THE
TEMPER THING
The
rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Senator
John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to
do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in
the Senate? The role he played as one of the "Keating Five" in
the savings & loan scandal?
No,
it was something much worse than all that. Supposedly, John McCain
had a temper. The rumor was apparently bruited about by George
W. Bush's campaign, which would make an appropriate bookend to
his family's sojourn in national politics. After all, it was George
peers allies who put it about in 1988 that either Michael Dukakis
or his wife or both had a history of mental illness.
What
all this speaks to besides the willingness of Bushes young and
old to go to the mat is how much importance we now attach to "character"
in the Oval Office. Why character and why now? On a political
level, it probably reflects how the differences between the two
major parties have shrunk to almost nothing. And as a people,
Americans have become more "attuned" to their feelings that ever
before in our history sometimes to an almost nauseating degree.
But
to put it in full psychobabble just what do we mean when we talk
about character? And is it really such a bad thing to have a temper
when you're president? To judge from our history, the answer to
the latter question seems to be "No" as long as its the right
kind of temper.
Most
presidents and nearly all successful presidents have had displayed
some kind of temper at some time in their tenure. Its simply too
difficult to get so far in politics without so invaluable a tool.
Sooner or later, its going to behoove any president to get tough
with trucculent senators, evil foreign dictators, willful special
interests, corrupt criminal syndicates, recalcitrant state governors,
shillyshallying bureaucrats, and feckless relations. And then
there's the rest of us. Any man who could get to be president
without becoming at least occasionally fed-up with all the silly,
self-serving demands we make of him would have to be possessed
of an almost unnatural serenity.
About
the only presidents who seem to have been consistently genial
were William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, and Warren
G. Harding (at least, until Harding discovered that all of the
erstwhile friends he appointed to public office were robbing the
country blind.) None of them fared very well in office, save for
McKinley, who was assassinated by a man in a reception line who
pretended to have a bandaged hand. A little more impatience "Why
is that idiot trying to shake my hand with a cast?" might have
served him well.
Of
course, not all tempers are created or regarded as equals. The
Bush rumormongers were obviously trying to imply that McCain had
an uncontrollable, perhaps a psychotically bad temper that he
was a sort of "Manchurian candidate," permanently warped by his
wretched wartime experiences.
The
only president generally thought of as possessing a "crazy" bad
temper is Richard Nixon. Releases of tapes from the National Archives
continue to confirm the widespread notion that Nixon spent much
of his time in the White House doing a sort of free-form imitation
of Captain Queeg. (Some of the most recent excerpts, in the course
of a single conversation with Ehrlichman and Haldeman: "Were going
to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls
Mexico is a much more moral country [than the U.S.] You know what
happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. You know
what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were
fags the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries
ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out.")
Even
in his own time, Nixon's sort of temper did not play well no doubt
in part because of his repeated, Freudian need to let his darkest
inner conflicts slip. At the end of the first debate in the 1960
election, for instance, in closing remarks supposedly designed
to show that he, too, wanted to "get America moving again," he
repeated over and over again, "We cant stand pat" thereby inadvertently
invoking the name of his wife.
Lyndon
Johnson's temper was less tortured but probably even more vitriolic
than Nixon's, and found release in repeated, disgusting humiliations
of his wife and closest aides. It was at least a useful component
in the famous "Johnson treatment" of alternating flattery, intimidation,
and general cajolery that got so much legislation passed. It might
have been better applied, though, to all those respected Wise
Men and Ivy League experts who kept telling LBJ how we could win
a war on behalf of a people who did not want to fight. (Hey, it
worked with the French)
Peevish
bad temper also fails to play well something that Bob Dole might
have noted before his 1996 campaign. One need only look at the
Adamses, John and John Quincy, who were smarter than nearly everyone
else and spent most of their careers letting them know this. John,
Sr., once went so far as to call George Washington "a muttonhead";
it was not surprising that the disastrous Alien and Sedition Acts
he signed clamped down on ridiculing cartoonists and columnists.
Certain
tempers have more-or-less faded out of style. While Washington
famously exploded at one of his generals, Charles Lee, for blowing
the Battle of Monmouth during the Revolution, he mostly specialized
in a sort of majestic aloofness something that did wonders for
establishing the dignity of the office, but that would scarcely
be tolerated today. Then there was Calvin Coolidge, who got out
his aggressions by bullying his wife and playing tiresome practical
jokes on the White House staff. This sort of temper is enough
to make one thankful for the tell-all memoir.
