?  Think again.  O Canada!

Dieppe by Harold Palin (1978).  Don't know what Dieppe was?  Oh, never mind.  This is an account of the armed incursion that presaged Operation Overlord two years later.  It was a disaster but O Canada!

The Interloper-Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union by Peter Savodnik (2013).  A portrait of newly-weds, and Russian agents in the apartments next door and the recordings that came out of their planted bugs.  Did they capture the full breadth of the first days of these two "lovebirds" (one was abusive, the other was an agent), because the Minsk agents knocked off at 12PM.  Two years later Lee Harvey Oswald slew the president of Russia's greatest adversary, and his wife knew nothing about it!  Yeah.

Hilary

I have a sister named Hilary.  Not Hillary.  Sir Edmund Hilary ascended the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, with his Sherpa porter Tensing, around the time she was born so perhaps she was named after him.

I want Hillary for president now, not because she's so great but because she's not The Donald.  I have no idea who Hilary prefers.

I have been working for Hillary's candidacy during this presidential campaign; the last presidential campaign I worked for was George McGovern's campaign against Tricky Dick.  You might know how that came out, an absolute debacle at the polls for the Democrats, so although I always vote, I don't work for candidates anymore.

The choice seemed so clear back then, and the stakes so high, just like now 44 years later.  But the lesson I learned back then, when I was young and hopeful and confident that if I worked hard I could make a difference, is that the American electorate is often its own worst enemy, and I always defer to that era's cartoon philosopher, Pogo, who famously said (a slight misquote), "We have met the enemy and he is us."

A Leopard's Spots

In 2009 I was elected president of the DC Road Runners Club, a post for which, coming into it as club director of training, I had a lot of ideas that I hoped to implement so the club could become more inclusive of and welcoming to ordinary runners.  I immediately ran into  buzz-saw of opposition from a group of 20-somethings on the board led by Brian Danza, who hated my style (from the training side of the club, not the Alpha side) and my age and within a year I resigned when one board meeting nearly ended in a fracas between me and him and three of his cronies.

I have always regretted that, not the near-fistfight in the restaurant (they totally dissed my friend John Braden at the meeting who was there as my guest) but the whole sorry mess of trying to run underwater all those months.  I learned that you need your people on a board, it's not enough just to do good work and think that people will adhere to long-standing custom and common civility.

I moved on from the club and I rarely speak with anyone from it.  Brian subsequently became president and then recently, after some particularly outrageous remarks dissing ordinary runners that made it into the Washington Post, someone else was elected president (selected would be a better word), from the training side.  : )  Over the weekend, out of the clear blue sky, I received this email from Brian in my personal account:


Hey Peter, long time no see/talk, 

I think I spotted you on the C&O canal today, well actually you were on Cap Crescent, and I was on the C&O. 

I was so concentrated on making it to the bathroom at Fletchers that I didn't notice you until you were directly beside me. 

How's your running been? Still have nagging injuries? You look like you are in the best shape since I've known you. 

B.

Here's what I sent in reply a couple of days later:

Good to hear from you Brian,

No that wasn't me on the C&O, this weekend I was on the W&OD. It must have been my doppelgänger.  

Take care,

Peter

People don't change but I suppose they can mature.

Out with the old, in with the new

As a former president of the DCRRC (2009), I want to congratulate my friend Lauren Bullis (pictured below completing a relay race in 2009) upon his election as president of the DC Road Runners Club.   Lauren replaces the divisive and controversial outgoing president who had this to say in a Washington Post article last year about the vast majority of runners in DC:

Brian Danza, president of D.C. Road Runners, divides runners into two groups: the competitive subset, who run for time, and the participatory or recreational group, or “people who do it to check a box.” Speaking on behalf of his running club, he said, “we firmly promote the sport of running in a competitive manner.”

Running a marathon just for the sake of completing one, said Danza, isn’t worth the effort. Danza cites “the advent of social media and bragging” as fueling marathons’ increased popularity. “The way to one-up each other — ‘I’m thinner than you, I’m better than you in various ways, I also checked this box’ — has really perpetuated the growth of the sport.”

Lauren has an attitude about runners, inclusion and participation that is diametrically opposed to that expressed on behalf of the club by Mr. Danza.  I am delighted with the new, promising direction taken by my former running club.

"Isn't worth the effort."

As a former president of D C Road Runners Club, I will speak to the hurtful and arrogant comments made by the club's current president in a Washington Post article published Friday, which article extolled runners in DC. Current DCRRC president Brian Danza explained that his club "firmly promote[s] the sport of running in a competitive manner."  

