Tag Archives: president

The Man for the Fall Season

He lost. They didn’t elect him.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

 In fact, he lost partially because of his efforts in behalf the nation.  However, it hasn’t been widely recognized that the most impactful, beneficial, and long lasting effect of his decision, wasn’t the decision that he is known for, reviled for, and awarded for.

vietnamese refugees 1975

“All that is gold does not glitter”

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What is the Presidency For?

“Then, what the hell is the presidency for!”
 “I have the power, now, and I intend to use it.”
— Lyndon Baines Johnson

HBO, All the way

Politics is War.

HBO premiered the movie “All the Way” on May 21. It is great film where Four Temperaments are clearly shown in action.

“November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy was dead in Dallas, killed by an assassin. Jacqueline Kennedy, her clothes still spattered with her husband’s blood, stood beside Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson as Johnson took the presidential oath of office. Camelot was suddenly and shockingly gone. In the passage of a few jolting hours, King Arthur had been replaced by the crude, graceless, but equally energetic Lyndon Johnson, a professional politician from Texas.”  [Presidential Temperament]

LBJ_1
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For the Good of My Country

No.

NO.

NO!

Grover Cleveland

Stephen Grover Cleveland [22nd and 24th President] was a man who knew how to say “no.” During his two terms in office he issued more than six hundred vetoes, four hundred and thirteen of them in his first term alone. This was more than the combined vetoes of all the twenty-one Presidents before him and more than any other President except Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Cleveland was quite proud of his record… [Presidential Temperament]
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Architecting History

James Madison

Thomas Jefferson, [Architect Rational,] served two terms as President, and like Washington before him decided that two terms of its “splendid misery” were quite enough for any man. He was eager to return to a life of study and to have his old friend, the gentle and scholarly James Madison, [Architect Rational,] succeed him in the White House. There was little opposition to his choice and “Little Jemmy” Madison, who stood about five feet, five inches tall and weighed in the neighborhood of 100 pounds, won the presidential election of 1808 handily, and was sworn into office in early 1809. Though he was pleased to have become President, Madison intensely disliked the ceremony and celebration that attended his inauguration. He was quick to announce to a friend his reaction to the gala inaugural ball: he would rather be in bed.

Another quiet, privacy-loving Engineer Rational had taken the helm of the ship of state. [Presidential Temperament]

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Power Reveals

It was really an impossible task for anybody. Especially for Jack.

Except for him.

There he was in the small room — secret service keeping him there, he, not knowing what was happening.

Jack had essentially had cut him off from power for three years.

Powerless.  A Fox on a Leash.

The first Vice President, had described it as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

But then one of Kennedy’s aides, came to him in that small hospital room, and said with some solemnity — “Mr President..

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