Tuesday, May 03, 2005

POTUS 5: Pres. James Monroe


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Monroe succeeded James Madison, and was easily elected with little opposition. He won re-election in 1820 by a landslide: he took every electoral vote except one. Best deal of his Presidency: he bought Florida from Spain for around $5 million.

Monroe also had a long career as a soldier, diplomat, governor, senator, and cabinet official. His two terms in office were generally prosperous and uneventful. He is best known for the Monroe Doctrine, which became a backbone of U.S. foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine basically said that America would resist European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. In other words: "not in our house!," and "keep out!"
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POTUS 26: President Theodore Roosevelt - The Roughrider


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He coined the phrase "my hat is in the ring" and ran for President as a Progressive (aka The Bull Moose Party).

Theodore Roosevelt is remembered as POTUS 26, but this cat also held dozens of other fascinating jobs and posts: New York State Assemblyman, Governor of New York, Vice President, President, deputy sheriff in the Dakota Territory, Police Commissioner of New York City, U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Colonel of the Rough Riders.

At 42,he became President. He was a conservation President (and an ouitdoorsman and hunter), and during his White House years from 1901-1909, he designated 150 National Forests, 51 Federal Bird Reservations, 5 National Parks, 18 National Monuments, the first 4 National Game Preserves, and 21 Reclamation Projects. He provided federal protection for almost 230 million acres. That's a lot of real estate.

President Roosevelt "busted" trusts and helped control large thieving corporations, began the Panama Canal and negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He talked about a "Square Deal" for all Americans, enabling millions to earn a living wage, and built up the Navy as our Big Stick ("speak softly, but carry a...").

"Of all the public men that I have known, on both sides of the Atlantic (and there are few that I have not known in the past thirty years), he stands out the greatest, and as the most potent influence for good upon the life of his generation." Viscount Lee of Fareham, English statesman
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Monday, May 02, 2005

The Man Who Should Have Been King: Governor Mario Cuomo

I wish I could create a POTUS picture and bio for Mario Cuomo. I don't know why he didn't run for President. I wish he had. I can guess:

a) The best guys never run for president.
b) The timing was never right. This is a perennial problem in Presidential politics--when do you make the run? There are scores of factors and infinite variations to consider.
c) Skeletons rattling in the closet? Those skeletons are often alluded to, but we have yet to see any substance. He ran for Mayor of New York and Governor of New York and nothing emerged. I never believed in those skeletons.
d) He didn't want to know if he would win or not. He wanted to keep that certain aura, which he would have sullied by jumping in.

In 1984, We ran Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. We lost. I'm not sure anyone, even Mario could have beaten President Reagan.

Michael Dukakis was our '88 candidate. I was a delegate for Jessie Jackson at the state convention, where we were rolled over by the other sides. Would Mario have had a shot at George Bush? I think so...

Could Mario have beaten Clinton in 1992? I don't know...but I'm pretty sure he could have beaten George Bush in the main event.

My favorite speech by Governor Cuomo (and he didn't give many bad ones) was at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco in 1984. I lived there at the time. I didn't get to see Mario (I came close to a ticket, but I blew it!) I did get to see speeches by VPOTUS candidate Geraldine Ferraro and Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles. Here is an excerpt of Mario's 1984 stemwinder. Read the speech, or better, listen to the audio here:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/cuomo1984dnc.htm

excerpt:


It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and
confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. The strong, the strong they tell us will inherit the land.

excerpt:



Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places. Maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds, maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to use.

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Sunday, May 01, 2005

POTUS 32: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - The Man In The Wheelchair Who Lifted The Country On His Shoulders; The Only POTUS To Win Four Terms


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FDR admired his distant cousin Teddy Roosevelt, and set out to emulate him (but as a Democrat!). He was in the New York Senate, and was an assistant Navy Secretary under President Wilson. He was the democratic candidate for VPOTUS in 1920.

In 1921, he was stricken with polio. He fought to regain the use of his legs and at the 1924 Democratic Convention he dramatically appeared on crutches to nominate Alfred E. Smith as "the Happy Warrior." In 1928 Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York. The crutches were used mainly for photo ops and he was confined to his wheelchair.

