🤔💭 The man before the president

In April 1969, weeks after Brazil's military dictatorship struck his name from the University of São Paulo payroll, Fernando Henrique Cardoso went to collect his severance. The clerk studied the file and announced that the man in front of her was dead. He pointed out that he was sitting there, alive. She corrected the record, handed over the money, and offered her condolences: so young, already retired. 

The sociologist who would write one of the sharpest accounts in Portuguese of how bureaucracies seize power from the governments that nominally command them had just been processed, by one, as a corpse.

Cardoso turned 95 on Thursday. A couple of months earlier, a São Paulo family court had placed the former two-term president under the legal guardianship of his eldest son, as his Alzheimer's disease reached an advanced stage.

For the past two decades, the essays about him have focused on his years as president (1995-2002): the Real Plan (which ended hyperinflation), the privatizations, and the political disputes with Lula. The biographies stop at 2002 and read backward through the politics. 

The Cardoso who existed before he became president has been buried under the brand. He is worth digging out…

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