by Sarah Vowell
It is curious that we Americans have a holiday—Thanksgiving—that’s all about people who left their homes for a life of their own choosing, a life that was different from their parents’ lives. And how do we celebrate it? By hanging out with our parents! It’s as if on the Fourth of July we honored our independence from the British by barbecuing crumpets.
Just as Amy and I grew up and left our parents, someday Owen will necessarily grow up and ditch my sister. And, appropriately enough, it is on this weekend that Owen spends the very first night of his life away from his mother. My parents baby-sit while Amy and I go to a rock show. Owen lives through it, as does she, though she talks about him all night, which I guess is how it goes.
Thanksgiving morning, my parents take Owen to see the Macy’s parade while Amy and I start making dinner. Let me repeat that—my mother leaves while I cook. Specifically, cornbread dressing, a dish my mother has made every Thanksgiving since before I was born. To her credit, she has not inquired about my process since she phoned to ask me if she should bring cornmeal in her suitcase. As an Okie, my mom only uses white cornmeal processed by the Shawnee Company in Muskogee. She does not even consider my cornbread to be cornbread at all because I make it with yellow cornmeal and, heresy, sugar. “You don’t make cornbread,” she told me, in the same deflated voice she uses to describe my hair. “You make johnny cake.”
I’m standing at the cutting board chopping sage and it hits me what it means that she is letting me be in charge of the dressing: I am going to die. Being in charge of the dressing means you are a grown-up for real, and being a grown-up for real means you’re getting old and getting old means you are definitely, finally, totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother and my sister is a mother and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore, well all be dead someday.
“Is that enough celery?” Amy asks, pointing to a green mound on the counter. Is there ever enough celery? Do my parents have more celery in their past than they do in their future? Do I?
I have invited my friends John and David to join us for dinner, and I was a little nervous about how everyone would get along. To my delight, the meal is smooth and congenial. My friends and I talk about the West Nile virus killing birds on Long Island. My father counters with a lovely anecdote about an open copper pit in Butte that filled up with contaminated rainwater and killed 250 geese in one day. There is nothing like eating one dead bird and talking about a bunch of other dead birds to really bring people together.
The next morning, right about the time Owen starts to cry while—simultaneously—my mother jams the bathroom door and my father’s on his hands and knees prying it open with a penknife, a cloud passes over me. Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can’t do anything about it. As my family fusses, I spend an inordinate amount of time pretending to dry my hair, the bedroom door closed, the hair dryer on full blast, pointed at nothing.
Everybody in the family goes through these little spells. I just happen to be the spooky one at this particular moment. When people ask me if I’m the black sheep of the family I always say that, no, we’re all black sheep. Every few hours they’re here, I look over at my dad, nervously crunching his fingers together. If he were at home for Thanksgiving, he’d be ignoring us and spending all his time in his shop. I watch him move his fingers in the air and realize he’s turning some hunk of metal on an imaginary lathe.
The thing that unites us is that all four of us are homebody claustrophobes who prefer to be alone and are suspicious of other people. So the trait that binds us together as a family—preferring to keep to ourselves—makes it difficult to be together as a family. Paradoxically, it’s at these times that I feel closest to them, that I understand them best, that I love them most. It’s just surprising we ever breed.
The next day, we do the most typical thing we could possibly do as a family. We split up. I stay home cleaning, Mom goes to Macy’s, Amy and Owen visit the Museum of Modern Art, and Dad tours Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace. By the time we all reconvene on Saturday evening, my ragged mother becomes so ambitious with her sightseeing that I can tell she’s decided that she’s never coming back. “Do you guys want to see Rockefeller Center?” I ask, and she says, “Yeah, because who knows when I’ll be back again.” Ditto the Empire State Building, “because who knows when I’ll be back again.”
If you are visiting the Empire State Building, may I offer some advice? If you are waiting in the very long line for the very last elevator and an attendant says that anyone who wants to walk up the last six flights may do so now, right away, and you are with your aging parents and a sister who is carrying a child the size of a fax machine, stay in the line for the elevator. But if you must take the stairs, go first, and do not look back; otherwise your parents will look like one of those Renaissance frescoes of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, all hunched over and afraid.
So we make it to the observation deck, Brooklyn to the south of us, New Jersey to the west, places that people fled to from far away, places that people now run away from, to make another life. It’s dark and cold and windy, and we’re sweaty from climbing the stairs. It’s really pretty though. And there we stand, side by side, sharing a thought like the family we are. My sister wishes she were home. My mom and dad wish they were home. I wish they were home too.
