Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation

Also by James MacGregor Burns

ROOSEVELT

The Lion and the Fox

JOHN KENNEDY

A Political Profile

THE DEADLOCK OF DEMOCRACY

Four-Party Politics in America

ROOSEVELT

The Soldier of Freedom

LEADERSHIP

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

Vol. 1: The Vineyard of Liberty

Vol. 2: The Workshop of Democracy

Vol. 3: The Crosswinds of Freedom

DEAD CENTER

Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation

James MacGregor Burns

and Georgia J. Sorenson

with Robin Gerber

and Scott W. Webster

A LISA DREW BOOK/SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1999 by James MacGregor Burns and Georgia Jones Sorenson

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

A LISA DREW BOOK is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Set in Electra

Manufactured in the United States of America

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data Burns, James MacGregor.

Dead center: Clinton-Gore leadership and the perils of moderation / James MacGregor Burns and Georgia J. Sorenson ; with Robin Gerber and Scott W. Webster.

p. cm.

A Lisa Drew Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United States—Politics and government—1993– 2. Political leadership—United States. 3. Moderation—Political aspects—United States. 4. Clinton, Bill, 1946– .5. Gore, Albert, 1948– . I. Sorenson, Georgia Jones. II. Gerber, Robin. III. Webster, Scott W. IV. Title.

E885.B88 1999

320.973'09'049—dc21 99-34871

CIP

ISBN 0-684-83778-1

eISBN 978-0-7432-0100-1

To our friends and colleagues

at the University of Maryland

CONTENTS

Prologue: Fast Trip to Falls Church

PART I: TURNING AND TURNING

Chapter One: Presidential Heroes and Moral Failures

HEROIC LEADERS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

THE CENTER OF MORAL LEADERSHIP

WHERE ARE MY FOLLOWERS TO LEAD ME?

LEADERSHIP: CONVICTION AND CHARACTER

Chapter Two: The Education of Three Politicos

SCHOOLS THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE

THE THREE HILLARY RODHAMS

COMEBACK—AT ANY PRICE

PART II: INNOCENCE IS DROWNED

Chapter Three: Leadership—for a Change?

THE TIME OF THE TROIKA

ARROGANCE, IGNORANCE, AND ADRENALINE

INAUGURATION: HISTORY AND HYPE

Chapter Four: The Gauntlet of Leadership

WITH HONEYMOONS LIKE THIS …

THE TESTING OF THE TROIKA

ORDEALS OF CHANGE

PROMISE KEEPING

Chapter Five: The Tragedy of Health

TASK FORCES, TOLLGATES, AND TIMING

WHAT WENT WRONG?

THE COST OF FAILURE

PART III: THE WIDENING GYRE

Chapter Six: Squarely in the Center

THE RISE OF CENTRISM

CLINTON AND HIS CENTRISTS

CENTRISTS AND IDEOLOGUES

THE CASE FOR CENTRISM

Chapter Seven: The Intrusion of Foreign Affairs

WHO KNOWS THE NEW RULES?

THE USE OF FORCE

UPSTAGED ON THE WORLD STAGE … AGAIN

MARKETPLACE LEADERSHIP

PART IV: THINGS FALL APART

Chapter Eight: Forward, About-Face, March

UNDER THE EYES OF FREEDOM

A DARK MOOD IN THE WHITE HOUSE

GRABBING FOR THE RUDDER

SEARCHING FOR THE DYNAMIC CENTER

MODERN ANTI-FEDERALISTS

Chapter Nine: Welfare and Illfare

A FEARSOME ASSUMPTION

A BROKEN SYSTEM

LEAVENED BY THE HISTORICAL MOMENT

ENTITLEMENT TO TOUGH LOVE

Chapter Ten: True North

DEEP SOUTH

THE SOUTHERN STRATEGIST

THE INHERITANCE

THE LEGACY

PART V: THE SECOND COMING?

Chapter Eleven: God and Second Chances

ADULT LEADERSHIP

MAKE ROOM IN THE MIDDLE

THE SECOND ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS

Chapter Twelve: Global Leadership and Moral Duties

THE PROBLEM FROM HELL

BOLDNESS BY DEFAULT

THE PEACEMAKER

Chapter Thirteen: What Kind of Leadership?

THE PRICE OF CENTRISM

THE MYTH OF PRESIDENTIAL VIRTUE

THE REAL TEST: MORAL LEADERSHIP

Epilogue: Fall Projection 1999

Acknowledgments

List of Interviews

Notes

Index

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—The Second Coming,

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

PROLOGUE

Fast Trip to Falls Church

SEPTEMBER 12, 1992

We—Bill Clinton and the two authors—are squeezed into the backseat of a small sedan, on the Washington Mall. The noise from the crowd outside is deafening. Clinton reaches through the window and pumps the hands of some children. In an instant we are off to the next campaign stop, the Virginia suburb of Falls Church.

For weeks Clinton has been ranging across the country castigating, Harry Truman–style, the Republicans for see-nothing, do-nothing government. Could he do any better? we asked. He ticked off the presidents who could: Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Kennedy. These would be his leadership models.

Sixty years earlier, in 1932, FDR had run a shrewd, calculating, foxlike campaign to oust the Hoover Republicans. Do you feel you are running that kind of campaign, we asked, and if you are, do you think you’ll be a lion as a president?

