THE GLORY —
and
—
THE BURDEN The American Presidency from FDR to Trump
ROBERT SCHMUHL
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
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—— c o n t e n t s ——
Prologue ix
one
Consequences of Change
1
two
Perils of Power
18
three
Paralysis of Polarization
38
four
Conundrums of Communications
59
five
Reveries of Reform
77
six
Presidency in Progress
101
Epilogue
139
A Chronology of the Modern American Presidency 145 For Further Reading 161 Acknowledgments 166 Index 169
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—— P r o l o g u e ——
My fascination with presidents and the American presidency began innocently enough when I was a small child, through the kindness of a hotel bellhop. On a family vacation to Kansas City, we were staying at the Hotel Muehlebach, and my grandmother happened to be a Muehlebach and one of the hotel’s founders. Ralph, the bellhop, indulged a be-freckled squirt’s obsession with collecting autographs of big-league baseball players—most teams stayed at the Muehlebach when they played in Kansas City from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. But one time, no doubt in an attempt to broaden a youth’s limited horizons, he proposed a new adventure. Instead of pointing out players in the lobby, whom I could corner into signing the baseball I unfailingly carried around, Ralph recommended a tour of one of the hotel’s restricted areas: the presidential suite. As we went up on the elevator, he patiently listed the presidents, a dozen or so, who had stayed there, devoting most of his monologue to Harry Truman. Beginning with his boyhood in Independence, and during his later years in Kansas City, Truman maintained strong connections to his stomping ground of western Missouri. Indeed, as I subsequently learned, the Muehlebach became known as ix
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“White House West” during his nearly eight years in office. What does an eager, young visitor do amid such historic surroundings? While Ralph was turning on lights around the penthouse, I decided to sit at the piano Truman used to play and plunked on the keys with wild abandon. Ralph kept this inharmonious interlude to himself, and, for once, I didn’t get into trouble. Learning about Truman—we also visited the Truman Library and Museum in Independence—served as just the beginning. By the earliest years of high school, I knew I wanted to work in journalism, so keeping up with the news (including coverage of Washington) became a daily and rewarding commitment. Being called “prematurely old” by classmates and others should have hurt my adolescent feelings, but it really didn’t. During senior year of high school, besides spending many more hours at the local newspaper as a part-time reporter than I did bookworming to prepare for college, I wrote a major research paper, the subject of which turned out to be “Barry Goldwater and Conservatism.” Why a seventeen-year-old decided to devote forty pages of juvenile scholarship to a losing presidential candidate and his cause two years after his landslide loss in 1964, I can’t remember. Yet heeding the teacher’s advice, I sent a copy of what I had written to the man who had run and led the movement. In his response, Goldwater said he “enjoyed reading” my immature effort at erudition, adding a concluding sentence: “I appreciate this more than words can ever express and I wish you success and happiness as you enter college.” (There was a nice compliment for my treatment of conservatism, but he didn’t address one of the paper’s conclusions: “It is unlikely that a conservative will run again for the presidency in the next few elections.” Ronald Reagan wouldn’t win his first term as California’s governor until November 1966, and he was, as it turned out, four campaign cycles away from winning the White House in 1980.) During my undergraduate years—the late 1960s and into the spring of 1970—it was impossible to avoid keeping a close x —
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Prologue
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eye on the serving presidents. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—with their controversial decision making about the Vietnam War—concentrated the mind of every male facing the possibility of being drafted. Though I composed numerous dispatches for newspapers and magazines about this tumultuous era, it wasn’t until graduate school and the Watergate investigation that I definitely decided that contemporary political affairs, particularly the presidency, would be the focus of my teaching and writing. Until then, I’d followed a traditional, rather unexciting path in pursuit of a doctorate specializing in American literature and American studies while writing fugitive pieces of journalism to stay in training. What could be more conventional or predictable for a graduate student interested in both literary and journalistic matters than a dissertation about Mark Twain’s autobiographical narratives? However, during a writing course I was teaching as a graduate instructor in 1973, a student raised her hand and wanted to know why so many people on television and elsewhere were talking about what was then referred to as “the Watergate affair.” She inquired with innocent sincerity, “What really happened?” It was a question and a class session I’ll never forget. For the remainder of the period, as I explained the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex and other nefarious deeds that ultimately resulted in Nixon’s resignation a year later, everyone in the classroom seemed uncharacteristically alert and genuinely curious. Somehow or other, worrying about split infinitives or the proper placement of adverbs faded in importance. During this time, I happened to be reading The Education of Henry Adams. One sentence in the book kept returning to my thinking: “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence to upset Darwin.” I wondered what Adams might have said about Nixon, and it’s a question I’ve asked myself about subsequent presidents since then. Prologue — xi