The article cited Mr. Danza as saying, "Running a marathon just for the sake of completing one isn't worth the effort."  Recreational runners, such as presumably the vast majority of participants in today's People's Marathon, "do it to check a box," according to Mr. Danza.

The club under the care of the president one before me and then myself believed in inclusion and participation, not elitism and disdain for the common runner.  We provided training programs for persons wishing to engage in or initiate a more fit lifestyle, for people who aspired to run a 5K or a 10K or a marathon, and actively encouraged achieving such a lofty goal.  

The club president mid-last decade and myself did not denigrate the efforts expended by such ordinary athletes for the uncommon accomplishment of running a marathon, even in perhaps 4 or 5 hours or more, rather, we tried to encourage and facilitate such activities by creating and running training programs tailored to certain races such as the Capital Hill Classic 10K, the ATM, and the National Marathon and HM.  (Recognition goes to Kristin Blanchet for being the genesis of such programs becoming a regular part of the club.)  

I consider it asinine that "competitive" runners such as Mr. Danza might say "recreational" runners are merely wasting their time by their participation.  (Mr. Danza related to the reporter that anything less than "competitive" running is merely "the way to one-up each other-I'm thinner than you, I'm better than you, I checked this box.")

I hail all those runners who did their best this morning at the MCM, all 30,000 athletes, and whatever time they achieved, I urge them all to exult in having accomplished a hard feat that 99% of all people have never performed.   I salute them all for undertaking the task and sticking with it and finishing it, competitive and recreational runners alike!

A Small Step

JFK said, before he died, that America would put a man on the moon in the same decade.  It did. 

I remember July 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong descended the ladder from the module on live TV to set foot in the Sea of Tranquility to proclaim American dominance.  He said, "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind."

I went outside at that moment to look at the bright moon and exult.  I exult no longer, because America is no longer dominant, and that was almost half a century ago.

Armstrong died today at age 82.  So many hopes, so unfulfilled.

Third time's the charm.

‎In November 2009, Brian Danza, the current president of my former running club, the DCRRC, totally disrespected a guest I had brought to a board meeting when I was president, even as Brian along with his posse of three other club IT guys, fellow twenty-somethings (one actually was barely thirty, a rogue club VP and liar who was their personal lapdog) typically and totally disrupted (nay, trashed) my board meeting.  It got so ugly that night that Brian felt compelled to call my friend (but not me) the next day to apologize.

I left the club shortly thereafter over Brian's actions, which included shutting me out of certain parts of the club's website and, in his ad hominen attacks upon me (I think it was a generational thing, or perhaps he's unbalanced, but it was certainly all-consuming on his part), unilaterally editing my president's column to the club.  The personal affronts aside, I could not enlist any board support in undertaking a review of Brian's control over and use of the club's accounts (I had heard stories of allegedly questionable conduct on his part), and since I could not therefore ensure fulfillment of my fiduciary duty as president to the club, I resigned.

Since then, Brian has run right past me and my friend, a running buddy of mine, twice on the trails, passing by within a yard of us each time and pretending not to see us, even when my friend called out a greeting to him.  I have been critical of Brian for his behavior.

Yesterday Brian ran by us again, overtaking us this time in contrast to running past us from the opposite direction, and this time he stopped briefly to say pointedly hello before going on.  My friend said later that Brian acknowledging us finally was to his credit, and that me shaking Brian's hand when he offered it was the right thing for me to do.

The Encounter, Part 3

Running with John last weekend in Rosslyn, I saw the bright future of my old running club. I was president of the club in 2009 before I was forced out in a coup engineered by the head of the IT department along with his hi-tek posse (all grossly disruptive grotesquely disrespectful 20-something board members) in collusion with a diminutive rogue VP.

Last month I saw the past of the club when I ran into the person who succeeded me, lets-call-her-Carol, and had a nice chat with her. The club was in terrific shape when I left and also when Carol ended her term, but I was sad to hear about club races which had recently been cancelled such as its former flagship 20-miler.

Also last month I saw the present when the current president, let's call him Bryan, ran right by me in Arlington. Although he saw me, he rigorously averted his eyes the entire 40 feet it took for him to run past me as I stood on the same sidewalk looking at him (maybe the guy is shy, or afraid). When I was president I had heard comments about his creepiness because allegedly he could track consumers' visits to the website and allegedly he would occasionally ask a female visitor if he could assist her in finding anything.

