Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial: A President for all the People In the second volume of his Memoirs, President Truman lamented that the president "seldom has time to reflect," and he went on to say that "one of the...
...And when he is not losing himself in the drama of competitive sport, he should give himself over to loafing on the front porch of the White House or to taking his wife out to the shopping center - especially if she is ugly...
...There is nothing wrong with the President's attending sports extravaganzas, indeed he should attend more of them...
...We expect no invitations from the White House, but we hope the essays will prove educational, for they all rise up from what we hold to be an intelligent and prescient set of principles...
...I stand with the illustrious Senator from Maine...
...Further, he might add that neither a middle Americano, nor a welfare fellow, nor a black...
...Today a man is not considered fit for high public office unless he can spin yarns of Utopia and Apocalypse, squall about the more glamorous species of in justice and dazzle the visual lusts of a mad industry of electronic con men...
...He was a sound leader and would have been kissed by greatness had he only spent more time wandering around the Gulf, disturbing marlins...
...He would dutifully mind the shop, scrupulously husbanding the nation's resources while treading the path of natural goodness that is characteristic of his wholesome ancestry...
...Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were well-intentioned men, but the truth is they spent just too much time pulling levers and shifting gears...
...Now during most of the presidencies of this century this inability has probably been an appreciable benefit to the Republic...
...There are people swatting flies over at the State Department who are still waiting for Woodrow Wilson to return from Europe, and the situation at the Post Office is an American legend...
...I suppose Hoosiers are just like all other Americans...
...The government claimed to do less good in those days and hence did less harm...
...In America our presidential candidates are to embody the virtues of a second-rater and our presidents the grandeur of Napoleon...
...During Harry Truman's presidency our confidence was always bolstered when he would set up shop down in Key West...
...Coolidge took a nap every day of his life and during heavy weather he often took two...
...Calvin slipped out of Washington as inconspicuously as he had slipped in, and no sooner had he rolled down the sheets in his Northampton, Massachusetts home than disaster and tumult befell the land...
...The merest glance at the political scene convinces me that the political science of the Hoosier is something more useful than the collection of fossilized notions my eastern acquaintances dismiss it as...
...Obviously, the last decades of this century will see the Great Cal exhumed and his reputation dusted off...
...So it is that as 1972's shouting match begins to heat up I expect to be asked variants of the question recently asked me by a New York editor when he said, "As a Hoosier, what do you and the rest of the people in California desire in the next President...
...The President should embody the virtues of the common man and nothing more...
...By 2072 the following essay will be read wherever ardent democrats survive...
...Only such a president could have the real interests of the people at heart...
...Teach the good government crowd a lesson, and emulate the great Coolidge...
...According to American folklore the ideal president is an authentic man of the people, undistinguished by wealth or achievement, unbeholden to any interest group or potentates...
...What captivated us about Ike was his energetic pursuit of golf balls...
...there is another deranged axiom guiding contemporary American politics that recommends a return to the Coolidge Cool...
...He might soon be one of the most relevant names in American political theory...
...Ours is a time of glamorously marketed crisis and doom, and I cannot think of a catastrophe that does not bring with it a swarm of Florence Nightingales armed with magic wands and bearing Good News...
...Open the windows, let the sun shine in...and get plenty of sleep...
...Besides, inspirational leaders generally wear epaulets and are rarely friends of democracy...
...Keep the fabulists and the sloganeers on Madison Avenue out of politics...
...Like all Americans we are vulnerable to the gifted sloganeers who herald "a breath of fresh air," from candidates who can "get the nation going again...
...Yet at times the weight and pother of the presidential schedule probably has damaged attempts at a coherent set of policies or even at making a judicious choice of policies...
...Yet, there are only a handful of these catastrophes that would not fade into the most remote pages of the daily newspaper were it not for the bellowings of their attendant charlatans...
...Since then scholars have shown a new and lively interest in the great man, and the libraries are hard pressed with orders for his complete works...
...In fact, those in the know around Washington whispered that the chief suffered from narcolepsy, but none was heard to complain...
...His most ambitious public act was to take long languorous voyages down the Potomac on the presidential yacht Mayflower, and when the talk among his official guests turned fervent he would fade away to contemplate the doings of his sheep...
...No president can possibly fulfill the contradictory demands made on him and it is foolish to try...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...But it was not uncelebrated, for the New York Times snatched it up immediately and published a revision of it...
