“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Gerald Ford, moments after he was sworn in as president after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

Tomorrow, barring an extraordinary series of events, another “national nightmare” will end. Joe Biden will take the oath of office and replaces Donald Trump, who, like Nixon, will leave office in disgrace. To mark that moment, today’s #stampoftheday is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1949 that pictures Edgar Allan Poe, who was born on January 19, 1809.

I wrote about Poe on October 3rd, the anniversary of the day in 1849 he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore. (He died four days later.) In that post, I noted that Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death” was a bizarrely prescient tale about how Republicans responded to the COVID pandemic.

That post, however, wasn’t accompanied an image of a Poe stamp from my father’s collection. Rather, I used an image of the mailing label from the package used to mail Poe stamps before they were issued. (My father’s collection included some of these labels from stamps issued in the late 1940s and early 1950s). As I wrote at the time, I found it oddly appropriate that the Poe stamp was missing.

I later discovered that my father did have the Poe stamp but that I had put it in a section for a different year. I think the return of the missing stamp (which could be the title of a Poe-like story) provides an opportunity to ruminate on the Poe-like theme of two nightmarish presidencies.

In the brief remarks he made on August 9, 1974, Ford noted: “I assume the Presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans.” This was an understatement. Not only had Nixon become the first president resident but Ford, a longtime representative from Michigan (and House Minority Leader), hadn’t been his running mate. Rather, he had been appointed to replace Spiro Agnew, another odious figure who resigned the vice-presidency after he was caught taking bribes.

As Ford noted, “this is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.” The moment, he added, demanded not a speech but “just a little straight talk among friends.” Later in his brief remarks, he returned to this surprisingly timely theme saying, “I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”

At one level, Ford was right. Nixon’s removal from office ended an especially odious presidency. But at another level, Ford was wrong. Many nightmares continued. The crushing recession continued. Inequality continued to be a problem. Gay rights were just beginning to be discussed but same-sex marriage was not.

More broadly, Nixon left behind many political viruses that continued to fester. The red-baiting rhetoric that fueled his growing prominence in the 1950s was surprisingly similar to the themes that Republicans used in the last election. His “Southern strategy,” a not particularly subtle embrace of white voters’ concerns (particularly southern white voters’ concerns) in his 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns, provided a template used successfully by a whole generation of Republican candidates and operatives. We saw all of this on display in the failed coup d’Žtat on January 6 (and in many other places before that). Indeed, I believe these strains fueled the crazed anti-science, anti-fact response that has greatly hampered efforts to fight the COVID pandemic.

Like most my contemporaries, I neither disliked nor supported Ford, a moderate Republican, who had supported both of Nixon’s presidential campaigns but who didn’t engage in overt Red- or race-baiting rhetoric. Like many, my dominant image of Ford was most shaped by the delightfully goofy send-ups of the president offered by Chevy Chase, one of the people appearing in a new and edgy TV show called “Saturday Night Live.”

But Ford struck me then – and he definitely strikes me now—as an unusually decent person, especially as compared to his two deeply flawed predecessors: Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to increasingly respect seemingly dull attributes like “decency.”

We can’t know the challenges for, and the pressures on, people in positions of power. We won’t always agree with their decisions, even those made politicians and leaders we think we like.

But, it seems to me, that powerful people I disagreed with who have been unusually decent have often turned out to have been better stewards than the powerful people who I generally agreed with at the time but who turned out not to have been as decent as I had hoped. (Read that sentence again because it’s a key point that I can’t articulate in a better way.)

I think this is due in large part to the fact that people who are decent often know and respect “competence,” which is another important but dull attribute. And it also turns out that decent, competent people tend to do a better job of working together, which is critical because really hard problems require cooperation and teamwork.

I’m heartened by the fact that Joe Biden seems to be an unusually decent person. I’m heartened by the fact that he’s tapped a remarkably large number of seemingly decent and competent people to lead efforts to address four pressing “wicked” problems: the pandemic, the economy, structural racism, and climate change.

What then can we look forward to?

I think of what the great bass singer Lee Hayes said when the long-dormant Weavers reunited for a concert in late November 1980, a few weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected. “Be of good cheer,” he told the sold-out crowd. “This too shall pass. I know, I’ve had kidney stones.”

I’ve also had kidney stones. I too know they will pass. But I also know that the passage and/or the treatment can be uncomfortable and painful.

Our long national nightmare is far from over. But, I believe, thanks to the return of decency and competence to the executive branch, that the nightmares won’t be as frequent or as intense as they they’ve been for the last four years.

Be well, stay safe, be of good cheer, fight for justice and work for peace.