Oh, absolutely. Clinton spoke clearly through the wailing sirens. Our system has benefited from electing people who at moments of change were able to be—to use your term—transforming leaders, who could get people to move beyond party and beyond the little boxes in which we normally think and vote and live …

Transforming leaders. This word transforming had come into vogue as meaning the most radical kind of change, both of outward form and inner character, as with a frog transformed into a prince, according to our Webster’s. It meant rising above everyday accommodation, expediency, pragmatism, and seeking instead real, intended, and lasting change, measured by fundamental values of security, liberty, equality, justice, as unforgettably dramatized in FDR’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear.

At the end of the cold war, Clinton went on, the fundamental reality is that most competition between nations will be economic, that military power is a mixed blessing but a clear responsibility of the United States, that history will judge us based on whether at this moment we make the changes we need to make. Clinton was waving vigorously through the closed window at everyone he spotted on the sidewalks—at everything that moved, it seemed. We must improve the productivity and efficiency of our work, increase our levels of investment to improve and advance our capacity to educate all of our people. To solve some of our thorny social problems, which other nations have been more willing to deal with, chief among them health care and quality of life in our vast urban areas.

But could he do all this without changing the system? we asked. Franklin D. Roosevelt—if he really was one of Clinton’s models—had enjoyed the usual hundred-day honeymoon and had then became fouled up in the checks and balances, the very system of deadlock he tried to reform. If Clinton as president began to run into trouble in his second or third year and felt that he too had been stymied by the system, what could you do?

Two or three things, he said. First, keep a coherent and powerful vision of change before the American people. Second—laughing—wear them down!

A lot of it is who lasts longest, Clinton went on, warming up to the subject. I’m good at that. I do a good job at that. And the third is to generate popular support.

That was how it was in Arkansas, he said. When he was politicking at the State Fair for a fifth term as governor, this old fellow in overalls asked if Clinton was going to run again. He remembered that Clinton would nag, nag, nag to put his programs through. I wouldn’t put up with that at home for ten years—still, yes, he’d vote for Clinton again.

But if Clinton did meet gridlock in Washington, we persisted, would he call for constitutional change? No, he said, he had tried that in Arkansas and it hadn’t worked. But he would favor institutional change, such as regulation of lobbying or setting up a National Security Council and Economic Council. He would like to see changes in the process by which we elect members of Congress. What about a relatively minor constitutional change? we asked—four-year terms for representatives? He had never thought about it, he said.

By now we had left the drab city blocks and were speeding through the Virginia suburbs, the sirens still howling. There were no pedestrians to wave at. Clinton seemed completely relaxed, yet focused on the dialogue.

Years before, Oliver Wendell Holmes had famously summed up Franklin Roosevelt: a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament. This interview had inadvertently become a test of that temperament. Because of a mix-up at the Mall, Clinton had had to intervene with the Secret Service to get us into the car, amid a clamorous crowd pressing around us. Two of the three tape players did not work. We were sitting partly on top of one another in the car. We gathered that the meeting with African-American leaders at the Mall had been difficult.

But here he was, during the few moments before the next venue, when he might have wanted some quiet, talking with two academics raising long-run, theoretical questions, while he was intent on winning an election seven weeks away. Still, he answered our questions thoughtfully, articulately, without a flicker of impatience. Grace under pressure.

In retrospect what struck us most about Bill Clinton was his calm, almost blasé confidence that he could take leadership, among the continuing disasters and turmoils of the twentieth century, to bring about transforming change. He had no experience of foreign-policy-making, he had presided over the economy of one of the smaller states, and he had little background for the throbbing, uncontrolled, and inequitable economy of the financial capital of the world. But he claimed to be a potential transforming leader who would bring about the comprehensive change that had eluded most of his Democratic and Republican predecessors.

Granted, he would enter the White House when the cold war was assuredly over, when the United States had brilliantly deployed its military might in the Gulf War, when the economy appeared stable, when most of the New Deal–Great Society reforms had survived the Reagan and Bush eras reasonably intact. As presidential historians, though, we wondered if we were witnessing in the Clintons, the Gores, and their youthful, exuberant campaigners the makings of that ceremony of innocence that William Butler Yeats had noted at the end of an earlier world war, when idealistic Americans embraced the League of Nations and savored the heady prospect of world government.

Could poets be more prophetic than politicians? The innocent Warren G. Harding had become president around the time Yeats was envisioning a world far different from the rosy hopes that followed World War I. With piercing insight Yeats saw past the peace of Versailles to the anarchy that would rule the world. He sensed the rising tumult that would reach across Europe, from the religious extremists in Ireland to the revolutionaries in Russia. But he saw much farther—to the desert lands in northern Africa and the Middle East and Asia that would let loose the blood-dimmed tides following the next world war.

Bill Clinton possessed none of this pessimism. He constantly invoked the image of a peaceful and prosperous twenty-first century that he and Gore would shape during their administration. Still, some historians remembered a similar optimism at the start of the twentieth century, when Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House. Aside from America’s lethal civil war and Europe’s colonial oppressions around the globe, the nineteenth century had laid the foundations, it was hoped, for expanded peace and prosperity in the twentieth. On the contrary, that century has been the most ghastly in history—decimation of whole populations, deliberate murder of weak and unarmed ethnic groups, worldwide pestilences, the tyranny of rough beasts named Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and scores of others.

During the 1990s some analysts were predicting an upcoming century of menacing overpopulation—especially of jobless youth, tidal flows of refugees across national borders, endless struggles over diminishing resources—with global crime and violence.

The leadership coming to power in America were well aware of some of these possibilities. Assuredly they would cope with tumult as it arose. They would rapidly adapt to global change. But history might ask for more—not only to react and adapt to change, but to plan and manage change—to take leadership of democratic transformation away from the worst, full of passionate intensity.

How to explain Clinton’s self-confidence, even cockiness, as he entered the White House, the global command center that would confront tumult abroad and sharp conflicts at home? A politician’s self-esteem hardly suffers, of course, when he pulls off the supreme triumph in American politics—beating an incumbent president. But Clinton had another reason to feel confident. He was bringing to the White House a strategy of leadership, a game plan that had been crafted in a string of Arkansas victories and carefully fashioned with his friends in Washington.

This strategy would come to be called centrism, embracing bipartisanship, consensus, incrementalism, moderation in policy, pragmatism. Other men had come to the presidency with tactical skills and experience. Clinton had a formula for leadership and change, a kind of do-it-yourself kit for an office that had defied efforts by journalists and scholars to generalize as to how to make it effective. He was fortified in this strategy by Al Gore, who had helped to shape it. Clinton would be challenged in the strategy by a person even closer to him in the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Still, transforming leadership in the White House would require more than grace and aplomb. It had to be a catalyst for change, taking leadership in risky initiatives: controversial reforms such as in campaign finance and even in the transformation of institutions such as the presidency or Congress or political parties. Transforming leadership would demand more than day-to-day incrementalism and fine promises; it would call for intellectual and moral creativity leading to real, purposeful, and lasting change.

Was Clinton capable of that kind of leadership?

PART I

TURNING AND TURNING

CHAPTER ONE

Presidential Heroes and Moral Failures

Why, we asked Bill Clinton, did he not use his full name? William Jefferson Clinton—what a perfect name for a Democrat. In other times, at least, an aspiring politico would have been tempted to steal it off a gravestone. But now it was just plain Bill. He seemed curiously uninterested in the question. He hadn’t thought much about it, he said. Probably I should use it. We hoped he would use his full name, if elected, at least in taking the inaugural oath. He wasn’t sure.

All this struck us as a rather casual attitude toward the founder of the Democratic Party—the party that had honored Clinton with its presidential nomination, the party whose D or Democratic would sit across from his name on millions of ballots across the nation. Admittedly, we were biased, as students of presidential history, but duly impressed that he had not claimed any descent from or kinship with the great Virginian. Still, his casualness did seem a bit self-effacing, historically, in a year when Democrats were invoking the party saints.

It was not just a question of sentiment. A Democratic president in the 1990s would face some of the same problems that had confronted the great party-builders two centuries before. In the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took the first steps in building a national party out of discordant and quarreling factions. At first they had no national political strategy—they were fashioning their platforms as their anti-Federalist party expanded. But people wanted something more than simple denunciation of Hamilton and the other elitists—a purpose, a vision of the century ahead.

As party leader, Clinton would encounter a dilemma that had faced the Jeffersonians—the widespread view that political parties, or at least their vigorous combats, were threats to national unity and hence were unpatriotic. So in his 1801 inaugural Jefferson had proclaimed, We are all republicans, we are all Federalists, but he didn’t really mean it. Rather he took strong ideological and policy leadership of his party, in dealing with Congress and with the press, and he selected a party cabinet. Like the party leaders that followed over the decades, the Jeffersonians would promise to rise above party and speak for all Americans, while assiduously pursuing party advantage and party spoils.

Jefferson demonstrated his political sagacity when, in the 1790s, he recognized the need—indeed the inevitability—of robust party conflict in a democracy. Would Bill Clinton recognize this need in the 1990s? Or would his centrist strategy compel him to make deals with the Republican opposition in a calculated bipartisan strategy? Or—a third alternative—would he switch back and forth between principled partisanship and pragmatic deals with the GOP as the shifting political situation seemed to dictate?

We did not have the heart to ask Clinton about the political symbolism of his last name—about the northern Clintons. He claimed no family kinship with them either, of course, but he might have jovially hinted of a Clinton connection while campaigning, say, in upstate New York. For George Clinton, and his nephew De Witt Clinton, were fierce New York anti-Federalists over a span of almost half a century. In choosing George Clinton as his running mate in 1804, Jefferson recognized the vital need for a Virginia–New York alliance, which would broaden out over the years to a North-South coalition in the Democratic party. Oddly, it was precisely that historic coalition that would be integral to Clinton’s winning electoral strategy in 1992.

HEROIC LEADERS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and Al Gore grew up in an era of transcending leadership. It was the era of three great presidents in a row: FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower. Of senators like Robert Taft, Hubert Humphrey, and Arkansas’s own William Fulbright. Of generals like George Marshall and Omar Bradley, who actually won wars. Of justices like Earl Warren and William J. Brennan Jr., who not only interpreted law but made law. Of first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson.

In Washington, schoolchildren flocked to monuments celebrating earlier heroes. These were mainly presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, in particular. After decades of presidential glorification, it was hard to find monuments even to the legendary senators like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The implication for youngsters like Bill Clinton was clear. To be really famous it was not enough to be a senator or a governor—you had to be president. And it was not enough to be president—you had to be a moral leader and a courageous innovator.

We can assume that whatever texts and storybooks about great presidents were available in Hot Springs, young Clinton would greedily seize them. We can also assume that many in Arkansas remembered Woodrow Wilson’s grassroots campaign for the League. Some might have recalled Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps having even served with him in the Rough Riders. Certainly the heroic memory of TR still vibrated fifty years later. It was not only the physical image—bristling mustache, gleaming eyeglasses, crenellated teeth—but the posture of constant combat couched in moral outbursts that was so vividly recalled.

Any schoolchild would be impressed by the story of the sickly boy, fatherless at twenty, who had tracked down bad guys in the Dakotas, fought his way into the rough-and-tumble of Manhattan politics, charged up San Juan Hill, succeeded to the presidency when hardly out of his thirties, and as commander in chief sent the American fleet around the world. All this was well remembered, because TR made it memorable through assiduous public relations. He first exploited the press as New York police commissioner; later he reported on himself in countless magazine articles and political speeches. He invented the bully pulpit.

Still, if Roosevelt was the first media president, as historian John Milton Cooper Jr. has noted, he was in many other respects the first modern president. Political power that previous strong presidents such as Lincoln had evoked only in wartime, TR mobilized without the help of a timely war, as had Jackson.

During the high tide of American financial and industrial capitalism, Roosevelt took on the trusts, and if his posturing sometimes outran his performance, he established for good the responsibility of the federal government to monitor the marketplace. Both through his peacemaking and his saber rattling he established his nation’s place among the great powers. Resoundingly elected to his own term in 1904, he turned even more left in fighting for railroad regulation and pure food and drug legislation. And if in the end he was carved in stone on Mount Rushmore, few felt that he was an interloper among the Big Three.

After Roosevelt emerged as the very model of the warrior-king, Woodrow Wilson headed toward his own destiny as the tragic hero in the White House. His ultimate failure was all the more poignant because he had entered the White House in 1913 with more definite views about political leadership than any other president before or after. Public opinion, he believed, must be molded by a moral leader who could convert the inchoate wants and needs of the community into grand principles that would embody spiritual and even poetic insights. The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people, he believed. The forces of the public thought may be blind; he must lend them sight; they may blunder; he must set them right. But leadership was not a one-way process; national renewal would spring from the followers, the people. Nor was it a one-person process—only by leading minds was the will of a community stirred to a guiding control of affairs. After the bloodletting of the Great War, diplomats and civilians alike hailed the peacekeeping role, however feeble, of the new League.

The test of this noble concept of leadership came swift and hard in Wilson’s campaign for American membership in the League of Nations. Senate Republicans, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, vowed to accept membership only with reservations that, in Wilson’s view, would cripple even the limited peacekeeping power of the League. There followed a contest between Lodge’s masterly transactional leadership, as he brokered support among his partisans in the Senate, and the President’s effort at transformational leadership as he carried the battle to the people. Greeted by cheering crowds, the scholarly Princetonian was transformed into a model of courage and conviction. But Wilson’s epic campaign for the League across the country ended in his own physical breakdown. The fight for the League finally collapsed when the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt carried the issue into the 1920 election and lost.

Twelve years later, when Wilson was mainly remembered as a leader who had gone down fighting for his ideals, Franklin Roosevelt invoked the concept of the presidency as preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents, he said on the eve of entering the White House, were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified. The presidential office was a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are all bogged up or lose our way.

Roosevelt moved through a series of leadership roles during his long presidency: the crisis president pushing through emergency legislation in 1933–34; Dr. New Deal turning left in 1935 as he shaped the enduring New Deal of social security and regulatory measures; the partisan president winning his huge reelection victory in 1936; the reform president of 1937 seeking to liberalize both the judiciary and the Democratic party; the interventionist president of the late thirties cautiously reorienting the nation toward the menace of Hitlerism; the nonpartisan Dr. Win the War during the struggle against the Axis; the leader in the establishment of the United Nations, achieving the American participation that Wilson had sought in vain.

For young Clinton, Wilson and the two Roosevelts were role models in courageous leadership. But—especially in FDR’s case—they were also models of caution and compromise. Was there one leader behind these many roles? A chameleon on plaid, Herbert Hoover had labeled FDR during the 1932 election campaign, and until FDR’s final days leaders in both parties were trying to pin him down ideologically. But he was a moving target, shifting adroitly to meet new exigencies. Viewed in retrospect, however, he always appeared to return to true north—to TR progressivism, Wilsonian internationalism, Democratic party liberalism. Thus during World War II, when he might have sacrificed social reforms to military needs, he established housing, health, education, jobs, and equality of opportunity programs far surpassing the achievements of the earlier New Deal.

If Bill Clinton’s schoolbook histories were behind the times, he probably did not read much about the New Deal. But he did not need to, to learn about the recent heroes in the White House. For the hero worshipers were all around him in Hot Springs—men and women who had survived on the WPA (Works Progress Administration), who had clung to their homes through mortgage relief, served in the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), benefited from soil-conservation and farm-electrification programs, gone to college under the GI Bill of Rights. The lesson for Bill Clinton was clear: leadership could make a difference in people’s lives.

During the decade after Roosevelt’s death American politics fell into a pattern of coalition and conflict that would shape the political landscape for most of the next half century. The crucial political division lay not in the ageold seesaw of two-party politics but in the bitter conflicts within the major parties. The liberal presidential wing of the Democratic party warred with conservative southern Democrats still entrenched in Congress despite FDR’s earlier efforts. And the victory of the military hero Dwight Eisenhower, an internationalist and moderate conservative, over the right-wing Robert Taft for the GOP presidential nomination in 1952 presaged the long battle between presidential and congressional Republicans. Americans had in effect a four-party system: liberal (Truman-Stevenson) Democrats, moderate (Rockefeller) Republicans, and two conservative parties entrenched in Congress and in most rural areas of the country.

