American Empty: Nine Lamentations for the Republic

AMERICAN EMPTY

Nine Lamentations for the Republic

By Paul Reidinger

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 by Paul Reidinger

And I saw askant the armies

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them,

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence.)

And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

-- Walt Whitman, from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1865)

Table of Contents

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Prelude: One Nation

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Left at the Bay of Pigs

And Other Sorrows: The Roots and Branches of the Kennedy Assassination

Whiteness Visible

A Tale of Two Friendships, from Angst to Pock

The American Half-Century: A Requiem

Or, How the South was Lost, and Labor Too

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Interlude: Under God

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Hey Nineteen

The Confessions of Brock Turner

Transubstantiation

A Rational Inquiry into Neither Here nor There

Once Upon the Isle of Blatt

Scenes from an Education in Prog

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Postlude: Indivisible?

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Readings

About the author

Prelude: One Nation

You haven't really seen America until you've driven across it. Everybody flies now, but you don't really see much from an airplane window. You don't get a sense of the scale. Planes travel too high and too fast, through too much cloudiness, and often, now, their windows, which are small to begin with, are completely obscured by those plastic shades the flight attendants pull down so passengers can pacify themselves with their gadgets.

In these days of routine abuse of passengers by airlines, it is crucial to have self-pacifying passengers – passengers who use their gizmos to lull or stun or hypnotize themselves into not noticing how little leg room, or any room, the airline has provided them, how little service there is, how little food and how terribly overpriced – and terrible – is that food. Human beings should not be eating from paperboard boxes filled with cellophane and soy lecithin. If Dante had flown coach, his Inferno would be very different.

Travel now consists largely of watching videos – or, if you're willing and able to pay for airborne wi-fi, reviewing your emails. It takes a certain amount of battery life to get you from Los Angeles to New York, say. If you're flying out of L.A., you're probably flying to New York, and if not to New York, then to Boston or Washington, D.C., or maybe San Francisco or Seattle. You are puddle-hopping from one blue bubble to another while taking care not to notice what you are hopping over, the fruited plains, the purple mountain majesty and all the rest. If you booked your flight at the last minute, you might have to change planes in Chicago, at the maze of O'Hare Airport. That is the closest many Americans ever come to setting foot in the Midwest, where I grew up.

In the old days, people spoke of flyover country, the continent whose 3000-mile breadth separated the great coastal metropolises. Nowadays we speak of red states, and, if we happen to live in a blue state, city or bubble, we speak of red states and their inhabitants with undisguised fear and loathing.

The citizens of our blue-bubbleopolises regard their fellow citizens of those red states far beneath the clouds with a horror and trepidation not unlike what the citizens of ancient Rome must have felt for the Gothic and Vandal hordes swooping upon them from the North – except that our red-staters don't do much swooping. Instead they've taken to voting.

Nor do our latter-day barbarians come from the North, not at least until quite recently. They are widely assumed to be Southern rednecks, to have guns, believe in God, enjoy NASCAR, eat too much fried food and perhaps, now, do even worse than all that, once they're safe in their voting booths, alone with their ballots.

When I was a tiny child, three or four years old, my father taught me how to drive a car. I was much too small to reach the accelerator or brake pedals, of course, but if I sat in his lap behind the steering wheel, I could guide the vehicle while he did the rest.

He always had Fords until, in the late 1960s, he acquired a splendid and gargantuan Olds 98 with a Rocket V-8 and velvet-faced footrests in the rear seats. There was so much legroom, and my legs were so short, that my feet never touched the footrests. But I liked the idea that they were there, and I took care to see that they were deployed for every outing of which I was a part. I would not see such legroom again until the early days of the new millennium, when, at an auto show, I sat in the back seat of a Volkswagen Phaeton and found it satisfactory. I made it a point to sit in the back seats of cars at auto shows. That was my test.

I was put to early driver's-ed school on the fenced, graveled grounds of my father's employer, a dealer in heavy earth-moving equipment. The giant machines -- graders, scrapers, back hoes and so forth, painted in their distinctive bumblebee livery of yellow and black -- sat motionless around the big lot, like museum displays or dinosaur skeletons, and I maneuvered the car among them cautiously and without catastrophe.

