American Experiment (406 page)

In October 1988, at the height of the presidential campaign, I was reminded of an earlier October—in 1932, when, amid the darkening red leaves on the mountainsides, Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt drove into Williamstown on the road along which the Berkshire troops had once marched to Bennington. His limousine passed Ben Simonds’s old tavern and then slid through the college precincts, slackening its pace so that all could see the cheery, hat-waving governor, but it did not stop. Perhaps he had heard something about Williams students’ political leanings. When the car did halt just beyond the college bounds, a frustrated throng caught up, crying, “Speech! Speech!” But FDR appeared far more interested in conversing with the politicos who crowded around his car. When an arm-waving party chieftain called for “three cheers for the next President of the United States,” hearty shouts for Hoover and a few yells for Norman Thomas rose in the autumn air. Unperturbed, FDR and his party moved on.

Later Roosevelt would set a standard for the presidency, in both its creative and its dangerous aspects. What has been less appreciated is the standard set by the “second-cadre” men and women around him, in the White House, his cabinet, his brain trust, his New Deal agencies. Frances Perkins and Harold Ickes and Thomas Corcoran and later George Marshall and Leon Henderson and always of course Eleanor Roosevelt have been celebrated enough—in part because many of FDR’s top people like Ickes and David Lilienthal were masterly diary-keepers—but the special greatness of these leaders lay in their capacity to draw a third cadre of leadership into the corridors of power.

It was the intellectual quality of the men and women of all three cadres that made the crucial difference. Jurists like Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black, politicians like Corcoran and Robert La Follette, Jr., legislators like
Representatives Thomas Eliot, Mike Monroney, and Albert Gore, or personages of the stature of Perkins or Eleanor Roosevelt herself were more interested in ideas than in political promotion or maneuver. No wonder, then, the comment of John Maynard Keynes in the mid-1930s that of “all the experiments to evolve a new order, it is the experiment of young America which most attracts my own deepest sympathy,” or Adlai Stevenson’s observation in the mid-1950s that the “next frontier is the quality, the moral, intellectual and aesthetic standards of the free way of life.”

Interviewing leaders like these, examining their lives, following the ebb and flow of their careers arouses a profound curiosity about the nature of intellectual and political leadership. Watching John Kennedy climb the greasy pole and reach the top while so young was a fascinating case study in human ambition, political skill, and audacity. As I came to know Kennedy during the 1950s, I found I was observing a politician who as a student of history and of major American politicians had had ample opportunity on Capitol Hill coolly to measure leaders at home and abroad. He had limned his own political heroes in
Profiles in Courage,
a portrayal of senators who had fought for their convictions at risk—often at fatal risk— to their political careers. Kennedy’s own career, however, suggested that he would not risk election defeat in pursuit of some Utopian principle.

Early in 1960 I published a study of Kennedy in which I expressed some doubt that he would show more than a profile in caution as candidate for President. The issue was intellectual and moral commitment as well as political. Though the book was generally positive toward the candidate, it did not meet the exacting standards of the Kennedy family and entourage. Jacqueline Kennedy in particular was disturbed by my portrait, which she felt made too much of the influence of his parents, his older brother Joe, and indeed his whole social background.

“You are like him in many ways,” she wrote beguilingly. “You know the hard parts and the pitfalls. Can’t you see that he is exceptional?

“Or is he to be just another sociological case history? Irish-Catholic, newly rich, Harvard-educated etc. — Does every man conform totally to his background? Surely there are some who contribute something of their own.…” She was most upset by my failure to emphasize more her husband’s learning experiences. What other candidate, she asked, had in his twenties talked to Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, Laski, had in his thirties known de Lattre, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, had been to Russia in Stalin’s day, had had friends in the French and English parliaments? “Jack was part of all that and it influenced him enormously.” She went on: “I think you underestimate him. Anyone sees he has the intelligence—magnetism and drive it takes to succeed in politics. I see, every succeeding week I am
married to him, that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self confidence and sureness of his powers.”

Jacqueline Kennedy’s letter was more than a wife’s brief for a husband— it was a reminder to biographers that their subjects can rise far above, or, by implication, fall far below, the psychological and sociological forces that have shaped them. And if John Kennedy turned to sundry Western leaders as role models, he in turn became a model for thousands of young would-be leaders. So had Eleanor Roosevelt for countless women, and so would Robert Kennedy later for young rebels, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for blacks.

The leadership gap that afflicts us today could be rather simply explained: our leaders were shot down. Yet a nation with strong second and third cadres can survive the loss of top leaders. While some of JFK’s best men left Lyndon Johnson’s administration during its first year, enough remained—and enough new talent came in with LBJ—to devise and launch the sweeping domestic programs of the Great Society. So there must be a more fundamental explanation for the decline of leadership, especially among liberal Democrats.

Does our foreign policy experience give us a clue? The leadership group that had waged the battle against isolationism in the late 1930s fell victim to the cold war mentality following World War II—with considerable assistance from Stalin—and two decades later younger men and women were even more victimized by the cold war. For they were stigmatized whatever side they took on Vietnam. As the Democratic party establishment collapsed in 1968, those who stuck with the Vietnam War went down with it, while those who broke with the war became isolated in the McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and McGovern secessions. Men and women on both sides later became university presidents or deans, foundation heads, distinguished attorneys, writers, and teachers. But what many of them in the 1970s were
not
doing was what they should have been doing when their turn came in the rise and fall of leadership generations—running the government. It is their exile, along with the withering away of the Stimson-Eisenhower-Rockefeller presidential Republican party, which helped produce the critical leadership gap of the last two decades.