Bill Clinton was only six when Harry Truman left the White House after Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1952, but a dramatic confrontation in Arkansas brought presidential politics almost to the youth’s door. Late in 1957, Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the state national guard in Little Rock to block court-ordered desegregation of Central High School. Despite his own reservations about integration, Eisenhower called out airborne troops and dispatched them to the state capital to enforce the court decree. The nation was mesmerized by news photos of brawny soldiers escorting apprehensive black girls into the building. Eleven-year-old Bill Clinton was frustrated by Faubus’s defiance, his mother recalled, but he had seen up close a demonstration of naked presidential power.

Burdened by repeated cold war crises, frustrated by a heavily Democratic Congress, Eisenhower appeared relieved to turn over the presidency to John F. Kennedy in January 1961. The exuberant young president presented a vivid contrast to the aging military hero. Kennedy’s inaugural address was a bracing celebration of freedom. Yet even more than most inaugural talks, it reflected the nation’s—and his own—uncertainty and confusion over the meaning of freedom. Americans still had their old revolutionary beliefs, but the torch had passed to a new generation. Americans would pay any price and bear any burden to protect liberty, but Kennedy decried the cost of arms. Let us never fear to negotiate, but let us never negotiate out of fear.

The Kennedy presidency reflected these ambivalences as it offered a new alliance for progress to Latin America but mounted an invasion of Cuba, renewed New Deal and Fair Deal programs but within severe budget restrictions, forced the Soviets to turn back their missiles headed for Cuba but on the basis of a secret deal to dismantle U.S. missile bases in Turkey. Despite Democratic party criticism of Eisenhower’s covert intervention in Vietnam through military advisers, Kennedy considerably enlarged the U.S. advisory mission in Vietnam and assigned American forces to combat-support missions.

Transcending Kennedy’s moderate policies and limited initiatives was the charismatic personality of the young president. Whether appearing as a hawk or a dove, as a moderate Democrat or dedicated New Dealer, he radiated excitement, intensity, commitment—even while he practiced caution and compromise. To some there seemed to be four Kennedys: the rhetorical radical delivering ringing speeches; the policy liberal constantly balancing human wants against limited resources; the fiscal conservative always intent, like FDR, on balancing the budget, though not succeeding; and the institutional conservative who hoped that, instead of reshaping the traditional constraints on the presidency, he could revitalize the torpid governmental system by applying jolts of New Frontier electricity.

All this was a long way from the day-to-day routine of Hot Springs, Arkansas. A high school hero-worshiper like Bill Clinton could only gape at this hero from afar. But then a wonderful opportunity opened up. Through intensive politicking he got himself chosen by Boys’ Nation in Arkansas as a senator who would travel to College Park, Maryland, and then to Washington for a presidential reception at the White House. Clinton carefully maneuvered to be in front of the group in the Rose Garden and to have his picture taken with John F. Kennedy. He was elated to shake hands with the President of the United States. He was even more elated, it appeared, to have a photograph showing him shaking hands with the President.

For young Clinton it was the Kennedy legacy of leadership that he most wanted to inherit. If historians saw JFK as a profile in caution as well as courage, this was a legacy for Clinton too. But when it came time for Clinton to take office thirty years later, it was JFK’s youthful élan and glittering style that Bill Clinton most wanted to emulate.

THE CENTER OF MORAL LEADERSHIP

Bill Clinton launched his presidency amid more than the usual inaugural effusions. He saluted his predecessor, George Bush, for his half century of service to America and thanked the millions of men and women whose steadfastness and sacrifice triumphed over depression, fascism, and communism. Then he quickly reechoed his campaign theme of change. Over a dozen times he spoke the language of transformation.

Today we celebrate the mystery of American renewal.… America, to endure, would have to change.… The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.… To renew America, we must be bold… must revitalize our democracy.… Together with our friends and allies, we will work to shape change, lest it engulf us.

Yet even this trumpet call had muffled notes. Clinton appeared to equate the terms change and renewal, but these words had highly diverse implications. He used change itself ambiguously—was it something out there, an enemy to head off, or a constructive force to be embraced and employed? Perhaps these questions demanded too much of a short speech, but presidents-elect and their staffs fuss over the inaugural language because it stands historically as the authentic statement of intention.

Whatever his purpose, an inviting array of powers lay spread out before the new president—law-writing, budget-making, treaty proposing, electronic pulpit–exploiting, appointing friends, and disappointing enemies. This was the fabled power of the president. The presidency was superbly equipped as a vehicle for conducting transactional leadership among a host of competing actors and agencies. But could such quid pro quo tactics produce real change, or at least renewal, or merely continuation? The fundamental question was, leadership by whom, for what, when, how, and at what cost?

A huge paradox dominated this question. The presidency was weak where it should be strong as a tool of majority rule. It was strong where it should be weak in a democracy. And, by the time Clinton took office, the presidency had become morally compromised as an institution; how would he cope with this?

Weak where it should be strong—this was the cardinal issue: the constitutional constraints on the presidency are familiar to all students of American government—the power of Congress to pass or bottle up laws, its power to override presidential vetoes, its fiscal authority carefully protected by the Framers. These powers are buttressed by extraconstitutional arrangements, such as the Senate filibuster and the fragmented committee systems. And the Constitution established a federal system that put state politics and policy far beyond the influence of most presidents.

