Presidents on Parade

By Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor

I went out to the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, MO., last week for the opening of an exhibition called "TIME and the Presidency," which will tour the U.S. over the next two years. It features great photos and TIME covers of Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, along with commentary by our longtime columnist Hugh Sidey.

Look! There's F.D.R. swimming, Truman on a morning walk and Kennedy chatting with coal miners. The classic pictures and colorful Sidey anecdotes help personalize the Presidents and make history seem so human, which has always been one of our goals at TIME. In America, more than in any other nation, we like to think of our leaders not as mysterious monarchs but as regular neighbors. Walk a few blocks to the old Truman home, and there's his fedora hanging on a rack in the hall where he left it after his last stroll.

But look at the pictures again, and you realize how we actually hardly knew them, at least at the time. We were shown F.D.R. swimming but not told the tale of his crippling polio. Nowadays, of course, we're at the other extreme: month after month, we've been told more about the personal life of the President than even his wife had known, or wanted to know.

I found it interesting, in light of this new focus on personal lives, to look at the images in the show and consider what matters most in a President. Foremost still are the issues that move our leaders. When it comes to personal character, we want them to be not so much straight arrows as straight shooters, not necessarily plain but preferably plainspoken.

"Give-'em-Hell Harry" was famously that way, and so was Gerald Ford, who was at the opening of the exhibition last week. At 85, Ford was as forthright as ever. He chided the Republicans for shifting too far to the right, praised George W. Bush for being more moderate than his dad, said Elizabeth Dole will be a formidable candidate, and questioned the wisdom of committing U.S. troops in Kosovo. He lamented that the Clinton scandal and the failure to resolve it quickly with a bipartisan censure "had an adverse effect on the presidency."

On that last point, he is surely correct. But what is just as true, and what is all the more remarkable because it almost goes without saying, is that the institution survived intact. In fact, the scandal showed once again the resilience of our democracy. That is also what struck me as I wandered through the TIME exhibition. It was a pleasant reminder of how abiding is our reverence for the presidency and how well placed is our faith in our system.

The show, produced in partnership with American Century Investments, will travel to the Newseum in New York City (June through September); the Reagan Federal Building in Washington (October through December); the Bush Library in College Station, Texas (April through June 2000); the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas (July through September 2000); and the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. (October through December 2000). Starting next week, you can visit parts of it on the Web at www.presidentsonline.com

Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor