Tough call

The most important qualities in a president are the ones that are hardest to know

Sunday, October 14, 2012

— Barack Obama makes big decisions the same way George W. Bush did. He gathers his top advisers around the table, quizzes them, and then leaves to make the final call in solitude. This is how Bush invaded Iraq and how Obama killed Osama Bin Laden.

“The Loneliest Job” is the name of the iconic picture of John F. Kennedy standing alone staring out the south window of the Oval Office. It captured the presidency so perfectly Bill Clinton hung it in his private office. It depicts an essential truth: This job rests on one human body and one mind. In minutes, a president must switch from smiling with college volleyball champions in the East Room to deciding whether to risk the life of some mother’s child. He holds enormous secrets, and usually can’t talk about them.

(Obama never told his wife about the planning for the Bin Laden raid.) A president must live in a world of constant uncertainty, where either a failure to act or hasty action can lead to catastrophe and political ruin.

A president’s temperament is his most important quality and it is the hardest to measure in the candidates who desire the office. It is at the heart of all the other key attributes. A president can’t ignore his critics unless he has a reliable sense of himself. He can’t make durable decisions unless he has strong values in which he roots them. The political game requires patience, and a willingness to ignore one’s emotions. He can’t adapt unless he has the emotional maturity to accept the fallout.

A president must maintain that delicate balance of mind in one of the world’s most distorted, artificial and constraining environments. “There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States,” wrote Woodrow Wilson.

Bill Clinton called the White House the nicest facility in the federal penal system.

A president is also denied the normal tools of relaxation. He can’t take a stroll through Georgetown. He can’t drink too much or blow off Sunday in sweat pants watching football in his friend’s basement. If a president goes on vacation at the wrong time, he catches hell. Golf must be in moderation. If you once enjoyed journaling, your lawyers will tell you to cut it out. Journals can be subpoenaed. No wonder Nixon wound up talking to the paintings in the hallways. It’s a surprise that more presidents aren’t found mumbling to themselves in their nightclothes.

Nothing tests a president’s temperament like foreign affairs. A president is the last word on decisions regarding military strikes, covert operations or how to treat political prisoners. George W. Bush signed off on every prisoner that faced enhanced interrogation techniques. Barack Obama personally approves every drone strike of a high-value terrorist target. When the president serves as the country’s chief diplomat, he acts almost entirely alone.

To understand how a candidate would handle national security issues, we should ask some tough questions-what are the lessons of the Iraq war? Is Egypt an ally? At what moment would a military strike on Iran be justified? These national security questions are important because they keep us focused on temperament-the internal fortitude required for the office. Does he have the stuff to handle the weight of these calls? On other issues, he may be buffeted by Congress and the public. But on the international stage he decides what the United States believes.

Of course, there are plenty of foreign policy decisions we shouldn’t know about. For a president, foreign policy is also a test of one’s ability to compartmentalize.

The night before the Bin Laden raid President Obama addressed the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. He told jokes and appeared to have a great time, a man at ease in a breezy world. But he was on the cusp of possibly the most defining moment of his presidency. And it wasn’t just that night that Obama had to compartmentalize. He’d been doing it for weeks. During the lead up to the decision to storm Bin Laden’s compound, the president had been dealing with a government shutdown, a big speech on the budget, the start of his presidential campaign, the birth-certificate follies, and the bombing of Libya. If you look at his schedule on one of those days, you see that he ran a national-security meeting on the Bin Laden question in between a trip to a middle school and a visit from Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen of Denmark.

Obama was regularly accused of being too soft on Iran. But what we now know from David Sanger’s book Confront and Conceal is that from the start of his administration Obama has been intimately involved in the covert operations against the Islamic Republic. “Perhaps not since Lyndon Johnson had sat in the same room, more than four decades before, picking bombing targets in North Vietnam, had a president of the United States been so intimately involved in the step-by-step escalation of an attack on a foreign nation’s infrastructure,” writes Sanger.