A single legislator can thwart even persuasive or overpowering presidents. In December 1963, when Johnson was receiving plaudits for taking over so firmly after JFK’s death, he complained to legislative leaders about Congressman Otto Passman of Louisiana, who was blocking a foreign aid appropriation. I’m really humiliated that I’m President and I’ve got a friendly Speaker and I’ve got a friendly Majority Leader… and Otto Passman is king. I think that’s disgraceful.… I think it’s awful that a goddamn Cajun from the hills of Louisiana has got more power than all of us.… If I ever woke up in the cold of the night and a rattlesnake’s out there about ready to get him, I ain’t gonna pull him off. I’ll tell you that.

Commonly called the separation of powers, this system is really the intertwining of powers among separated institutions. In effect this intertwining distributes veto power throughout the whole presidential-congressional system. Activist presidents—and indeed activist congresses—confront permanent barriers of conflict and deadlock.

It would take a president of rare courage to challenge this structure. When we asked Bill Clinton in our campaign interview whether he would support some kind of institutional change—party or even constitutional change—to overcome gridlock, he replied not constitutional. He mentioned FDR’s court-packing plan. In fact that plan was not to change the Constitution, but for Congress to authorize FDR to appoint up to six more justices to modernize—really liberalize—the high court. His plan failed—and remains as a warning to Clinton and other presidents not to essay basic reforms that even look like constitutional change.

Deadlock and delay on domestic policy help explain one of the most consistent presidential patterns—decline in presidential legislative support from Congress. Eisenhower’s support dropped from 89 percent at the start of his presidency to 65 percent at its end, Johnson’s from 88 percent to 75, Reagan’s from 82 percent to 47, Bush’s from 63 percent to 43. This pattern in turn helps explain another phenomenon, the drop in popular approval ratings during presidencies. All the last presidents prior to Clinton lost popularity—Truman from 81 percent to 29 percent from start to finish, Eisenhower from 68 to 61, Johnson from 74 to 42, Carter from 63 to 41, Bush from 64 to 40. Liberal Democrats and centrist Democrats, moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans—they all lost support of people and politicians suffering from blighted hopes and crushed expectations. For Clinton this was a dire aspect of the presidential legacy.

What can presidents do when faced with dwindling support? One thing they have done, with some consistency, is to focus on areas where they can act more on their own—foreign policy, war making, crisis control. And this is the area where the presidency has most been strengthened—but also twisted and perverted. While the Constitution granted Congress the authority to declare war, to raise and support armies and a navy, and to regulate the armed services, from almost the start early presidents—even the strict constitutionalist Thomas Jefferson—bent the war-initiating power by launching secret operations against Barbary pirates and other miscreants, sending secret agents abroad, and denying relevant information to Congress.

The larger and more critical the war, the broader the president’s warmaking role. Abraham Lincoln simply conducted the early Civil War without Congress, which was not in session. On his own authority he expanded the army and navy, spent unauthorized funds, and even suspended habeas corpus—the last a most dramatic action for a Whig who had opposed federal power. Fully aware he was violating the Constitution, honest Abe was candid about it: Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? Often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life was never wisely given to save a limb.

At least Lincoln’s actions were public. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt launched secret naval operations in the North Atlantic against German U-boats to protect American lifelines to Britain. He also sent troops to Iceland without congressional authorization. Roosevelt, like Lincoln, relied on his sense of popular demand and public necessity, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote. Since Congress had authorized arms to Britain as national policy, then, inferentially, national policy was to make sure the arms got to Britain. But Congress was sidetracked.

Nor did Congress have a formal role in the foreign-policy decisions and crises of the 1960s—in John Kennedy’s disastrous Bay of Pigs gamble, in his skillful handling of the missile crisis, in Johnson’s escalations in Vietnam. The grimmest irony of all was that, despite all the constitutional limitations on presidential foreign-policy-making, the president of the United States had separate and exclusive control of nuclear weapons—and hence the power to precipitate global holocaust. Presidents have intervened in explosive situations around the world—Theodore Roosevelt and others endlessly in Latin America, FDR in the North Atlantic, Harry Truman in Korea—without formal congressional sanction and often without true consultation with Capitol Hill. Congress might still possess the war-declaring power, but the president controlled the war-making power.

Much of this intervention has been defended as an inevitable and necessary response to a turbulent and threatening world, but assumptions of power and abuse of power have marred the domestic presidency as well. Watergate is too fresh in memory, with its myriad cover-ups, violations of constitutional rights of citizens, and other illegalities, to need detailing here. But Watergate so dwarfed other presidential transgressions as to make these earlier ones seem trivial. They were not.

When Congress dragged its heels on a crucial price-control bill during World War II, Roosevelt told the legislators that if they did not enact the bill within three weeks, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act. Congress passed the bill in three weeks and the people cheered FDR, but a dangerous precedent had been established. During World War II, FDR, in another far-reaching act of executive authority, allowed the army to incarcerate tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. Harry Truman established by executive order a loyalty program requiring loyalty checks and oaths of all federal employees and applicants—a program that even his admiring biographers have called a shameful mistake.

Clinton inherited other malign legacies of the presidency: When Joseph R. McCarthy called General George Marshall a traitor, Dwight Eisenhower dropped from his campaign speech a defense of his former boss’s patriotism.

Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—or the administrations they presided over—connived in assassination attempts against foreign heads of state.

