Sorry, I had to find some way to feature U.S. Grant this morning, in part because he died on this date in 1885, but mostly because my son was named after him, and I love Grant Viktor Bowen Marshall with all my heart. Grant is one of the most interesting and complex of Presidential personalities, as well as among our most ethical Presidents. Even in death he was ethical: he spent his last days furiously writing out his memoirs so his family could be cleared of debt by selling them. (The publisher was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.) Grant was in the process of dying in agony of throat cancer, but he not only wrote through the pain, he did a fine job of it. I’ve read most of the Presidential autobiographies, and if there is one as good, I haven’t encountered it yet.

I suppose by now everyone knows my favorite piece of Grant trivia: he was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant, but was embarrassed that his initials spelled out “hug” (Grant was fanatically modest, and wrote that his wife had never seen him naked), so he flipped his middle and first names so the initials spelled “uhg,” as if that’s an improvement. Then some careless clerk at West Point substituted an “S” for the “H,” and the young Grant recognized that “U.S. Grant” was a pretty cool name, and kept it. The “S” didn’t stand for anything except “Hiram,” but he got sick of explaining this, so settled on “Simpson.” This eventually made Grant one of two U.S. Presidents with a middle initial S that actually was meaningless: the other is Harry Truman. If a source prints Harry’s name with a period after the S, it’s a hack outfit. Wikipedia has the period, for example. No, Truman’s middle name was just “S”…

But I digress.

Start writing about your ethical issues, concerns and observations, please…