WHEN PRESIDENTS BECOME WEAK
Robert Dallek
THE HISTORIAN RICHARD HOFSTADTER SAID THAT AMERICA IS THE only nation in history that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement. The country’s success as the richest and most powerful nation has helped sustain the myth of American perfection at home and exceptionalism in the world. But given the numerous stumbles the country has experienced at home—assassinations, recessions, corrupt public officials, and an inability to master a variety of social problems, including unsustainable medical costs, forty-seven million people lacking health insurance, a flawed system of public education, and millions of undocumented immigrants—it is difficult to imagine that most Americans still see the country as without major defects. As for those who still believe that foreigners everywhere aspire to imitate our way of life, they must wonder why millions in Iraq and Afghanistan, like the Vietnamese, refuse to follow our lead toward democracy.
Domestic and foreign doubts about American exceptionalism have registered most robustly in assessments of the country’s chief executives. Although Americans see every presidential election as an exercise in renewal or harbor expectations that a new administration or a second term for an incumbent carries with it the promise of better days, it is an optimism that is invariably disappointed. Despite partisan pronouncements by party chiefs about the achievements of their respective presidents, examples of public frustration with each administration are legion. Only Franklin Roosevelt was able to win more than eight years as president, and his successful bids for third and fourth terms rested on unique circumstances. All other presidents, excluding the seven who died in office, ended their terms under political storm clouds. Some, mindful of their diminished popularity, gave up running for a second term; others—William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush in the last century—unsuccessfully tested their appeal for additional years in power.
With the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, those who retired after more than four years as chief executive departed to the sounds of grumbling about the nation’s state of affairs. In the last century Woodrow Wilson was a defeated foreign policy leader unable to convince senators and the public to back the settlement he had negotiated at Versailles; Harry Truman, dogged by a stalemate in Korea, could muster only 32 percent approval ratings; Dwight Eisenhower left behind a country frustrated by an economic downturn, fearful of eclipse by Soviet power, and experiencing a lost sense of national purpose; Lyndon Johnson was in disrepute over the Vietnam War that he seemed incapable of winning or ending honorably; Richard Nixon had to resign or be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors for his role in the Watergate scandal; Ronald Reagan suffered the embarrassment of unprecedented deficits and the Iran-contra affair, which threatened administration officials with prison terms; impeachment for personal transgressions shadowed Bill Clinton’s departure; and George W. Bush left town hounded by complaints about an unnecessary war in Iraq and the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.
These downturns in presidential fortunes were not inevitable. While uncontrollable circumstances partly explain these presidential troubles, the presidents themselves contributed to their difficulties by poor policy decisions or stumbling leadership, especially, but not exclusively, in response to foreign crises. Presidential actions during World Wars I and II as well as in the Korean, Vietnamese, and Iraq conflicts fueled contemporary and retrospective concerns that undermined their reputations.
Take, first, the case of Woodrow Wilson. In the thirties Winston Churchill is alleged to have said that if Wilson had kept the United States out of the fighting, the war might have ended in a stalemate. Moreover, a deadlock could have meant not Germany’s national frustration, which helped propel Adolf Hitler and the Nazis into power, but a sense of shared loss across national lines that might have produced less passion for revenge and greater eagerness for accommodation. It was certainly a plausible alternative to the miserable one that brought so much destruction to Europe for the second time in a generation.
Two other alternatives might have spared Europe and the world from the second round of suffering. The Allies could have followed Wilson’s proposal for a generous settlement that lived up to his advocacy of a peace without victors. But this would have been decidedly at odds with the intense emotions for revenge in the victorious nations. A more likely possibility would have been an Allied occupation of Germany that could have shaped a different future from the one produced by imposing a harsh Versailles Treaty on the defeated powers and expecting rather than compelling them to live up to its clauses. An occupied Germany, as after World War II, would not have taken the turn toward the ultra-nationalism Hitler dictated—at least not if the Allies had maintained a long-term presence that aimed at the creation of a democratic society. As long as the Allies were unwilling to enforce the treaty directly, they were in no position to control the economic and political developments in Germany that facilitated the rise of Nazism.
But it was not only in Europe that the postwar settlement planted seeds of discontent. In the United States, where disillusionment with Wilson’s unrealized peace program revived traditional isolationism, Washington became a helpless observer of the downward spiral toward international disaster.
