An exit poll taken after the 2016 presidential election found 53 percent of the people in my age group, 65 and older, claimed to have voted for Donald Trump. Voters 45 to 64 said they favored Trump by the same percentage. Younger voters appear to have sensed the likelihood that he would abuse his power as president. Among those 18 to 29, only 37 percent said they voted for Trump and just 42 percent in the age group 30 to 44.
As a senior citizen, it’s embarrassing to consider this possibility: If Sarah Palin had been right about how those Obamacare “death panels” she dreamed up were going to pull the plug on old folks, a younger electorate might have brought us a better president.
Trump, himself, has not made a convincing case that age brings political wisdom. His embarrassing presidential stumbles have set me to leafing back through my own journal in the years after I retired, as well as some columns I wrote early in my dotage for a weekly newspaper in Ohio. As a non-leader of the free world, I ask myself, have I done any better?
In June of 1998, recently retired, I considered our “victory” in the Cold War after President Reagan won the defense-spending duel with the U.S.S.R. This, I thought, was not the triumph it was cracked up to be. Free-market capitalism had already solidified big-time crime and a huge concentration of wealth among a few at the top in Russia. Plus, they still had nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at our cities. Although I didn’t imagine they would interfere with our elections, you can perhaps glimpse a hint of prescience in my worries.
Less than a year later, however, I missed the boat badly while writing about the connection between celebrity and politics. I’d noticed a major shift from a time when writers in the 13th and 14th centuries considered fame essentially a good reputation joined with honor and a noble character.
Television, I claimed, was one of the culprits. Estranged husbands and wives, unfaithful lovers, former friends and quarrelling relatives were hoping for fame when they gathered in television studios to share with millions their acts of betrayal and meanness.
Then I made the mistake of turning to politics, where I found two instances of honorable fame with good political results. John Glenn used his celebrity as an astronaut to join the U.S. Senate, and Bill Bradley rode his basketball renown into politics. Both men turned out to be fine senators who might have made terrific presidents. Unfortunately, in 1999 I extrapolated way too optimistically from their examples. “This is a sign, as I see it,” said I, “that we still take politics seriously, that we are not as cynical as we sometimes seem to be. It makes me feel better about fame.” Little did I imagine reality television in the form of Celebrity Apprentice would one day be the training ground and launching pad for a celebrity president.
A few months later, however, I seemed to be recovering. The process began in the autumn of 1999 with a visit to the Vietnam Memorial, where my wife and I saw people seeking the names of their relatives in beautiful black granite. Maya Ying Lin, the 21-year-old Yale architecture student who designed the memorial, had prepared me for this dark vision when she wrote: “I had an impulse to cut open the earth. … It was as if the black-brown earth were polished and made into an interface between the sunny world and the quiet dark world beyond, that we can’t enter.”
If we had missed Lin’s elegantly understated point about the everlasting darkness brought into many lives by those who make war, it would have been clarified when we walked over to the Lincoln Memorial. Completed four years after World War I, it has become more than a remembrance of the president who guided our country through the violence and death of the Civil War. Americans have gathered there to protest racism and dream together of our nobler possibilities, embodied in President Abraham Lincoln.
After continuing along the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, we found ourselves facing a rope and a police officer. He wasn’t eager to say what was happening. Pressed, he smiled and winked and asked who we thought might be landing in a helicopter. He pointed to four black vans, an ambulance and two fire trucks, all waiting on 17th Street.
Soon a limousine joined the vans, and a large helicopter came by fast and low, disappeared, came around again and slowly landed, beating water into mist that drifted over us and stirring up leaves from trees beside the pool. Then a second helicopter, identical to the first, came in and landed near the limousine.
After several people left the first helicopter and climbed into the vans, steps came down from the second helicopter, and a tall man with gray hair emerged, waved, and walked to the limousine. Within moments there was a procession on its way to the White House, where, we learned, a public tour of the gardens had closed off the usual presidential landing place.
This was the man our young granddaughter had recently called “the cheater president,” the man who seemed to have exhausted the patience of even his supporters. All of America, some pundits wrote in those days, was ready for him to fade into the shadows.
But we were surprised by our emotions. We knew more than we cared to about his immature sexuality, his appetite for junk food, his temper and his willingness to deconstruct poverty programs, but we felt respect, even affection, for him. And it wasn’t just respect for the office of our president. Maybe we found in all the precautions, including the well-armed Secret Service people we knew to be inside those vans, not just the dangers he faced but the enormous challenges he had met, including keeping us out of war.
An emotional take on William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency doesn’t qualify as aged wisdom. Maybe it suggests only that senior citizens can imagine complexity in people, including our presidents. And that might be a comforting insight in this dark time.
Bill Nichols, who retired from the faculty at Denison University in 1998, lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.