Ike Was a Handsome Man
Memo
To: Former President William Jefferson Clinton
From: Citizen Sarah Jane Vowell
Re: Presidential libraries fact-finding tour
Mr. President, I’m tired. Who wouldn’t be after a decade of sticking up for you? I am looking forward to your presidential library in Little Rock because I am worn-out from defending you. I would like to donate what’s left of my faith to some building in Arkansas, where it can be archived in an acid-free box, so I can make a little extra room in my heart and fill it up with trying not to hate your successor. But before relinquishing my duties as your crabby little cheerleader, I scoped out four presidential libraries to help you figure out how to do the job right. Not that you asked me. I just don’t want you to mess this up.
We’ll begin our tour at the John F. Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor. Partly because your youth and flash have been described as “Kennedyesque,” and partly because you yourself have often invoked the comparison, most notably by trotting out that film of you as a teenager shaking JFK’s hand, an image of eerie destiny.
I talked to the Kennedy library’s curator, Frank Rigg. We agreed that the plainest pleasure of visiting presidential libraries is getting close to the actual stuff of history. For example, the presidential cheat sheet for the pronunciation of a certain German phrase. Rigg tells me, “We have on display in one of the cases in that room the little card on which he’s written ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ spelled out phonetically. If you watch the film [of his Berlin speech], you can see that just before he gets to the line he looks down at the paper and then looks up and says, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ I love those little correspondences between an artifact and a piece of film. The most beautiful one comes towards the end of the museum, where we have the video of his tour of Ireland in 1963. As he was leaving, he quoted a piece of poetry that Mrs. De Valera, the wife of the president of Ireland, had recited to him the night before at dinner. He’d written it down on the back of his itinerary.”
On the video, Kennedy says that Mrs. De Valera “quoted this poem and I wrote down the words because I thought they were beautiful.” Rigg points out how “you see him in the film pick up a piece of paper that he has under a silver jug. It’s windy. That’s why he has it under there. He picks it up and then he recites the beautiful lines.” Kennedy quoted, “‘Thus return from travels long. Years of exile. Years of pain. To see old Shannon’s face again.’ Well, I’m going to try to come back and s
ee old Shannon’s face again.” Rigg continues, “At the end, he folds it up and you can see the crease. And again it’s one of those things where you feel as if you’re there in that moment in time.”
In this I. M. Pei—designed white box, JFK’s life and death unfold primarily on television monitors and video screens. I walk in suspicious. I have never particularly worshiped Jack Kennedy. I mean, he didn’t really do anything. Except talk. He spoke of civil rights, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got actual laws passed. And then there’s the minor matter of the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the scariest single week in the history of the world. And yet, at JFK’s library, I found myself hoodwinked by pretty words. I stood there, transfixed by the film of his Inaugural Address:
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself…. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
“As you may have noticed,” Rigg says, “there are no narrators to our films and our videos. The principal voice is that of John F. Kennedy himself. And we did that very consciously.”
There are also a lot of pretty pictures—home movies of JFK handing a dandelion to John-John, one weirdly evocative filmstrip of the president in which all he does is carry a briefcase and walk to a car. I watch it wondering, Why is this so riveting? He’s taking work home. But I can’t resist him. The man is Medusa: Don’t look in his eyes.
President Clinton, you should milk this in your library. Where the legislative record is perhaps ambiguous, or downright shabby, go for the flashy sound bites. You are such a sweet talker, the Charlie Parker of the press conference Q & A, riffing rhythmically about everything from interest rates to Greece versus Turkey with regards to Cyprus. There are probably too many momentous quotes to sift through, but placing all the State of the Union Addresses on video loops is a good place to start. My personal favorite was the one in 1997 in which you proclaimed, “America is far more than a place. It is an idea—the most powerful idea in the history of nations. And all of us in this Chamber, we are now the bearers of that idea, leading a great people into a New World.” There was one paragraph in your speech at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial service that actually made me want to be a better person. You said, “When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death let us honor life,” And I always thought one of your loveliest moments as president was one of your smallest. Might your librarians dig up a tape of that special you did for the music channel VH1 in your second term called Bill Clinton: Rock ’n’ Roll President? There was one scene in which you were flipping through your old records, reminiscing about what music has meant to you. Your face lit up when you spotted a Ray Charles album in the stack. It was a fleeting, seemingly trivial clip, and yet the way you beamed at the cover and said Ray Charles’s name revealed your ability to revere.
