The future president I didn't notice in class: Column

I went to college with Barack Obama. But I didn’t know that I had taken a course with him until a friend called me, many years later. “Hey, do you remember our class with Obama?” he asked.

I did remember — after my friend identified it. And then I recalled a quiet, unassuming African-American who sat next to me. He rarely spoke, and he didn’t draw any other attention to himself. “That guy?” I said. “He was Obama?”

He was. Obama will be remembered as our most unlikely president, and not just because he’s black. Most of of our modern presidents have been gluttons for attention, seeking affirmation and adulation from everyone around them.

That wasn’t — and isn’t — Barack Obama. He is a gifted orator, and I’m sure he enjoyed working up a crowd. But he didn’t demand to be venerated, the way other presidents did.

Woodrow Wilson told an aide that God ordained him to be president. Richard Nixon routinely referred to himself in the third person, even after he was pushed out of the White House. “When Nixon was President and Leader of the Free World,” he’d say . . . and then he’d go on and on.

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Other presidents were notoriously abusive towards their staff, another hallmark of arrogance and conceit. Lyndon Johnson made aides sit in the stall next to him while he defecated; he also urinated on a Secret Service agent who was shielding him from public view. “That's my prerogative," Johnson said.

That's the mantra of the narcissist, of course. The sun and the moon revolve around him. He must be obeyed and worshiped by everyone, but especially by attractive younger women. Johnson told the director of White House personnel to get him the “prettiest secretaries” in Washington. “I want them 25 to 40,” Johnson specified; no “broken-down old maids” need apply, he added.

Always resentful of his dashing predecessor, John F. Kennedy, Johnson felt further diminished as posthumous stories of JFK’s extra-marital affairs surfaced. “I have had more women by accident than he has had on purpose," LBJ would yell. He made sure his wife didn't walk in on him and a mistress in the Oval Office by installing a buzzer.

Bill Clinton’s dalliances were legion, of course, dating back to the “bimbo eruptions” of his gubernatorial years and culminating in the Monica Lewinsky scandal that almost ended his presidency. And he had a temper, too. Clinton and Jimmy Carter both posed as affable Southern gentlemen, but they were also known to fly off the handle behind closed doors.

Even in public, they sometimes flashed their anger. Clinton shouted down a heckler on the campaign trail in 1992. Carter got in a yelling match with Sudanese security officials in 2007 when they blocked him from a town in Darfur where the was trying to meet with refugees.

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It’s impossible to imagine Obama behaving that way. Part of that has to do with our ugly heritage of racism, of course: You can’t act like “angry black man” and get white Americans to vote for you. But mostly, it’s just who Obama is. He doesn’t get too high or too low. And he doesn’t need you to adore him.

At times, that’s also been his Achilles heel. It turns out that the voters want you to want them to adore you. And if you don’t care enough about that, you’ll come off as distant and diffident.

But I’ll take diffident over arrogant any day. Sometime in the very distant future, when race doesn’t matter like it does now, the most astonishing thing about Obama won’t be that he was African American. It will be that he was consistently decent and dignified in an office that attracts mainly blowhards and bullies. In that sense, Donald Trump — a textbook narcissist — might not be as different from most of our presidents as many of us have assumed.

I never imagined that the guy sitting next to me in class could be president, and I never imagined that a president could show that much class. No matter what you think of his politics, you've got to respect the way he conducted himself. Adieu, Mr. President. We will miss you.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983, the same year as Barack Obama.

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