...Coolidge probably spent more time napping than any other president in the nation's history, surpassing even the sainted Roosevelt, a man whose tenure in office exceeded his by eight years...
...It is the price America must pay to fulfill its historic promise...
...In the summer of 1927 when all the greasy-pawed politicians were slinking about, oiling up the campaign bandwagon for Mr...
...Hoover saturnine-ly fussed about for a while, but his show had no sauce...
...Editorial: A President for all the People In the second volume of his Memoirs, President Truman lamented that the president "seldom has time to reflect," and he went on to say that "one of the hardest things for the President to do is to find time to take stock...
...In the following essay our editor discusses what he believes to be the proper role and conduct of a modern American president...
...Waste, malfeasance, and idiocy are the little costs everyone must pay for the blessing of big government...
...The President could be no more common were he purchased in a Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogue...
...What makes this tale a hollow joke is that our present president comes from just such an unexceptional nest...
...Alas, the nation has never been the same...
...Lamenting his "inability to inspire," they have been shattered by his shallowness and gaucherie...
...In plain English, ungarnished by campaign poesy, we believe that what America needs is a president who spends less time bumping and grinding before the bulging eyes of the media and more time ministering to the needs of the people, that is to say, a president who spends more time at the siesta and in the Rose Garden...
...Such a man would be a blessing to the Republic and a bromide to this troubled globe...
...The essay was originally delivered at this year's July 4th Saturday Evening Club commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of President Coolidge...
...It became my custom several years ago, upon assuming stewardship of this renowned intellectual digest, to take leave of the serene hills of southern Indiana and to journey east, there to dip into the haute culture of the original Americans - the various health exhibits around New York's Times Square, Boston's famed salons, and, of course, the intellectual haunts down in Washington...
...But at Health, Education and Welfare, no president has ever known what was going on, and if he did he could be tried for treason...
...a woman, a student, nor a gay is ever going to inspire much devotion as president...
...Were Hoosierpolitik to energize future administrations I have no doubt America would be as free of mischief, crisis, and paradox as the Vatican...
...nonetheless the curators of American folklore find him repulsive...
...So much for what the Founders called republican moderation...
...Curiously, the speech was the only one of its kind delivered through the entire centennial year...
...Then Roosevelt glided onto the stage and began to whoop it up...
...Supposedly one of the grave scandals of the age is that the Pentagon is ravenously and surreptitiously looting the Treasury, leaving the President and the Senate without any idea of what the big brass is up to...
...As the federal government expands, bringing with it a bewildering population of bureaucrats, it is obvious that no president really controls his government, and after listening to the cads and charlatans making a run for it in 1972, this appears to be one of the few things the citizens have to be grateful for...
...The essential job for every American president is: (a) to entertain the citizenry at a minimum cost to the polity, and (b) to reassure his fellow citizens that in America practically anyone innocent of felonious acts can be president...
...It was the end of an era...
...How should he deport himself...
...Obviously, the question is a serious one, and it demands a serious response...
...It is with this in mind that we asked Jeffrey Bell, Alan Reynolds, Tom Taggert and William Schneider to put together four essays suggesting a sensible agenda for the Nixon Administration's next four years...
...During these holidays the cognoscenti besiege me with many lively and percipient questions, always startling me with their keen sense for history's currents, their political savvy and their incomparable grasp of the America that sprawls beyond the Appalachian barrier...
...So these are the kinds of policies that we think a president should follow, but what of the president himself...
...Calvin brought the splendor of the presidency to Rapid City, South Dakota, and disturbed the national calm only twice, once when his wife kept him waiting one and one-quarter hours for lunch, and again when he preemptorily flattened the Republican sachems with that mysterious statement, "I do not choose to run for president in 1928...
...But we who are afflicted with these political slogans interpret things differently from those clever fellows who dream them up...
...Coolidge's 1928 re-election, he left Washington to establish a summer White House, but not amid the gorgeous confusion of California or Florida...
...In fact America has not had a great President since Calvin Coolidge...
...The question in 1972 is faith in government, and the first thing the President can do to restore faith in our system is to wear proudly the soup stains on his shirt and admit that he has no idea what is going on in the vast nether regions of his administration...
...They ask that their president be a distinctive sort of man, touched by greatness - a statesman of vision, a fount of prudence and benevolence...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