Compartmentalization requires equanimity. A president must be able to handle a roller coaster of good and bad news in such succession that he can neither get too high nor too low. The private anguish LBJ felt at losing Vietnam ate away at his presidency. Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman’s journals show how Nixon’s obsessions led him to drink and bouts of insomnia that robbed him of his reasoning faculties.

A president must be able to live in constant uncertainty. George W. Bush was derided for calling himself the “decider,” but that’s what a president does: He makes decisions. No easy decision makes it to his desk, so at its most basic, the presidency is a place where a man has agreed to take on the responsibility for huge failures. As Obama explained to Michael Lewis, “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. . . . Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with at 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”

A president’s ability to make decisions is crucial and finite. President Bush understood that he needed to husband his energy for decision making. He used to interrupt squabbling staffers and ask, “Is this something you want to waste the president of the United States’ time on?” It may sound arrogant, but it was a move of self-preservation. When you have to make so many decisions, you must preserve your energy for the important ones. Irritating disputes on nonessential matters eat into your battery power.

President Obama steels himself by intentionally limiting the number of decisions he makes in a day. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

Obama’s skill at concealing his emotions on the eve of the Bin Laden raid is proof that he is fit for the presidency’s most challenging duties. But it’s also proof of exactly why campaigns tell us so little about temperament. We can be fooled by appearances, which are all we have to go on during campaign season.

And herein lies the problem: While the press is casing the house, trying to throw open one small window to get at a candidate’s personality, he and his team are building fences. There are no long free-flowing interviews; reporters are kept from the rope line so they don’t hear a stray honest remark; and before any fundraiser all cellphones are supposed to be turned off so no moment of serendipity is revealed.

In the place of authenticity comes a shrink-wrapped facsimile. Campaigns manufacture or embellish anecdotes to create a false intimacy that fits whatever the electorate seems to want at the time. This storytelling was on display at the recent Republican and Democratic Party conventions, which offered a parade of vignettes of character, perseverance and determination.

For some candidates, their temperamental qualities may be obvious during a campaign. Kennedy was so physically frail he had to sneak into the Navy. But anyone who had the grit to rescue a man by swimming for six miles, dragging him by a belt he held in his teeth, probably could be trusted to not buckle at the first sign of adversity.

FDR’s polio gave us a hint that he would be able to endure the rude discipline of the office. His sunny response to adversity would have equipped him with the balance to know that all is not lost, even when it might first seem that way. The illness no doubt also gave him sympathy for others who had suffered. “There had been a plowing up of his nature,” Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor, said of his polio. “The man emerged completely warm-hearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts.”

But even Roosevelt hid a lot from the public. If there was ever a president confident in his abilities, it was FDR. Yet inside Roosevelt was terrified, according to Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment. “I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job,” Roosevelt said to his son in 1932 after defeating Herbert Hoover.

Despite those fears, Perkins said that she “came away from an interview with the president feeling better not because he had solved any problems,” but because he had somehow made her feel more cheerful, more determined, stronger than she had felt when she went into the room.

So how can you look for tell-tale signs of good temperament in a candidate? It’s very hard. One place to look could be a moment in a candidate’s past that reveals his true nature. Teddy Roosevelt ran for office having had horses shot out from underneath him. Voters knew he could handle a crisis. When he was shot in the chest while campaigning for office-and finished the speech before accepting any medical treatment-that certainly told voters everything they needed to know about his tenacity.

Of course, standing tall through one crisis doesn’t guarantee that one will succeed in the next. Kennedy’s toughness during the PT-109 episode didn’t help him with the Bay of Pigs. And just because someone didn’t have a searing experience in their youth doesn’t mean they can’t stand up to the pressures to come. Lincoln served in the Black Hawk War, but freely admitted that the toughest enemy he faced was the mosquitoes. He also faced at least half a dozen bouts of debilitating depression during his life. Today, if a candidate’s battle with depression became public, he would almost certainly never be elected. But it may have been Lincoln’s ability to endure this suffering that gave him his stamina for office.

