Presidential sites offer lessons in history

Call it the innocence of youth or simply the logical next all-consuming step after X-Men, Spidermania, Batmania and Star Wars. But the resident 6-year-old in my house has a whole new pantheon of superheroes. They're called presidents. Great, good, mediocre and bad. Famous presidents. Forgettable presidents.

Disney World? Not on his radar screen. Instead, David is planning our next family trip to Kinderhook, N.Y., the birthplace of Martin Van Buren.Who would've thought it? We grown-ups wax cynical about the men in the Oval Office, picking apart the peccadilloes and predilections of presidents past and present. Not my David. You might as well tell him there is no deity.

I suppose I've been encouraging such benign beliefs with a collection of presidential plates from FDR to Jimmy Carter that hang on our kitchen wall, and by showing off other presidential memorabilia in my possession. But it's striking that at a time when the networks trumpet "The White House Under Siege" or "The Presidency in Crisis," all David wants to do on a day when there's no school is pay homage to presidents.

We do this, on a mild spring day, by driving down to the Lincoln and FDR memorials, stopping at the National Museum of American History exhibit on presidential campaigns, winding up on the downtown block where, in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre, Lincoln was shot and, the next morning in a house across the street, died.

The FDR Memorial is a maze of tablets and tableaux. FDR does not appear until the stone labyrinth reaches the third term. Demands David: "I want to see FDR. Where's Franklin D. Roosevelt. We want to see Franklin. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we want you."

En route to The Man, David joins a stationary second term bread line, a photo op for dad. Prosperity is right around the corner, and so is Franklin. He is seated, sort of staring into the distance. Families pose. Cameras click. "Daddy, there he is," David says.

Next to FDR sits Fala, his Scotch-terrier pooch. But where is Eleanor? The first lady is next, but not as FDR's social conscience and chief lobbyist for the downtrodden. In the politically correct '90s, Eleanor cannot stand by her man. She must stand alone, statuarily speaking, identified not as a presidential spouse but as the postwar first U.S. delegate to the United Nations.