I wanted to go to the Dwight David Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, to see how they handle something the Clinton Presidential Center will have to tackle. Which is, if one of the achievements of a presidency is economic prosperity, how can that be displayed without trotting out a bunch of toasters and hula hoops? Without making people seem dumb and materialistic? How do you convey the decency of making people’s lives better? Unfortunately for our project, the way the Eisenhower library deals with this challenge is—they basically ignore it. In fact, you’d barely know the man was president. The exhibit devoted to his White House years mostly consists of heaps of weird but swanky gifts he got, like a mosaic desk from the shah of Iran. The museum is great at Eisenhower’s military career. I walk around with its director, Dan Holt, who points out “the original note that Roosevelt and Churchill signed appointing Eisenhower the Supreme Commander.” We pass a documentary in which a corny narrator calls Ike “a military meteor on the rise” and I think, Who cares if he accomplished anything after V-J Day?
There is a lesson to be learned here after all. Mr. President, play to your strengths. Eisenhower’s greatest achievement was liberating Europe. Your greatest achievement? Balancing the budget. Not as dramatic, I know. They’re probably not going to make a Tom Hanks movie about fiscal policy, no matter how inspired that fiscal policy might be. But still, as your White House Web page cheerfully pointed out, your money wrangling did result in the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, the lowest unemployment rate in thirty years, and the most new jobs ever created in a single administration.
In the Eisenhower library, the climax of the visit is D day, in which you turn a sharp corner and, suddenly, you’re standing like a soldier on a ship’s ramp, facing a Normandy beach. My tour guide, Dan Holt, walks me across “a small mock-up of an LCI (landing craft infantry) and into the photograph that’s been called the Jaws of Death, which is the landings at Omaha Beach.”
As we trudge across the ramp, we glimpse our buddies ahead of us, slogging through the bloody wet, and the beach so far away In short, this is very effective theater. Which leads me to my next recommendation, Mr. Clinton. What about a similar stage set, only in your library, instead of being a soldier leaving the boat for Omaha Beach, the visitor could walk in the shoes of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as he steps out of a Lincoln Town Car and into the Dirksen Senate Office Building to endorse the Clinton deficit reduction strategy before the Senate Banking Committee!
A word on the people who run these libraries, Mr. President. Fortunately for you, they are very attached to their subjects, very loyal. Their president becomes a kind of mental roommate. And each of the library directors I interviewed spoke of his president with affection, like a mom almost.
Dan Holt praises Ike’s correspondence skill: “He was a wonderful letter writer.”
And talks up his private-sector prowess: “He was an outstanding businessman.”
His book learning: “His grammar was very good.”
His looks: “He was a very handsome man.”
All the loyalty you would want while you’re in office you finally get after you quit. None of the library directors have written kiss-and-tell memoirs and gone on to work for ABC.
I ask Holt if he has any advice for the administrators of the new presidential library in Little Rock. “Bigger rest rooms,” he says, “and more drinking fountains. But I think you have to have fun. I’m a true believer in that. There have to be bells and whistles.”
In the bells and whistles department, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, features a little piece of Disney World in the form of an LBJ animatron. It is a Lyndon Johnson robot, a robot who wears cowboy garb and tells folksy stories. Have you heard the one about the man who goes to a doctor because he’s hard of hearing? The doctor advises the man to quit drinking and sends him home. A few days later, the man returns to the doctor’s office. He hasn’t stopped his drinking. According to the LBJ robot, the doctor scolds the man, asking, “‘Didn’t I tell you when you were here that you should cut out your drinking if you wanted to improve your hearing?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you do it?’ He said, ‘Doctor, when I got home and I considered it, I just decided that I liked what I drank so much better than what I heard.’”
The library’s director, Harry Middleton, who is showing me around, turns a corner and says, “As we move into this area, we show some of the correspondence that President Johnson got, some of it quite critical, some of it quite supportive.”
One letter hanging on the wall is addressed to Lyndon Johnson from one Frances Mercer of Beverly Hills, California. She wrote, “Mr. President—you have engaged this country in an
act of war, without the consent of Congress. I consider having worked for your campaign one of the most tragic mistakes of my life.”
President Clinton, I am going to hazard a guess that you yourself have received one or two angry letters. The question arises: What are you going to do about all the people who hate your guts, not to put too fine a point on it. What are you going to do about all the aspects of your presidency you’d rather forget about?
I tell Harry Middleton that I heard a rumor that in the initial exhibition at the LBJ library, there was little or no representation of Vietnam and that the president himself came to the library and insisted that that part of the exhibition should be beefed up.
Middleton nods. “To a certain extent that’s true. There was a representation of Vietnam. But nothing that showed the controversy of Vietnam. And when President Johnson walked through the library just a few weeks before it was to open, one of the things that he commented on was that the library did not indicate how contentious that time was. He said to me, ‘That was a very controversial period. We’ve got to make sure that people know that we understand that.’ He said to me, ‘I don’t want another damn credibility gap.’”
“Do you think the people who are in charge of a president’s legacy are more apt to protect him than the president himself would be of his own legacy?”