But Saturday the current Vice President for Training, my old post before I became president, ran by me and stopped to chat. This former coach who I elevated to the board gave me confidence via a warm and animated conversation that the club was undergoing a great revival in its training programs after an unfortunate period of stagnancy under the last training director (the lilliputian rogue former VP who was a total slackard in my opinion). This committed, compassionate and competent current VP represents the club's bright future, and I couldn't be more glad for it. (The club's bright future is on the right, wearing a shirt I designed for the 10-Miler program. Photo credit John.)

Running Through History

I went to Dallas on business last week and asked the concierge at the downtown Sheraton for a 3-mile running route. She pulled out a map and traced a route with a marker.

"Go out the north door and turn left, follow the tracks down Pacific Avenue and go a mile, loop down around the Grassy Knoll here . . ."

I interrupted her. "Excuse me, the Grassy Knoll? You mean the site of the JFK assassination?"

"Yes," she said.

At 5 a.m. the next morning, in perfect weather for running, I altered her route slightly and ran through history. I went out the north door, ran west a block to Harwood, turned left and ran by the magnificent Majestic Theatre on Elm Street and continued on to Main Street. Turning right, I ran through the stillness of the early morning thinking about November 22, 1963 and President Kennedy's last few minutes of life.

Perhaps I was running down Main Street at the same speed as his open-air limousine was travelling along the same roadway as his presidential motorcade crawled towards its history-altering meeting with fate at Dealey Plaza, still half a mile ahead of me. I had no noontime sunlight or cheering crowds to spur me on, only my somber thoughts in the early morning darkness and the presence of little groups of silently moving homeless people on the sidewalks.

I passed over Griffin, Lamar, Austin and Market Streets. I ran by Founders Plaza on my right as Houston Street loomed ahead, on the corner where the motorcade made a torturous right turn and passed by the very building which housed the jail where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been taken when he was executed in the basement of the courthouse a few blocks behind me.

I made the same right turn. Forty-eight years ago the unsuspecting President Kennedy had less than a minute to live.

I ran a short block and yawed left onto Elm Street, right under a tall fortress of a building, the Texas School Book Depository. I ran down the hill directly away from the Depository and entered the killing zone.

An X painted on the roadway in the middle lane marked the spot where the first bullet struck President Kennedy. This "magic bullet" fired from the corner sixth-storey window of the Depository by Oswald using a twelve-dollar mail-order rifle passed through both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly and inflicted seven wounds upon the two men.

I stopped and looked back. I instantly saw that a man with a rifle in that window could easily kill me, even if I was desperately darting about.

Ten yards further down there is another X painted in the roadway, the site of the fatal head shot. I looked back and the window still seemed so close.

That spot is directly in line with the magic-bullet shot, leaving the shooter to only have to train the rifle barrel slightly downward without any side-to-side movement. The assassination spot was obviously carefully chosen and previously sited in.

I glanced to the north thirty feet and surveyed the infamous grassy knoll. I could see no obvious place for a shooter to hide over there, and it would be a much harder shot since the target would be passing across the shooter's sights and not merely away from him.

I ran the rest of the way down the hill and under the triple underpass where the vehicle bearing the mortally stricken president went. Now I had gone too far on my run and I got lost within a maze of elevated restricted-access highways.

After fifteen minutes of adventuring which included a trip through a homeless camp, a climb up a steep hillside and a trek along an elevated railroad track, I found my way back to the hotel. Inside I went by the workout room and glanced in to see half a dozen guests toiling away in place on dreadmills, ellipticals and stair masters, a mere mile away from a run through momentous history.

The Encounter, Part Two

I was at the post office on Friday when I saw a woman in line ahead of me looking at me. It was Carol, past president of the DC Road Runners Club, whom I hadn't seen since I stepped down as president two autumns ago and she assumed the presidency.

Part of my decision to resign as president back then had been made based upon the fact that she was a capable, grownup person who could take over the club and keep it prospering. A significant part of the board then was very young and in league with a reckless board member who had set out to destroy my presidency for his own advancement and who controlled the club's IT department, the club's Pay Pal account and much of the club's equipment such as its timing system.

