REMEMBERING GREAT (AND NOT SO GREAT) PRESIDENTS

By Juan Montoya
My first remembrance of the presidency was when I was eight and in the second grade at Garden Park School.
We had gone to Harlingen on a field trip t the Holsum bread and the Hygeia dairy company. The experience remains vivid because most of us had never been out of Brownsville, never mind in a commercial bakery or dairy company. There we wondered through the fragrant entrails of the bakery and were treated to freshly-baked pasties. At Hygeia, we watched as their engineers were attempting to use salt water to manufacture ice cream. We got some Popsicles out of that, too.
This was in November of 1963, Nov. 22, to be exact.

We were just getting to Las Prietas and about to be let off at the school after noon (closer to 2 p.m.), when a teacher told us in tears (a teacher in tears, imagine!) that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and had died in Dallas. We sate there stunned, many of us not knowing what that even meant. We were, after all, barrio kids from Las Prietas.
I do remember that I asked in the silence whether that meant that we were a country without a president.
The teacher nodded, and then we were let off the bus and allowed to go home with out Hygiea and Holsum pencils and souvenirs.
Little did we know at the time that the assassination f that young popular president and the questions of his assassins would linger to this day and become an index point on the lives of all those who were witnesses to that wrenching moment in history. It was, it turned out, a precursor to the tumultuous eras that followed that included the Vietnam War, the Anti-war movement, Rock and Roll, the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King, and the loss of innocence as we knew it.
I joined the Marines when I was 18 and remember that we blamed Richard Nixon for the war, not knowing as we would later find out through Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers, that the war had been started way back in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration and had escalated until the mid 1970s when our nemesis Nixon eventually pulled out the troops with his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was not, as they said, a "Peace with Honor."
My only brush with Nixon was joining antiwar marches and reviling him and Spiro Agnew.
Then came Watergate, his impeachment, resignation, and Jerry Ford.
I never met Jerry Ford when he was president. But I do remember meeting him when he was a visiting lecturer to a Constitutional Law class I took as part of my Journalism School requirements at the University of Michigan, his alma mater. It was an unannounced visit and in a question-and-answer session overseen by the ubiquitous Secret Service guard detail afforded former presidents, he was asked about his wife Betty's health and her recovery from prescription drug addiction, etc.
I was at the time completing a paper on the success (or failure) of the UM's affirmative action program and got up to ask him a question. He pointed in my direction and I asked him:
"Sir, given the fact that it is the executive branch that makes sure the laws are implemented, and given that Brown vs. Board of Education became law in 1954, that now in 1977, why is it that after you left the presidency there are still more black janitors in your law school than there are black professors?"
Ford was taken aback amid the collective gasps of disapproval from the other students, a a goodly percentage from his native Michigan.
"Well," he stammered, "I don't think I agree with you. I believe that the dean of the University of Michigan Law School is a Latin."
"His name is San Antoine," I answered. "That's Italian-American and not of the native ethnic."
The applause that flowed drowned out mu retort and he left amidst a covey of agents as we stood and clapped. He was, after all, a president.
The closest I got to meet another sitting president was when i was working after college with the Saginaw News and George H. Bush (the elder) came to visit a local school. The News pulled out all the stops to cover his visit and the closest I got to him was to interview one of the elementary-grade students who was invited to climb aboard his armored limousine parked safely away from the media contingent kept at bay across the street.
"The glass is really thick," the little girl said.
Bill Clinton was the next president that I met anywhere near close and personal. Clinton was in town touting his educational programs and was accompanied by the secretary of education )I forget who it was and was hosted by the South Texas legislative delegation at the old Confederate Air force hangar before the organization was given a more politically-correct title.
We saw Clinton at a distance and were assaulted by Johnny Canales' brand of MCing along with Jaime de Anda y Los Muchachos. Bill arrived in Brownsville bearing gifts, among them the presidential permiit for the notorious Port of Brownsville's Bridge to Nowhere. But, that's not his fault, I guess.
Later that evening, when Clinton arrived at the McAllen for a frenzy of fundraising, I, along with my then-protege and cub reporter (and photographer) Anthony Gray climbed on the platform afforded the national press with our hand-held Instamatic and tried to take pictures from about three blocks away. That didn't work and when Clinton and his SS detail walked onto the tarmac to press some flesh, we darted out among the crowd and Tony got off a few shots at arms' length from the president as he walked a few feet away. I forget how many times we used them in the English-language El Valle
section of El Bravo, but we wrung their usefulness to its maximum potential. We got to be as bad with them as the Mexican reporters from El Bravo were of taking pictures of the Gateway Bridge or shoppers on Elizabeth Street.
Hillary Clinton came to a political rally once at the International Blvd., Convention Center and she reminded us of the time she came to Brownsville for a voter-registration drive when she was in college, but we never got close to her.
The only other brush with the presidency (or future president) was when George W. Bush came to the Brownsville airport to host a conference of border governors from U.S. and Mexico. W was governor of Texas and he hosted an impromptu press conference at the airport for the media. After a few questions, I asked him if he was concerned that the crackdown on illegal immigrants in downtown Brownsville which included Border Patrol agents going int restaurants and bars and accosting people on the streets disturbed him any as far as the constitutional rights of American citizens such as freedom of movement, etc., were being violated.
He pulled a Jerry Ford on me and then turned to his press handler Karen Hughes, who would go on to become  his White house Advisor, who reminded him of the pat answer.
"I fully support Operation Rio Grande," said Bush.
"Yes, governor," I replied, "but what I asked was whether you are concerned that the legitimate constitutional rights of American citizens are being violated through indiscriminate stops of local residents."
"I'll get back to you on that,"said W.
Up to today, I am still waiting.