Lessons from Meeting Two Presidents and Watching One

Are you tired of hearing (or maybe even saying yourself), “What’s wrong with that man?” when you read what the president has written or hear what he's said?  Seems to me that it’s time to move beyond that to, “What’s wrong with the people who should be monitoring and being a check to the president?”  People know that he’s a crass, self-absorbed grifter.  We heard what he said about his relationship to women in the Access Hollywood recording in 2016, and we’ve heard and read his racist, homophobic, and ableist slurs for the past decade – and even before.  It’s no surprise who he is.  The real question is why aren’t Congress and the Supreme Court holding him accountable.  Why are they giving a man with no moral standing unfettered power? 

 

I’ve met two U.S. presidents in my life.  I met both before they assumed the presidency – when one was the vice-president and the other was a governor.  Curiously enough, both were Republicans – even though the trajectory of my life suggests that if I ever met a president, it should have been a Democrat.  After all, I was raised in a household where my father attended the national 1960 national convention where Kennedy was nominated as an alternative delegate, and he was a leader in the county Democratic Party.  Each of my pre-presidency encounters with these two men was distinct.  And my encounters with each of the men shaped how I view where the nation finds itself today.

 

In March of 1957, I was yet a couple of months from my fifth birthday.  My mother, father, sister, and I lived in Ethiopia where my sister and I were born.  My father taught health and physical education at Medhane Alem School in Addis Ababa – a school the government funded to help the nation adapt to the modern world.  After World War II, Emperor Haile Selassie’s government recruited teachers from developed nations to teach in Ethiopia.  Because Ethiopia had never been colonized or conquered, except for the brief Italian occupation in WWII, bringing in foreign educators didn’t have the same negative, colonizing connotation as it came to have throughout the rest of the continent.  Bringing in foreign education helped foster a cosmopolitan aura in the capital.  Foreign teachers, like my father, could access the highest levels of Ethiopian social structures and often, as my father did, marry Ethiopian nationals. 

 

For dad, who was raised in the segregated south and was only able to get work in the U.S. as a chauffeur at the end of the war, he found new freedoms and opportunities as a Black man in the Ethiopia that emerged from the war.  He left the U.S. in 1947 and began a life in that country where he didn’t speak the language or know anyone.  Within a couple of years after he arrived, he connected to the elite levels of the society – something unavailable and unimaginable to him in his home nation.  In 1949, one of those connections, the son of a wealthy merchant, introduced dad to his sister, the woman dad would marry:  my mother.

 

In 1957 U.S. Vice-President Richard Nixon made a 17-day tour of the African continent.  Historians have different explanations for Nixon’s trip:  He sought to provide a U.S. presence to counter the communist uprisings in the continent; Eisenhower wanted to raise Nixon’s profile for the upcoming 1960 elections; Nixon wanted to be on the right side of the civil rights debate that had gained some visibility since the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision.  As evidence of that last explanation, some historians note that he met Dr. Martin Luther King in Ghana for the first time during that trip as Dr. King traveled there to celebrate Ghana’s liberation from colonial rule.  Whatever his reasoning, one of Nixon’s stops was in Addis Ababa where he was scheduled to meet Emperor Haile Selassie.  

 

The emperor’s staff, most likely eager to make a connection to the U.S. vice-president by inviting one of his compatriots, invited my father and our family to Nixon’s formal greeting ceremony.  Clearly, no one briefed the Ethiopian government staff who was arranging the event about race relations in the U.S.  My father wasn’t just a U.S. citizen; he was a Black one – a distinction that had no import in Ethiopia.  It would be years later when the world heard the tapes that exposed the depths of Nixon’s disdain for Black folks, but my father and other U.S. Blacks living in Ethiopia in 1957 already knew.  So when I greeted Nixon on the steps of the imperial palace waving a U.S. flag in my left hand and reaching up to shake his hand with my right hand, one of my father’s friends, a journalist for the Philadelphia Defender, took a picture.  Little me reaching up and shaking the hand of the U.S. vice-president framed by the majestic pillars and stonework of an imperial palace.  The friend jokingly remarked to my father that he took the photo as blackmail.  After all, my father wouldn’t want the picture shown that his son was getting chummy with Tricky Dick, a nickname Nixon already earned years before I met him. 

 

I remember the event because of the photo and the story behind the joke.  My family often told the story of meeting Nixon and of that photo especially.  In the retelling, the moral was that Nixon was forced to act contrary to everything he lived in a moment when he had to meet with a Black family.  He had come to Ethiopia where the rules were different and where he encountered and interacted with people whom he normally would have dismissed as inferior and not worth his time.  Because of the visuals, the four-year-old boy whose hand he shook had to be treated with the gentle respect that any adult should afford to any child.  That may not have been possible in the U.S., but in that place and at that moment, Nixon had to reach down, shake my hand and, as much as he ever did, smile. 