FDR became President in 1932, succeeding Herbert Hoover. He helped the American people regain faith. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and in the very pit of the depression, told America in his Inaugural Address:


The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Two years into his first term as President, the Nation began a slow recovery. But the fat cats turned against Roosevelt's New Deal. They feared his social experiments, and his removing the nation from the gold standard. And they feared the deficits he was running up (which Republicans now pile up at the greatest rate ever).

Roosevelt's response to the fat cats: a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

In 1936 (and in 1940 and in 1944) he was re-elected by huge margins. And he blew it for a bit. Sure that his mandate in '36 gave him carte blanche, he sought to pack the Supreme Court (which had invalidated numerous New Deal programs) by increasing the number of justices (all of whom would be his nominees). He lost that battle, but now the government itself could and did regulate the economy.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt led uns into a global war and worked closely with England and Russia and their leaders Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin to take out the Axis.

President Roosevelt felt the future of the world depended on relations between the Americans and Russians, and he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations organization.

As war drew to a close, Roosevelt's health declined, and on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a brain hemorrhage, reportedly with his girlfriend.
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Saturday, April 30, 2005

POTUS 28: President Woodrow Wilson - The President Who Short-Circuited & POTUS 28A: President Edith Wilson - An Alternate Portrait


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Happy Birthday, April 30th!

April 30 is an important date in the history of the USA. On this date in history:

Washington was sworn into office, Hitler commited suicide, and The Vietnam War officially ended.

POTUS 33: President Harry Truman - "The Buck Stops Here"


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Harry Truman did not want to be vice president, and he didn't have to be for long. He was VPOTUS 83 days before FDR died in his fourth term of office.

He hoped to play the piano for a living, but opened a haberdashery with a fellow army buddy that went bust. Harry refused to declare bankruptcy and worked his entire life to pay the debts from the business. He got into politics.

In his bid for re-election in 1948, he was dubbed the loser to Thomas Dewey as newspaper headlines read DEWEY WINS when in fact Truman was the winner. You've seen the famous photograph of Harry holding the 'paper declaring Dewey the winner.

When bad reviews appeared in the press following his daughter Margaret's singing debut in new York, he threatened to punch the reviewer in the nose.

The President never removed his suit jacket while working in the Oval Office. Harry was not a shirt-sleeve guy.

When Japan refused to surrender in World War II, he made the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities devoted to war work. He may have ended the war, but he let the genie out of the bottle, and we've never been able to put the genie back.

In June 1950, when the Communist government of North Korea attacked South Korea, Truman again went to war: "There was no suggestion from anyone that either the United Nations or the United States could back away from it." A brutal struggle ensued as U.N. forces held a line above the old border of South Korea. Truman kept the war a limited one, and avoided engaging either China or Russia.

He retired in early 1953, succeeded by President Eisenhower.
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Friday, April 29, 2005

POTUS 28: President Woodrow Wilson - The President Who Short-Circuited & POTUS 28A: President Edith Wilson


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President Wilson started out as an academic, working his way up to President of Princeton in 1902. He ran for governor, and won, in 1910, and was nominated for President at the democratic convention in 1912.

After winning re-election in 1916 on the premise that "he kept us out of war," he asked congress to declare war on Germany in 1917. The American presence in the war eventually helped tilt the balance in favor of the allies. After the Germans signed an armistice, Wilson went to Paris to work on the Treaty of Versailles and The League of Nations. Alas, in the midterms, the balance in Congress had tilted toward the Republicans. The Treaty died in the Senate.

After a long tour on the hustings to drum up support for Versailles and the League of Nations, President Wilson became ill.

On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side. His intellectual capacity remained intact, but his emotions and judgment were shattered. No one suggested that Wilson resign. The 25th amendment was fifty years in the future. His wife, Edith, undertook a massive cover-up of his condition. She controlled access to him and made the decisions for him. In a very real sense, Edith Wilson was the 29th President of the United States (or maybe 28A).

It's a mind f**ker for us in the age of revved up Kleig-light journalism and media scrutiny to imagine keeping a President on ice for two years. Imagine if a year from now, we never saw President George W. Bush again. We get communiques from him, we never actually see him. He is somewhere behind The Closed Door. He becomes a Howard Hughes and any information we do get comes from aides. You no longer even really know who is behind that closed door. No one has the power to peek beneath the covers.