Wilson’s prewar defense of American neutral rights, which he equated with the advancement of international law, was an error that ill served U.S. and international interests. It was not as if no one had seen these dangers; Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest against Wilson’s policy. It is a tragic irony that Wilson, America’s greatest advocate of international peace, inadvertently involved the United States in unwanted bloodshed and helped create conditions that led directly to a second world war.
The election in 1920 of Warren G. Harding, a Midwestern Babbitt as different from Wilson as any successor could have been, demonstrated the depths of Wilson’s personal and foreign policy unpopularity. Harding’s unsuitability for the country’s highest office was transparent within two years of his election. The corruption of people around him and his obvious limits as a chief executive would have put his reelection in doubt. In the midst of an economic downturn early in his term, he admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what to do.
Harding’s sudden death in 1923 opened the way for Calvin Coolidge, his very different vice president, to win a decisive victory in the following year. Scrupulous and taciturn, the embodiment of old-fashioned values in a time of rapid social change from a rural to an urban society, Coolidge reflected the current antipathy for federal activism and attraction to isolation from overseas political commitments. While his hands-off policies served him and the country well enough in the short run, they were a prescription for long-term disaster. His decision not to run in 1928 spared him the burden of dealing with the economic collapse that beset Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1933.
Hoover’s rigid economic outlook made him the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. An architect of humanitarian relief during World War I and the Russian Civil War of 1918–21, he ironically left office with a reputation as a rigid ideological conservative more intent on preserving free market principles than easing the plight of his fellow Americans. The designation of shantytowns as Hoovervilles spoke volumes about his standing in Depression America.
Although New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to win a decisive victory in 1932 and establish himself as the greatest president in twentieth-century America, he was not without failings. His blunder in 1937 in proposing to increase the number of Supreme Court justices as a way to overcome its conservative bias and rejection of New Deal legislation was not the greatest misstep of his twelve-year presidency. Nor was his turn toward economic caution in 1937–38 that caused a recession or even his relatively passive response between 1941 and 1945 to news of the Nazi Holocaust against Europe’s Jews. Although some have described his response to the Nazi killing program as an “abandonment” of the Jews, the extent of what Roosevelt might have accomplished had he been more determined to counter Nazis actions is open to debate.
It was Roosevelt’s ill-advised decision in 1944 to run for a fourth term that stands out as his greatest error of leadership. He was in failing health and too frail to serve another four years as president. To be sure, he had the precedent of a Grover Cleveland, who had hidden a surgery for cancer of the jaw at the start of his second term in 1893. Roosevelt could also invoke the analogue of Wilson, who had refused to resign despite being in much worse shape from a massive stroke than FDR appeared to be in 1944. Similarly, Coolidge had not been in full command of his capacities during his presidency after he had fallen into a depression when a teenage son died of blood poisoning. Although encouraged by his doctors to believe that he could manage to lead the country through the end of the war and into the postwar period, Roosevelt died less than three months into his fourth term. Having failed to inform Vice President Harry S. Truman about the atomic bomb or about his postwar plans, Roosevelt left an unelected president to deal with the great end-of-war and post-1945 challenges.
When it became known that he was a dying man who had recklessly run for a fourth time in 1944, Roosevelt came under sharp attack for his performance during his brief last term, especially at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Although any close assessment of events at this second wartime meeting among Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin suggests otherwise, the president’s conservative critics impugned his historical reputation by asserting that he gave away Eastern Europe to Soviet control; Stalin allegedly extracted concessions from a frail president unable to defend U.S. interests. As any balanced reconstruction of the Yalta context shows, the Soviets had the military might to impose their will on Poland and its surrounding neighbors no matter what Roosevelt and Churchill said. Nonetheless, Roosevelt made himself vulnerable to the later political attacks on his historical reputation by trying to serve for a fourth term in a weakened state of health. Roosevelt believed he was indispensable to the nation’s well-being, but as the French leader Charles de Gaulle later asserted, the graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Few Americans thought that Harry Truman could possibly be a credible replacement for the storied FDR. Initially he gained the public trust by ending the war and arranging the establishment of the United Nations. But daunting postwar economic and international problems—continuing shortages of consumer goods, strikes, inflation, and rising worries about Communist aggression abroad and subversion at home—convinced most contemporary commentators that Truman could not manage demobilization without an economic collapse reminiscent of the Depression or a peace settlement that kept Germany and Japan at bay and maintained good relations with Soviet Russia. A decisive Democratic Party setback in the 1946 congressional elections, in which the Republicans asked, “Had enough shortages? Had enough inflation? Had enough strikes? Had enough communism?,” seemed to foretell a Truman defeat in the 1948 presidential election.
