Consoling the nation fairly new role for U.S. president
Among the duties we ask presidents to perform is to express grief over the many senseless tragedies in American life — such as the recent shooting deaths of eleven men and women at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
This secular-pastor function is not part of the Constitution: that document delineates the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the armed services, not consoler-in-chief of us all.
It is not even part of the historical presidency — until recently, that is.
Let’s see: President Taft did not show up in New York City to comfort the citizenry in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire on March 25, 1911. The fire claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, mostly women. Sixty-two of the dead jumped or fell to their deaths.
His successor Woodrow Wilson, a pastor’s son, no less, did not preside at a public memorial for the 128 Americans lost at sea when a German U-boat sunk the British passenger liner Luisatania in 1915, resulting in nearly 1,200 dead.
President Kennedy did not fly to Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 following a church bombing which took the lives of four young African-American girls. The nation was shocked by the callousness of the bombing and the senselessness of the deaths. Conducting services for three of the girls, Martin Luther King said, “Life is hard … but you don’t walk alone.”
The attorney general, Robert Kennedy, ordered FBI agents to Birmingham. But his brother, the president, stayed away.
Nor was JFK on hand to mark the passing of the 37 miners who perished in the Robena Mine Explosion in Greene County on December 6, 1962.
Presidents were not expected to show up at such events in those days. Contrast Kennedy’s non-response to Robena with Barack Obama’s public eulogy for the 29 miners who died on April 25, 2010, in the Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion in West Virginia.
“How can a nation that relies on its miners not do everything to protect them?” said a somber President Obama to the families and friends of the dead. “The men lived — as they died — in pursuit of the American dream.”
Times change. Presidents used to throw out the first ball at baseball games from a seat in the stands, from the sidelines; now, he makes the toss from the pitcher’s mound, in the center of the diamond.
“In the center of the diamond” is where modern presidents find themselves, always. Nowadays, says the historian Jeremi Suri in his book The Impossible Presidency, “The American president is closer to a mythological figure” than a normal human being with normal human limitations.
Not everyone is cut out to be, in the words of presidential daughter Alice Roosevelt (Teddy’s rambunctious off-spring), “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”
If he had only thought of it, Theodore Roosevelt would have relished the role of chief national mourner. Alas, that role was first taken up in earnest by Ronald Reagan.
When Reagan addressed the nation on the day of the Challenger space shuttle explosion in January 1986, remembering the eight lost crew members as having “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”, he established a template for future presidents to try to live up to.
It just so happened that this sort of thing was in the wheelhouse of the former Arkansas governor who became president, Bill Clinton. Clinton’s eulogy delivered four days after the deadly Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 was both masterful and measured, beginning with identifying himself and Hillary “as your neighbors for some of the best years of our lives.”
And so the course was set.
But not every president is a Reagan or a Clinton. For instance, there’s Trump, whose trip on Tuesday to Pittsburgh, where he visited a makeshift memorial to the victims of the synagogue shooting and met with some first-responders, was awkward indeed.
Many wanted the president not to come; others advised him to come later, after the funerals. Donald Trump barreled ahead anyway. He departed the city without one public utterance.
What now? Many people insist the president — any president — play the central role in commemorating the lives lost in public tragedies such as the Pittsburgh shooting. Expressions of national sorrow are necessary, at times.
But for most of our history presidents were not called on to officially grieve our civic dead. Maybe it’s time to lay this presidential obligation to rest.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.