Schools and banks were closed, no mail was delivered but, aside from that, nobody seemed to notice Presidents Day.
In a Gallup poll, Ronald Reagan is named “greatest,” followed by Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt–and Barack Obama. (Name recognition seems to matter.)
For someone who has lived through 13 of 44 White House occupants, “greatest” is meaningless. The important question is how much difference did the men in the Oval Office make in the lives of Americans.
They used to inaugurate them on my birthday, March 4th, and FDR took office in 1933 when I turned nine. I was past 21 on April 12, 1945, sleeping in uniform on a German farmhouse floor when someone shook me awake to tell me the only President I had ever known was dead.
After the Great Depression and World War II, the tenure of future Presidents went by in a relative blur. Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs–twice–to end the war, making the U.S. the only nation ever to use that ultimate weapon.
In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower prided himself on staying in the “middle of the road,” in retrospect an admirable undertaking, followed by Kennedy’s thousand days, in which he learned after a Bay of Pigs fiasco how to avoid blowing up the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Lyndon Johnson passed an historic Civil Rights law, started a War on Poverty but left office in despair after escalating a small Vietnam War to tragic proportions.
Then came Nixon…
MORE.