Lyndon Johnson had faced no great crisis, yet he knew exactly what to do in the hours after Kennedy’s assassination. He knew he needed to establish immediate legitimacy as the new president, while creating a moment that showed that the grieving members of Kennedy’s family supported the transition of power. So he drew the first lady and Bobby Kennedy close in those early hours after the shooting. Johnson hadn’t learned this from a personal crisis. He knew what the country needed from having spent a career sensitive to the public mood.

There are moments when the challenge of a campaign tests a candidate’s ability to make decisions under pressure. In the fall of 2008, in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bank collapse, John McCain suspended his campaign. Obama did not. For months, the Obama campaign had been pushing the idea that the 76-year-old former fighter pilot was unreliable. Now he seemed to be lurching, while the one term senator looked cool and steady.

Making clean evaluations of temperament is also tricky because some qualities that can seem unappealing can actually be helpful in office. We don’t like arrogant candidates. “A self made man, he was distressingly proud of his maker,” historian Thomas Bailey wrote of the hapless Andrew Johnson. (Johnson, who had apprenticed to a tailor, sometimes liked to remind audiences that Jesus, a carpenter, had also worked with his hands.) It was Obama’s sense of self-regard that Mitt Romney poked fun at during his convention speech. “He promised the oceans will rise and the earth would begin to heal,” Romney said. “I just want to help you and your family.”

For many of Obama’s critics, his excessive fondness for himself was an easily identifiable flaw. But if you are a supporter, you want a president to have that confidence. “There was a strain of messianism in Barack Obama, a determination to change the course of history,” writes Noam Scheiber in The Escape Artists. “And it was this determination that explained his reluctance to abandon his presidential vision. Recessions would come and go, even recessions as painful as this one. But the big achievements-like health care and climate change-were the accomplishments that posterity would recall.”

That confirms the Republican critique: He launched an expensive and distracting health-care crusade out of personal grandiosity. But Obama’s sense of mission on health care was no different from the sense of mission that animated President George W. Bush, who promised, “We write not footnotes but chapters in the American story.” In that case, Bush’s personal push to achieve big things like education reform and restructuring Social Security was considered a laudable attribute.

The only people who really know about whether a man running for president has the temperament for the job are those who have worked alongside him. This is one of the attractive qualities of the presidency, as it was first conceived by the Founders, where elites promoted candidates and the candidate didn’t sell themselves.The political class was in a position to have evaluated the temperament of a candidate like George Washington-someone they had closely observed over long careers. Mitt Romney, for example, has a well-earned reputation for the interchangeability of his public positions. But firsthand accounts of his character speak very well of him. Those who worked with him in the lead up to Winter Games in Salt Lake City testify not just to his focus and intelligent management, but his commitment to integrity and ethics.

Words like character and values get shapeless pretty fast. Like the word leadership, they are used by politicians to critique their opponent without having to explain exactly what they mean. But genuine examples of character in a candidate’s background give us some indication that he has ballast. Values, whether based in religious beliefs or personal ethics, are what stabilize a president in the swirl. His decisions are rooted in something larger than the moment.

Temperament, the most important quality, is the one we really can’t know. Voters are taking a gamble on what their presidents will do when they are alone. It’s a quality that can only be really measured once someone is in office. That would seem to favor incumbents, but proof that a president has the temperament to endure the challenges of the first four years is no guarantee that he could endure four more. For a challenger, experience and success are perhaps the only proxy for voters who want to know about a candidate’s temperament. If someone has been effective over a long career they must have some inner strength that allows them to make decisions, ride out disappointments, and endure uncertainty. This is essentially the Mitt Romney argument.

Though the office’s most important moments happen in private, we elect presidents based on who they are in public. In the end, voting for a president is like making decisions as a president. There’s no guarantee. The outcome is always uncertain, and there’s a 30 to 40 percent chance it won’t work out.

John Dickerson is Slate’s chief political correspondent.

Perspective, Pages 73 on 10/14/2012