Here we go again.

He considered any publicity good.  He “spun one narrative after another that was palpably untrue, [finding it] …next to impossible to say anything that is not in some crucial way untrue.”  “He [didn’t] let anybody get too close.  …Those who worked with him found him curiously elusive.”  He had no interest in briefing books.  “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed.”  Sound familiar?  This is how the distinguished historian and UNC Professor Emeritus William Leuchtenburg described Ronald Reagan in his 2015 book, The American President.  So what Gerald Ford might have aptly called our current “Nightmare” isn’t entirely new.  Here we go again.

I couldn’t help being struck by the similarities between the Gipper and the Donald.  Reagan was sworn in at age seventy, so too will Trump.  Being six months older he will be the oldest ever.  Both disregarded facts on the stump and beyond.  Periodic fabrication and outright lying is something Reagan took all the way through his tenure.  It reached its peak late in his second term when he denied both selling arms to Iran and funding the Contras.  Leuchtenburg contends that his actions – trading with an enemy and unauthorized arming – constituted impeachable offences.  Only because Democrats (who controlled Congress) feared having to face George HW Bush as an incumbent in the upcoming election did he escape prosecution.  Reagan represented the then radical right of his party much as Trump represents an extreme today.  We Americans have a short memory and may have forgotten how ominous we thought the Reagan presidency would be.  We survived.

Survived, but Reagan, the GOP mythical icon, had a profound and lasting impact on the country’s direction.  So much so that twelve years on, Bill Clinton, despite liberal inclinations, determined his only path to the presidency lay in pulling his party to the right of center, to govern as a New Democrat.  That produced, among others, “an end of welfare as we know it”, (after pushback from the military) “don’t ask don’t tell” and “three strikes”.  It wasn’t enough for the opposition.  Tokened by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract” the right never lost its focus on regaining power and extending Reagan’s conservative “revolution”.  Barack Obama moved further left but met bitter resistance from the start.  His progressive legislative initiatives had no Republican support and others had to be accomplished by Executive Orders, many of which can – probably will – be reversed by Trump.  Democrats are said to be the majority party – Hilary Clinton outpolled him in November’s election – but that “majority” has proved ephemeral.  Republicans, dominated by the hard right, hold the executive mansion in a majority of states and beginning in January will control all three branches of the federal government.   We will survive Donald Trump, but not without paying a significant price.  The Supreme Court, especially, is likely to skew conservative for decades to come.

I reach back to Reagan’s election and our survival as a reassurance, but that doesn’t mean we should be sanguine about the immediate future.  Quite the contrary.  The fact that there are similarities between Trump and Reagan doesn’t mean they are the same.  I ran into Bill Leuchtenburg here in Chapel Hill a few days before the election and we shared our dismay in watching the 2016 campaign.  I said that to my knowledge, there had never been anything like it, never a candidate like Trump.  He concurred, and of course from the perspective of a scholar who, unlike an opinion blogger like myself, actually can back up his assessment with a lifetime study of the presidency.  I’m privileged to live in the same community and to have him as an acquaintance.

In significant ways, Donald Trump is very different than Ronald Reagan.  Professor Leuchtenburg describes Reagan’s politics as “divisive”; Trump’s are polarizing.  While being “grossly ill informed” relative to earlier presidents, Reagan had served as governor of our largest state.  Trump has zero government experience, which makes him not merely ill informed but inexperienced and totally unprepared.  Like Reagan, Trump is a performer who knows how to move and indeed manipulate a crowed, but unlike him he has shown himself to be an obsessive misogynistic and xenophobic narcissist.  Also, while Reagan worked within a clear ideological framework and surrounded himself with experienced people, Trump seems to function with no such compass, relying on loyalists, some with no credentials for carrying out their assigned job.  Perhaps most important, Reagan may have been a rightist ideologue, but was never mean spirited.  His persona didn’t give license to the kind of audience hate speech that often was heard at Trump rallies nor did he give an essential White House role to the likes of the alt-right Steve Bannon.  We know what Reagan did as president, we don’t yet know what Trump will do once he is sworn in on January 20.  His actions since November 8 are hardly reassuring, in fact they point to our worst fears not our best hopes.  His continued use of tweets, the latest to claim that absent millions of fraudulent ballots he would have won the popular are frightening.  But we’ll have to wait and see.

Our first and still relatively primitive car “GPS” systems offered us less than perfect turn by turn directions from here to there. To say that the resulting trips were often circuitous, even torturous, would be an understatement.  Following such directions once took me on an hour long drive to a destination I discovered upon arrival was just fifteen minutes away.  The American story is very much like those circuitous road trips; the opposite of a straight line.  More often than not, that means two steps forward and one back or even one step forward, two back.  President Obama likes to refer to our democracy as “messy”.  It can be very frustrating, even unnerving.  Mirroring the human condition, it is complex not simple.  We should keep that in mind when characterizing this past (or any) election and those who drove its perplexing outcome.