There
are two sorts of temper that seem to have been all but indispensable
in the presidency. One is contrived indignation. Nothing is more
valuable in politics than the ability to summon up false anger
on a moments notice. A recent example is Bill Clinton conveniently
blowing up at Jesse Jackson within earshot of reporters during
the 1992 campaign. The all-time, Academy-Award-winning performance,
though, was put on in 1980 by unsurprisingly Ronald Reagan, when
he waylaid George Bush in a New Hampshire primary debate by declaring
"I paid for this microphone!" No matter that his campaign had
set up the whole incident or that his lines were taken almost
verbatim from a speech by Spencer Tracey in the 1948 film State
of the Union. It was an extremely effective piece of political
theatre.
The
other most effective presidential temper seems to be the ability
to channel all of the offices inherent frustrations and aggravations
into a focused, useful, limited hatred toward various person or
persons. Just how limited, of course, depends upon the president.
For Andrew Jackson, it extended (in part) to the Bank of the United
States ("The bank is trying to kill me, Mr. Van Buren, but I will
kill it!"), Henry Clay ("the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever
disgraced the image of his God), John C. Calhoun ("I will hang
him higher than Haman!"), and the British Empire (see "New Orleans,
Battle of").
And
yet, here is where the line between performance and reality becomes
smudged, as it always does in politics. No one would accuse Jackson
of faking his rages yet as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., pointed out
in The Age of Jackson, even his famous temper was often wielded
for political effect. He cites a quote from a Jackson contemporary,
Henry A. Wise: "He [Jackson] knew that the world counted him of
a temperament weak, impassioned, impulsive, and inconsiderate
in action; and he often turned this mistake as to character into
a large capital of advantage. He was a consummate actor, never
stepped without knowing and marking his ground, but knew that
most men thought he was not a man of calculations. This enabled
him to blind them by his affectation of passion and impulse."
Somehow,
the objects of Jackson's wrath all proved to be very useful enemies,
whose mutual animosity helped advance Jackson's own career. Most
successful presidents have had their personal bete noires, who
have proved similarly helpful as long as these hatred have been
kept within reasonable bounds. For Jefferson, it was Aaron Burr;
for John Kennedy, Richard Nixon. For Woodrow Wilson, the United
States Congress, which was certainly understandable but a little
too much. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was Robert Moses. FDR knew
enough to stop when his hatred threatened public works funds for
New York City during the 1930s but only with the very human appeal
to a visitor, "Is the President of the United States not entitled
to one personal grudge?"
Hatred
can be an animating force for statesmen, and sometimes a very
creative one. Theodore Roosevelt was renowned as "a good hater,"
and one who "knew how to cut a throat." Yet these seem to have
been mostly his attempts to, in Satchel Paiges phrase, "angry
up the blood." As biographer Edmund Morris put it, "The mans personality
was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of
low pressure. The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and
his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity,
while a stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure, Roosevelt
was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear."
One
president who seemed genuinely unable to contain his anger was
Harry Truman, and it cost him. It was one thing when Truman chewed
out the Soviet ambassador supposedly telling him, when he protested
such treatment, "Carry out your agreements and you wont be spoken
to that way!" or when he fired nasty barbs in the direction of
Bernard Baruch, John L. Lewis, and Drew Pearson. It was another
when he accused the Marine Corps of having "a propaganda machine
that is almost equal to Stalins" or when, in December, 1950, he
wrote an almost comically nasty letter to the Washington Posts
music critic, Paul Hume.
"Some
day I hope to meet you," Truman warned Hume, who had dared to
give daughter Margaret Truman's recital a bad review. "When that
happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for bad eyes,
and perhaps a supporter below!"
Never
before had a sitting president threatened to knee a music critic
in the groin. This was just the sort of outburst we now cherish
about Harry Truman, but it did not go over so well at the time,
once the Washington News printed the letter on its front page.
The U.S. was enmeshed in the worst stage of the Korean War at
the time, our troops being pushed back by the Chinese onslaught,
and millions of worried American mothers and fathers were in no
mood to sympathize over Margaret's professional travails. Letters
poured into the White House, denouncing Truman as "uncouth," "common,"
and even mentally unstable.
Yet
Paul Hume himself had tried to keep the letter from being published,
and was cognizant of the fact that Truman had recently endured
the death of his lifelong friend and press secretary, Charlie
Ross. Hume announced that he had voted for Truman and supported
him still, adding "I can only say that a man suffering the loss
of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis
ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper."
What
better proof that Americans will tolerate the hottest temper,
so long as they believe it is wielded on our behalf?
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
