Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Leadership:
FDR,
Ike, the Gipper, and Other Bumblers
Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2000:
"Well, the hands-on guys haven't done very well," a college friend of mine
remarked as Ronald Reagan was about to be inaugurated. He had the perspective of an
engineer and business executive who'd taken a career break as a White House Fellow, and
has since been promoted to the inside-director level of a huge multinational corporation.
As we ponder today's candidates, it's worth remembering that the presidency is an
executive position.
President Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer famous for keeping track
of who used the White House tennis courts. Other recent presidents had included Richard
Nixon, who thought he could use tape recordings to control every word uttered in the White
House; Lyndon Johnson, micromanaging the Vietnam War and the Great Society; and John F.
Kennedy, too clever by far in deciding to overthrow an ally, putting us in Vietnam
irrevocably.
The Gipper was cut from a different cloth. "It's true hard work never killed
anybody, but I figure why take the chance," he once quipped. In cocktail party
chatter Clark Clifford, a Beltway doyen before the BCCI scandal, dismissed the president
as "an amiable dunce." His biographer Lou Cannon sums up, "Reagan both
began and ended his presidency as a popular leader who essentially pleaded no contest to
the accusation that he failed to mind the store."
Yet somehow President Reagan resolved the economic
malaise of the 1970s, set off an economic boom, restored the nation's spirit and won the
Cold War. Because he didn't talk like a policy wonk, his detractors
attribute his success to luck and historical inevitability. The secret is that precisely
because he refused to get bogged down in detail, he was able to get the big things right.
In the executive how-to manuals they call this "focus."
In today's political parlance, it also serves as "Teflon." If a president
doesn't pretend to be on top of everything, he doesn't get the blame for every mistake.
Ronald Reagan did not invent this technique.
- I remember Vermont Royster telling me that Reagan
reminded him of covering Franklin D. Roosevelt: "He never knew what the hell was
going on."
The true epitome of hands-off management was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who'd
prepped for the presidency by running the invasion of Normandy.
- He cultivated the image of spending time on the golf
course and spoke an English so impenetrable it must turn central bankers
green with envy.
Looking at this record, Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein was moved to
write a book entitled "The Hidden-Hand Presidency," and Stephen Ambrose detailed
these techniques in a two-volume biography.
- Geoffrey Parret, the latest biographer, says that Ike's
success in both the military and politics has often been written off as sheer luck,
"But the truth is, Eisenhower generated a lot of his own luck by anticipating
events."
This history, of course, pertains to the current choice between Vice President Al Gore
and Governor George W. Bush. There is a clear choice of ideologies, but also a huge
difference in management styles, hands-on versus above the fray.
The vice president prides himself in comprehensive knowledge of policy detail, as
almost an intellectual. In fact, his intellectual credentials are about as overwhelming as
his vaunted debating skills proved to be. He once accomplished the extraordinary feat of
pulling a D in a Harvard course, and he dropped out of both divinity school and law
school. He did write a very silly book; I'm afraid he actually may believe it.
Gov. Bush was also a C student at Yale, but he did finish a Harvard MBA. Yet he has no
intellectual pretensions; he's not even afraid to say he'd consult his advisers. He
doesn't talk in terms of policy detail, but of general principles. The specific
legislation can come later, in political give-and-take. He views his skill as bringing
people together to get something done.
This difference in executive style showed up clearly in the presidential debates, and
probably has had a lot to do with Gov. Bush's success in the post-debate polls. Yes, he
showed that he was not dangerously ignorant of policy detail, and yes, he showed himself
as more likeable. But more important, he projected an image of someone who could
keep his eye on the main issue, someone you might trust to sort his way through
the complications that bedevil serious decisions in either business or politics.
Vice President Gore, by contrast, came across as someone preoccupied with, say,
"the Dingell-Norwood bill," whatever that may be. His catalog of policy
details sometimes has an idiot-savant flavor. He promises actually to expand Social
Security and government medical insurance, start new entitlements for prescription drugs,
universal pre-school, college tuitions and retirement savings, and shrink the government
and retire the national debt all at the same time. As appealing as these promises may be,
they are scarcely an example of setting priorities and making choices. If his magical
"lock box" were purely cynical it would be one thing; the real danger is that he
actually believes it.
Gore campaign chairman William Daley, his candidate behind in the polls, visited
Washington last week to coordinate an offensive questioning Mr. Bush's competence for the
presidency. In the New York Times, Sen. Bob Kerrey's contribution was, "When
I hear him answer a question about the Middle East, I don't hear experience talking. I
hear: `I was a governor. I've got a vision. And I stick with my friends.'"
In tending to first principles, this already sounds like a better Middle East
policy than the one we've got.
No one is ever prepared for the presidency, of course, and there can be no sure thing.
But in terms of the kind of leadership needed, it seems to me Gov. Bush shows the right
instincts and Vice President Gore all the wrong ones. And one more thing. With Al Gore you
get what you see, a man fully formed by a lifetime in Washington. By contrast, Gov. Bush's
progress in the three debates suggests he actually has a capacity for growth.
**********************************
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 3, 2000
The last time we had an "amiable
dunce" for president--Clark Clifford's contemptuous characterization of Ronald
Reagan--he went on to (1) win the Cold War, and (2) launch the longest economic boom in
American history.
Official Washington -- the permanent establishment (like Clifford) and the mainstream
media -- finds it hard not to condescend to successful conservative politicians who do not
quite share its vast learning. Not just because the "wise men" find none of
their brilliance and erudition in the conservative pol, but also because they fail to
understand how a person can hold beliefs so contrary to theirs and still retain any mental
acuity.
- Gerald Ford was considered thick. Eisenhower, whose
syntax was so fractured it made George W. Bush sound like Clarence Darrow, was equally
disdained by egghead Stevensonians. Why, even Franklin Roosevelt, before he became a
liberal icon, was famously described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as a "second-rate
intellect, but a first-rate temperament."
Temperament matters. Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan, together with Harry Truman, were
the greatest presidents of the century. And Truman, too, the only president of the century
with no college education, was disdained for unbearable lightness when he first acceded to
the presidency.
- The three presidents with the greatest reputation for
braininess--Wilson, Carter and Clinton--are among the century's worst: Wilson was a
disaster, Carter a mere failure and Clinton, probably the cleverest of them all, leaves
scandal and impeachment as his most significant legacy...
Editor's note: December 16, 2000. Fox News: a comedian wryly asserted
that George Bush speaks to us as if English were his second language; but that Al Gore
speaks to us as if English were our second language.
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