I rather looked forward to these little adventures, and they had a tonic effect on me. From my earliest days I felt comfortable with cars. I understood them. I knew them. I knew make, model and model year; I recognized headlights, taillights, bumper redesign – though of course these identifications were much easier to perform in an era when every model of car was restyled virtually every year. When we would drive down the highway, I would peer out my rear window, calling out the information on passing vehicles as if I were some kind of miniature auctioneer.

When the time came for my teenage self to take the wheel, I never had the slightest doubt about my competence – even though I barely passed my driver's exam due to a suboptimal parallel park, and the examiner advised my mother not to let me have the car unsupervised for a while. Since the car in question was a massive and graceless station wagon, I wasn't too sorry about that.

Even before I'd gotten my license I began lobbying for a Pontiac Firebird, but that low-slung, high-horsepower dream was not to be realized. It would have been my mother's car, at least nominally, and it was not at all suitable for a mother's car. It was completely impractical, just the way teenage boys like their cars.

In the summer of 1979 I managed to lay my hands on a little four-cylinder hatchback with a manual transmission – a car that did not remotely resemble a Firebird, but it would do – and, thus equipped, I drove myself, by myself, across the West to the West Coast for my junior year of college. I can imagine now that my mother must have felt twinges of disquiet at seeing her twenty-year-old son toss his meager belongings into the back of that tiny machine and set out on his own for a journey that would last four days, if all went well – and what if it didn't? What if I ran out of gas or got a flat tire?

She needn't have worried. I didn't run out of gas or get a flat tire. All went well. The journey was remarkably uneventful. Still, it took four days to make the crossing from our little North Woods town to my college town in California, and that wasn't even the whole country, only about two-thirds of it, the two-thirds that lay west of the Mississippi, plus a bit of surplusage, the seventy or so miles that my hometown lay east of the Mississippi. I wouldn't drive the other way, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast, for a few more years, but until then, the West was more than enough. It offered a full measure of spectacle. There was a lot to notice. There was a lot to take in. The West was an epic movie.

Iowa wasn't all that interesting, of course, a flat universe planted with corn, though as I turned right at Des Moines I did come upon a shirtless young hitchhiker, a blond guy about my age. He was porn-star handsome, and I did hesitate. We exchanged glances. I did wonder. I wondered what might happen if I stopped to collect him. But it had been deeply engrained in me that one did not stop to take in hitchhikers, let alone porn stars. The result was sure to be a grisly murder or a porn movie. So I sped past him and sped on, full of relief and regret.

In the west of Iowa the land did unexpectedly begin to undulate. It became a treeless, rippling country, like an immense rumpled blanket woven of cornstalks. The change helped take my mind off the blond kid and my muffed chance either for sexual adventure or to be sensationally murdered, or perhaps both.

Then came Omaha upon the mighty Missouri River – traffic jam on an elevated freeway ramp during rush hour – then, an hour or so later, Lincoln, state capital and home to the state university, with 747s sitting on tarmacs at the airport on the outskirts of the city. Why such huge planes in such a small town? I never knew.

West of Lincoln, the plains of Nebraska seemed to stretch on forever. I felt as if I were driving across interstellar space and would not reach another state for several light-years.

Yet the West began to seem real to me out there in western Nebraska, along the muddy North Platte River. I began to feel it. Somewhere not far past Ogallala, the freeway divided. The south fork went to Denver; I took the north fork, into the high country with its great vault of sky, its stony ridges and its pine forests, along with the occasional oil rig. It was lonely and beautiful, like a Marlboro ad, though of course I didn't smoke.

(I'd smoked a cigarette once, in secret, as a high-school student, in my mother's station wagon, and the reek nearly made me sick. I'd taken the car out onto the highway and driven it at 80 miles an hour, all the windows down on a winter's night of subzero cold, to blow out the stench. Never again.)

As I approached Salt Lake City, the road rose steadily into the Wasatch Range – high, rugged and dark green, like the spine of some unimaginable animal -- and on the far side it fell just as steadily, down, down endlessly down for miles. On that long descent to the city, the air became noticeably drier and warmer, and, beyond Salt Lake, the country grew more desolate, in fact completely desolate, ninety miles of salt flats, glittering white under a hostile sun, like the surface of some distant waterless planet. I felt as if I'd strayed into the opening credits of Run for Your Life, a television show starring Ben Gazzara I'd sometimes watched as a little boy in the 1960s.

