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.” Uncle Sam is watching thepresident and says to him, “Considering that you’re not a foreign policy kindof guy, Mr.President, you’ve picked things up quickly.”23To look hard at the American presidency and the people who’ve occupiedit is not to be overly critical, and it’s not to imply that other countries havedone better.For example, here’s what a historian has to say about NikitaKhruschev:Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the unquestioned leader of the Soviet Unionfrom 1957 to 1964.In this fairly short span, he managed to provoke two major inter-national crises, survive a coup (a second toppled him), order two disastrous eco-nomic overhauls, and hold erratic confrontations with nearly everyone in sight – theChinese leadership, President Kennedy and Vice President Nixon, the neo-Stalinistsin his Presidium, and the Russian intellectuals in his midst.24This was the man with whom John Kennedy had to deal.Perhaps it is nosurprise that a result was the Vietnam War.THE GREATEST PRESIDENTIAL CHALLENGESTo assess the challenge to the American presidency in our time, we shouldrevisit the major challenges of our past.We’ll find that they were surmountedonly in part.In 1860, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln faced the situationthat there was a great evil, slavery, in the country but the electorate was verydivided about whether or not it ought to be disposed.Probably a majorityP1: KDD0521857449c18Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:30How Public Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership433didn’t want to end slavery.So Lincoln took the position that slavery was agreat evil but that his duty was only to preserve the union, not end slavery,and he initiated the Civil War on that issue.He continued to educate thecountry against slavery, but to refuse to act against it, until, late in 1862, theconditions were ripe to move against slavery, and he did then act to beginits abolition.Lincoln had political genius, and it shouldn’t be unexpected that a suc-cessful politician is good at his or her trade.25 But political genius is at best only a part of a presidential leadership.In fact, it may be a great shortcoming of democracy that the skills needed to attain office are impediments toperforming an effective leadership role.We often recognize this in privatediscussion when we say that a president is still campaigning and hasn’t real-ized that he or she has been elected and now has to govern.Lincoln was aneffective politician; yet his campaigning for office helped lead the countryinto a war that might have been avoided; and his frequent blunders in officemade that war the most costly in lives we have ever had, exceeding greatlyeven World War II.For example, with the crisis of the Civil War at hand, inthe months immediately proceeding Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg,and over the bitter personal objections of his top commanders in the field,“Lincoln was still making military appointments as political favors,” fillingthe Union Army with unqualified commanders who cost the nation muchin blood and treasure because of their incompetence.26 This is not to say that there wasn’t much to admire in Lincoln – there was, and some of it iscited in this book; but the overall record was more destructive and bloodythan necessary.Interestingly, many of the same people who today denouncethe use of even moderate force in political affairs continue to praise Lincolnfor what was unparalleled, in American history at least, resort to force in apolitical dispute.Apparently the slavery of African Americans was a suffi-cient evil to justify massive bloodshed; why isn’t the indiscriminate murderof thousands of American citizens by Islamic terrorists sufficient to justifymoderate bloodshed? Judgments that violence is justified in one circum-stance and not another are political – not historical nor even, in the broaderscope (that is, divorced from political convictions), objective.FDR’s situation paralleled Lincoln’s in 1933 when he took office.InGermany a great evil was emerging.Hitler was coming into power, andalthough FDR opposed Nazism he didn’t act against it because of isola-tionist sentiment in America.Our country was not prepared militarily toact, because although it was one of the victorious powers of World War Iand party to the Versailles treaty that had ended the war, we had disarmedafter the war and retreated into internal considerations.FDR recognized theP1: KDD0521857449c18Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:30434American Presidential Leadershipdanger, but the American public wasn’t ready to act, didn’t see the need, andwas stuck in isolationism and the Depression.So for almost a decade FDRmaneuvered in support of the other western democracies without being ableto tip the balance against Hitler.In April 1939, in an especially significantincident, FDR sent a telegram to Hitler asking him to guarantee the territo-rial integrity of twenty small nations in Europe and the Mideast.Hitler readthe telegram in a mocking voice to the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament),amid thunderous laughter from the Nazis who were the audience – an insultthat FDR waited a chance to repay.27 In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor causing Hitler to declare war on the United States, and finally FDRhad his opportunity to destroy Nazism with the American people standingunited behind him.This is how the story of these two momentous periods in our history isordinarily told.But there is more to both stories
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