But a series of foreign policy actions in 1947 and 1948 highlighted by the Truman Doctrine to rescue Greece and Turkey from communism, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, and the Berlin airlift, which saved the western part of the city from East German Communist control, gave Truman credentials as a strong foreign policy leader. Nevertheless, none of the pollsters predicted a Truman victory in the presidential contest. But a brilliantly designed election campaign that appealed to the Democratic Party’s liberal base and endeared Truman to voters as well as his unexciting opponent, New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who ran a low-key campaign that compared poorly with Truman’s whistle-stop cross-country tour, produced the greatest upset in presidential history.
Truman’s triumph, however, was short-lived. By 1951, two years into his term, his approval ratings had collapsed, and he was a lame-duck president who could neither effectively control foreign policy nor enact his Fair Deal agenda of domestic reforms promised in the campaign.
His problem was a stalemated war in Korea. The initial attack in June 1950 on Syngman Rhee’s anti-Communist South Korea by Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, a Soviet satellite, had brought the United States into the fighting. Post-1945 Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, including a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, joined to Moscow’s detonation of an atomic bomb in September 1949, at least five years earlier than anticipated, and the triumph in the following month of Mao Zedong’s Communists in a Chinese civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists made another Communist conquest politically unacceptable to Washington. By the fall of 1950 the successful defense of South Korea had opened the way to consideration of an invasion of the north and the possible ouster of a Communist regime. After so many Communist advances in the previous five years, the liberation of a country from Soviet control was irresistible.
But unifying the Korean peninsula under a pro-Western government carried risks of a wider war with China and the Soviet Union. Truman had his doubts about reaching for more than the rescue of Rhee’s government. In October, at a meeting on Wake Island with General Douglas MacArthur, the highly regarded hero of the World War II Pacific fighting, the architect of Japan’s reconstruction, and the organizer of the successful offensive that drove the North Koreans back above the thirty-eighth parallel, Truman asked for reassurances that an invasion of the north would not cause a new, larger crisis. MacArthur promised a quick victory without Chinese or Soviet involvement, predicting that if Beijing entered the conflict, it would result in its decisive defeat.
Truman was only too ready to hear optimistic forecasts of a prompt and successful end to the fighting. Political pressures in the United States made it almost essential for the president to liberate North Korea from Communist control. To stop at the parallel would have been in line with the administration’s containment policy of holding the Communists in check until their predicted collapse from internal contradictions. But right-wing critics saw this as a weak response to Moscow’s and Beijing’s ambitions for world dominance. As 1952 Republican vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon was to say of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, who supported the Truman foreign policy, he had a Ph.D. from Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist containment. Without rollback or liberation, Truman risked a political attack on his administration that put in jeopardy his political influence and his party’s chances in the 1952 elections.
Crossing the parallel, however, produced the consequences it was meant to forestall. Not only did the Chinese enter the fighting in great numbers, but they also proved to be formidable foes whose defeat seemed to require much more power than the Truman administration or a majority of Americans were willing to use. Whereas MacArthur wished to expand the fighting from Korea into China and even to resort to atomic bombs if necessary, neither the president nor the public shared his preference for actions that could lead to another world war.
MacArthur’s public advocacy of a wider war was an act of insubordination that ran counter to the tradition of civilian over military authority. Truman could not leave it unchallenged. He abruptly recalled MacArthur from Japan and forced his retirement from the service. His dismissal of the general produced a firestorm of criticism that did as much to undermine the president’s public standing as to protect the prerogatives of his office. Opinion polls showed that majorities did not favor MacArthur’s wider war solution or his defiance of the White House but took exception to the president’s unceremonious dismissal of a military hero people felt deserved better of the chief executive.
The downturn in Truman’s political fortunes accelerated as casualties in the fighting increased and victory seemed unlikely without expanding the conflict to the Chinese mainland. Because neither side seemed capable of decisively defeating the other in a continuing conflict confined to Korea, they agreed to begin truce talks in the summer of 1951. But the discussions reached an impasse over exchanging the more than one hundred thousand Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war for the roughly twelve thousand American and South Korean POWs. The Chinese demanded an all-for-all swap, and the United States favored voluntary repatriation. Since the U.S. proposal seemed certain to produce a propaganda victory for Washington, Beijing and Pyongyang denounced the suggested arrangement as entirely unacceptable.
