ABSTRACT
The communal convulsion of choosing a president is a privileged route to the many worlds of the American people. Elections "legitimize" the exercise of concentrated power. Each citizen is called on to examine his own symbolic world and to place its weight behind the symbolic world of one of the candidates. The realism and structural power of symbolic forms is not to be underestimated. Symbolic forms have had power even over persons who thought they were supreme pragmatists: over John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Everett Dirksen, and Richard Nixon, to name a few. A starting place for such an inquiry lies in the odd duality of the office of the American president, in a glimpse of the necessary elements of symbolic power, and even in the strangly revealing, somehow poignant and tragic career of Richard Nixon.