And yet, the sources of our leadership failures lie deeper than electoral prudence or political assassinations, cold war attitudes, or foreign policy disasters. They lie in habits of thought long shaped in a land that has
allowed ample leeway for social and political as well as economic and industrial innovation, on the part of people who like tinkering and patching up and proceeding “by guess and by God.” Looking back over two hundred years, the chronicler sees the American Experiment as a series of planned or unplanned experiments—ventures in a written Constitution, a Bill of Rights, checks and balances, federalism, Jacksonian democracy; in isolationism, expansion, empire building, Wilsonian internationalism, cold war interventionism, bountiful foreign aid; in slavery, civil war butchery, emancipation, serfdom, southern white rule; in massive migration and immigration, industrial innovation and giantism, Social Darwinism, New Deal regulation, Keynesian spending, war economics, laissez-faire; in nuclear attack; in race hatred and segregation, exploitation of women and children, Prohibition, repeal, depression, joblessness, drugs, poverty; in public education, social movements, populism, desegregation, literary and artistic creativity, youth rebellion, scientific discovery, space exploration.

But the grand experiment that transcended all the others was the effort to expand both individual liberty and real equality of opportunity for all—the supreme promise of the Declaration of Independence, the campaign pledge of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians and their successors, the subject of Tocqueville’s most penetrating observations, the core of the epic struggle of the 1860s, the essence of the twentieth-century philosophical battles over the dynamic tension and interplay between liberty and equality. This experiment was called Freedom, combining as it did liberty and equality. And this doctrine of freedom was forged and promoted by liberals of all creeds, liberals in both parties and third parties, Republican liberals like Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Clifford Case, Democratic liberals like Wilson and Al Smith and FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Jordan, Truman and LBJ, Senators Lehman and Wagner, Fulbright and Kefauver, and three leaders by the name of Kennedy.

The political and intellectual vehicle for the ideology of freedom was called liberalism. So pervasive was this doctrine in American history, so comprehensive its reach in American politics, that liberalism and liberals seemed unassailable. During the 1980s, however, Reaganites converted this mild and venerable word into a hate object. Where in the old days conservatives had attacked communism and socialism, now they were moving toward the heart of their target. At the same time, liberalism was ripe for a fall. Like some old mansion top-heavy with junk-filled attics and sagging excrescences but weak in its foundations, liberalism collapsed of overextension—its overemphasis on individualism and pluralism, its
flabby appeal across the wide center of the political and intellectual spectrum that resulted in a lack of core values.

All these tendencies reflected habits of thought that foster experimentation but at the same time lead to an excessive reliance on expediency, short-run planning, opportunism, and ultimately to the erosion of the supreme values—liberty and equality—by which the experiments themselves must be tested.

I completed the writing of this volume during the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Doubtless my dismay over the quality of late-twentieth-century leadership in both parties, and especially in the Democracy, has been deepened by the inevitable contrast with the thinkers and politicians of the late eighteenth century. Historians have long studied the personal qualities of the Framers that led to that explosion of talent in Philadelphia in 1787. Some of their findings are summarized in a capsule explanation of mine I like to quote: they were well bred, well fed, well read, well led, and well wed. But the thousand or so delegates to the state ratifying conventions often lacked some or all of these advantages: many came from poor, low-status families, they had little or no formal schooling, they were cut off from the main leadership networks, and their brides rarely brought them the several thousand acres of land that could provide leisure for deep thought. How then explain the intellectual capacity of the second-cadre leadership that came to the fore in the ratification debates?

The answer, I think, lies in the transcending, even overwhelming moral and intellectual commitment that these early Americans made first to independence from Britain, then to a new constitutional order, and finally to the Bill of Rights, all within the twenty years between the early 1770s and the early 1790s. All these commitments were crucial, and each vivified the others. The leaders, national and local, had staked their hopes and their lives on a carefully thought-out balance of liberty and order. In a time of tumultuous conflict they had fought their colonial governors in America, their imperial masters in London, and then one another, for what they considered the highest purpose. And because every major step they took was informed by a powerful but incalculable moral passion as well as a calculation of grand political strategy, they spoke from the heart as well as the head.

It is this combination of moral and intellectual commitment that I find so lacking in our current politics. All political leaders in democracies are brokers, finaglers, manipulators; the question is whether they rise above
this when fundamental issues reach crucial turning points. FDR transcended his foxlike maneuvering when he moved to the left in 1935 and 1936, when he tried to deal with a deadlocked political system during his second term, as he came to confront the menace of Nazism, when he sought to leave a legacy of world peace and security in postwar plans for the United Nations and in settlements with the Russians. John Kennedy made the kind of commitment of the heart as well as head that the presidency called for in his third and last year in office, setting a standard for his successors. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, struck one as merely opportunistic to the last, operational, pragmatic in the worst sense—he earned the appellation “Tricky Dick.” Conservative Republicans had to wait for Reagan to make a firm, strategic commitment to rightist doctrine— a commitment hopelessly snarled in Reagan’s White House.

Aside from Reagan and Jesse Jackson, presidential candidates in the 1980s seemed all of a piece—cool, calculating, prudent, carefully choosing and exploiting issues on the basis of public opinion polls and media attention. They were leading with their heads, not their hearts. A year or so after JFK became President I saw in him four Kennedys—the rhetorical radical, the policy liberal, the fiscal moderate, the institutional conservative—and I expected that the four tendencies could not live together indefinitely. Presidential candidates today seem equally fragmented—able rhetoricians, fine policy analysts, fiscally cautious, sublimely indifferent to the fact that their larger hopes and programs cannot be achieved through our splintered and often deadlocked governmental machinery. The candidates forswear ideology, not recognizing that they themselves possess ideologies of flabby liberalism or cloudy conservatism.

Moral passion informing intellectual power harnessed securely to explicit, overriding ends or values—this must be the essence of twenty-first-century leadership.