The difference became an insurmountable barrier to a settlement. Determined to have more than the restoration of South Korea’s autonomy as the result of the fighting that eventually cost the United States more than thirty-five thousand battlefield deaths, Truman could not reach a peace agreement in Korea. Public frustration with the war drove the president’s approval rating to a low of 23 percent and left him powerless to enact his domestic Fair Deal reforms at home or further build NATO defenses in Europe, which critics complained the administration should have been putting at the center of its defense against Communist aggression.
Crossing the parallel was a disaster that destroyed Truman’s effectiveness and made his second four years a washout. True, his historical reputation greatly outpaced his contemporary standing. Fifty-six years after he left office he is currently remembered as at least a near great president. His reversal of fortunes rests on America’s victory in the Cold War, which most historians agree was the result of the containment policy that held the Soviet Union in check without a direct military conflict until the contradictions in its economic and political institutions caused its self-destruction.
Nevertheless, the decision to expand the fighting in Korea to bring down Kim’s Communist regime ruined Truman’s last two and a half years in office. An end to the fighting in the fall of 1950 could have been presented as a triumph over Communist aggression, served as a warning against future military adventures by Moscow and Beijing, and left Truman free to work for the domestic reforms he proposed in 1948. In short, crossing the parallel was a blunder that trapped Truman in a disastrous war that played havoc with his presidency.
Could Truman have rejected a policy of invading North Korea and the subsequent conflict with China? Certainly the domestic political pressure on him to act aggressively was compelling and was much more the motive for going north than any national security consideration. A decision to stop at the parallel would have provoked fierce political attacks on his leadership. But a rational explanation of what it would have risked in causing a wider war with China and possibly a military conflict with Russia could have promoted sober second thoughts among millions of Americans, who could have accepted the wisdom of simply rescuing South Korea. Knowing how things turned out, of course, makes it easier to offer this judgment. But clearly, restraint was Truman’s better option and would have spared the country and his administration considerable grief. It is not unreasonable to conclude that he exercised poor judgment in behaving as he did.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have not been as fortunate as Truman in having their historical reputations boosted by recent events. The failed war in Vietnam continues to dog the presidential standings of both men.
For Johnson, Vietnam was the most dramatic and transparent demonstration of failed foreign policy leadership by a president in the twentieth century, though Wilson’s aborted peace program is an unenviable rival. The backdrop to Vietnam was the riots in the inner-city ghettos that critics blamed on Johnson’s overindulgent treatment of minorities; the stumbling War on Poverty that conservatives complained created a generation of welfare cheats and allowed Ronald Reagan to joke: “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won” and Johnson’s affinity for exaggerated claims, which produced a “credibility gap” and made Johnson vulnerable to comedians, who asked, “How do you know when Lyndon Johnson is telling the truth? When he pulls his earlobe, rubs his chin, he’s telling the truth. But when he begins to move his lips, you know he’s lying.”
Despite Johnson’s incomparable record of groundbreaking domestic reforms, led by civil rights and Medicare, he seems unlikely ever to overcome the many poor decisions he made between 1963 and 1969 about the Vietnam War. Within days of becoming president he told American Ambassador to Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge, “I’m not going to be the first president to lose a war.” Instead of judiciously weighing the advantages and disadvantages of fighting in Southeast Asia, Johnson jumped to the conclusion that he could lead the United States to victory. Never mind that the French with a long history of involvement in the region could not control events there or that Truman’s experience in Korea should have been a cautionary tale giving Johnson pause. His instincts told him that superior American military power would defeat the Communist insurgency promptly and certainly before the war became a politically crippling source of frustration to most Americans, as it had in Korea.
His miscalculations about the dangers to the United States from losing Vietnam skewed his judgments or inhibited him from giving closer scrutiny to the unlikely effectiveness of U.S. forces fighting in jungles ten thousand miles from Washington. He shared President Dwight Eisenhower’s assumption that the countries of Southeast Asia were like a series of dominoes that would fall to the Communists if South Vietnam were not defended against Soviet-Chinese–North Vietnamese–inspired aggression. Moreover, Johnson saw the defense of Saigon as equal to avoiding the Anglo-French error in appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938. Johnson believed that losing South Vietnam would embolden the Communists and possibly lead to a world war. He intended to fight in Vietnam in order not to risk a larger nuclear conflict.
