word choice - "Would you have liked to have been" vs. "would you have liked to be"


I was interested in the following sentence which appeared in an article titled “No Rest for the Weary” in The New York Times (February 15, 2008).



Would you have liked to have been president from 1862-1864?



It sounds ungrammatical to my ear as the journalists (MICHELLE SALE and YASMIN CHIN EISENHAUER) did use "to have been" rather than "to be", but I am not able to find what rules govern this problem.


So, I would write:



Would you have liked to be president from 1862-1864?



Am I right? If so, why?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?