At the far end of the salt flats, I was glad to reach Nevada, which at least had mountains. Nevada had little in the way of trees or water or even people – or much of anything -- but it did have terrain. It had that. It had something to look at. In fact the state line lay almost exactly at the seam where the salt flats met the hills. Several hundred miles of Nevadan bleakness lay before me, but at least I was through with the salt flats. I had survived that part.

Traffic thickened as I drew near to California, and the roadway gained lanes to accommodate the mounting flow. Everyone drove faster and faster, except the 18-wheeler trucks crawling uphill in the right lane, trailing streamers of fragrant black smoke. The mountains were craggy and wooded, and the wide road full of speeding vehicles wound through them, up and over the summit, then downhill for many miles, until a turn revealed a broad vista opening to the west – a ribbon of concrete straightening itself out on the flat land below, teeming with steel corpuscles that glinted in the late-afternoon light of a late-summer sun drooping into the Pacific.

That ribbon was the home stretch, or almost. I could just see the skyline of Sacramento through the haze. A few hours later, by evening, I had crossed the Central Valley and the Bay Bridge into the coastal coolness, and once I reached campus I telephoned my mother from a pay phone at the student union to let her know I had arrived. She exhaled with palpable relief.

Always, on these journeys, I was aware that I was not crossing any meaningful political boundary or even much in the way of cultural boundaries. Everybody spoke English. I paid in dollars. I stayed in Motel 6s. It was safe to drink the water. I didn't get stopped at checkpoints. My driver's license would be regarded as valid if I got pulled over.

So much of the country seemed quite empty to me, so much of the West. In the Mississippi Valley I had passed many farms, many barns and siloes and pastured cattle – signs of settlement and order -- but even as soon as the west of Iowa the land had begun to turn arid and forbidding, and for hundreds and hundreds of miles past that – for several days – I was struck by the beauty and indifference of the country. The land had not been, and would not be, tamed by the hand of man. It was not subject to our dominion.

Oh, we would build our roads over it and our bridges and dams across its rivers and streams, we would put up fences and plant our corn and wheat and stash our nuclear missiles in the countryside. We would act as if we owned it. We would tell ourselves we did. We claimed the land, but we could never truly possess it. We divided it up into states and put it on our maps in different colors, we awarded ourselves title, but the land did not belong to us, not really. It did not and could not belong to our kind.

Thirty years later, when I was driving from California to Flagstaff, Arizona – or, on another occasion, to Kalispell, Montana – I would see long freight trains crossing the broad plateaus of the West, and I would think: It couldn't have looked much different from this in 1880, a mile-long train chugging through a spacious and lonely landscape at twilight.

And it will probably look much the same in a hundred years, or two hundred. Rail won't be going out of style any time soon. Rail will remain the means for ferrying cargo across the broad lands of the West. Rail, along with the telegraph, first knitted the country together from coast to coast, and rail, along with the fiberoptic Internet – successor to the Pony Express and to telegraph and telephone wires -- will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

From the beginning, America has needed knitting together. It was not and is not self-knitting. It is not an obvious coherence. It is too big, too wide, too far-flung, too varied in lands, peoples, practices, habits and customs to attain a natural unity. In the most basic physical or geographical sense, it is diverse, and diverse elements tend to diverge – they tend toward dispersal and eventual dissolution. Diverse elements want to go their separate ways. They will fly apart unless they are gathered or herded or constrained in some way.

In law school, in the mid-1980s, I was told to use the word national instead of federal. We were to speak of the national government, not the federal government. No explicit reason was offered for this guidance. I was also told that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution – the last bits of the Bill of Rights – were for all practical purposes inoperative, like arrangements of dried flowers sitting on a dusty table in a forgotten corner. These amendments reserved power, in a general way, to the states and to the people, but they were to be ignored.

Even then, in my callowness, it dimly occurred to me that the Civil War had left those amendments hollow. They were deemed no longer to matter, and therefore there was evidently no need to do away with them. They were the constitutional equivalent of wisdom teeth or the appendix. They were superfluous. That was the conventional Northern view. That was the explanation no one quite gave, perhaps because no one felt a need to give it.

Perhaps it was understood to be a given. The Civil War was widely supposed not only to have resolved the troublesome matter of slavery – by smashing the slave South and bringing on amendments 13, 14 and 15 – but to have reset the balance as between the government in Washington, D.C. and those in the state capitals. It was supposed to have produced a new, and real nation – a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln had put it. What had gone before had collapsed upon itself and been replaced, presumably by a better arrangement.

