Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents - Softcover

I’ll explain.

He’s the first president born in the nineteenth century, the first born after George Washington dies; there’s a significance to this, a continuity, the idea that the country is more than its founders. He’s the second vice president to become the president after a death. He’s the last Whig president. He signs the Compromise of 1850, which adds California to the Union as a free state and organizes the land taken in the Mexican-American War into the Utah and New Mexico territories, delegating to them the decision on slavery (“The Union Is Saved!” cry the people upon the news, eleven years before the war begins). It’s his name on the letter from the United States that Commodore Perry carries when the black ships sail into Tokyo Bay on the last day of March 1854. Perry turns away all the emissaries the Emperor sends to the ship; he’ll meet only with the Emperor himself, occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne, the man descended from Emperor Jimmu, the first Emperor of Japan, descended himself from the sun goddess and the storm god.

This is what I hope you will remember: wealthy men and their corporations sought to open Japan to the West, and as the president was a means to those ends, these men considered Millard Fillmore the equal to a living god.

His signature’s lovely, calligraphic elegance, the swash added to the top arm of the F swirling out over the M, doubling back to meet the dot of the I. The first name, waves cresting, black ink a ship’s path on the paper. He had the biggest library of any president up to that point. He signed his name in each book, marked its shelf number in each one. Methodical. Complete.

In the same year that Perry opens Japan with Fillmore’s signature, the painter Kano Kazunobu begins a series of scrolls, one hundred total, of the five hundred disciples of the Buddha, commissioned by a temple in Edo. The disciples―arhats or rakan―are capable of amazing feats. A dry river flows again. The lotus flower grows from a begging bowl. Stones rain from the sky to end conflict. The rakan fly on foxes.

They travel between the six realms: gods and demigods, humans and animals, hell and the realm of the hungry ghosts, consuming, consuming. When an earthquake kills seven thousand people in Edo in 1855, the rakan use tiny dragons to blow out the fires, while people escape from their collapsed worlds.

The hungry ghosts are the reincarnations of those who have died having done evil deeds of a certain kind―not those bad enough to warrant rebirth in hell or as an animal, but bad enough to keep them from a peaceful state. Desire, greed, ignorance―these are the sins of the hungry ghosts.

Kazunobu works on these paintings until his death nine years later. He almost finishes the series; after his death, his wife and his own disciple work from his sketches for the last ten. Methodical. Complete.

Everything happens slowly, with the deliberation of Kazonobu making his hundred paintings. Fillmore’s an accident, president only because of a hot July 4 and some cherries and some milk. By the time the black ships reach Edo and Perry demands that Fillmore’s signature be presented only to the Lotus Flower Throne (although the Shogunate, and not the emperor, is the true leader of Japan at this time), he is no one again, retired to the city by the crashing water, the city of the Falls. Franklin Pierce, a drunkard consumed with sorrow, takes his place. The nation Fillmore once led slides toward war, world collapsing, and he is headed toward obscurity and embarrassment. In his final notable act, he runs for the high office again on a campaign against the foreign, calling himself a Know-Nothing, presenting himself as against the foreigners, the invaders, who arrive not in five hundred black ships but in the ports of the East Coast. At his career’s end, Fillmore is driven, like the hungry ghosts, by something that prevents him from a peaceful rest. Maybe power. Maybe greed. Maybe the knowledge of his former godliness.

And Kazunobu’s paintings too. They are installed in the temple, survive the firebombing of Tokyo in the second World War, although the temple is badly damaged. In 2011, the public sees the hundred scrolls for the first time, and in 2012 they travel, in a reversal of Perry’s ships, back to Washington. The Smithsonian Institution sells out of the exhibition catalogue.

Once, Fillmore was a god’s equal; then, nothing. What sorrow that must be. Every man who is president is president, whether by election or by accident. Nothing can remove them from the paintings, the forty-five disciples of the Constitution. They perform the amazing, but only briefly, and then they are men again.

When Perry arrives, Japan is unknown, the mysterious East. And now we know more of Japan than we do of Millard Fillmore, the hungry ghost, once capable of magic, now capable of nothing. Write your name in the book. File him away on his shelf. Use your method. His story’s complete. A tiny dragon will blow out the flame.

At a point―some night, most likely the day’s cutting and sewing and stitching done, tomorrow’s work ahead of him―the idea becomes clear, snaps into focus in front of the young tailor’s eyes. A moment, when in the light of a candle, his wife over his shoulder guiding him, he looks at the scratchings in front of him, lines like jagged stitches:

XXXXX XXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXX

He is a tailor, he is good at putting things together, and he recognizes―he reads―a word in all of that mess. Perhaps a simple word like the, he, or she, or perhaps his name. Perhaps he points to the word, sounds out its phonemes, looks up to his wife, who smiles at him, saying yes, Andy, that is your name, Andy.

In that moment, Andrew Johnson, illiterate tailor of rural Tennessee, looks at the page beneath him, and confirms that yes, he is emerging from the page:

XXXXX XXXX XX ANDY XXXXXXXX

He is a tailor, a good one. Years from now, when others could do it for him, he mends his own clothing. He looks at a bolt of cloth and sees it unfurl into shirts, dresses, a coat here and a pair of pants there. He sees patterns, where to cut or to stitch, where to bind, or where to rip a seam apart. He sees how to use as much of the cloth as possible, how to reattach a sleeve so the stitches do not show. He has not needed to read for this, but when his wife teaches him, he understands both that the marks on the paper mean something, and that whatever they mean, they mean a station beyond a tailor’s.

He reads. The world opens to him. What had been XXXXX, he now recognizes Eliza, his wife, his teacher. He had known his state’s name, but now he sees written Tennessee, the pattern of repeated letters, the way a pen moves when writing it. He reads everything, books, newspapers, the Constitution, whose XX XXX XXXXXX becomes WO LKU RUQRIU and finally resolves into We the People, and where he encounters another word, potentially for the first time, emerging from the shadows: impeachment.

Because of the customers who come into his shop, he has learned to speak well, and he begins his ascent―alderman, mayor, the state house and senate, United States Congress. He buys a slave, his Constitutional right. He...