Trump voters, and indeed voters in general, are not a monolith.  One vote can reflect current views and emotions, but long term it can’t change fundamental facts.  For some, this election represented a white person’s rebellion against a change in our racial and ethnic balance – of who is in control – but it can’t alter demographics.  Some voters may have expressed discomfort with growing secularization or marriage equality.  That won’t alter the views or practices of the upcoming generation.  Some – more than would admit – simply didn’t want a woman in the Oval Office.  But that will come to pass, must come to pass.  Some, as evidenced by a rise of hateful speech and actions, are simply bigots.  They represent not only something reprehensible but also a real danger that dare not be underestimated or overlooked.  It will present a test for the new president’s own identity and intent.  Much, perhaps most, of the vote expressed frustration about the economic and social stalemate that has come to characterize their lives and, worse, spell a dismal outlook for their children’s future.

One thing is for certain.  None of us, regardless of how we affiliate or how we voted, should either over read or under read the results.  Warning signs were and are present for both Republicans and Democrats, for the right and the left.  Whoever is up at bat, should understand that at present “all is not well in Mudville”.  Victory parties and loss wakes should not be read as more than they are, another fleeting moment in time.  Work will be required to repair our still imperfect union, step by often painful step.  We’ve seen much in the past, ups and downs.  Here we go again on another roller-coaster ride, but let’s not allow ourselves to be either complacent or cynical.  What comes after this is not inevitable, but rather lies in our hands.  If many like myself were deeply disappointed, indeed shocked, by the election results, I believe many of those who voted for Trump, who believed his unrealistic promises, are destined to be deeply disappointed by what is to come, what is not to come.  We’ll have to find a way of coming together if we want to move forward.

Theodore and Franklin

On November 4, 1944, three days before the vote, Franklin Roosevelt appeared at a final campaign rally in Boston’s Fenway Park.  In the audience was a twenty-three year old army private who would depart the next morning for the European front.  Young Albrecht Strauss was among the German refugees, my maternal uncle included, who signed up to fight the man who had robbed their families of both freedom and home and who was murdering millions of fellow Jews.  In a letter some months later, Albrecht told his parents, “I had marveled at the magnificent physical endurance that frail body had withstood — and had feared for it.  His presence, more than anyone else’s, generated a liberal viewpoint, and at the same time a wise handling of the world’s forces in American politics”.  FDR, we now know, would be dead in April.  But the “frail body” notwithstanding, like Private Strauss millions of Americans, “marveled at his physical feats”, idolized a president whom they saw as both indispensable and indestructible.  He was larger than life, a mythical figure.

Of course Franklin wasn’t the only President Roosevelt.  His fifth cousin Theodore preceded him to the White House and was an equally fabled figure.  Their story, together with TR’s niece and FDR’s wife Eleanor, was retold again in Ken Burns’ fourteen-hour documentary, The Roosevelts aired last month on PBS.   I will come to Eleanor in a future post.  For now, let’s consider the two extraordinary outsized men and how their presidencies play against the current American landscape.  The Roosevelts were a presidential dynasty  — not the first (Adams) and not the last (Bush) — in itself interesting as we contemplate the possibility of the second Clinton in the White House. 

The cousins Roosevelt had much in common.  They were both charismatic figures that always commanded center stage.  They had parallel resumes: Assistant Navy Secretary, Governor of New York and Vice Presidential candidates, TR successfully.  They each fathered six children and endured personal adversity.  Was there something in the Roosevelt genes that made them succeed, or was it the strong nurturing that ultimately formed each man?  Perhaps we can attribute some to the former. but like most of us, more of the latter.  Both men had family heroes to emulate including, for Franklin, Theodore the role model upon whose career he fashioned his own.

Comparing presidents is a great American sport.  When they are blood relatives there is an added dimension of interest.  The Burns documentary lends itself to comparison because it presents these men and their somewhat parallel careers in such close proximity, documented with remarkable film footage.  What’s striking to me is, that despite the obvious similarities, how very different they were.  Had they not both been Roosevelts, we might not couple them, as did Burns.  On the most elemental level, FDR was an only child with a doting, domineering and ever present mother.  TR was one of four and had to face competition for his parents’ attention.  But more important, these men were of two different generations and, despite both being of the Twentieth Century, they governed in vastly different times.  TR certainly faced challenges while in the White House, but they pale in comparison to FDR’s Great Depression and World War II.

