What it takes to be a good president
Well before he became president, John F. Kennedy jotted down in a notebook he was keeping the words of Liddell Hart, a British scholar, military historian, and strategist.
“Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool,” Hart wrote in his book, “Deterrent or Defense,” as noted by Kennedy. “Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes – so as to see through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil – nothing is so blinding.”
Kennedy must have remembered Hart’s words years later when he confronted the presence of Soviet missiles off the Florida coast, in Cuba, for they pretty much describe the ways in which the president deftly handled the confrontation with his counterpart in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev – the closest the world has come to nuclear annihilation.
We are in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign. I thought it might be useful to review – in truncated fashion – some of the things that have been said, written, and thought about on the topic of what qualities, what knowledge a person who puts himself, or herself, out there for the top spot should possess in order to become an effective chief executive, post-election.
Kennedy’s notebook came to mind. For the rest, I’m leaning heavily on a 2016 broadcast of “Face The Nation.” The CBS moderator, John Dickerson, assembled a panel of former White House advisers and asked them to consider the matter.
Mike Leavitt, a former secretary of Health and Human Services and a former Utah governor, said “a good metaphor to think about the White House and the job of the presidency would be an air traffic controller with 500 planes in the air at any given moment, all of which think they’re about ready to run out of fuel or need to make an emergency landing.
“There’s a lot happening” at any one time for a president, he said. “There’s a lot of voices. And you need a person who has the temperament … to operate in an orderly way, that has a history of making good decisions … and (who) can deal with it in an atmosphere where there’s going to be a lot of conflicting voices….”
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the first-ever secretary of Homeland Security, under George W. Bush, weighed in, insisting a president should combine “respect” for both Democrats and Republicans with “empathy” for all Americans.
Ridge recalled that George H.W. Bush told him privately that one of his proudest moments was passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, because it brought together members of both parties and helped a segment of the population long relegated to the sidelines.
Ridge said he wished to see a president with “good intuition” who could “distill” information, though he didn’t say how these attributes might be cultivated or rendered, so that voters might judge a candidate for president on that basis.
Several panelists said good presidents are good listeners who are open to new ideas, even ideas that counter ideas that he or she may have already voiced support for.
Rosa Brooks worked in the Obama administration’s Pentagon. She noted that the executive branch of the government “is like an iceberg and the president and the Cabinet are … at the very top of the iceberg, but most of the government is way below.”
It happens sometimes that presidents are not presented with every option bubbling up from the bureaucracy when it comes time to make a crucial decision. This happens maybe “for the dumbest reason, like it didn’t fit in the bullet points” on a one-page memo.
A president has to be smart and wise enough to then ask, “Is this all? Where’s the rest?”
Brooks stressed that if a president doesn’t know “where the ‘more stuff’ is and how to access it,” she or he may be “facing two choices, both of which may be dumb.”
Michael Hayden, a Pittsburgh native, was CIA chief. His conversations with presidents were mostly about covert activities in which case, he said, the course ahead was not always clearly defined. In that instance, Hayden said, “temperament, honesty, integrity” in a president really matters.
“And so when I’m talking to a president about that … I want to know that I’m talking to a decent human being. I want to know that I’m talking to someone who broadly reflects the values of the country.”
The last word goes to young Kennedy, whose 1946-47 notebook includes this assessment which he penned himself: “… One must have three things: a solid moral code governing his public actions, a broad knowledge of our institutions and traditions and a specific background in the technical problems of government, and lastly he must have political appeal….”
Political appeal – ah, there’s the rub.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.