Like a Rock

This brings up the real question about the administration's devotion
to unshakable purpose, its immunity to self-scrutiny and second thoughts: Isn't this a good thing?
During a crisis, it really does matter whether the leadership is capable of standing up and persevering.
In the days and weeks after the terror attacks, it was vital for the country to know that President
Bush could make decisions and stick with them, that he would not be rattled -- that he
could lead. It was all the more vital because what the public saw in the new president's eyes when
he first emerged before the cameras on the evening of September 11 was not encouraging. That night
he looked rattled, diminished, out of his depth, an impression only deepened by the script he was
reading and his awkward ad-lib about "those folks who committed this act." His cause had not been
helped earlier in the day when his adviser Karen Hughes announced that "the Secret Service
immediately secured the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the House, and they are
all safe" -- as if the chief concern were the chief executive's safety and not the republic's.
One could be forgiven for thinking that all the hundreds of occasions since that day when Bush has
let the world know that he knows what he must do and that his course is fixed and right have been corrections
of that original wobble. Both before and since 9/11, Bush has had to prove to himself and the nation
that a lifetime of unearned successes and unpaid-for failures did not render him unfit to serve.
His is a presidency based on overcompensation.

If the Republicans have become the party of monolithic will, the Democrats
lately have been the party of nuance and complexity. They get to point out that the world is far less
simple than the president's declarations of absolute moral clarity make it seem and that oversimplification
can be extremely dangerous. The ability to make distinctions and arrive at subtle judgments and
hold two competing thoughts in one's head is crucial to functioning as an adult in the modern world.
But at least since Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and perhaps going back to Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic
Party has been afflicted by its attraction to a certain type of leader whose musings seem like profound
reflections to admirers but, to the general public, come off as unsteadiness and indecision. One
voter's nuance is two others' flip-flop, and during a crisis that coincides with an election this
equation can be fatal -- ask Jimmy Carter.

It remains to be seen whether or not John Kerry is the latest avatar of
this Democratic archetype. But if he loses, it will be because the public doesn't see in him a man
it can count on in a very dark time. This would be a shame, as well as a bit of a mystery, since Kerry's
biography suggests less of a need for overcompensation than Bush's does. For my part, I would like
to see a little more of the inspiring, action-taking leader that, according to his superiors' reviews
of his service in Vietnam, Kerry once showed himself to be.

For models, Bush and Kerry should look further back than the obvious
historical examples, Reagan and Kennedy, both of whom mastered the style of leadership
with more assurance than they did its substance. For Bush, the most relevant ghost is Churchill's,
whose wartime speeches have clearly inspired the efforts not just of Bush's own speechwriters,
but of a large number of lifelong noncombatants who have recently discovered their inner Churchills
as resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. But long before Churchill told the world
in 1940, "We shall never surrender," he presided over one of the biggest debacles in British
military history, the 1915 campaign on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli, in which the British
suffered a quarter million casualties before having to withdraw. The disaster nearly ended his
career when he was still a brash young star in his early 40s; the British public blamed Churchill
with a personal fury that went beyond what he actually deserved. "I am finished!" Churchill
moaned at one point; having lost his position as first lord of the Admiralty, he went off to serve
as an army officer in France. It may be that the searing experience of Gallipoli gave him the real
resolve that comes with knowing that mistakes and failures are not only possible but inevitable.
When, a quarter century later, Churchill was given another chance to lead during an even greater
crisis, his personal history allowed him to speak to the British public in a way that expressed the
whole nation's will, for his own was not the point -- it was never in question.

Roosevelt exemplified a different quality of leadership: not inflexible
resolve, but a deep confidence that allowed him to absorb his own numerous mistakes, during both
the Depression and the war, and shape his policies accordingly. "Above all, try something," he
urged his Cabinet. When central planning under the National Recovery Administration failed to
achieve results, FDR -- instead of asserting in rigid and halting fireside chats that he continued
to have faith in the NRA as the answer to the nation's economic woes -- turned his energy to social
welfare and the breakup of monopolies. The experimentation at the heart of the New Deal would not
have been possible if Roosevelt's self-assurance had been so brittle that any confession of error
might have caused it to break. His flexibility in the face of facts had nothing to do with a weak will.
Roosevelt in his wheelchair was the very picture of strength.

It's always tempting to turn psychobiography into history: If FDR hadn't
been crippled as an adult by polio, would he have had the depth of compassion to launch the New Deal
and become a traitor to his class? History is driven by far more complex forces than just individual
character and the accidents that shape it. But when historians write of the Bush presidency and
the turn of the 21st century, one of them should ask a question like this: If Bush had been called to
serve out his Guard duty, sent off to Vietnam in the dying months of the war, and found himself having
to make life-and-death decisions on behalf of a squad of men, might he have gained enough true faith
in himself that he could later admit he was wrong about tax cuts or Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?
Could he, at least once, have corrected a mistake?