This Memorial Day holiday, consider the modern American presidential motorcade, and its lonesome rider
I found myself on a road trip to New England this Memorial Day holiday. On a freeway in Connecticut I got off the road at a service plaza to take a rest and stretch my legs.
The service plaza was rather ordinary, though with something new: in the back of the parking lot four or five spaces had been converted into charging stations for high-priced Tesla electric cars.
Buick Roadmaster Stationwagon at Tesla charging station
It was decidely not a Tesla, but the station wagon’s scruffy owner seemed not to care. He stood beside the car, talking on his cell phone. Did he expect to get gas from the Tesla spaces, I wondered?
Two Connecticut state troopers parked out front of the plaza, chatting.
I went inside the plaza to look around. I came back out and lit a cigarette.
The two state troopers, still huddled beside their cars, now stared at me as I smoked. They kept staring intently. I was standing beside a receptacle for cigarette butts, so I couldn’t figure out what, if anything, I was doing to draw their attention. Perhaps it’s now illegal to smoke a cigarette in Connecticut, I mused.
As if on signal the two troopers suddenly jumped into their cars and pulled into the exit lane out of the plaza. They blocked the only lane back to the freeway, sealing us in.
An elderly couple in a car tried to leave, but the troopers hopped out of the cars and brusquely ordered them back to a parking space.
“Go back and park,” a trooper ordered the couple. “And close your windows.”
The troopers began shouting orders for everyone in the plaza to close their car doors and windows. The cops seemed under some strange state of agitation, and worry.
Boy, I thought, I’m really going to get in trouble for smoking a cigarette now.
I noticed then that traffic on what had been a busy interstate in front of the service plaza had stopped. It was strangely quiet. No one came or went.
By this time the elderly couple got out of their car and sipped from Starbucks cups. They asked what was going on, but I could only shrug.
We looked at the Buick station wagon in the Tesla spaces. Was something about to explode? we wondered.
Apprehension lit the faces of those around me. We stood confused, and worried.
Should we run? Should we hide? Were we in danger?
At last, seeing our concern, the cops offered an unusual explanation: President Barack Obama was in the vicinity, and we all had to wait and watch until his motorcade went by.
Hearing this explanation we felt a sense of relief and detumescence, if befuddlement.
The cops did little to calm folks down.
Not far from me a young woman stood beside an SUV, talking to another woman inside the car through an open door. One of the troopers hurried over and ordered the women to close the car door.
“The Secret Service is very nervous,” the cop informed them.
Can I take a photo? I asked. No, the cop replied. No photos.
“The Secret Service don’t want photos of the motorcade,” the cop tells me. “They’re very nervous. Obama’s on his way to a fundraiser.” With that the cop laughs: “Pay $33,000 at the fundraiser and you can take his picture there.” He laughs again.
Later I would read in the local Journal News that the president had flown in to a nearby airport on Air Force One. From there he motorcaded to a Democratic fundraiser in Stamford. “The fundraiser, at a private home, was to be attended by about 30 supporters contributing up to $33,400 each,” the newspaper’s website reports.
This was why we’d been waylaid and barricaded in at the freeway service plaza: so the president could meet political donors.
With the traffic now stopped on the four-lane freeway before us, all around us became unnaturally quiet, like before a storm.
I mention to the elderly couple standing beside me that all this is ludicrous, sad and appalling. The president of the United States — the supposed leader of the free world — shouldn’t be locked away in a hermetically sealed bubble. And we shouldn’t be locked in a service plaza.
The president should be free to walk among us, and talk with us, and us with him, I say. Instead, these days, the American president is supremely and near totally isolated from the people, and our many problems.
“I’d buy him a latte!” the old gentleman beside me offers, hoisting his Starbucks cup.
“This is how it has to be nowadays,” his wife volunteers. “There’s so many people nowadays. So many crazy people…”
I go back to my car and pull out a sandwich. My traveling companion impatiently waits inside the car. She doesn’t like it that I smoke. She doesn’t want me to smoke in the car. So we have to stop at service plazas like this, so I can get out and smoke.
“Can we get going?” she asks me.
“No,” I tell her.
“Why not?”
“You’re not going to believe me,” I tell her.
I explain the exits are blocked, that we are stuck in the service plaza and must wait for the President of the United States to go by first. I have to repeat this several times before she takes me at my word.
“Well, is he walking, or flying?”
“No, he’s in his motorcade.”
“How can they do this?” she asks.
“Be thankful they don’t lock us in a stall in the rest room,” I tell her.
