About the Author:
BOB GREENE is a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning journalist whose books include Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen; Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War; Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan; Be True to Your School; the novel All Summer Long; and, with his sister, D. G. Fulford, To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come. As a magazine writer, he has been lead columnist for Life and Esquire; as a broadcast journalist he has served as contributing correspondent for ABC News Nightline. For thirty-one years he wrote a syndicated newspaper column based in Chicago, first for the Sun-Times and later for the Tribune.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
ONE
Voices
Here is what they said--some of it.
"I don't allow my feelings to be hurt," Richard Nixon said. "I learned very early on that you must not allow it to get to you. And as the years have gone on--and this used to infuriate my critics during the White House years--I made the decision not to respond, no matter how rough the attacks were."
I asked him about those two famous catchphrases--"Tricky Dick," and "Would you buy a used car from this man?" They had been thrown off so glibly, so routinely, for so many years by so many people who may have assumed that there was not really anyone on the receiving end, at least anyone who was listening. I wondered about the person who was, indeed, on the receiving end--Nixon himself. Had he ever heard the lines--the "Tricky Dick" and "used-car" lines?
"Oh, my, yes," Nixon said. "Yeah."
Were his feelings ever hurt?
"If I had feelings," Nixon said, "I probably wouldn't have even survived."
Here, along the journey, is what they said--some of it:
"I went to visit a middle school," Jimmy Carter said. "One of the bright young girls asked me why there's an old person who loses Social Security payments. I told her that couldn't happen--once you start drawing Social Security you don't lose it unless your income goes up.
"She said, 'No, my granddaddy doesn't make anything, and he lost his Social Security.' And I said, 'Sweetheart, you must be mistaken.' She said to me, 'Mr. Carter, you are mistaken.' She said, 'My granddaddy lives on the bridge over by the new domed stadium, and since he doesn't have a mailing address they cut off his Social Security.'"
Carter was talking about the mysteries of compassion--why the need to help others kicks in in some people's lives, and why others are able to walk away from the troubles of people who don't have enough--or at least are able to turn their heads, in the hopes of not seeing the troubles.
He said that the question from the girl in the middle school--the girl whose grandfather lived on the bridge--was not a question he would have heard in the schools of his own, more affluent, grandchildren, in their own, more prosperous, communities.
"I think most of us find it difficult to cross the barrier that we erect around ourselves," Carter said. "We prefer naturally to be among folks just like us, so we feel at home and we talk the same language, we wear the same clothes, drive the same kind of cars, go to the same kind of schools, live in the same neighborhoods, and we feel that that circle of friends won't put a burden on us.
"You know. They won't make us feel guilty. They won't make us feel obligated."
Here is some of what they said:
"We were out at a hotel in Hawaii," George Bush--the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush--said. "Maui."
This was after he had left the presidency, he said. He and his wife had gone for a walk on the beach early in the morning, just to get some exercise and talk to each other and look at the water before the sun was all the way up, before the sand was full of tourists and vacationers. At a time of the morning when they could still have some solitude and privacy.
So George and Barbara Bush were walking near the ocean.
"And they had, on the beach, carved deep into the sand, a swastika," he said.
He said he didn't know who had done it.
"And in the middle of it, the Star of David," Bush said. "And next to it, another swastika.
"I got so mad--it was six in the morning, and I was walking with these Secret Service agents, and I was almost just crying."
He said he was unable to continue with his walk. The hotel, he said, was a "very rich, unbelievably secluded thing," and there was the swastika, on American soil, and the old World War II combat pilot who had become president of the United States thought of some of his comrades from the war, men who never made it home: "people who gave their last breaths," he said, to defeat the Nazis.
"Six o'clock in the morning," Bush said. "I took a rake, and I said, 'Let's clean this up, Barbara.'"
He did it himself--he found a rake and erased the swastika in the sand?
"Yeah," Bush said. "Yeah."
Here is what they said, some of it:
"I would be scared," Gerald Ford said.