There were domestic political dimensions as well to Johnson’s initial actions on Vietnam. Memories of Republican attacks on the Truman administration for having “lost” China to the Communists haunted Johnson. He imagined a similar onslaught against his leadership if South Vietnam fell. He believed it would become a distraction from the Great Society reforms he hoped to enact and would ruin his chances of becoming a great president.
In addition, he thought that setbacks in Vietnam could jeopardize his prospects in the 1964 presidential election. Consequently, in the summer of 1964, in the midst of his campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, a superhawk, an alleged attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin became a chance to blunt Republican complaints about weakness in meeting the Communist threat. Johnson extracted a resolution of support from the Congress to counter acts of Communist aggression in Vietnam. He believed that the congressional endorsement would not only immobilize conservative complaints about a weak foreign policy but also assure him against future political criticism should the fighting require greater commitments than he anticipated. Privately, he crowed: “The resolution was just like grandma’s nightshirt, it covered everything.”
In February 1965, after Johnson had decisively defeated Goldwater, a Communist assault on Pleiku in Vietnam’s Central Highlands killed eight U.S. military advisers and wounded dozens more. With the election out of the way, Johnson’s concern remained to mute a foreign policy problem that could shift the focus from domestic reforms, which were his highest priority. Still seeing a passive response as encouraging additional acts of aggression in Vietnam and elsewhere, Johnson decided to use American air power against the North to raise morale in Saigon and discourage Hanoi from supporting further attacks. He ordered a sustained bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, on the mistaken assumption that Hanoi would respond to air strikes on its military facilities by limiting or even ending support for the Vietcong insurgency in the South. The New York Times now reported that the United States had begun “an undeclared and unexplained war in Vietnam.”
By the summer of 1965 it was evident that air power would not assure South Vietnam’s autonomy and that some greater military pressure would be necessary to defeat the Communist campaign in the south. The limited results of the air war frustrated Johnson. He complained to his press secretary that there was no light at the end of the tunnel from the bombing. “Hell,” he said, “we don’t even have a tunnel; we don’t even know where the tunnel is.”
The only alternative he saw to a long-term conflict that seemed likely to test domestic patience and result in a Communist victory was a commitment of substantial ground forces that he hoped could produce a quick end to the fighting. In July 1965 he announced that one hundred thousand combat troops would be sent to Vietnam. His decision now rested on two erroneous judgments. First, he mistakenly believed that one hundred thousand infantrymen could make a quick end to the war, and second, he thought he could mute the importance of the commitment by announcing it at a news conference in which he also revealed that he was filling a Supreme Court vacancy with Abe Fortas, a distinguished jurist and old friend, and that one of his daughters was pregnant.
By the beginning of 1966 both assumptions had proved false. The war was not being won and was daily front-page news, agitating an antiwar movement on college campuses. In January, Johnson concluded that he needed to deploy another 120,000 troops, but to hide his decision, he told advisers that he would announce an increase of 10,000 a month over the next twelve months. The ploy was ineffective; opposition to a conflict that dissenters in the United States complained was a civil war, which did not threaten the national security and would be interpreted as the actions of a Western imperial power seeking to maintain a colony in Southeast Asia, made Vietnam a domestic controversy that threatened to ruin Johnson’s presidency. It was a distressing irony: while he believed that inaction in Vietnam would destroy his credibility and undermine his capacity to win passage of Great Society reforms, the military action was producing just that result.
Yet the more antiwar opponents challenged Johnson’s policy, the more determined he became to prove them wrong. By 1968 he had sent 545,000 troops to South Vietnam despite clear indications that the war was a stalemate or could not be won without an invasion of North Vietnam. But fears that such an expansion of the fighting would bring China and the Soviet Union into the conflict persuaded Johnson to resist advice either to use “battlefield” nuclear weapons against the Communists or to send ground forces north of the seventeenth parallel to topple Hanoi’s Communist government.
In the spring of 1968 Johnson found himself in a political trap of his own making. On March 31, after a North Vietnamese Tet offensive at the start of the year refuted Johnson’s claims that the United States was winning the war, he announced his intention to begin peace talks. Also recognizing that the war had destroyed his domestic political standing, Johnson revealed that he would not seek another presidential term. Secret promises from Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon to South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu that he would get a better deal from a Nixon administration than from Johnson in any peace agreement convinced Thieu to resist Johnson’s pressures to discuss a truce.