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While serving my last years in graduate school, I was lucky enough to jump from the English Department to a new center that had been established in the wake of Watergate and was dedicated to the study of American institutions, including the presidency, Congress, and journalism. There I was able to teach and to do research. Good fortune continued when a regular faculty position in American studies at another university followed this five-year immersion in contemporary affairs. Before too long, besides teaching an assortment of classes, I was writing journal articles, op-ed columns, and lengthy magazine essays about political topics, from time to time over the next few decades publishing collections of previously published articles or books that amplified my shorter works. Beginning in the 1980s, each presidential campaign became something of a marathon talkathon for providing commentary and punditry of one kind or another. Print reporters would call for a paragraph or two of analysis, and radio or television producers would request sound bites or longer interviews. In due course, invitations arrived asking me to lecture on the current White House occupants or the presidency in front of audiences, both domestic and foreign. Journalistic shorthand has occasionally branded me a “political scientist,” which I most assuredly am not. Other pithy phrases have described me as a “politics professor” or, somewhat more intriguingly, a “political professor.” The late, in comparable Christopher Hitchens went so far in an essay for Harper’s Magazine to say I was an academic “who specializes in the country’s peculiar fascination with personality politics.” More generalist than specialist, I try to keep vigilant watch on the Oval Office and the institution of the presidency. Is a developing trend worth pointing out and analyzing? Are changes involving the institution affecting the conduct of its occupants? Have American politics since the 1960s made day-to-day governing more difficult? For instance, back in 2011, I wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune pointing out that, if Barack Obama won reelecxii —
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Prologue
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tion in 2012, the United States would have three consecutive two-term presidents, a situation that had occurred only one other time in history and under vastly different circumstances— with the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe between 1801 and 1825. What could that possibly mean? Why? Was the tendency for retention strong enough among voters that there might be four in a row after the election of 2020? No person is objective. All of us harbor biases and prejudices to one degree or another. In teaching, writing, and speaking, I work to focus on interpretable facts and their contexts, specifically words and actions, with as much impartiality as one can muster. To the often-asked question about my favorite president, I respond with one last name but two figures: Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, and his fifth cousin Franklin, a Democrat. When requested to pass judgment on the most consequential president since World War II, I usually say that John Kennedy, a Democrat, possessed an abundance of promise but didn’t have the chance to complete his service, while Ronald Reagan, a Republican, served eight full years (something his five immediate predecessors couldn’t accomplish), restored a spirit of faith in the nation, and retired with historians composing studies about the significance of “the Age of Reagan.” If prompted for a more robust explanation, I say the Gipper’s popularity certainly helped his vice president, George H. W. Bush, win an electoral victory in 1988, a first for a sitting number 2 since Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s understudy, in 1836. Reagan also announced he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease the weekend before the midterm election of 1994, which turned out to be a Republican landslide. (The GOP took control of the House of Representatives by gaining fifty-four seats and of the Senate by capturing eight.) Commentators dubbed what happened “the Republican Revolution.” I argued in a commentary for the Christian Science Monitor that all the attention to Reagan’s revelation of his illness right before balloting might have Prologue — xiii
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been an unmeasured yet influential factor in the outcome, an explanation a political scientist would never hazard. My analysis was based in part on an uncomplicated observation: timing is everything—in both acting and politics. After nearly fifty years in classrooms across four continents— and being no longer “prematurely old” but certifiably senior—it seemed time to set down some summary reflections on presi dential subjects, and the arrival of Donald J. Trump on the political—and world—stage became the appropriate provocation. His election as president in 2016 represented more than the ascent to America’s highest elective office of someone without a day’s experience in either government or the military. The victory by the business mogul and media celebrity reflected just how much today’s presidency and US politics differ from those of not so long ago. The word unprecedented kept appearing in reportage about Trump. How he won—rallies rather than advertising, imprecise statements instead of specific proposals, strict privacy related to his taxes in lieu of the usual disclosure, and all the rest—proved that time-honored political practices could be challenged and often broken. Though Trump’s triumph was unpredicted by prognosticators and bookies, it was not totally unpredictable when you examine larger patterns and trends in the presidency and in American politics during recent decades. Self-branded as a modern-day Midas with unrivaled celebrity appeal, Trump’s public persona—complete with its massive magnification by the media—tends to overshadow and obscure the political forces that helped propel him to the White House. To be sure, he portrays himself as a Washington outsider—but so has every winning presidential candidate (except George H. W. Bush) since Jimmy Carter in 1976. How about the emphasis on personality instead of party credentials? Carter’s toothy smile and pledge never to lie signaled that the dominance of establishment, insider politics was in decline—and citizens’ say, via primaries and caucuses, could be decisive. xiv —
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Prologue
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Ironically, as the parties have become weaker institutionally, we have seen partisanship increase to the point of polarization or even tribalism as defining traits of Washington’s political conduct. Concepts of compromise and consensus seem quaintly anachronistic in an environment that favors winning, whatever the cost, and vanquishing one’s opponent in the process. Transacting the federal government’s business without cross-party support—just as not a single Republican in the House of Representatives or Senate voted in favor of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, no Democrat said “yea” to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017—is increasingly de rigueur. And, to be more precise, controversial legislation is becoming more transparently partisan when the legislative and executive branches are controlled by the same party. Trump, viewed in the round and beyond himself, is the embodiment of several existing forces that wittingly or unwittingly he effectively exploited and, in some instances, pushed to extremes. He’s a distinctive, often indescribable effect of this particular political and cultural time, who is also causing our democracy to change more and more in ways that reflect his image. How long his brand of politics—defiance of institutional norms as though they never existed, constant direct communication with his base of support, unfiltered criticism of government agencies, confrontational attacks aimed at any perceived opponent, and all the rest—will be influential is a mystery of the Trump drama and is territory for someone else to explore. Here we are interested primarily in assessing what’s already happened, with the patterns and trends of the recent past providing the backbone of this book. Those patterns and trends, along with their effects on the people who occupy the Oval Office, deserve careful delineation. Before Trump, the last New Yorker to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Revolutionary changes have occurred in the presidency from FDR’s era to Trump’s time, and the circumstances that gave rise to those changes deserve explication and evaluation. As I’ll explain, the office is Prologue — xv