Lyndon Johnson carried FDR’s manipulative tactics to an ugly extreme, pressuring and bullying people to his will.

President Gerald Ford pardoned ex-president Richard Nixon.

At a critical moment of loss of popular confidence in his leadership, Jimmy Carter sacked three cabinet members.

After preaching fiscal responsibility for years, Ronald Reagan lowered taxes and triggered an almost catastrophic budget imbalance.

George Bush conducted a campaign for president against Michael Dukakis that was scurrilous even by late-twentieth-century standards.

Such was the presidency that Bill Clinton inherited, with its real heroes, constitutional authority, political powers, lofty visions, occasional creative leadership, and also with its fake histrionics, unconstitutional and illegal actions, unconscionable overpromising, shabby compromise, endless dealing and brokering. The center of moral leadership was also a center for moral failure. This mixed legacy would offer Clinton ample leeway but little guidance.

All this assumes that Bill Clinton knew American history—at least presidential history. Evidently he did. He had good history teachers in school and university, and he read omnivorously. But even more, he—and Rodham and Gore, along with many of his future colleagues in politics and government—grew up among people who had watched Wilson and the Roosevelts and the other activist presidents firsthand, who knew of their achievements and their failures, who understood the power and the impotence and the occasional perversions of the presidency. Did Clinton see a presidential legacy embodied in them?

WHERE ARE MY FOLLOWERS TO LEAD ME?

Bill Clinton’s assumption of office early in 1993 would mark the two hundreth anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration to a second term. It would mark an even more significant anniversary, though generally unnoticed—Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s effort to plant the seeds of an opposition party. Incensed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal policies and political ambitions, Jefferson during 1790–93 joined James Madison in setting up the National Gazette to propagandize the Democratic-Republican cause, and the two men made a long excursion to New York and New England to sound out anti-Federalist feeling. Jefferson’s resignation from the cabinet in 1793 marked his decisive break with the Federalists.

Since the two Virginia leaders looked on their trip as a botanical as well as political expedition, they could hardly have known that they were setting two great precedents. One was for disaffected leaders to mobilize opposition elements in the hinterland, thus laying the basis for two-party combat. The other was to turn from the transactional maneuvering within the capital to potentially transformational politics in a much wider arena of conflict, with profound implications for the conduct of presidential leadership.

Jefferson, with Madison and thousands of republican activists, led the way to the first voting realignment in American history with their victory over John Adams in 1800. Jefferson became the first—and some historians say the strongest—party leader of the nineteenth century. He worked closely with Democratic-Republican leaders in Congress, mapped party strategy for upcoming legislation—but above all he starred as a symbol of democratic leadership for the whole country. Later, Andrew Jackson exercised Democratic party leadership even before he entered the White House. Shut out of the presidency in 1824 as a result of what he considered to be a corrupt bargain between John Quincy Adams and Washington insiders, he appealed to the country—especially the South and West—so forcefully that he beat Adams, 178 to 83, in the 1828 electoral college.

The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian revolutions, while not really revolutionary, laid the ground for major changes in fiscal policy, foreign relations, territorial expansion, tariffs, internal improvements. In between these transformational eras, leaders returned to the familiar brokerage, trading favors, fixing things up, giving a little here and getting a little there. Most Americans appeared content with this transactional style of leadership. Most of the issues were economic and quantifiable—additive, divisible, multiplicative.

But what would happen in the face of moral, qualitative, incalculable problems? As conflict heated up over the transcending issue of slavery and as both zealous abolitionists and fanatical secessionists stoked the flames, all political arithmetic was altered. The grand compromises of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and others took on an almost mythic importance, but they merely postponed civil war. The masterly mediators and compromisers utterly failed to deal with the supreme moral issue of the century.

In a four-way party split of the electorate—Lincoln Republicans, Stephen Douglas Democrats, old-time Whig Unionists, and Southern secessionists—Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. He prepared to take office as southern states were seceding, charging northern aggression against their domestic institutions. Civil war would now be the ultimate test of the American people, their democracy, their values; it was also a test of the presidency. It would incidentally prove that a man could be elected with less than a majority, as would later be the case with many candidates including Bill Clinton, and still govern.

Lincoln soon faced not only a big war with the South but a small war with leaders of the abolitionist movement. Some of them assailed him as vehemently as did Confederates. The conviction that SLAVERY IS A SIN is the Gibraltar of our cause, Wendell Phillips proclaimed. William Lloyd Garrison publicly incinerated a copy of the Constitution because it protected slavery. Lincoln, Phillips proclaimed, lacked the boldness to declare an emancipation policy, until by a pressure, which Phillips and others created, the administration would be forced to do it.

The abolitionists made their priorities clear—emancipation first, union second. Lincoln made his clear, in reply to Horace Greeley: If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

Never in American history has the clash of values been sharper or more consequential. For Lincoln the supreme need was order—the security of the North, the survival of the Union. But the issue was not that simple. Only by subduing the South, Lincoln believed, could the slaves finally be freed. Only by emancipation, Phillips and others believed, could the President invoke the moral fervor and popular support necessary to win the war. The issue was resolved, temporarily, not by rational debate, but by soldiers and guns. Perhaps Frederick Douglass, impassioned though he had been over the issue, rendered a more lasting judgment. Had Lincoln put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered the resistance to rebellion impossible, the former slave wrote. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country… he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Second only to slavery as the supreme moral issue facing Americans was the rights of women. In Woodrow Wilson’s administration votes for women sharply posed both the moral and political dilemma of his presidency. Early in the century, after decades of frustrations, blocked by the veto traps in the constitutional system and often divided among themselves, many women suffrage leaders had concluded that a constitutional amendment was necessary and that the president, even though he had no formal role in the amending process, was key politically to a successful drive to mobilize popular backing. In 1912 they were heartened by Wilson’s support for votes for women, at least in principle but seemingly not in political practice. Women were not lacking in boldness. While Wilson was speaking against monopolies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Maude Malone suddenly rose in the audience.