By every count, Johnson’s Vietnam policies were a failure. Not only did more than thirty thousand U.S. troops perish along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese during his presidency, but the fighting did nothing to advance Johnson’s domestic agenda or promote America’s national security. To the contrary, the war destroyed Johnson’s political hold on the country and undermined its credibility with allies and foes. From the perspective of 2009, twenty years after the Cold War ended, it is apparent that fighting in Vietnam was entirely superfluous to winning the struggle with Soviet communism. The North Vietnamese takeover of the south in 1975 had zero impact on the larger Cold War struggle. As both Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and John Kennedy’s and LBJ’s first national security adviser McGeorge Bundy freely admitted after they had left office, the Vietnam War was a mistake; its only retrospective value was as an object lesson in what a president and the country should not have done.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, despite their vaunted reputations as foreign policy realists, did not fare any better with Vietnam than Johnson. They were convinced from the start of Nixon’s presidency in January 1969 that acknowledging American defeat in the war would undermine the confidence of allies in America’s defense commitments and encourage the aggressive ambitions of Communist adversaries.
At a minimum, Nixon and Kissinger believed that they needed to convince the world that they had achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Initially, they thought that increased military pressure on Hanoi could force it into an acceptable settlement. Specifically, in April and May 1970 they authorized a combined U.S.–South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that aimed to cut North Vietnam’s supply lines to the south. In a nationally televised speech defending the “incursion,” Nixon offered an apocalyptic view of America’s stake in holding the line in Vietnam: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” He concluded by declaring, “We will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated.”
Nixon’s defense of the Cambodian attack was an exercise in hyperbole that provoked renewed antiwar protests on campuses across the country: Students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi lost their lives, and turmoil on other campuses forced the early end of spring terms at several colleges and universities.
The invasion did little, if anything, to halt Hanoi’s assault on the South or to assure peace with honor. Because it was politically essential for Nixon to withdraw American ground troops from Vietnam if he was to win a second term and because he had no way to compel a peace agreement that assured Saigon’s future autonomy, he announced a program of Vietnamization, the transfer of military security in South Vietnam from U.S. forces to South Vietnamese troops. Despite the questionable ability of Saigon’s army to keep the country safe, especially when a 1971 offensive in Laos demonstrated its inadequacies, the Nixon White House publicly maintained that Vietnamization was a viable alternative to a continuing U.S. military presence in the country.
It was another false note in the litany of failures that dogged the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations in trying to save South Vietnam from communism. The defeat in Vietnam produced a public relations cover-up: The Nixon administration tried to persuade the world that the sacrifice of more than fifty-eight thousand American lives in the conflict was essential to America’s national security and that the peace settlement in January 1973 was based on guarantees that South Vietnam would not become the victim of Hanoi’s aggression. The occupation of the South by the North in January 1975 gave the lie to peace with honor and demonstrated that even the most tough-minded foreign policy realists like Nixon and Kissinger could be the victims of self-defeating illusions. Because misjudgments in fighting the war were too painful for most civilian and military architects of the failed policies to concede, they defended themselves by arguing that South Vietnam’s demise could be balanced against the “fact” that the defense of South Vietnam had given other Southeast Asian countries time to develop their economic and political wherewithals to resist Communist subversion.
Other failures of presidential leadership dogged the country after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Foremost among these was Nixon’s forced resignation in August 1974, following revelations of his involvement in the Watergate cover-up scandal. The unprecedented decision of a president to leave office before the end of his term was compelled by the understanding that he was vulnerable to becoming the first president to be ousted from office by a Senate trial for high crimes and misdemeanors. Nixon’s resignation moved Gerald Ford, his successor, to declare: “Our long national nightmare is over.” But not entirely: His pardon of Nixon in 1974 opened Ford to political attacks that underscored his ineptitude in making domestic and foreign policy and contributed to his defeat in the 1976 presidential election.
The national distress at failed presidential leadership continued under the next five presidents: Jimmy Carter’s stumbling presidency punctuated by the limitations on oil exports of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and gasoline rationing in the United States; the Iran hostage crisis, which demonstrated America’s powerlessness to control the actions of a weaker Middle East adversary; and domestic economic dislocations, including stagflation, limited him to one term. Ronald Reagan’s restoration of national confidence in presidential leadership through his talent for communication with a mass audience and contributions to the successful ending of the Cold War could not entirely eclipse the feelings of distrust toward occupants of the White House generated by past misdeeds and a new scandal involving policy toward Iran and the contras, conservative opponents of a leftist Nicaraguan regime. Reagan’s apparent ignorance of the unlawful actions in the Iran-contra affair by some of his closest associates raised later questions about whether his Alzheimer’s disease had begun to affect him and about the wisdom of having someone past seventy serve as president.
