The Magic President

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 01, 2021

 

Joe Biden is in Surfside, Fla. But why?

 

The fact that this question will be received in most quarters as facetious if not outrageous is one more little data point illustrating the metamorphosis of the American president from chief magistrate to chief priest.

 

There was a time — and it wasn’t even all that long ago — when presidents weren’t expected to make ritual pilgrimages to scenes of suffering.

 

As John Dickerson recounts in his very readable The Hardest Job in the World, a series of tropical storms pounded the United States in 1955, doing more damage than had been inflicted during any hurricane season on record. Dwight Eisenhower was on vacation in Gettysburg and did not interrupt his family retreat. There was no public outcry or criticism — this was utterly normal. Vice President Richard Nixon joked that Washington staffers used President Eisenhower’s absence to catch up on their sleep. “He has the ungodly habit of getting up early,” Nixon said. The storms kept up: In 1957, Hurricane Audrey killed more than 600 people in Louisiana’s Cameron Parish. President Eisenhower was again nowhere to be seen. He did not visit Louisiana, did not make a heartfelt public speech, did not rush to put together a federal response. No one thought this was remarkable on his part.

 

Things were much the same for John Kennedy when Hurricane Carla struck Texas in 1961. He did not tour that scene or the scene of a catastrophic East Coast storm a few months later. He did not parachute in and perform five acts of sympathy theater.

 

“Neither Kennedy nor Eisenhower was callous,” Dickerson writes. “Ike believed, like most did at the time, that local governments, civil defense forces, and the Red Cross were supposed to stack the sandbags and distribute food packets and blankets after a storm hit. The federal government’s job was to rebuild structures. Eisenhower believed that if the federal government preempted the local duty to care for neighbors, it would jeopardize the core American value of Americans giving back to their communities.”

 

The man who really changed that was Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously was a genuine idealist and a grotesque political opportunist. Johnson was an FDR man through and through, and he admired his legendary predecessor’s ability to forge an emotional bond with the American people through symbolic displays of presidential goodwill. Expanding on that strategy, Johnson, over the objections of his own emergency advisers, visited New Orleans after a hurricane drowned 75 people there, convinced by the powerful Louisiana senator Russell Long that his arrival on the scene would be the American answer to a Roman triumph — which it was. It was an unqualified public-relations coup, and the major newspapers, as Dickerson reports, “portrayed Johnson in action-hero terms.”

 

Johnson repeated the performance in subsequent disasters, and President Nixon continued the new tradition. Johnson’s gambit, as Dickerson puts it, produced a “merger between the duties of the office and the requirements of politics that gave birth to the presidential first-responder obligation.” President George W. Bush, who in spite of his cowboy pretensions was connected to a much more reserved New England cultural current, paid a high political price for failing to follow Johnson’s example after Hurricane Katrina. The lesson lost on President Bush was that Johnson had not been greeted merely as an executive but as a savior. Calling to mind both New Testament stories and medieval superstitions about the healing power of the touch of a king, Americans had reached out for physical contact with the president and gone into ecstasies upon achieving it. Whatever that nonsense was about, it wasn’t about federal emergency-relief funds.

 

The belief in the magical healing powers of the president can be seen dramatically illustrated in the myth of Ronald Reagan’s response to AIDS — the legend that insists, falsely, that he would not so much as speak the word in public. That is a fiction, and it obscures the more relevant fact that the Reagan administration took aggressive steps to combat the epidemic, streamlining FDA procedures to make experimental drugs more readily available to patients and appointing intelligent deputies to take the lead on the issue. (Among these was Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an “unsung hero” in the fight against AIDS, as the Washington Post put it decades later.) President Reagan and his administration took important substantive action and very likely saved many thousands of lives by doing so.

 

But President Reagan, in spite of his career as an actor, was not much on sympathy theater. And so the Magic President was nowhere to be seen in the early days of the AIDS crisis. Instead, the heroine of that period was that other magical figure of the 1980s, Princess Diana, who contributed nothing of substance to the AIDS response but made a point of physically laying hands on AIDS patients and of being photographed doing so, thereby performing one of the traditional magical duties associated with royalty. Those who were surprised by the impromptu shrines and mass hysteria occasioned by Princess Diana’s death had not comprehended the cultic character of her public career.

 

It is not entirely clear what practical purpose Joe Biden has in visiting Surfside. As a lightly informed political careerist who seems to believe that the infamous Tuskegee study had as its subjects the Tuskegee Airmen, President Biden is not the first first responder a thinking person would hope for. I would be shocked if he knew basic relevant things such as where building codes actually come from, or if he had anything meaningful to contribute to the rescue work. Such presidential visits often are framed as an executive effort to press the relevant bureaucracies into action, a folk belief that has very little basis in reality: If it actually were the case that our agencies could be counted on to react with appropriate commitment and urgency only under personal presidential direction, then we would in some real sense have a failed state. We don’t, yet, and for that we should be grateful.

 

But President Biden is in Florida neither to find facts nor to direct rescue efforts. He is there in his magical capacity. Dickerson writes that the president fills many roles in American life, among them “first responder” and “chief priest.” I would only quibble that, in the current configuration of the presidency, those are one role rather than two.