Ronald Reagan was the first saluting president, as far as anyone seems to know.
Ronald Reagan was a man whose charming insincerity and fakery became for him what we now call a "lifestyle" thanks to corporate marketing in the '60's and '70's.
Probably he conned himself no less than he did others. I mean, he may have really believed it when he "remembered" service in the military, disremembering that he'd only played a soldier in a movie. His salute came straight out of fiction, not reality. It's probably hard for many Reagan supporters to understand but the salute was just one more embarrassing thing about Reagan. He embarrassed the hell out of many of us when he wasn't actually scaring the hell out of us with his... well, Central America, Iran, Scalia, Grenada, corporatism, Reaganomics.
That salute. For us pre-Reaganites it seemed like just another appalling gaffe of a B movie president. It would go away. But it didn't. Other presidents went along a bit self-consciously. Carey Winfrey, a Marine and an op-ed columnist in the New York Times, has tracked the salute.
Mr. Reagan’s successors continued the practice, and I continued to be conflicted — believing that when it comes to salutes (and one or two other matters), presidents deserved to be cut some slack, but also feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing.
My ambivalence came to an end last week, when I saw a videotape of the president’s midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he had participated, very early that morning, in the “dignified transfer” of 15 Army soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents killed that week in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama stood ramrod straight and saluted as six soldiers carried the coffin bearing the body of Sgt. Dale Griffin of Indiana off a C-17 transport aircraft and into a waiting van.
I know, I know! I was embarrassed for Obama, sorry this civilian leader felt he had to do the salute thing. A bowed head would have been more appropriate. But the salute was there and at least it was a good one, according to the Carey Winfrey, the Marine.
His salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way.
Better it should be the last one we see in an American president. Not for nothing did the framers take care to separate the president from other rituals -- military or religious. He's our president, after all, not our commanding officer. He presides over a democratic consensus, not trained and submissive troops. Fakery, awkwardness, and insincerity aren't traits we should want in a president.
