From the Vault of Art Shay: Mr. President

Aside from the fact that President Reagan died of Alzheimer\'s at 93, (and Sen. Percy has it at 92) and in the inset, my 1948 picture of Israel\'s first President, Nobelist (for chemistry) Chaim Weizmann shows him with the young Sargent Shriver- who also died of Alzheimer\'s at 92 the other day- sigh... Why have I grouped these pictures together?\r\n\r\nThe far right is doing a good job of standing in for Alzheimer\'s. The U.S. doesn\'t need Alzheimer\'s to cause the same distorted havoc with history that false-rememberers like Limbaugh and Beck display.\r\n\r\nThe bigger picture shows Governor Reagan and Senator Chuck Percy at the opening of Melick Library at Eureka College in 1967. It would be more than a decade until Reagan became President, but his split-level beliefs would never change. Reagan\'s 100th birthday the other day was marked by an orgy of disinformation perpetuated by the far right press and its rewriters of history. There was erstwhile drug addict Rush Limbaugh and erstwhile alcoholic Glen Beck beating their hollow drums to the fake rhythm of President Reagan\'s ongoing attacks against big government.\r\n

President Herbert Hoover, on his 80th birthday, went back to his birthplace town of West Branch, Iowa, and despite the FBI guards, I made believe I was a member of the family, and went in with my wide angle Leica. Went into the one room house in which he was born- where he walked over to the bed on which he was born in 1874. And on which, chances were, he was conceived. I was then thrown out and warned I was committing a crime. I got away with it and he became 31st President in 1928 and began his disastrous leadership of the U.S. that terminated in that earlier Depression, that would not be over until FDR\'s fourth term.

Covering Presidents is often fun. Our first Mayor Daley rolled Harry S Truman out in time to greet JFK and Lyndon Johnson in their turns at McCormick Place. \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine used another of my pictures instead of this one, but the Tribune did a big magazine story on my political coverage, and they too liked the two honchos using salt on their shrimp with the waiter\'s hand between them. Trouble is when the picture appeared I got a complaint from the waiter, who bawled me out for cutting his head outta \<em\>da peecta\<\/em\>.What kind of photographer was I? He works his whole life to get to serve Da Mare and Da Preseedenta and \"You-a- cutt-a my head off.\" Regarded from the point of view of his family history, the guy is right.

President Ike had been my overall commanding officer of the D-Day\r\nforce. Even riding around the East Anglian shore on our bikes we knew the month of June was the day we invaded Europe. Armored vehicles, troops bivouacked in pastures, hustle here, bustle there. We couldn\'t wait. I would eventually on June 6 fly two missions, one bombing the shore installations just beyond the first wave, and the second, that afternoon, bombing a small town in Occupied France that Hitler was supposed to visit. We flattened the barracks there but never saw Hitler. One night a few weeks before D-Day, my rich English cousins took me to Ciro\'s night cub in the blackout. I as doing OK with a young sister WAAF then as we hit the street - there having an argument with his lady Major Brit chauffeur was a slightly tipsy General Ike. An aide was trying to pull him away from the lend-lease driver and her dull khaki 1942 Dodge. Eisenhower\'s Eisenhower jacket was disarrayed . I didn\'t have the guts to take a picture- because I knew the kind of trouble a lowly lieutenant could get into portraying the U.S. commander in a pre-Invasion spat with the lady Mamie Eisenhower, when she was sober, considered to be a simple chauffeur provided by the understanding Brits for one thing or another. The Eisenhower jacket, I remember, had kindergarten buttons.

Near Fargo, South Dakota during the 1960 campaign, an earnest chief tries to remind JFK that if his tribe can not get its land back from the white man who spoke with forked land deeds, he could at least get permission to start a casino. Kennedy was there that day to address 100,000 farmers, and I remember it as the day I bought the first two Widelux cameras in town from Helix, and \<em\>Time\<\/em\> ran one of my first 140 degree pictures over two pages, showing the great grasp JFK had over all those farmers, their site caparisoned by big fluttering ribands of red, green and yellow. Great for Kodachrome. It was almost impossible to take a bad picture of JFK.

I am, of course prejudiced, but it was almost impossible to take a good\r\npicture of Richard Milhouse Nixon. Best one I ever took shows him in a football crowd and the magazine put a caption on it: Find Waldo. My full page in \<emTime\<\/em\> of the smooth-faced JFK shaking hands with the bluebearded Nixon, probably cost him thousands of votes.

Not long after the 36th President took office after the cataclysm of 1963, there I was having my neck-tag credentials examined by an FBI hand at the left. And smiling me, caught by the Sun-Times, three people away. In those days of uncertain security, how honest I looked! Like an Al Jazeera freelancer for Getty. And there was LBJ pushing his way towards the Hilton. This same trip in custody of a Daley crew at City Hall, I actually heard Johnson tell one of his favorite stories. It ended up : \"So even though I knew he was a stupid Republican, I appointed him to judge. Because I\'d rather have the sumbitch in the tent pissin\' out than in the tent pissin\' in.\" (Probably Lincoln had heard this along the hustings too.) I never heard lover-boy Johnson\'s favorite pitch to a few married or unmarried new lady reporters: \"Honey, some day when you are an old lady and sittin\' by the fire, wouldn\'t you like to have the satisfaction of rememberin\' that years ago, in this godforsaken place, to while away an hour or so, you helped a President of the Yew-nited States relax?\"\r\n\r\nWouldn\'t have been a bad picture.\r\n