George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, gained initial approval by putting the finishing touches on Reagan’s efforts to bring down the Soviet Union. But his ineffective response to a recession that allowed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to frame the 1992 presidential election by declaring, “It’s the economy, stupid,” made Bush another one-term president. Bush’s competence as a foreign policy leader and his limited interest in and/or understanding of domestic issues revived doubts about the capacity of any individual to master the multiple challenges of the modern presidency.
Although Clinton managed to serve two terms, winning reelection against Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, another elderly Republican, his presidency also came to grief when he was impeached for having lied about a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-one-year-old White House intern. His acquittal in a Senate trial added to sharp divisions between Democrats and Republicans and to the belief that national consensus was beyond the reach of any president. Despite surviving accusations that he had committed perjury, Clinton could not fully repair the damage to either his reputation or the presidency, which once more suffered diminished public regard.
The start of a new century could not reverse a distressing trend toward what seemed like permanent doubts about the integrity and wisdom of the men—and now women—who were putting themselves forward as leaders worthy of elevation to the White House. The disputed 2000 presidential election added to beliefs that the country’s political system was badly in need of repair and that the United States might have seen its best days. Governor George W. Bush’s victory over Vice President Al Gore reminded many of the 1876 contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, which had to be settled by a special commission that satisfied no one. Hayes’s critics belittled him as “Rutherfraud,” and Tilden supporters had to be discouraged from acting on threats of “Tilden or blood.”
The 2000 contest evoked complaints of another undemocratic result: Bush not only lost the popular vote but also had a questionable victory in Florida, the deciding state in the contest, which the Supreme Court put into his column with a sharply divided 5–4 vote that many believed an inappropriate intervention in a state election.
George W. Bush’s presidency provoked new rounds of recrimination about a president’s competence and honesty. Although winning an initial large tax cut, a major education reform, No Child Left Behind, and a far-reaching revision of the 1965 Medicare law that provided access to drug benefits for seniors, Bush could not sustain his hold on a majority of Americans. True, he reached unprecedented heights of popularity after he rallied the country following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and military action in Afghanistan ousted the Taliban and threw Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda on the defensive. Moreover, he was able to become only the sixteenth sitting president out of forty-four to win a second term.
But his last four years became a demonstration of Thomas Jefferson’s complaint that the presidency was “a splendid misery” or, as Andrew Jackson described it, “a form of dignified slavery.” Herbert Hoover said the office was “a compound hell.” Bush also could have echoed Harry Truman’s grumbles that being president was like riding on the back of a tiger and that the White House was a “great white prison.”
Most of Bush’s misery was the product of his own misjudgments. To be sure, after the opportunity presented by the crisis of 9/11, circumstances turned against Bush. The Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans and the long history of sectarian hatred in Iraq were conditions beyond Bush’s reach. Still, his dilatory response to the Louisiana natural disaster, which was captured so graphically in the photos of his Air Force One flyover of New Orleans, and the stumbling response of FEMA, which he refused to acknowledge by declaring, “Brownie, you are doing a heck of a job,” sounded the initial death knell of his presidency.
But it was the misadventure in Iraq that did so much to play havoc with Bush’s standing. When White House assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda proved unmerited, it raised questions not only about Bush’s gullibility in trusting false intelligence but also his honesty. Did he in fact know that he was peddling myths in order to take the country into a war of choice that he had been committed to from the start of his term? More than forty-three hundred American military deaths and more than twenty thousand wounded, tens of thousands Iraqis killed in sectarian attacks and millions displaced, and the shadow cast across America’s reputation for civilized behavior by its torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons condemned Bush as a president who fought an unnecessary war with unwanted consequences. Even with the 2007–8 “surge” that reduced but did not eliminate Iraq’s sectarian violence and gave a hint of credibility to Bush’s stated intention of bringing democracy to the Middle East, he could not escape the responsibility for failed policies.