Although President Wilson gradually recovered from the worst effects of the stroke, Wilson never got his game back. In the meantime, the Senate twice rejected the Versaille peace treaty. Wilson had refused to compromise and the United States never joined the League of Nations. President Wilson left the White House in March 1921 a broken man.
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Thursday, April 28, 2005

More Thoughts On Jacko - Michael Jackson's Trial Continues

A comedian has to have already said this, but::::::::::::::::shouldn't Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon and dermatologist be on trial for something?
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POTUS 31: President Herbert Hoover - The Scapegoat


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As I've said before about Hayes, Taft, Coolidge, Bush, Ford (who barely qualifies), et al, my second favorite variety of President is the one-term Republican defeated for re-election. My favorite configuration is, of course, the two-term Democrat. I am sad to report that in my now lengthy lifetime, I've seen--and voted for--only one: POTUS 42 William Jefferson Clinton.

Run from office on a rail in 1932 by the FDR juggernaut, President Hoover's star has risen over the years.

In the book, The Herbert Hoover Story, Eugene Lyons writes: "A Fantastic Hoover Myth. . .It presents our thirty-first President as a heartless ogre, inept and callous and reactionary, who 'caused' a depression, then 'did nothing' to mitigate its horrors."

President Hoover is no longer blamed for causing the Depression. However, he was trounced by FDR and the nation then began the excruciatingly slow march toward recovery, and, a decade later, war with the Axis.

Years later, in 1947, President Truman enlisted Hoover to help with various issues, including flying to Europe to fix the food production pipeline in defeated and occupied post-Hitler Germany.

Flags in the classrooms at Kent Elementary were draped with black bunting for a month when Hoover died in the fall of 1964. It was a relief I think, going back to a time when Presidents died in bed, of old age.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005

POTUS 17: Pres. Andrew Johnson - The Worst President Ever


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While Andrew Johnson's predecessor, Lanky Link, is considered America's greatest President, Johnson is often considered the worst. It requires a crash course in The Reconstruction to understand how badly he screwed things up.

When Civil War broke out, Johnson was a first-term Senator in the proslavery wing of the Democratic Party. He differed with them in that he didn't want to split The Union. When Tennessee left the Union after the first election of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson broke away and became the only Southerner in the U.S. Senate.

Johnson wanted to save the union, but did not believe in the emancipation of slaves. Concerned about his chances for reelection, Lincoln felt that he needed a man like Johnson on the ticket in 1864. Lincoln's enemies could not easily depict him as a tool of the abolitionists with the scurrilous and racist Johnson as his running mate.

Days after the Civil War ended, Lincoln was assassinated. President Johnson now blocked efforts to force Southern states to guarantee equality for blacks. While Congress was in recess, The President rushed through his own twisted policies--handing out thousands of pardons and essentially allowing slavery under another name. When Congress reconvened, the Republicans went to political war against the President.

During the congressional mid-terms in 1866, President Johnson went on a speaking tour to campaign for congressmen supporting his policies. In speech after speech, Johnson personally attacked his Republican opponents in vile and abusive language. On many occasions, it appeared that the President was drunk. One observer estimated that Johnson lost one million Northern votes in this debacle.

Congress voted to impeach Johnson by a vote of 126 to 47 in February 1868, citing his violation of the Tenure of Office Act and charging that he had brought disgrace and ridicule on Congress. The Senate voted not to convict Johnson (he won by one vote), and he limped through the sullied term originally won by President Lincoln.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Happy 202nd Birthday Meteors


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202 years ago today, around 2,300 meteorites weighing between one quarter ounce and 20 pounds fell on the town of L’Aigle in northeastern France, 100 miles from Paris.

No one was killed. No one was even hurt. It was the first time scientists could verify that stones could come from outer space.

How the scientists figured it out is anyone's guess. Doctors at the time still believed that "humors" in the blood caused all illness. Bloodletting was the cure-all. Doctors didn't even wash their hands until the late 19th century, when Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister's findings led to antiseptic surgery. Antiseptic practice saved thousands of lives during the Franco-German War, and yet American and British doctors--who killed far more people than they saved--long resisted the theory of sepsis.
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