In a study of children’s attitude toward the President completed in the 1950s, Yale political scientist Fred Greenstein found that children had a benevolent attitude toward the President of the United States, sometimes conflating the President with God. Keep in mind he was doing his study in the 1950s, when the President was Eisenhower, organizer of D-Day and a man who often seemed to be above politics. Greenstein’s work was criticized, since his study focused on New Haven school children, few of whom were black or hispanic. Given those limitations I think the study was fairly accurate.
When Kennedy was assassinated people were depressed for months. People couldn’t sleep, felt bereft. You don’t feel like that when your U.S. Representative dies. A group of my friends and I drove to Washington to attend Kennedy’s funeral. It was a major event in my life.
I believe that most parents and teachers taught their children or pupils that the president was to be respected and revered. When our daughter came home from her elementary school in Oakland in the Seventies talking about “Pig Nixon,” I was shocked. This was at a time when I loathed Nixon and loathed his Vietnam War policies and demonstrated against him. In spite of that, I remember telling her, “He is the President of the United States. We do not call the President a pig.”
I would have said the same thing for Ford, or Reagan, or either of the Bushes. The President was a figure to be respected.
No more. There is no way our current President is a person to be respected. Unlike previous presidents, even those whom historians rank at the bottom like Buchanan or Harding or Johnson, I cannot think of any redeeming qualities of the current occupant of the White House. Not one. None.
