DETOUR
Graveside
Attractions
While some presidential
fanatics visit libraries or
birthplaces, media gadfly
Mo Rocca prefers a more
macabre locale that puts
it all into perspective—
their final resting places
BY MO ROCCA
I’m a native of Washington, D.C. It’s a mill town: Like Hollywood, it’s built largely around one industry. In Hollywood
that industry is entertainment; in D.C. it’s politics, which on
average is more entertaining than most of this year’s prime-time schedule. (Some people call D.C. “Hollywood for ugly
people.” To be fair, Hollywood with all
its political activism and its nipping and
tucking has become “Washington for
weird-looking people.”)
The biggest star in Washington,
of course, is the president. To win the
role, a candidate needs serious presidential acting chops. He—or eventually she—doesn’t need Colin Farrell’s
looks or Meryl Streep’s ability to
morph from a Polish war survivor
into a high-fashion editrix. He needs
to do something trickier: convince
the country that he is just like us—a
regular Joe who just happens to have a $200 million campaign
war chest at the ready.
The ideal candidate isn’t too much like us. (Larry the Cable Guy
is unlikely to be elected president, at least not in ’08. It’s 2007 and the
guy hasn’t even formed an exploratory committee.) He’s a better
version of us—strong and decisive, heroic when
he needs to be; clearing brush and stumping for
House candidates at all other times.
Of course, presidents really are just like
us in many of the most mundane ways: They
eat, they make mistakes, they sleep, they
make mistakes and, well, they die. Did I mention that they make mistakes?
My longtime fascination with presidents
has taken me to their birthplaces, their homes
and their final resting places. It is their graves
that offer the greatest reminder of their fallibility, their humanness—even if one of the lousiest ones has a monument befitting an emperor.