Those generational and time differences are often lost when we compare presidents and assess their relative performance.  The current occupant of the White House is often measured against Ronald Reagan, especially in how the two confronted our global adversaries.   In fact, just like TR and FDR, and despite governing just decades apart, the foreign challenges confronting these more recent presidents are, as suggested by others, effectively apples and oranges.  Reagan functioned in the Cold War where he faced an opponent who led a nation state and with whom he could and did engage.   Obama faces stateless fanatics with whom any semblance of diplomacy is impossible — different time, very different problem.  What the two Roosevelts shared, at least in public, was tremendous self-confidence.  That translated into a kind of free spirited and ebullient — both traded on winning smiles and obviously loving the job — leadership.  No one inside or outside of government had any doubt about who was in charge on a Roosevelt watch.   Their self-confidence was infectious impacting not only how they led, but also how those being led felt about themselves and the country.  This was especially remarkable during FDR’s tenure where, if you can call it that, the misery index was often through the roof.  I always cringe when we proclaim our country “exceptional”, but there is no question the descriptor can make people feel good, even if in an unrealistic way.

Franklin had an advantage over Teddy.  His cousin had tested the waters of governance and provided lessons to be learned.  Both men are generally ranked in the top ten of US presidents, but FDR is ranked higher in part I think because he had to perform, and did, in far more challenging times.  These were great leaders.  What made them, most especially Franklin, so?  Two things: first, the ability to make tough decisions and second, to communicate those decisions to the public.  It wasn’t Reagan but Franklin who was, hands down, the great communicator of the American presidency.  Between 1933 and 1944 he delivered twenty-seven “fireside chats”, radio talks in which he came figuratively and literally into America’s living room.  I was far too young to understand the import of what he said, but a picture of my family sitting “around the radio” and listening is etched into my early childhood memories.  And that coming into the living room was something unique to the radio age, a voice heard probably having greater impact than any of the television visuals that have now become so common as to be indistinguishable.  A voice without an image has transcending power because it evokes larger-than-life imagination, one consistent with FDR’s personality.

If comparing Obama and Reagan can be characterized as apples and oranges, then certainly measuring any contemporary chief executive against FDR is especially difficult, if not unfair.  Even so, it’s hard to watch Ken Burns’ documentary without being struck at how leadership-impoverished is our contemporary political scene.  To be sure FDR faced some partisans who hated him as much, perhaps even more, than many of our modern presidents, including Barack Obama.  He didn’t live in a time when a president’s popularity temperature was taken virtually on the hour.  But the fact remains that few, if any, of his successors had even close to his leadership ability.  Barack Obama is blessed with great oratorical skills, perhaps ones that can hold their own against FDR.  But somehow he has been unable to come into our living rooms to explain his decisions and give us the sense that he is personally communicating with us.  It will take some time and perspective to understand that deficiency, but we can get some hint from the nick name given him by staff in 2008: No drama Obama.  If FDR, and for that matter TR, was anything, it was full throat drama.   Obama, even six years in, is seen as aloof, his heart nowhere to be found on his sleeve.   He presents two contrasting, even conflicting, images; the skillful campaigner who at the same time seems to dislike the political game.  FDR loved it all, the politics and the governing.  He relished sharing cocktail hour with others and, even in 1944 when he was dying, couldn’t resist going out on the stump, making that final speech at Fenway.  Will history judge Obama harshly?  It’s far too early to know, but lacking TR and FDR’s special spark may account for his lousy poll numbers as we head into the coming election.

Albrecht Strauss returned home, earned a PhD in English Literature and went on to a distinguished academic career as both a gifted teacher and Johnson scholar.  An emeritus professor at UNC Chapel Hill and neighbor, our lives were brought together by a mutual friend on the day after his 90th birthday.  We have become good friends and, despite a difference in age, have found much in common.  Like my mother and two older siblings, Strauss was born in Berlin.  And like my parents, who came to America to escape Hitler, his academic parents settled here in the late 1930s.  Our early conversations revealed friends and acquaintances in common — six degrees of separation.  Both of our parents came here as fully formed adults who had to build totally new lives in America, function with a new language and adapt professionally and socially to a new world.  Franklin Roosevelt, despite his early reluctance to enter the war, was their hero.

The April 13, 1945 letter recounting Albrecht’s memory of FDR’s campaign speech was actually devoted to his death.  He wrote:

I am stunned by the news of the President’s death.  The surprise of it!  And its significance for the future!  The War is won to be sure - but someone else might have handled that purely technical part with equal efficiency.  Where this great man excelled was in diplomacy, in understanding and grasping international problems – and in the days ahead when he would be needed most.  One has to revise one’s entire thinking about the future – and there is a proportionate decrease in hope and confidence.  Two men who had the most liberal grasp of foreign affairs, Willkie and Roosevelt, are dead – and there is no one to take their place.  Certainly, Churchill lacks this breadth of vision – and anyhow, his main interest in preservation of the Empire, not the welfare of humanity.

Private Strauss was 23 and, as with us, contemporary assessments are not always the most accurate.  Nonetheless, it’s quite an astounding and insightful statement by someone so young and such a new American.  Does it reflect an idolized and idealized president?  Absolutely, but as a contemporaneous reflection of how Americans felt at this loss and about this man, it was remarkably spot-on.  Would that any of our contemporary leaders could engender such words, such sentiment much less have them stand up well against more retrospective assessments.  Where are the “Roosevelts” when we need them so?