As a law student I took a keen interest in constitutional law – in fact it was the only kind of law I took any kind of interest in – but I never thought to ask my professors why, in the wake of the war, the victorious North failed to amend the Constitution to forbid secession as it forbade slavery. Surely if ever there were a moment to reify Lincoln's perpetual union of the states, that was it. The Constitution was amended three times from 1865 to 1870, the immediate aftermath of the war. There was an amending mood in the air, the sense that the war, with all its death and destruction, had opened a window of opportunity to fix what needed fixing.

Yet an amendment to ban secession did not come to pass. To this day, there is no constitutional language to prohibit secession. There is only the Civil War. Maybe that is thought to be enough. A constitutional amendment might seem to be trivial and unnecessary in light of a catastrophic war. The matter of secession was decided in the end not by lawyers and politicians, with their endless quibbling and niggling over words, but by rifle and cannon.

If you tried to leave the Union, you would draw heavy fire, end of story. You would get shot. If you stayed in your seat, no one would get hurt. No one would be leaving. No one would be trying any funny business.

It is a myth, to my mind, that Lincoln preserved the Union, as the columnist George F. Will claims in Ken Burns's 2014 documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. He did no such thing. The Union survived the secession of the Southern states. The United States continued. It held a presidential election in 1864, which Lincoln quite expected to lose, given the disastrous nature of what was, after all, his war of choice. He had not needed to invade or subdue the South, and as a lawyer he must have understood perfectly well that those states had every right to leave the Union if they so chose.

But if Lincoln did not preserve the old republic, he did forge a new one. The United States that emerged from the war was not only restored, in some sense, by the return of the onetime Confederate states, but made Lincolnian. It became the Lincolnian republic. The balance of power had shifted decisively away from the states and toward Washington. The Lincolnian republic was a nationalized republic and, perhaps, much nearer to being a true nation than it had been in 1860.

It also became a presidential republic. The war had greatly amplified the powers of the presidency. Lincoln, not Congress, prosecuted and eventually won the war. We tend to think of the two generations of presidents before Lincoln as mediocrities and obscurities, unheroic and unworthy of being remembered. The likenesses of Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore won't be going up on Mount Rushmore any time soon. Even educated and informed people who can name the first three presidents (Washington, Adams and Jefferson) tend to stammer into silence when trying to recall who came after them – until Lincoln.

Lincoln made himself into the great authority figure, the father figure, the moral arbiter. His will, almost alone, drove the war, and he pursued military victory with a single-minded ruthlessness Napoleon would have admired, but he has entered the national mythology as the freer of the slaves. He gave his life to free the slaves, we are told, because he knew that slavery was an unspeakable evil and must be broken at any cost.

Slavery was brutal, certainly – it was a brutal economic arrangement. It was dangerous and ugly. And it certainly damaged the United States from the very beginning by making a mockery of the country's foundational rhetoric about liberty and equality. The American nation was born in self-contradiction and naked hypocrisy, so that it cannot come as much of a surprise that the national style has so often tended toward hypocrisy, with sanctimonious self-approval on the one hand and shameless self-seeking on the other. Hence our moral confusion and our corresponding taste for myth, which offers a kind of balm for the harsh clash of ideal and reality. We are myth addicts.

But the war had been no myth. Lincoln, having been assassinated just days after winning his war, might have stepped from this life into the mists of the national mythology, but the traumas of battle remained: the hundreds of thousands of dead, the countless maimed, the burned cities, the general wreckage, the astronomical expense of it all. Was it worth it? What had been gained?

Much of the public discourse in modern America takes as a given the unique depravity of the slave South. The Confederacy is likened to Nazi Germany and, some suggest, was motivated by hate. This kind of talk is seriously wide of the mark. The Confederates hated the Yankees, certainly, for invading their land by force of arms. But slavery itself was not an institution of hate or bigotry. It was about money. It was about capital's endless quest for cheap labor.

Surely there were brutal slaveowners and overseers, since there are vicious psychopaths in any sizable population. In our present political and cultural climate, any example of cruelty or abuse of slaves by their Southern masters will be held out as typical if not universal. But the slaveowners' basic interest lay not in abusing or destroying valuable property but in making as much money as possible, and slavery was merely an instrument for doing so.

