No sitting President has been as old as Joe Biden. “It’s no insult to President Biden, nor is it ageist, to write that all men are mortal, and that older men are more mortal than younger ones,” Jeffrey Frank writes.
After President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a serious heart attack in September, 1955, Republican Party leaders fretted over his health and, more than that, the health of their party if he didn’t run for a second term.
President Joe Biden’s résumé bears little resemblance to Eisenhower’s; his career is that of a politician, not a soldier. But concerns about his health and his stamina follow him, just as they followed Eisenhower.
But approval of Presidential performance is not the same as a wish for that President to perform in office for another six years. A recent CNN poll suggested that Democrats, by a wide margin, don’t want Biden to seek reëlection, and that few want another contest in which Biden faces a resurrected Donald Trump, who is once morein polls among Republicans. Biden has every right to ask, “What’s the hurry?” If he declares, each sentence he utters becomes a political statement.
He did continue, but died in office in April, 1945. By the end of 1951, approval for his successor, Harry Truman, had fallen to the low twenties—brought down by the stalemated Korean War, an assortment of small-bore scandals, and a gnawing fear of Communism.
Measured by major legislative accomplishment and personal sanity, Biden has already had a successful Presidency, with unsurprising fluctuations in public approval. But this is not the gentler Eisenhower era; missteps tend to get unforgiving scrutiny. The slipshod treatment of