Who can even begin to imagine what they discussed, what matters of grave importance and what trivialities were brought up in that room during that hour when they were alone? Has there ever been a meeting between two American Presidents -- one outgoing and one incoming -- that encapsulated so much, that sat perched on that most perfect precipitous acme of history? Sitting here, briefly thinking now I admit that I can think of none other.These are the sort of iconic images and events in human chronology that speak to the historian in me. These two men represent two absolute watershed moments in our American saga like few other. But not only they themselves but the way they and their ideologies clash and run up against each other like a mad herd of berserker Tectonic plates. One man's importance and global after-effect felt all too well, and the other's only glimpsed at through a smoky prism -- both to not be fully realized for many many years. Two men with such conflicting guiding thoughts, differing personalities, and personal bearing -- yet they will for the rest of their lives be brothers in a shared experience even few former Presidents could ever understand. To share the greatest mantle of power in the history of our existence and bear the burden of working the hardest job while struggling to maintain a fractured, vulnerable, suicidal world. God bless them both.
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