Since the slaveowners were businessmen, not sadistic criminals, their view of their slaves would have been mainly practical. Slaves would have been regarded like oxen; they were useful beasts of burden who sometimes made babies – a windfall for the master – or, if in good working condition, could be sold for profit as needed.

Slaveowners would realize no economic benefit from mistreating their slaves. A measure of violence and terror might be necessary to maintain the slaves' physical subjugation and thus their owners' control over them, but that too would be instrumental. Cruelty can be instrumental. Cruelty can have economic value. Cruelty has its uses, but cruelty is not hate. Hate is a sustained and unhinging emotion, cruelty merely a mode or method. Cruelty might be at its most powerful and effective, in fact, when it consists of indifference. A lack of feeling can be the greatest cruelty.

It is widely accepted by historians that the Civil War began with the belief on both sides that hostilities wouldn't last long. Neither North nor South expected a long war. Let us remember that the Union was so confident of swift victory that oglers from Washington journeyed into the countryside with their picnic baskets and bottles of champagne in July 1861 to witness the first battle of Bull Run, as if they were tailgating before the kick-off of the Army-Navy game. Presumably they expected to enjoy a crushing Union victory that would bring the South to its senses and back into the Union. Instead these spectators found themselves fleeing from a rout.

The Lincoln administration was slightly more sober about the prospect. When the president put out his call to the states for 75,000 troops on April 15, 1861, the term of enlistment was to be three months. Just a few weeks later it was extended to three years, a sign the government understood what it was getting into even if the Washington grandees and the rest of the public didn't.

In the beginning, Lincoln did not see the war as a war against slavery. As he wrote to the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862, his "paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it ... ."

But, the president concluded, "I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

The war, like all wars, developed its own logic. It also became a sacred struggle against evil. It was the first American holy war, and by the end, the Union was not only restored, or saved, to use Lincoln's own word, but slavery had been destroyed, along with Lincoln himself.

No one had anticipated the scale of the nightmare. More than 600,000 American soldiers, of both North and South, the vast majority of them young Caucasian men, died in the struggle. The country's population in 1860, on the eve of secession, was about 30 million – an eleventh of what it is today, at the end of 2017.

How would we moderns deal with a conflict that killed 6.7 million American soldiers, virtually all of them young people, with virtually all their lives ahead of them? For that would be the equivalent number in contemporary America. That would be ten times the number of American soldiers who perished in the all country's major wars of the 20th century combined: the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam.

That was the scale of the injury to American society by the war's end in April 1865. Apocalypse is not too strong a word to describe it. Short of a nuclear holocaust, it is hard to imagine a comparable injury to our own society. Both sides had paid an almost incalculable price, and what was to be bought with that payment? What was to emerge as moral justification for such an expense?

The Lincolnian republic abided for almost exactly a century. It began with the assassination of one president who, like Moses, perished upon completion of his task, and ended with the assassination of another, who had barely begun his own. The Lincolnian republic settled, for a time, certain fundamental questions of American politics, culture and identity, and when it ended, those settlements began to unravel. They continue to do so.

In 2012, after many years of reading and pondering the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – and reading much else too, for the half-conscious purpose of cross-illumination – I published a little essay entitled The Federalist Regained, in which I argued that the basic value enshrined in all the founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, was the sovereignty of the people. Our constitutional system was established to promote and protect the right of the people to govern themselves.

This, I had come to believe, was the great brilliance of America. This was its beating heart. This was the true American revolution. This was the true parting of ways with the old world and its many corruptions. We would not submit, as they did, to monarchs claiming a divine right to rule. We would not submit to rule by a hereditary aristocracy. Instead we would rule ourselves. Our rulers would be of our choosing, and they would be accountable to us. They would answer to us at the ballot box.

With power comes responsibility, of course. A system of popular sovereignty imposes certain requirements on the population. People who propose to rule themselves will have to educate themselves accordingly. They will have to pay attention. They will have to read, they will have to read widely, and they will have to think about what they've read. They will have to discuss and participate, and on occasion, they will have to change their minds. Passivity and orthodoxy are two of the many enemies of democracy.

Democracy, in fact, has proved to be vulnerable. It has shown itself to be vulnerable to the contraction, or extinction, of the reading habit and the corresponding blandishments of a media age in which nothing can be known or be true unless it appears on a pixilated screen. Before there was media there was print journalism – written words, with readers to read them -- but journalism has been subsumed into media, and media now means sounds and images, a round-the-clock beguilement of the people through the smartphones they are completely addicted to and cannot stop checking every few seconds, as if the lottery numbers are about to be announced.

