President and Precedent

The dark joke about Elvis Presley is that his best career choice was to die. This kind of humor also connects to a former president, William McKinley, who never visited Alaska but has a mountain named after him since his assassination. The mountain was renamed Denali by the Alaskan people. Now, it seems the current leader wants to rename it back to McKinley for unclear reasons.

But our 25th president: the last president to serve in the Civil War, liked tariffs, was assassinated, but still had a deep respect for precedence and a sense of history.  There still was a sense of precedence, long lasting impacts, and unintended consequences, that gave leaders pause. Not so sure it is like that today.

There is the story about how McKinley visited Niagara Falls in 1901. He was careful to only walk halfway across the bridge connecting Canada and America. He explained that he didn’t want to be the first President to leave the boundaries of America while in office.

It’s nice to think that precedents and presidents still exist.