Thanks, Obama!
I take my sandwich from the car and return to the curbside, to sit beside the elderly couple to watch the strange procession pass by. It was to be a sighting of that rarest American bird in the wild: americanus presidentus.
The two state cops all the while watch me intently as I unwrap my sandwich. Relax, boys, I say to myself. I’m not going to throw a turkey and provolone sandwich at the President of the United States….
Now, on the quiet road before us, there arises a deep, terrible rumble.
First comes about twenty-five or thirty motorcycle cops, riding two abreast, their lights flashing, engines roaring, shaking the ground. Then comes several black Secret Service SUVs with tinted windows.
Two presidential limousines follow these, I guess one being a decoy. Sitting inside one of the limousines we think we can see a solitary shadow, whizzing by at seventy miles an hour. We wave at the passing shadow, and pray to be released from this highway rest stop.
Following the president’s limousine, in quick procession, come several more black Secret Service SUVs and support vehicles, an SUV with its windows rolled down, followed by not one, but two ambulances, bringing up the rear.
It was a horrific and terrible parade, wrapped in grand isolation, and fearsome history.
Watching the president and his party go by, I began to reflect.
This being the Memorial Day holiday, I think of those who’ve fallen, and the meaning of this strange and deadly procession, and the reasoning behind it. What has become of the modern American presidential motorcade, and its lonesome rider?
History and literature are full of chance encounters with great leaders on the public road. But those stories are much different from this.
America’s great poet, Walt Whitman, wrote one account about our great president, Abraham Lincoln.
Barack Obama, of Illinois, frequently spoke of Lincoln while running for our country’s highest office, and drew comparisons to him. So mentioning Lincoln here is appropriate.
During the Civil War, Walt Whitman saw Lincoln on the road dozens of times, though they never exchanged words.
Whitman wrote in his diary, on August 12, 1863:
“I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location, some three miles north of the city, the Soldier’s Home, a United States military establishment. I saw him this morning about 8:30 coming in to business, riding on Vermont Avenue, near L street. The sight is a significant one.
“He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry, with sabres drawn, and held upright over their shoulders. The party makes no great show in uniforms or horses. Mr. Lincoln, on the saddle, generally rides a good-sized easy-going gray horse, is dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc., as the commonest man.
“A lieutenant, with yellow straps, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men, in their yellow-striped jackets. They are generally going at a slow trot, as that is the pace set them by the one they wait upon. The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortège (as there were no motorcades then, the procession was called a cortège, meaning a group following and attending to some important person) as it trots toward Lafayette Square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes.
“I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche (or horse-drawn carriage)….
“Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dressed in complete black, with a long crape veil. (Their carriage) is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They passed me once very close, and I saw the President fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. He bowed and smiled, but far below his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect, expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”
We should note that Abraham Lincoln, unlike President Obama, was not isolated from the public. Far from it. Nearly every day Lincoln would throw open the White House to the public, for what he called his “public opinion baths,” from 10 to 2 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and 10 to noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“All a person had to do was merely show up in the White House at the stated time and wait their turn,” one historian notes. “Usually (Lincoln) would greet people with ‘what can I do for you?'”
Lincoln, I sincerely suspect, would not have locked us in a rest room until he had passed down the hall.
Of our four presidents killed in office, two — Kennedy and Garfield — were shot in transit. William McKinley was felled by an assassin’s bullet while greeting visitors at an exposition hall.
Lincoln was, at once, both our most down-to-earth, yet most “artistic” of presidents, Walt Whitman tells us. He was shot watching a play.
The man who shot Abraham Lincoln, actor John Wilkes Booth, advertised himself on handbills with a line spoken by Richard III in Shakespeare’s play Henry VI: “I am myself alone.”
In this respect, today’s American presidential motorcade and even the presidency itself — a leader locked alone in frightful isolation, trailing behind horrific ambulances and weapons of destruction — is more influenced by John Wilkes Booth, than Abraham Lincoln.
Plutarch writes that the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope one day lay contentedly in the sun, when he looked up and saw Alexander the Great and his mighty entourage coming down the road in his direction.
Alexander no doubt sat mounted on his tall steed, Bucephalus, often called the most famous horse in history.
“Diogenes raised himself up a little when he saw so many people coming towards him,” Plutarch writes, “and fixed his eyes upon Alexander.
“And when the monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, ‘Yes,’ said Diogenes, ‘stand a little out of my sun.'”
One imagines Diogenes’ discontent.