This rebellious contingent actively disrupted the board meetings I conducted, changed and removed my president's posts from its traditional place on the club's website, engaged in suspicious transactions and undertook important club business without my knowledge or approval. One of this youthful band of plotters, a dishonest sycophant (he was a vice president so he gave this posse quite a bit of clout) even called me one night and unloaded a profanity-laced tirade upon me, drunkenly telling me that I had "stepped into it" by opposing their actions and assuring me, correctly it turned out, that I would be a one-term president. Shortly thereafter the posted club bylaws on the website changed without notice in a way that greatly weakened my position during this power struggle.

None of the rest of the board was interested in dealing with the ambitious Iago leading this usurping gang and the two adult vice presidents declined to support me when I requested their assistance in looking into and dealing with the activities of this independent brigade. Although it was a great disappointment to me personally, especially after all the tremendous things I had done for the club both as president and over the years as its training director, I shortly thereafter resigned rather than be powerless as president to control these miscreants. It was a volunteer gig, after all.

It is the ultimate irony that the henchman of these ferocious young turks is now club president and the little drunken liar in their pocket was cast aside and is no longer even a board member. All of this unpleasantness dropped away on Friday as I called out a greeting to Carol and she came over to speak with me. We had a delightful chat, catching up on each other and she filled me in on what's new with the club. President to president, you know?

I was gratified to hear that responsible, good people, persons I had largely cultivated on the training side of the club, had been put into important board positions such as treasurer and VP of training. Although I no longer belong to the club, I wish it well.

The Encounter, Part One

I was president of my local running club in 2009, being forced by circumstances to resign when my presidency was deliberately wrecked by a young contingent on the board (all 20-somethings except for one 30-something) that was made up of the IT department of the club plus a sad-sack lackey VP who was in their pocket. These young men, led by the head IT guy whom I'll call Bryan, loathed me personally and disrupted my administration of the club by doing things like unilaterally removing my president's post from its traditional spot on the club's website and conducting important club business without my knowledge or approval.

This posse of four miscreants took to actively disrupting the board meetings I conducted by sitting in a group and noisily acting like muttering, smirking school children in an out-of-control classroom. When they voted and seconded among themselves to "end" my last board meeting before business was concluded, personally affronting a friend of mine whom I was trying to present to the board as the next newsletter editor, the other board members fled the restaurant to escape the contentious scene and I found myself standing confronting Bryan, the henchman of this gang, while his three juvenile friends pressed in behind him in support. My friend interposed and led me away from this tense impasse before it degenerated into fisticuffs, and I tendered my resignation to the non-supportive board the next day and quit the club.

This was a great disappointment in my life because I had worked hard in a volunteer capacity for years to develop the club's training programs and I did some wonderful things in my six month tenure like overseeing its lucrative association with the country's premiere ten-mile race by becoming the race's official training partner. I wasn't able to properly develop my vision for the club of making it more inclusive of runners of all types by developing more programs and activities, but who ever said life was fair? The VP who took over the presidency, whom I'll call Carol, is a grownup and she stepped down this year whereupon Bryan, now barely thirty, fulfilled his consuming ambition by becoming president.

One Saturday morning last month I was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington after a six mile run when the current president of my former club ran by. He was running alongside a woman as he approached and he caught my eye from thirty feet away. Bryan instantly looked away and, only having a woman for support this time around rather than three strapping young men (well, two strapping men, the rogue VP is a pathetic pint-sized little guy), he found something of absorbing interest to look at in the curb on the other side from me until he was past me even as I looked directly at him the entire time. One president passing right by another, you know?

I have heard that Bryan has said slanderous things about me since I stepped down, for instance to the management of the premiere running store in the area. That conversation with Bryan will have to wait for a time when he doesn't run away from me.

Thank you!

Americans achieved an historic milestone last night as the House Democrats passed a bill creating near-universal health-care coverage, extending a more hopeful future to the tens of millions of Americans hitherto unable to obtain health insurance, and ending the worst of many egregious abuses by the health-care industry. It's a good start. As my Daddy taught me, Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

Reset

In 2008 I got swept up in Obama's rhetoric for change and hope. I wasn't for Obama initially, because I thought he was too inexperienced, but I came around as the campaign progressed.

He's intellectual and he speaks so well! Complex problems, you would suppose, demand complex solutions. He could do that.

Then I said hello to some Tea Party types on the Mall. Tea Baggers. When I was a cop, we talked about dirt baggers. These particular tea baggers quickly offered to stick their "Don't Tread On Me" flagpole up my, well... . Ehh, not too intellectual, that bunch.

Anyway, a year later, where are we except a year recovered from the Decider? (Thank goodness.)