The onset of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression in the last year of Bush’s term added to his reputation as a chief executive with a limited understanding of either domestic or foreign affairs. Fortunately for the country, Bush did not cling to a rigid free market perspective that might have deepened the country’s economic problems. He understood that the federal government had to take a central role in providing credit and bolstering economic activity despite substantial deficits that his opponents blamed on his multibillion-dollar tax cuts for the rich. But the atmosphere of deregulation that the Bush administration had fostered promoted speculation in housing and other investments that triggered the Great Recession, as commentators came to call the downturn.
Bush left office with approval ratings in the twenties and low thirties that rivaled Truman’s numbers in the last days of his term. Bush hoped that like Truman, he would make a comeback if and when his decision to fight in Iraq was eventually seen as successful and necessary for the country’s national security. But the current weight of evidence on Iraq makes this unlikely. Nor will recollections about the response to Katrina or the economy help his reputation. Whether he will be seen as among the worst presidents in the country’s history, as most historians have been describing him, is open to question, though it’s difficult to imagine that he will ever be seen as more than a mediocre or poor leader. What is currently transparent is that a majority of Americans were demoralized by Bush’s stewardship, as suggested by Barack Obama’s election on the strength of promises that the country could do better under a president with a decidedly different outlook. “Yes, we can” was as much a referendum on the Bush years as on Obama’s unproved qualities of leadership.
Are there any discernible patterns in the various missteps by chief executives recounted in this essay? Uncontrollable circumstances have certainly been one major contribution to their poor performances. Herbert Hoover’s bad luck in dealing with the worst economic crisis in the country’s history and Jimmy Carter’s misfortune in having to overcome a gasoline shortage caused by foreign actions out of his control were instances of presidents poorly served by unanticipated challenges no president could have prevented. The management of their respective crises, however, left something to be desired, as was made evident by the more effective leadership of their successors, FDR and Reagan, respectively, who demonstrated that a crisis can be as much an opportunity for successful governance as a cause of failure.
A more common source of flubbed leadership has been presidential misjudgment stemming from rigidity and arrogance. Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s assumptions that they were essential leaders whose illnesses would not deter them from performing their presidential duties were miscalculations that cost the country dearly. Truman’s misconceptions about what he could carry off in Korea and his refusal to be more flexible in end-of-war negotiations led to results that no one can describe as anything but failure. LBJ’s and Nixon’s unbending convictions about Vietnam drew them into unwise actions for which they and the nation paid a heavy price. George W. Bush’s similar stumbles in Iraq—false assumptions about what would serve the national security and what could be accomplished there—were another example of how bad ideas and an unwillingness to acknowledge any mistakes undermine a president and hurt the country.
Because all presidents, however well intentioned, are vulnerable to the sorts of errors that even the most intelligent and best advised chief executives can make, is there a mechanism for guarding the country from the consequences of their bad judgment? Since impeachment is reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors, the Constitution offers no remedy for unwise presidential performance. To be sure, the congressional and judicial branches were designed to act as checks on arbitrary executive behavior and the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides for the temporary suspension of presidential authority for incapacity. But the amendment was not designed to suspend a president’s powers because of unpopular policies. Moreover, most presidential stumbles have come in foreign affairs, and neither the courts nor the Congress have had an effective response to overseas misjudgments, though they may be costing the country lives and treasure. And even where the other two branches might have acted to inhibit a president—crimping his funding for a foreign adventure or declaring his actions in violation of constitutional restrictions, undeclared wars being the most obvious example—challenges to presidents insisting they were defending the nation’s safety have been extremely difficult to assert.
The country needs to consider a constitutional amendment that would give voters the power to recall a failing president. Because political opponents would always be tempted to invoke the provisions of a recall procedure, it would need to be both difficult to exercise and a clear expression of the popular will. The process should begin in Congress, where a recall procedure would need a 60 percent vote in both houses. This could be followed by a national referendum on whether all voters in the previous presidential election wished to remove the president and vice president and replace them with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and a vice president of that person’s choosing.
To judge from the fact that only two sitting governors were recalled in the twentieth century—in North Dakota in 1921 and in California in 2003—it seems unlikely that such an amendment would get much use. Nevertheless, its availability would act as a check on a lame-duck president in the closing months of his term. It would give voters a way to punish a president pursuing an agenda that was distinctly at odds with the popular will. It would not be a definitive remedy for presidential missteps, which seem likely to define all future presidencies, however smart and wise they may be, but it could place marginal limits on the damage unwise leadership can do to the nation.