We were talking about how Ford would feel if he had a child growing up in an American city today.
Ford had always seemed so optimistic about the country--he had always seemed to be skittish about nothing, nervous about no one. But he would be frightened for his sons and his daughter if they were children today?
"I would," he said.
And not just for his children. For himself, too.
If he didn't have Secret Service protection, he said, he would not want to take a walk through downtown New York or Los Angeles or Chicago all by himself late at night.
"I'd be apprehensive, alone," Ford said.
But he was always known as a big, strong guy, a former athlete who kept himself in shape.
"That doesn't do you much good when somebody comes up with a knife or a gun," he said.
In fact, such people had come up to Ford twice when he was president. Two women, on two separate occasions, had tried to assassinate him. Because the women failed, many people before long forgot about the incidents, at least about the specifics.
I asked Ford if he remembered the women.
"Yeah, the two of them," he said. "Sara Jane Moore, and . . ."
He tried to come up with the other woman's name.
"One of them wrote me," Ford said.
She had? From prison? I asked him which woman it had been. Squeaky Fromme?
"Squeaky, I think," Ford said.
So the woman who tried to kill him actually dropped him a note?
"There was a strange letter," he said. "Of course, she tried to and did escape. They caught her two or three days later."
Did the Secret Service show him the letter she had written to him?
"Well, that's interesting," Ford said. "The letter came to me, and I've saved letters from all kinds of people. Before I became president and after. And I had these evaluated for--I just wanted to know their worth. That was one of the most valuable."
He had shown the letter to an autograph dealer?
He started to laugh. "It's amazing," he said.
"You didn't sell it, did you?" I asked.
"Oh, no," Ford said.
So of all the presidential papers he had saved, all the documents that played a part in affecting the course of nations and of world politics, the one that would bring the most on the open market was a letter from a woman who had wanted to shoot him?
"Yeah," Ford said, laughing anew.
Here is what they said:
Come on out, Ronald Reagan said. Come have a visit.
He said it in a letter from the house where he lived in retirement in California.
By the time I got there, things had changed.
There's one thing they never said--never asked.
None of them asked what I was doing there. None of them asked why I had come to call.
TWO
Off to see the wizard
I'm not certain I could have given them a very good answer.
I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing there myself.
The best I had been able to sift it out in my own mind was that this was a trip of sorts--a vacation trip in search of history.
Many Americans make such trips--always have. They head onto the road to seek out the narrative story of our country--to see the places where the history has unfolded. Mount Vernon, Gettysburg, the White House, the Liberty Bell, Appomattox--there has long been a draw to packing a suitcase, buying a plane ticket or loading up the car, and setting forth to take a look at the saga of the United States close-up.
I don't know the precise moment when it occurred to me that it was possible to give oneself a different kind of trip like that. A trip to beat all trips--a journey that had the potential to be more fun than anything a travel agent could book. An uncharted excursion into American history.
The presidents--those who were still living, those who had held the office and had then gone back to their own lives--could be a destination in themselves. They were members of a fraternity--the smallest and most exclusive fraternity in the world. If they would say yes--if they would agree to the visits--the journey held the promise of providing memories that would last a lifetime.
Only in this country, it seemed to me, was such an idea even conceivable--only in the United States could a person decide to go looking for the men who had been the most powerful in the world, and stand a chance of the idea succeeding. The authority that Americans bestow on their presidents is born of the democratic instinct upon which the country was founded; a president is given his power because the citizens decide to grant it. Maybe--or so I thought--the members of the fraternity, the recipients of the gift of that power, never forget it. Maybe, in the backs of their minds, the instinct still exists to open their doors. Once, a long time ago, when they were first asking for votes, each of them had to knock on doors to introduce themselves to strangers. Maybe--I hoped--they would not reject a knock.
I knew, of course, that I could not just literally knock. I would have to write and ask in advance, and the trip could take years to complete. I also knew that, for this to work, I should not come to their doors in pursuit of breaking news. That's not what this journey was about--each...
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