Back to re-set, I think. If Obama was my laptop, I'd turn it off, remove the battery for ten seconds, then put it back in and restart it.

An African-American President, an idealist, a Democrat, a brilliant guy. Which former president is Obama most like? Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK?

It hit me. He's like Woodrow Wilson. An idealist, a Democrat, winner of the nobel peace prize, a war president, a brilliant guy. He expounded the Fourteen Points upon which to end WWI, that would lead to world harmony. (Go ahead, name even one of the Fourteen Points.)

The French leader Georges Clemenceau privately complained that even God Almighty only espoused ten principles. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI, and the League of Nations failed.

Wilson had potential but got nothing done. An historical non-entity.

Where is the one following W?

Number two has dropped off the board. I used to think, because of his folly in getting us into the quagmire in Vietnam, that LBJ was the worst US President ever. Nixon, who was also a war-mongerer, was a close number two. (He didn't create the mess.)

Somehow, Nixon has achieved stature as a strong president. I always thought he achieved his foreign policy "advances" by the world notion that he was a little crazy. Can you imagine being in a neighborhood where a neighbor is on the street waving around an AK-47? And all you have in your nightstand drawer is a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson? You're not going out there to confront the bully. Unless you're a tough North Vietnamese and you want the bully off of your block.

Then along came the Decider, with his stolen two elections, W (for Worst ever), who is by all measures the worst president ever. Remember Mission Accomplished? How's your IRA? Can you spell Katrina? Did he fix New Orleans like he promised he would? Helluva a job Dubya!

So number one is locked into place. Did you vote for him, ever? If so, you didn't do your homework, and you should be waterboarded. Like to breathe? Not being able to breathe, that's not torture? Darth Vader says it's not.

I was running with some thinking Americans awhile back before Obama's triumph (including a Vietnam era veteran) and we rated the presidents as we ran. The VN era vet said, hands down, the worst president was James Buchanan because he brought us the Civil War. (We disqualified the Decider because he was still president.)

Well, I guess the Civil War was worse than the VN War. Maybe my friend is right. Because after watching all the high drama involved in bringing America into the 21st century by giving all of its citizens access to adequate health care, as is common to the rest of the civilized world, I have to admit that LBJ bringing us Medicare in the sixties was a notable achievement.

Although they'd like to dismantle it, now the GOP defends Medicare as if they had anything to do with bringing it about. They're more than a little hypocritical. It was an accomplishment that LBJ brought us, senior serenity (the Great Society), along with the VN war. So now I insert Buchanan into position number two, as the worst ever after the Decider. Perhaps LBJ has dropped out of the bottom five list even.

That Day in Dallas

Forty-six years ago I was sitting in math class at Edwin Markham JHS 51 on Staten Island when school principal Miss Anapole came on the school intercom system and in what I now recognize was a hysterical voice announced, "The President has been shot! He's dead! President Kennedy is dead!" One student broke into a cheer and Mr. Guzio yelled at him, "You shut your mouth!" Tension and oppression immediately settled over us seventh graders and we sat in shocked silence. Those were in the days before they sent grief counselors to the schools.

We were called into the school auditorium where Miss Anapole harangued us some more about the event in a shrill voice. I remember the loudspeaker system humming as she shrieked and glared at us. Then we were turned out of the school shortly after noon and we all went home. It was a long walk home on that gray, cold November afternoon.

At home I lay on my parents' bed for awhile, listening to the radio. That was how we mostly got our news in those days. It kept replaying Walter Cronkite's intonation that it was confirmed, the president of the United States is dead. I cried for awhile, quietly and alone, because I thought that was the right thing to do.

When I visited Dallas last summer and toured the Texas School Book Depository, where the fatal shot came from, people around my age were asking each other where we were on that fateful morning. That's a reference us baby boomers can relate to, sort of like do you remember what you were doing the moment you heard that the Challenger had blown up (shopping at Target in Boulder and I saw it on a demo TV) or when you first heard about 9/11 (at Metro Center waiting for a Red Line train and Metro announced that trains were running slow due to "the attack" at the Pentagon). I was only eleven the day JFK was shot but I remember it quite clearly.

The fatal shooter

On my visit to Dealey Plaza in Dallas last summer, I stood on the Grassy Knoll contemplating that terrible day forty-six years ago when President Kennedy was shot. Looking up at the corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, I could see that the distance the shot traveled wasn’t so great. It was easy to imagine that a sharpshooter up there with a sniper’s scope and a stable platform upon which to steady his rifle could score a head shot on an unsuspecting target sitting immobile in a car that was slowly moving away. It wasn’t shooting fish in a barrel but it wasn’t the stuff of fantasy either.