Mr. Wilson, you just said you were trying to destroy a monopoly, and I ask you, what about woman suffrage? The men have a monopoly on that.

Woman suffrage, madam, is not a question that is dealt with by the national government at all, and I am here only as a representative of the national party.

I appeal to you as an American, Mr. Wilson.

I hope you will not consider it a discourtesy if I decline to answer this question on this occasion.…

Amid rising hubbub a burly detective swooped down on Maude Malone and carried her out.

Slowly over the next few years, letter by letter, conference by conference, setback by setback, suffrage leaders thrashed out tactical questions of intellectually baffling complexity. To what extent should the women’s movement try to work through either or both major parties, or leverage between them, or form its own party as of old? How strongly should it link with labor and consumers and even farmers? What political tactics should be used—electioneering (with most women voteless), propaganda, personal influence, militancy, even violence?

New leaders were rising, notably Carrie Chapman Catt and other militants. Early in 1917, on the eve of America’s declaring war, suffragists began picketing the White House itself. Standing motionless outside the gates, they held banners demanding How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty? Violence escalated as passersby tore the banners from their hands, and police began to arrest pickets rather than the malefactors. Thrown into a notorious workhouse, women protested their brutal treatment, underwent hunger strikes, suffered forced feeding—and became martyrs.

Catt’s ablest lieutenant was Helen Gardener, a wealthy Washingtonian who had personal access to Wilson. As a crucial House vote neared in late 1917, Gardener played on the commander in chief’s newest and strongest motivation by urging him to support suffrage as a war measure. Wilson finally agreed. With the president’s help the suffragists and their allies pushed the voting amendment through the House of Representatives by exactly the required two-thirds majority. Then the Senate, a tougher obstacle. Redoubling her White House operation, Gardener persuaded Wilson again and again to intervene with vacillating senators. In September 1918, on her urging and that of party leaders, the President staked his prestige on a sudden personal appearance before the Senate.

This is a people’s war, he said. Democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. But the magic two-thirds still could not be won in the Senate, which would wait another year to vote it through. It would take the women’s movement still another year to push the amendment through three-quarters of the states. It was a splendid but flawed victory for the suffragists, with implications for presidential leadership too. Why did Wilson, the fervent apostle of freedom, take such a moderate, cautious, centrist position on women’s suffrage, at a time when rivals such as Theodore Roosevelt and even Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson’s Republican foe in 1916, were taking bolder stands? In a country dedicated to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, and rededicated to equality by Lincoln, how could he accept the grossest inequality in women’s right to participate in democratic politics? Wilson took refuge, of course, in supporting state-by-state suffrage, but all knew that this was a hopeless alternative.

Finally Wilson came around, but on what basis? Not liberty or equality but mainly because of the suffragists’ militance. Some women, perhaps forgetting that their own efforts had often been disconnected from those of millions of other Americans lacking freedom, complained that Woodrow Wilson lacked moral leadership. He could in turn complain that he lacked effective followership.

Twenty years later this could have been the lament of Wilson’s protégé Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well. Midway in his second term FDR was heard to remark glumly, It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present. How could he say this—the President who had exuberantly presided over the one hundred days of emergency measures in 1933, the reformer who had put through the permanent New Deal in the progressive legislation of the second one hundred days of 1935, the grand reformer who had won all but two states in his reelection campaign? He could say it because the great mandate he had appeared to receive in 1936 had been followed by some painful defeats—the ignominious failure of his effort to pack the court, the dismal results of his attempt to purge the Senate of reactionary southern Democrats, the shocking recession that sent joblessness spiraling again.

Critics came up with various explanations for these setbacks—FDR’s lionlike boldness and radicalism; FDR’s foxlike cautiousness and centrism; the ferocity and resources of the conservative opposition; the constitutional checks and balances that inhibited comprehensive planning and action, as dramatized by the Supreme Court’s vetoes of major New Deal measures; the control of congressional committees by conservative southern Democrats.

The fundamental cause lay much deeper, in Roosevelt’s failure to mobilize a strong and dependable followership and his followers’ failure to gain a definable and dependable White House leadership.

Mobilization of the masses would have been difficult even for a masterful politician such as FDR. The masses were not massed, but rather fragmented or inert. Millions of Americans whom FDR had excited and politicized later followed strange populist gods—the anti-Semitic hate monger Charles Coughlin and his National Union for Social Justice, the populist Senator Huey Long and his Share the Wealth plan, the radical oldster Dr. Francis Townsend and his movement for federal pensions of $200 a month for everyone over sixty. These protest organizations were united only in their opposition to Roosevelt.

Unionists and populists and oldsters rallied to FDR’s banner in 1936, but many would be fair-weather friends as the New Deal faltered. What about the Democratic party? In most democracies party support would be the leader’s most dependable backing, but the Democrats too were divided between New Dealers and southern conservatives, with old Al Smith Democrats still on the outs with FDR. Like most presidents, Roosevelt