January 2011

The picture any President presents to the public is unlikely to be the picture he himself sees. It may not even be the picture seen by those who are closest to him. Neither the camera nor the typewriter is apt to make a wholly accurate portrayal—partly, no doubt, because the White House is inevitably a distorting glass whose images are always subject to a certain amount of retouching, and partly too because any human being, whether he be President of the United States or the humblest voter in a remote precinct, is always a good deal more complex than is commonly realized.

Anyway, it is hard to feel sure that we are seeing any President as he really was, and the amount of exposure a President gets does not help very much. By design or by accident, an image is created, usually fairly early in the game, and what comes later tends to conform to it. We ourselves, as spectators, even help make it conform; we have our own notion of the man, and we are likely to cling to it, discarding bits of evidence that do not fit our preconceived pattern.

Indeed, the exact picture may lie forever out of our reach. Even the searching portrayal of television can hardly remove the veil; perhaps the Presidency must always hide the man. No President was ever subjected to such intense, intimate, friendly portrayal as John F. Kennedy received during the weekend following his assassination—and yet in the end we really know just about what we had known before. We did come to learn a good deal about ourselves, and the knowledge undoubtedly was good for us, but our picture of Mr. Kennedy remains just what it always was, ennobled by the memory of solemn ceremonies, flagdraped casket, and immense silent crowds, but still essentially unchanged. Perhaps any man who lives in the White House inevitably steps just a little out of clear focus.

Even the man who has himself been a President cannot always paint a clear portrait. A man who survives his time in the White House and sits down in the pleasant twilight of life to tell what he did and what he meant can fail just as the cameras of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner failed.

Abert B. Corey was a gifted historian who believed that true history is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

As he saw it, history is basically the record of things done by ordinary, everyday folk who try to earn a living, to get a little fun out of life, and to serve their ideals and fellow men as best they can. They contribute the faith and quiet courage which make possible the bright deeds of their famous leaders; out of what they want and do and believe in come the great, seemingly impersonal forces and movements that make up the formal story of historic events. They not only make history: they are ultimately the ones to whom history’s story has to be directed.

Portraits of a President By the President Himself ALBERT B. COREY 1898—1963

For Cleveland, Ohio, the summer of 1936 was a time to remember. In the steaming month of July, during which a twelve-day heat wave in the Midwest and East cost 3,000 lives, there came to the great lake-front city a procession of people—gray, simple, sixtyish, and poor—from all across the nation. They came in buses and railroad coaches and brokendown Fords. Carrying their battered suitcases, they found dollar-a-night lodgings on the city’s outskirts and travelled to the downtown convention hall in trolleys, eating bananas and oranges out of bags to save lunch money. They had calloused hands and wore clean but threadbare Sears, Roebuck clothing. They were the delegates to the second annual convention of Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd.—disciples of Dr. Francis E. Townsend, whom they fervently believed had been sent by God to save the old people of America in their time of deepest need.

Her full name was Frederika Charlotte Louise, Baroness von Riedesel, and according to contemporary admirers she was a “most amiable companion and Friend,” and a “cheerful, affable well bred woman.” It is also clear from her writings that she was a singularly adaptable person. When she came to America in 1777 to be with her husband, Baron Friedrich Adolph von Riedesel of Brunswick, commander of the Brunswickers and Hessians attached to the army of “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, she proved thoroughly capable of dealing not only with three young children and a retinue of servants, but with a strange country, a new language, and the trials and terrors of war. In fact, during the years that followed the defeat of the combined British and German forces at Saratoga, the Baroness put up with the humiliations and hardships of semi-captivity with considerably more fortitude than her ailing and nervous husband.

William Wordsworth, the most benign of poets laureate and best remembered for his idyllic view of daffodils and country maidens, was capable, when provoked, of flashes of baleful fire. Thus, in a sonnet published in 1845:

All who revere the memory of Penn Grieve for the land on whose wild woods his name Was fondly grafted with a virtuous aim, Renounced, abandoned by degenerate Men For state-dishonour black as ever came To upper air from Mammon’s loathsome den.