In response to Matt’s thoughts about the late Senator Edward Kennedy, a reader comments via Hotmail that Kennedy’s brother, John F. Kennedy, may have been one of the greatest Presidents of the United States.

The reader asks Matt who he believes is our greatest President.

Matt responds:

I have an eclectic taste for all Presidents.

It seems to me that to be a President, you really have to go through the gauntlet of public scrutiny of every iota of material you ever thought about anything, which will be dragged out through the fields, the bogs, the garbage heaps...  Everything will be commented upon from every possible angle.

It takes a lot of courage and strength to submit yourself to that amount of scrutiny.

Therefore, I think that each of our Presidents has brought something to the table.

The thing that ratifies that is that in a free society, where we can all comment on anything we want to comment on, is that there’s always a cheering section and a bitching section, which means we must be doing the right thing.

If everybody hated it, it’s probably poison, if everybody loves it, it’s probably pabulum.  The counterbalance seems to agitate or soothe, according to which party you’re espousing at a given point in your life.

Herbert Hoover was President when I was born, but he left office when I was 1 year old.  My first President that I can really remember was Franklin Roosevelt.

It seemed to me in later years that we really didn’t know what what was going on with our Presidents at that point in time.  We didn’t even know that FDR had polio.

That shows the difference in the expansion of how we view our nation—where now, if you cut your fingernails on Friday, everybody wants to know how long they were, and what time did you cut them, and should the public have the right to do a DNA scraping from the fingernails...

I honor the office, and I believe that the person who is occupying it, if they make the office more attuned to “government of the people, by the poeple, and for the people,” then they’ve done a great job.  And if they haven’t, then the office isn’t diminished, they are.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Each of us looks at the deeds of our Presidents and gives them a grade of an “A” or an “F.”  But history always gets it right.

I’m of the camp that says, “Wait decades and see what the hell was going on.”

I remember that when Harry Truman left office, everybody thought he was disgraced.  Now he’s one of the most admired Presidents we’ve had.

So much for all the cheering and all the booing in the grandstands!

Matt