 

Twelve years later, I found myself as a 16-year-old on the steps of a different government building.  I had skipped school that day with a friend.  We drove to the capitol to attend a rally in Sacramento to protest cuts in school funding.  My friend and I were among the few younger people in the crowd which was mostly made of White women who were worried what the funding reductions meant for their children’s education.  I don’t recall any other Black folks there besides me.  The crowd gathered where we filled the steps to the entrance entirely.  This was a comfortable place for me.  I’d been to the building before with my father as he met with state legislative leaders to discuss legislation or political wrangling.  He’d died a year or so before that day, so I was there for the first time without him.  But the place was familiar enough that I stood at the top of the entrance steps feeling relaxed to be there.  I could see the door to the capitol and the crowd below.  People stood with the typical array of placards and chanted in between speakers who loudly complained about the state’s impending budget reductions.

 

You know those westerns where the sheriff ambles confidently outside the jailhouse to quell an angry mob?  The sheriff’s charisma and the moral rightness of his arguments always bring the crowd under control.  Without any violence of threat of violence to them, the crowd shamefully backs down and goes back to their lives as good citizens of the community.  The sheriff goes back inside and tells everyone inside that he’s won the day once again.  The hero against the mob, and the hero wins.  What happened that day felt like the opening of that clichéd, stock scene from movie westerns – the first part where the sheriff strides out with the expectation of subduing the wild mob.

 

As the rally continued, the capitol door opened and out walked Governor Reagan, standing like the mythical sheriff.  Clearly, his many B-movie roles prepared him for this moment.  But unlike the lone sheriff, a formation of plain-clothes security men led the way and stood between him and the crowd.  He stopped and tried to speak.  I can’t recall a word of what he said because he was quickly outshouted by the crowd who refused to hear anything he said.  I joined in the yelling.  He’d come out there expecting a quick ending like those westerns, but the crowd had a different script.  He couldn’t get out more than a few words before the noise silenced him.  I yelled louder, and as I did, he turned his head to look at me.  My voice had risen above the din and caught his attention. 

 

As we looked at each other for a brief moment over the 15 or so feet of distance and through the security guards who separated us, I experienced something I’d never before or since experienced.  I saw his face register fear.  This man, standing behind his large security guards, was afraid of me, a skinny kid who was the only person of color in the crowd.  Fear was the only word to explain the sudden change in his demeanor from the confidence he first showed in confronting the protesters.  He had come to tell the crowd he was in control, but he encountered resistance that made his message impossible to deliver.  That must’ve frustrated him, but that’s my conjecture.  But I do know that in the brief moment as we looked at each other, I saw fear. 

 

The PTA moms yelling at him didn’t create that reaction.  But this skinny brown kid with the long and shaggy hair caused him a moment of fright.  I can now only guess at how he reached the conclusion I was dangerous.  Maybe he figured I was armed like the Panthers who’d entered the state house two years before.  Or maybe he thought I was on some drugs that might give me superhuman strength to overcome the security force.  He made a quick judgment of me that was very different to his reaction to the other people around us who were yelling as much as me. I was dangerous, and they weren’t.  It’s hard for me, even today in retrospection, to understand how or why he feared me.  But the look he returned as I stood yelling at him was unmistakable.  He and the guards retreated back into the building. 

 

Two very different times in my life and two very different encounters.  In the first, I was left to make sense of why a friend of the family thought it was funny to take a picture of me shaking a man’s hand.  It took a few years of understanding history and learning about Nixon to get at the meaning of the experience.  By the time I got to the second encounter, I understood that a leader could be duplicitous and not trustable.  By that point, I had become an activist teen who understood why my father and the people he knew distrusted Nixon in 1957.  As a four-year-old boy, the seeds of my mistrust in some leaders were just being planted by my Nixon encounter, the picture, the stories, and my own observations that followed.  By 1969, those seeds had long sprouted as I had seen the clouds of tear gas from the troops and police that Reagan had sent to Berkeley to quash demonstrations, and I experienced the oppression from what demi-authoritarians like Nixon and Reagan sought to make in the nation.  They feared people like me who wanted the nation to live up to its promises for all. 

 

Reagan and Nixon were the opening act in the country’s most recent right-ward evolution.  They learned to appeal to the fears that the majority felt would lead to their demise if they didn’t keep people like me under control.  As each assumed the presidency, he enacted laws and took actions that ran contrary to the democratic ideals that the nation seeks.  Nixon expanded COINTLPRO to keep tabs on anyone he thought to be subversive.  He also created an “enemies list” which identified specific people he sought to destroy.  During his campaign for the presidency, Reagan undermined his predecessor’s efforts to free U.S. hostages held in Iran.  Then he illegally sold arms to Iran and used the money secretly to fund armed rebels in Central America.  And Congress had to pass its first override of a veto of civil rights legislation since Andrew Johnson (in 1866) when it overrode Regan’s veto of the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act. 

