Ex-Presidents
It must be a strange experience to be the President of the United States. For a brief period of your life, the whole world is watching every move you make.
Pretty soon you’re not President any more but to the day you die, everywhere you go, you’re a highly visible ex-President.
There are five living ex-Presidents now. There are that many partly because ex-Presidents are living longer and partly because four of the five served less than the full eight years allowed.
Whether they served two full terms or not, we get our impression of our Presidents from the stories about them and, after a few years in office and thousands of sometimes inaccurate stories, thousands of sometimes fair and sometimes unfair stories, we end up with a truer picture of them than they have of themselves.
Presidents almost always hate reporters because…you know how it is. When someone takes a picture of you, you wish you were better looking…and that’s how it is with Presidents. They wish they looked better…in pictures and in print.
Most of us have more or less the same feeling about our ex-Presidents. Say you rate them on five things: Intelligence, Honesty, Ability, Likeableness, Decency.
Richard Nixon was smart and capable but not likeable. We aren’t sure he was decent.
Ford was decent and likeable. Not too smart.
Carter was decent, smart, likeable and honest but strangely ineffectual.
Reagan was likeable. He didn’t have much else going for him but that was a lot.
Bush is the last and maybe the most forgettable of the living ex-Presidents. I don’t know why that is. He seemed fairly smart, decent enough, sort of likeable and probably honest but for some strange reason he’s already less remembered than Nixon or Reagan.
We’re still deciding what we think about Bill Clinton and he isn’t too happy these days because he wants to make his points with his foreign policy by going to Russia and reporters keep poking him about things that happened back in Little Rock. He doesn’t want to talk about that.
There are four kinds of Americans when it comes to how we talk about our President. First,there’s the Republican who’d hate any Democratic President even if he was George Washington. Second, there’s the Democrat who’d hate any Republican President even if he was Abraham Lincoln. And third, there are people who’d hate any President no matter who he is.
From Andy Rooney, Years of Minutes, pp. 259-260.
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