When President Harding died in San Fransisco while on his Voyage of Understanding in 1922 (White House spin being what is was even then, even if it was not called that yet) the national outpouring of grief caused people to line railroad tracks while his body was transported back to Washington and after the state funeral to Ohio for burial. The New York Times wisely editorialized on the say after his death that the President's sudden death was not the right time for Americans to consider "the place which history will assign to" him for good reason. The Teapot Dome scandals broke shortly thereafter and his presidency is now seen as one of the worst, led by a former newspaper publisher far more interested in wine, women and song, so to speak, than the operations of the government or the welfare of his country. His successor's grip on the new technologies of the day, so tenuous that he insisted on calling the most significant of them, the raddio (with a flat a), did not help and, after President Cooolidge famously chose not to run for a second full term in 1928, was succeeded by Herbert Hoover.


The country did not recover from the Harding administration and his virtual withdrawal of the nation from international involvement (unpopular as ever after President Wilson's dream of a League of Nations went to defeat in the United States) was not helpful either as Europe tried to pick up the pieces from the empires destroyed by the world war. Seven years after his death, the stock market crashed and a decade later Europe was again at war.

To be sure, there are many factors unrelated to the Harding administration which led to the tragedies that unfolded, but the idea that we can change presidents and immediately fix what was broken or unattended to when the country, for whatever misbegotten reason, chooses some unprepared or unqualified person as its president is an absurdity.

The Harding parallel is not perfect since President Bush's departure saddened nobody and his incompetence almost universally accepted by the time he left, but I suspect that the extent of the damage his administration has done to our country, its institutions, its standing in the world and, yes, its security, is vastly underestimated.

The world is infinitely more complicated and dangerous since President Harding's time and, since President Hoover was succeeded by the greatest President since Lincoln, the role of the federal government in protecting the welfare of the American people is considerably greater today than President Harding could have even imagined in his most stunning alcoholic stupor.

A president in these times who chooses to read books to children on a photo op, rather than to address a threat to the country detailed to him a month earlier, whose disdain for the functions of government leads him to put a useless crony (one of the hallmarks of the Harding administration) in charge of the agency which provides disaster relief, and whose comic book view of the world leads his country into lawlessness, and a foolish war, can damage his country in so many ways that recovery could take decades if it is possible at all.

So, here we are in the worst economic straits since, well, since President Hoover with so many crisis facing the nation in the aftermath of the disastrous eight years, and Americans look to perhaps the best president we have had since John F Kennedy told us we could do better, with some shockingly expecting miracles, or that the mistakes made---mistakes made by voters as much as anyone else--- in 2000 and 2004 can be made to disappear.

And at the same time, the New York Times tells us of "revisionist historians"---the same fools who told us that a second President Bush would not be the disaster he turned out to be because he would surround himself with "smart people"--- who have decided that President Roosevelt did not get us out of the Depression and was as responsible for it as was President Hoover.

Fortunately, this is the same New York Times which publishes Frank Rich to tell us, with so much more truth that it is amazing to see his words share the same newspaper, that

Any citizen or business that overspent or overborrowed in the bubble subscribed to its reckless culture. That culture has crumbled everywhere now, and a new economic order will have to rise from its ruins.

This is what [President] Obama is talking about when he insists on pushing for change simultaneously on so many fronts -- green jobs, health care, education, new financial regulation, infrastructure spending and all the rest. As has been true since he promised "a new foundation for growth" at his inauguration, the most important question is not whether he will try to do too much at once but whether he will and can do enough. Change is hard. Change is traumatic

and the same New York Times that warns us, with Op-Eds from Joseph Stiglitz to join those of the great Paul Krugman in warning us of how much there is to be done.

Sadly, it is also the same New York Times which in its own financial distress exacerbated by the new technologies of the day has demanded extraordinary concessions by the people who work at the Boston Globe with the threat to close down as great a newspaper as there has ever been in thirty days.

I have railed about all of this for some time now (see, for instance, this poorly entitled rant) but I am certain that I cannot live without the Globe and the Times and the Washington Post and so on, and unclear that anyone else can, too.

My dad used to bring the Evening Globe home every night and I tore through it even at a very young age---mostly for the Red Sox and comics then. Today, the first thing I look at when I wake up is the Globe web site---first for the Red Sox and then other things.

But my soon to be 23 year old daughter, my doppleganger in so many ways, "reads" newspapers rarely and then almost always on line.

I am grateful for the huge amounts of information now available to me from my couch, and for the new voices I am able to read without getting newsprint on my fingers, but, with the greatest respect to all of you, I cannot rely on just your voices. I am aware of the fact that almost any newspaper article about something in which you are personally involved has radical mistakes in it which make one question how accurate the reports are where you have no personal knowledge, and the slippage in ethics, in standards, and in coverage is obvious and well known.

But we need newspapers: especially the likes of the Boston Globe. Tomorrow is, of course, Opening Day, among the most important on my calendar. Many have determined what will happen in the months to come, based upon reporting in the Globe.

I cannot imagine how to get through the season, or life itself without the Globe: without Ellen Goodman or Derrick Jackson, Joan Venocchi or even Jeff Jacoby. What about the Sunday magazine? (Can you think of any other magazine that would put "brown bagging" on its cover?) Who told us about lawlessness in the Bush era? The Globe.

In the days before there was an internet, I could not walk within ten blocks of Times Square without going to the out of town newsstand to buy the paper, and when I worked downtown I browbeat a news dealer in the Trade Center into carrying the Globe, even showing disappointment over how long it took to restore his sale of the Globe after the first bombing of the Trade Center in 1993.

It will probably rain Boston tomorrow and, thus, instead of enjoying a Sox home game to start the season for the first time in many years, we can ponder the long road ahead and how much we need the Globe to help us walk down it.