Президентские встречи превратились в иллюзию: от открытого рукопожатия до скрытого перелета

Let us read it for you. Listen now. At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Sept. 6, 1901, the doors of the Temple of Music in Buffalo, N.Y., swung open and the public began filing past the president of the United States. An organist played Bach. William McKinley stood beneath a blue-and-gold dome, smiling and extending his hand to anyone who wished to take it. As far as McKinley was concerned, making himself available to the public was part of the job. He had come to Buffalo for the Pan-American Exposition, an extravagant world's fair built partly around the still-new wonder of electricity. At night, hundreds of thousands of bulbs powered by Niagara Falls illuminated the grounds. There was even a nine-ton elephant, Jumbo II, whose owner later tried (and failed) to electrocute him after he attacked two people. (Electricity was still in beta testing.) And there was the president, available to anyone who got in line. An estimated 116,000 people had come to hear McKinley speak the day before. Now, after a morning excursion to Niagara Falls, he had returned for a public reception his personal secretary George Cortelyou had tried to strike from the schedule. McKinley put it back. The receiving line moved quickly. McKinley shook hands with roughly 50 people a minute. Secret Service men watched the crowd, but no one was searched. Seven minutes after the doors opened, Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old former factory worker who had embraced anarchism, approached the president with a.32-caliber revolver concealed beneath a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. McKinley apparently mistook the handkerchief for a bandage and reached solicitously for Czolgosz's left hand. Czolgosz fired twice. One bullet caused a relatively superficial wound. The other entered McKinley's abdomen. Eight days later, the president was dead. What seems almost as extraordinary as the assassination is the arrangement that made it possible. No magnetometers. No advance clearance. No Secret Service agent examining everyone who came within 20 feet. You bought admission to the fair, got in line, and if you wanted, shook hands with the president. American presidents had long been expected to make themselves available to ordinary citizens, sometimes to an extent that now seems almost deranged. Abraham Lincoln spent hours receiving what were essentially walk-in visitors at the White House. He found this traffic exhausting, particularly during a civil war, but submitted to it as part of the peculiar obligation of being president of a republic. James Garfield inherited the custom. On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau, a delusional office seeker who had repeatedly sought a diplomatic appointment, approached Garfield at a Washington railroad station and shot him. Garfield died 79 days later. Garfield's assassination did not extinguish the idea that accessibility held value. A president was not a king. His authority did not descend from God or pass through a bloodline; it was lent to him by the people he served. To remain physically available to those people was a way of acknowledging the terms of the loan. McKinley's assassination changed everything. The Secret Service had been created in 1865 principally to combat counterfeiting; afterward, it assumed responsibility for protecting the president. Every president since Theodore Roosevelt has received continuous protection. And it is hard to argue against it. John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in 1963. Ronald Reagan was shot outside a Washington hotel in 1981. Donald Trump was wounded at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in 2024 and survived another apparent assassination attempt later that year. Presidents need protection. Trump knows the hazards of public life in a particularly personal way. He has reportedly remained the target of Iranian threats. This summer, returning from a NATO summit in Turkey, he took part in an extraordinary deception. After boarding the presidential aircraft in view of the public, Trump was concealed in an airport catering container, driven across the tarmac in a catering truck, and transferred to a smaller military plane. The aircraft presumed to be carrying him continued without him. Most of the reporters and White House employees aboard apparently were not told about the maneuver or the threat that prompted it. Protecting the president was reasonable. Leaving uninformed people aboard the apparent target was not. Whatever the security rationale, using them as unwitting decoys looks cowardly. But presidential security is only the most dramatic form of a larger withdrawal. The people who represent us have become increasingly difficult to encounter anywhere they have not chosen the room, curated the audience and dictated the terms of the exchange. Arkansans can see Sen. Tom Cotton on television far more easily than they can see him in Arkansas. Rep. French Hill offers tele-town halls, newsletters, press conferences and congressional offices. Constituents can telephone, email or request appointments. But these forms of communication are controlled and mediated. They are not the same as standing in a room with the people who elected you and taking whatever questions come. This is the preferred arrangement of modern politics: a stage-managed, poll-driven performance conducted at a remove from genuine engagement. Politicians issue statements, appear on television, hold telephone forums and speak before friendly audiences. They know what voters think statistically and demographically while taking pains not to encounter them in the wild. The old presidential receiving line was corny, inefficient and obviously dangerous. No sensible person wants to bring it back. But protection from violence has gradually become protection from encounter--from inconvenience, contradiction and embarrassment. There was a democratic idea embedded in those receiving lines. The president was one of us, temporarily entrusted with an office. You could approach him. For a second or two, the abstraction called "the people" had a specific face. Meeting that gaze required a certain vulnerability. Cotton and Hill do not merely represent Arkansans who attend Republican dinners, receive their newsletters, or are selected to ask questions during telephone forums. They represent those who are irritated, suspicious, rude and did not vote for them. Those people are entitled to something more than the opportunity to leave a message. The distance works in both directions. When politicians become people we experience mainly on screens, it becomes easier to turn them into saints or monsters. When citizens reach politicians principally as poll numbers, social-media posts and demographic groups, it must become easier for politicians to stop thinking of them as particular human beings. Everybody knows what everybody thinks. Nobody has to meet anybody. Democracy does not require our representatives to risk their lives. It does require them to risk a conversation. [email protected]