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shaped by the occupant, while the occupant is shaped by external forces (increasingly these are cultural ones related to communication) that produce the environment for campaigning and then for governing. Those realities are related but different. Recent changes, however, coexist with historic continuities and institutional complexities. In 1797, while serving as vice president, Thomas Jefferson admitted in a letter to Eldridge Gerry that “the second office of this government is honorable & easy, the first is but a splendid misery.” Using an oxymoron (such as “splendid misery”) to describe the presidency became something of a lexical tradition. Less than a year after moving into the White House, Andrew Jackson noted in a letter to Robert J. Chester, “I can with truth say mine is a situation of dignified slavery.” Four years before his election in 1856, James Buchanan wrote to his friend Nahum Capen, “The Presidency is a distinction far more glorious than the crown of any hereditary monarch in Christendom; but yet it is a crown of thorns.” More recently, service in the nation’s highest office has been characterized as a “glorious burden,” a two-word quotation appropriated from a poem by Goethe. Since 2000, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, has featured a permanent exhibition called “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.” (Interestingly, for trivia aficionados, that phrase, in another manifestation, word order, and context, became the title of a book—The Burden and the Glory (1964)—that collected Kennedy’s last speeches and statements from the twenty-three months before his assassination on November 22, 1963.) For years, the following sign greeted anyone visiting or just passing by the edifice-cum-monument at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: “Since 1792, the White House has become symbolic of the American presidency throughout the world. While the Capitol represents the freedom and ideals of the Nation, the White House stands for the power and statesmanship of the chief executive.” Called the “President’s Palace,” the “Presidential Mansion,” or the “Executive Mansion” before 1901, “White House—Washington” was the name Theodore Roosevelt put on xvi —
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Prologue
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his stationery. The label took hold and stuck. “Palace?” “Mansion?” No. But “House”—without alluding to the principal resident and closer to the nickname you hear frequently now: “The People’s House.” Look around from the street and a certain majestic glory is in full view. Should you see the president leave the White House as you are rubbernecking, the motorcade roaring by seems endless, each vehicle carrying staff with specific responsibilities; or you might observe the helicopter Marine One departing to take the president on the five-minute flight to Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland, to board the imposingly impressive Air Force One. In either case, grandeur meets power, and your head shakes. Yet if you take in the whole scene of what the welcoming sign calls “the most famous address in the United States,” the house also resembles a modern-day fortress—with high fences, multiple concrete barriers, well-armed guards, bomb-sniffing dogs, weaponry on the roof, and all the rest. Along with the glory, the burden of constant security stalks a president’s every step—and daily deliberations. The glory and the burden, both magnified to degrees approaching the unimaginable, come with the job from inauguration through the final hour of service. One can hope that more attention to the vagaries and vicissitudes related to the wielding of (in the Constitution’s phrase) “executive Power”—with a capital P—will help citizens better understand not only the office, with its duties and responsibilities, but also their own civic role as they consider what incumbents are doing and where candidates seeking the presidency want to take the country. Americans tend to think about the White House in individualistic terms—a succession (to this point) of men, making decisions and offering leadership on domestic and international affairs. This personalization of the presidency is inevitable but also limiting. The institution—its definition, its development, its opportunities, its boundaries, and its other dimensions—often shapes the conduct of America’s head of state, highest governmental executive, commander in chief, principal policy initiator, top diplomat, and party leader. This book attempts to take a Prologue — xvii
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broader view at the presidency in its contemporary context. Why is the office as it is today, and can we expect tomorrow to be markedly different? Along the way, we shall also discuss the current (and, in the view of many, dubious) state of American politics. Back in 1979, political scientist Theodore J. Lowi noted in the preface to the second edition of his influential study The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States that “this book is dedicated to the proposition that the most fundamental political problem of our time is our politics” (xiii). One could argue that the problem he identified four decades ago has not improved but become much worse—reaching, in the opinion of many thoughtful observers, a breaking point. What will it take to make American politics work more effectively for the public at large in the years to come? At a time when the United States looks more divided than united, with the political conduct in Washington a daily (and often depressing) reminder of our contemporary disunion, this series of essays seeks to explain how we arrived at this civic crossroads. An informed, inquiring citizenry serves as the foundation of a well-functioning, participatory democratic republic. Each of us has a considerable stake in the success or failure of the one person who has the authority and responsibility for representing all the American people and the country’s interests at home and around the world.
xviii —
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Prologue
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