 

By the time each of these men became president, I was not surprised by their actions.  My mistrust of them had personal roots, but beyond those roots lay their actions.  What I saw Nixon doing from 1968 until his resignation affirmed who and what my father had believed him to be.  Reagan proved himself to be equally bad.  Although the news still extolls his folksy charm, I’ll always remember him as the guy who took funding from schools and hospitals.  He was also the guy who took one look at me and became afraid.  His policies and actions as governor and later president confirmed that at the heart of all he did was the fear of differences. 

 

As anti-democratic as these two presidents turned out to be, though, we now face something that’s many times worse.  Both Nixon and Reagan were hemmed in by the courts and the legislature.  The courts forced Nixon to reveal the tape recordings that showed the world why people named him “Tricky Dick” decades before.  He resigned when members of his own party refused to support his illegal acts against democracy.  Reagan fared better in the public’s sentiment.  But after his party controlled both houses of Congress for two years, he was forced to negotiate with Democrats as they controlled the House in years after.  While he was able to bring three conservative judges to the Supreme Court, those court’s rulings were mildly ideologically conservative – not completely contrary to past precedent and generations of understanding.  The checks and balances of the legislature and courts worked to keep Nixon’s authoritarianism and Reagan’s libertarianism at bay.

 

That’s not happening today.  That’s not because of the authoritarian rants and actions of the current president.  It’s because, unlike for Nixon and Reagan, the two other branches of government that are designed to balance those tendencies have capitulated or corroborated.  As a result, the nation isn’t at risk of becoming an oligarchy or being run by a despot.  It’s already happened.  Powerful people are granted special favors that give them more money and power.  People of wealth are encouraged to pay tribute to the president and his family.  The president has pardoned convicted criminals who attempted to stop Congress from fulfilling its constitutional duties on January 6, 2021.  The president has assumed powers not constitutionally granted to him.  He has used false pretexts to create a powerful national police force that operates outside of the law and to send federal troops to take over cities – also, extrajudicially.  He has killed foreign nationalists in international waters without any judicial or legislative oversight.  He has sent federal troops into the nation’s cities under while falsely claiming anarchy in the streets.  All of this is being blessed by both the legislature and the Supreme Court.  We’ve already lost the democracy for the present. 

 

Like many others, I’m despairing about the state of the nation.  Decades of progress toward finally living into the ideals expressed at the nation’s founding have been steadily eroded from the time of Nixon and Reagan.  And now that erosion has accelerated by people in power who stoke fear, hatred, and mistrust while being abetted by radical voices and foreign bots that feed misinformation and disinformation through social media.  It’s Nixon and Reagan unfettered.  The protections have been methodically removed so that corruption and acting outside the traditional laws is normative.

 

What to do?  It’s time to put this genie back into the bottle.  The nation will always have people like Nixon and Reagan.  They will always find ways to gain power and attempt to act unilaterally.  But as we did with them, it’s time to organize and fight back.  Not fighting in the military sense, but in the way that we mobilized against acts of tyranny in the past.  That means organizing voting and that means challenging openly undemocratic acts with democratic action.  For me, that means supporting organizations and people who commit to challenging the current status quo.  It means being willing to use my voice to argue for democracy over tyranny.  That’s what it took to counter Nixon and Reagan, and it’s actually what it took to create the nation 250 years ago.  While the military battles are what gets remembered in popular histories, it’s the organizing that really made the difference.  It was a group of people agreeing to common beliefs and actions.  It was the creation of “We, the people.”  The consensus and shared vision are the real genius of this nation when 250 years ago people began the march toward “a more perfect union.”  In that time, until now, that vision has become more perfect as it came to include more people. 

 

The six million voters who voted in 2020 but didn’t vote in the last presidential election contributed to the resulting election of the current president since he won by a slim 1.48% margin of the popular vote.  We need to get those people back involved in voting – not just in the coming midterms, but permanently.  People need to demand that federal legislators take back their roles.  The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and of declaring war.  Congress cannot allow a president to usurp those responsibilities without damaging the balance of the tripartite system.  Also, we need to hold the federal judiciary accountable to the Constitution.  The recent corrupt acts of certain justices and the court’s willingness to ignore long-standing precedents cannot continue.  We need to demand overhaul of the Supreme Court so that justices live to the same standards as other judges. Finally, those of us who understand the current situation need to find ways to educate others about the severity of our circumstances.  We need to stop just talking to ourselves and find opportunities to remind the nation of what it has been and can become.