Then a number of Segways rolled up and people in a tour group dismounted and ascended the grassy knoll. I could tell from their accents that they were Brits. The tour director wore a jacket saying "Dallas Tours." I sidled over to listen so I could get the benefit of her expertise for free. (Right: The Warren Commission said the fatal shot, the Magic Bullet if you will, came from up there, the corner window one level down. From it's original velocity of traveling 2,200 feet per second upon leaving the barrel of the rifle, the bullet would be hurtling onwards at 1,800 feet per second when it arrived here six feet above street level.)

Using sweeping arm gestures, she explained how on that fateful morning the presidential limousine had just executed two awkward ninety-degree turns and was slowly traveled down the middle lane in the broad roadway below us. She pointed out the window where the shots had come from, above and behind the car. She engaged the tourists by asking them what they would expect the driver of the limousine to do when he heard the first shot.

“Get the 'ell out of there, Luv?” one ventured in Cockney.

“No, actually, he slowed down further.”

“G’wan!”

“He did, he practically came to a stop. Some people have said that was so the agents in the Secret Service car following could come forward to protect the president.”

She had me engrossed now. My thought was that the driver panicked and his reactions froze.

“Another shot rang out. Still the car crawled slowly away. The president was hit by now and bleeding.”

Everyone’s eyes were shining as they stared at the road and looked up at the window. She had us hanging on her words.

“And then,” she said, gesturing her arm in the opposite direction to the far corner of the grassy knoll where it meets the overhead railroad viaduct, “the fatal shot came from there. It entered the president’s skull through his temple. That’s the shot that killed him”

(Left: The fatal shooter was standing in the little triangle framed by the lamp post, the sloping line of grass meeting the cement wall and the bottom level of leaves on the trees, to the right of center in this photo.) Everyone’s heads snapped around to look for that phantom shooter. Forgotten was the specter of Oswald up in his sniper’s perch.

Aha!

“Now the car sped up. Only now did they rush off to the hospital with the already-dead president. Meanwhile a police line advanced across the street towards the Grassy Knoll, to seal it off."

Our heads snapped back to scour the roadway for the spectral police phalanx.

“That was to give the shooter time to escape.”

Ahh! (Right: The fatal shot came from here. It looks like a difficult shot to me because the target would be moving across the shooter's front, causing him to to swivel the rifle barrel to track it.)

“It was the CIA,” she added gratuitously.

Now I know.

The fatal shot

Last summer I was in Dallas and I visited Dealey Plaza, the spot where President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The goodness that flowed into America out of the magnitude of its effort to overcome the badness of World War II seemed to filter through that moment in time, and nothing was the same thereafter. Vietnam, Watergate, Irangate, trickle down (ketchup as a school vegetable!), Monica, W. We still don't have universal health care. (Right: Dealey Plaza. The Grassy Knoll is in the exact center of the picture. JFK had only a few seconds to live when he unsuspectingly encountered this vista.)

Driving down Elm Street in Dallas, as soon as I topped the rise leading down into the Plaza I recognized it instantly. The wide expanse of the split-roadway slope leading down to a highway underpass has been seared into the memory of every American who was a school child in the early 60s through countless published photographs of the event. Like a suddenly developed Polaroid photograph, there it all was. The Texas School Book Depository with its sixth floor sniper's perch, the broad roadway flowing past and under that window, the Grassy Knoll beyond.

I believe something more was going on that day than just a lone-wolf political-nut shooter taking out the President by a blind convergence of luck and circumstances. Additional shooters? I didn't know. My nagging doubt always centered upon the difficulty, nay, impossibility of three shots being fired with such great accuracy from a bolt-action rifle at such extreme range. The difficulty of distance was what impressed me from the numerous pictures I had seen of the place. (Left: The Texas School Book Depository is behind me. Although I am not in the roadway, imagine a sniper with a scope in the right corner window one level below the top row, trained upon me. Completely doable. A slow moving car in a parade procession would be traveling directly away from the shooter, not across his front, so he needn't swivel the barrel to track the target.)

In person I instantly saw that it was very possible. Actually seeing the site, the distances compressed. For a good shooter with a stable platform, that was a likely shot. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine sharpshooter.

In the next post I'll disclose the official Dallas version of the shooting, to which I am now privy.