Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EAETH WHAT is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night? The Ghost in the White House. The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people. The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization. What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is—a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People. Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times. That is all there is to Her. It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody—either to the hundred million people or to the President. It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President—to be a Ghost. It is not efficient. Naturally—much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President. chapter{Section 4Ill THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST THERE are a number of things about going in... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.