Addiction is a limbic phenomenon, not an intellectual one. If you're checking your smartphone, you're in the grip of a compulsion, and a compulsive act is by definition thoughtless. It rises from deep in the primitive brain, where thoughts do not penetrate. Without thinking there can be no democracy. Emojis aren't democracy. Speed and convenience aren't democracy, nor are shininess and elegance.

On the other hand, what about democracy? The word has the ring of the sacred in our democratic culture. Its value is beyond question. It is an absolute good, and more of it is always better.

I thought so, anyway, until quite recently. In a democracy, people get what they want – or what they deserve – because they vote for it. They choose it, they elect it. If they like it, fine. If they don't, they can vote for something else the next time. In this way a democratic system is self-correcting and, perhaps, self-perpetuating. The people, in theory, should never become dissatisfied with their government, because they can alter it as suits them. They can throw out a gaggle of unsatisfactory bums and install a new batch. From time to time, this does still actually happen.

The American leaders who, emerging from the Civil War, were to give effect to the Lincolnian republic for the next generation and the next century perhaps took national unity and cohesion less for granted than we, their distant descendants, would. They had seen at first hand – they had lived – the effects and consequences of political dissolution.

Their understanding of social collapse was visceral. Reconstruction might have been a failure, an era of carpetbaggers, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, but as an idea it was sound. If you were going to refloat the stranded ship of the Union, you were going to make adjustments so that it would not run aground again. You would do all you could to make sure the disaster could not repeat itself.

You would stress the nation, in other words, not just as a phrase or an idea but as a reality in need of attention and care. You would not take for granted that entropic, outward-flying forces in society would behave themselves and remain within acceptable bounds. You would recognize the value of and need for assimilation, because you would understand that nations – or at any rate your nation – would have to be built. It would not naturally occur. It would have to be composed, and composition involves choices, acceptance and rejection, yes to this and no to that. There would have to be a conscious effort and a sustained one.

You would acknowledge that cultural differences matter – differences not merely of race or ethnicity but of language and faith tradition. Cultures stand in relation to other cultures in varying degrees of kinship. Closer kin might adjust more smoothly to an existing arrangement, perhaps, than more distant kin. If you were going to use immigration policy to build your nation – if you were going to welcome immigrants from other lands for that purpose – you might well keep the question of cultural kinship in mind as an aspect of the national cohesion you hoped to achieve.

You would not need to consider your culture, the home or original culture, as superior to others, merely that it was your own culture, your home, and that you wished to augment and enhance your home, not transform it or tear it down in favor of something completely new. You would seek addition and harmony, not argument or anarchy.

When I graduated from college in June 1981, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. He'd been elected the previous November, then shot in March in front of the Mayflower Hotel in the heart of Washington, D.C. just blocks from the White House. He had survived that attack and would go on to be reëlected and serve out two full terms – the first such president to do so since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.

At the time, it did not strike me as at all surprising that yet another president had been shot. Presidents, in my observation, were routinely shot or shot at, and occasionally they were shot dead. Kennedy had been shot dead; he was the first president I remember, and the commotion surrounding his assassination filled the TV screen for days at a time in November 1963. I watched, rapt but not quite comprehending.

Kennedy's broken presidency turned out to be merely the first of many. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, though elected in a historic landslide in 1964, was driven from office in disgrace a few years later. His successor, Richard Nixon, was also driven from office in disgrace in 1974, not long after winning his own historic landslide in 1972. Gerald Ford was a caretaker president who served about two years before barely surviving a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, then going on to lose in the general election of 1976. He lost to Jimmy Carter, who turned out to be a one-termer. Then Reagan returned in triumph in 1980, only to be gunned down on a city street by a nut trying to show off for the actress Jodie Foster.

As a graduating college senior, I knew no other sort of presidency than a broken one. The presidency broke people. It killed them or sent them into exile, their reputations stained and shattered. It was plainly too big a job for anyone. No wonder their hair tended to turn white, as if they were suffering from radiation poisoning. No matter who you were, you had no chance to be a successful president. There was no longer any such thing. You were lucky to escape with your life and your shock of white hair.

For the duration of the Reagan administration, which also happened to be my twenties, I did not like Reagan. With his