Monday will be Presidents Day, an ideal time to think about our perspective on the nation’s highest office.

I’ve seen a big change in my lifetime in regard to how people view the presidency. When I was growing up, I had a book with biographies of all the Presidents. I memorized their names and the years that they served.

I’ve never forgotten that.

The presidency was considered a vital part of our society. We looked up to our president. That’s why people felt betrayed by Nixon during Watergate.

I remember when Watergate hearings were taking up most of the daytime television schedule. I resented it because they took the place of my game shows.

All I really knew about Watergate was that President Nixon was in trouble. Adults didn’t say much. We all just watched and waited to see what would happen.

Watergate destroyed America’s trust in government. It’s never recovered. Even Ronald Reagan couldn’t totally bring it back.

The public perspective on the presidency changed. A clue to how it was changing was the 1980s Iran Contra situation. Reagan brokered an arms sale to Iran and sent the proceeds to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua without consulting Congress. He got by with it.

The Clinton impeachment in the 1990s was a further indication. I thought he should have been impeached. It’s one thing to have an affair. It’s something else to have it with a White House employee in the Oval Office.

A generation later we have Trump’s two impeachment processes. I was surprised in November that a majority of voters wanted him back.

It tells me that they don’t care about character. It makes me think people have changed, that their core values have changed.

It will be interesting to see how history treats Clinton and Trump. Impeachments aren’t good for the country. They reflect something that’s wrong with our government, something that shouldn’t have happened but that the President did anyway.

Every president since Nixon, with the exceptions of George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden, has been an outsider to Washington, usually someone who was a governor. Barack Obama was a community organizer. Trump is a business executive.

We have a bias against insider politicians. We expect them to be snake oil sellers. The reality is that there are good people on both sides of the aisle, people who want to do good things. Their hearts are in the right place.

History tends to be kind to most presidents. It’s been very kind to Jimmy Carter. When he was president he was widely considered to be weak and ineffective.

Now he gets credit for creating the federal departments of education and energy. He gets credit for his efforts to create peace between Israel and Egypt. He also gets credit for his honesty, for his sincere faith and for the many ways he served the public.

When I was in grade school several people in my class thought that they could someday be president. We were taught that anyone could potentially lead the nation.

Our first Presidents in the 1800s were aristocrats. They didn’t campaign for the presidency. Instead they served because it was their duty, a responsibility that went with being part of the upper class.

More recently we’ve had people rise from humble beginnings. Examples include Coolidge in Vermont, Hoover in Iowa, Truman in Missouri, Eisenhower in Kansas, Ford in Michigan, Carter in Georgia, Reagan in Illinois, and Clinton in Arkansas.

I think the four greatest presidents are the four faces on Mount Rushmore. They’re famous because of great achievements; Washington at Valley Forge, Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln with the Gettysburg Address and Theodore Roosevelt with the Pure Food and Drug Act.

It’s good that we have a Presidents Day to recognize all of our nation’s past leaders. They all influenced the direction America has taken over the years. They all contributed to the long term transition from a set of East Coast colonies to the coast to coast country we’ve become in the past 250 years.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter in southwest Minnesota