Presidential descendants reflect on Trump, history and the importance of the office

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AJC: Tell me a little bit more about the Society of Presidential Descendants.

Massee McKinley: The Society of Presidential Descendants is made up of all direct and collateral descendants of all 46 United States presidents.

We focus on having the Book Award, which is done every two years and it’s based upon the best book that honors the legacy of each of the presidents and the focuses on presidential leadership.

We also focus a lot of our attention on presidential studies, so we try to honor people with scholarship money in order for any type of academics to study the presidency.

And then, lastly, we focus a lot of our attention on trying to create a camaraderie among the presidential descendants. So we have gatherings every two years and all the presidential descendants come together and we get a chance to know each of the families.

AJC: You mentioned that gathering. Tell me a little bit about what happened at Key West, Florida, over the weekend?

Clifton Truman Daniel: In Key West every year on Presidents Day weekend we do the Presidential Families Weekend and we pick a different topic every year. The topic this year is preservation of historic sites because we’re all associated with our grandfathers’, great-grandfathers’ homes, libraries. So we’re going to be talking about how you preserve those, what the meaning of them is, how important they are.

AJC: When did you first learn you were presidential descendants? Clifton, you go first. Were you picked on for being a Truman kid? How did that work out?

Daniel: The truth is my parents didn’t explain it to me. I found out in school. Thank God it was first grade and not fifth. The teacher went around the room the first day and asked each child to stand up and say their name and say a little bit about themselves, and apparently I stood up and said, “Clifton,” and sat back down, and she said, “Wait a minute, wasn’t your grandfather president of the United States?” And I said, “I don’t know. News to me.” I went home, I dropped my book bag by the front door, and I marched across to where my mother was sitting, and I said, “Mom, did you know Grandpa had been president of the United States?” She said, “Yes, I knew that. But remember something, any little boy’s grandfather can be president. Don’t let it go to your head.”

Credit: The Society of Presidential Descendants

Credit: The Society of Presidential Descendants

McKinley: My father was a history teacher. And so every morning at the breakfast table, we always talked about current events and what was going on in my life and what I was studying. And one day my dad said, “You know that you’re related to two United States presidents.” And of course, as a child, I had no clue. And he said, “You’re related to William McKinley on my side, the paternal side. (You are) the great-great nephew of William McKinley. And on your mother’s side, the Cleveland side, you’re the great-great grandson of Grover Cleveland.”

AJC: Until last November, Cleveland was the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms. President Donald Trump joined him by returning to the White House in January. Your thoughts or advice?

McKinley: Well, I’ll say this, the first is always the most important, and I think Grover Cleveland deserves that honor, and I definitely think that his impeccable character and his impeccable integrity will forever be remembered.

He was certainly a president that valued not giving favoritism to family members. He certainly didn’t have cronyism in his presidency. I think I don’t have to say much to differentiate the two, so I think I’ll leave well enough alone, and I won’t say much about the Trump presidency.

Credit: The Society of Presidential Descendants

Credit: The Society of Presidential Descendants

AJC: I think you hit on something important. How we think about the presidency and how people ascend to the presidency has changed.

Truman: Yeah, and we talk about it among ourselves as well, and we’ve talked about it on stage in past years because that always comes up.

In this day and age, particularly, the job of a presidential descendant is to remind people what it’s like to have a good president. What it’s like to have two sides of the U.S. House and Senate that actually talk to each other and work on legislation together, rather than the infighting that we have been experiencing for a decade or so now. So that’s our job: Not to attack, but to remind people to keep the history alive.

AJC: Clifton, you had a chance to meet your grandfather. What are some memories that stick out?

Daniel: Yeah, my grandfather Truman died when I was 15. And we came to Key West with him when I was a kid. We spent family vacations with him and went out to Missouri to see them and came down here.

AJC: Can you talk about some of those influential times?

Daniel: When you’re related to a former president, people ask that question: What pearls of wisdom did Harry Truman drop on you? The truth told, he was Grandpa.

So what I heard from Grandpa Truman was, “Don’t run in here with that. Finish your lunch before you get a cookie. Hey, cut that out” — basic grandpa stuff. He turned out to have been a terrible babysitter, just bad. The first time he babysat for us, I think I was 2½ and my brother was 1 year old. And the last thing my mother said to him before she went out of the house was, “Don’t let any photographers take their picture.” And he said, “Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.” And she walked out the front door and he picked us both up and walked back through the apartment and stuck us in the picture window so all photographers out on the street could take our picture. Terrible babysitter.

AJC: Presidents also have a darker history to their legacy. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. We know that Andrew Jackson was instrumental in the Trail of Tears, displacing Native Americans across the country. How do descendants grapple with the tougher parts of presidents’ legacies?

Daniel: Well, since you mentioned President Jackson, Andrew Jackson was my grandfather’s favorite president. But he acknowledged that Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans was horrendous. So, he dealt with that honestly and up front. But he could still admire what Jackson did as a populist president, as a president of the people who came from nothing.

And when my grandfather was a judge in Jackson County during the 1920s and early ’30s, he had a statue of President Jackson put up in front of the Jackson County Courthouse in Independence, Missouri. Today, that statue is still there, but there is a very large and well-written plaque next to it that details Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. So, they amended the statue. They didn’t tear it down. They left it up, but they put in, blow by blow, what he did to the Native American tribes in this country.

AJC: Many parents are off from work, kids are off from school. How can they acknowledge our leaders on Presidents Day?

McKinley: Learning about civics education, going to the library and actually checking out books about each of the presidents and learning specific stories about how they accomplished what they did and even some of the dark sides of each of the presidency. That’s how we learn from history. If we don’t learn both sides of the equation, we never learn how to reconcile a lot of the darker parts of history.