Presidents Day

I know that Presidents Day is a great day to get a new washer and dryer on sale, but if you could hold off for a few minutes and read this, I think you will be happy to have done so before charging off to the appliance store. Or in my case, Starbucks, to meet a buddy for coffee.

My wife Lina has an uncle who lives in a picturesque farmhouse Western Massachusetts close to Worcester, a city whose name has to be the biggest difference between how it is spelled and how it is pronounced, in the world. For the record, it sounds like Wooster...an Elmer Fudd reading of Rooster. The town Uncle James actually lives in is Sterling, a town that was the place where "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow." There is a statue of her and her lamb in the town square. Interesting factoids, nothing more.

Uncle James has a nice-sized library and one time while on a visit, I grabbed this book about JFK off the shelf and started to read it. I made a pretty substantial dent in it and Uncle James offered to let me take it home but I decided not to. Working on the Ph.D. caused me to put almost all book reading on hold for 8 years. As such, I put it back on the shelf and would start to read it when visiting again in the ensuing trips back to Sterling. When on vacations, I would take a break from studies. My eagle-eyed wife found the JFK book on sale at the local library for like a buck and brought it home last summer. So, I finally finished it, with my studies now completed.

The book details the early life of JFK from birth to sometime soon before his election to President. It was a story of both great valor and great venality. JFK had incredible gifts of oratory, writing, and leadership, but also a propensity for less than honorable behavior, in particular, in his treatment of women as sexual playthings, and the party life that with went it. This duality continued on into his Presidency until his assassination. The public persona and private life were at odds with another, and JFK had the prototypical double life of a powerful man. An inspirational American Knight to millions both here in America and around the world, with the Camelot allusion, yet quite a sordid and spoiled individual behind the curtains and closed doors.

This duality of public virtue vs private vice is true about all of humanity, just not as profoundly dichotomous with JFK. We want to be seen as "good" people but also face the temptation to sully that visage behind the scenes. This tension is the theme of another book from the author Nigel Hamilton called Biography: A Brief History. He and I had a brief exchange of emails about the JFK book and he said that it is a challenge for biographers to tell the story straight without lionizing the subject or salaciously emphasizing the sin. Hagiography or literary dumpster-diving is the writer's dual temptation.

In our stories about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and not being able to tell a lie about it or Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return a penny, whether apocryphal or actual-- or some alchemy of the two--were the lore of school children for generations. Now, we avoid such tales as to not create the illusion that pure virtue is a possibility with anyone, so why bother. Yet, the remarkable thing about Washington and Lincoln is not that they were perfectly virtuous men with no stain of sin, it is that they were so virtuous despite their propensity for sin...now, that's heroic.