Analyzing Presidents: From Passive-Positive (Taft) to Active-Negative (Nixon)
Barber, James David
ANALYZING PRESIDENTS: From Passive-Positive Taft to Active-Negative Nixon by James David Barber The President is a lonely figure in a crowd of helpers: he must share the work; he cannot share...
...But it was probably Nixon’s own preference which brought together in the Cabinet a collection of competent, quiet, relatively obscure men whose “extra dimensions” he had to describe to the unknowing national audience, and in the White House a crew of younger lieutenant-colonel types leavened with two brilliant Harvardians...
...the fatalism and pessimism...
...The notion soon spread that it was necessary to get Lyndon’s approval first in order to see Dr...
...I never give much weight or attention to the brickbats that are thrown my way...
...But at the same time his character and style fit together to contribute - along with many external factors-to a long list of less happy incidents and trends (Dixon-Yates, Dullesian brinksmanship, the Faubus and U-2 bumbles, the McCarthy contagion...
...Roosevelt understood this instinctively...
...Franklin Long and the National Science Foundation directorship...
...The big decisions are what to say...
...He impressed the group with his calm, crisp answers...
...Eisenhower mastered the skills this system increasingly demanded, particularly the ability to coordinate, to gather together the rightthreads into the right knot...
...I am giving them boom times and more good legislation than anybody else did, and what do they do-attack and sneer...
...In character, Taft was from the beginning a genial, agreeable, friendly, compliant person, much in need of affection from wife, family, and friends...
...He accepted almost immediately...
...He drew on a home in which the rules said: Do the right thing, Love one another, and By their fruits shall ye know them...
...Taft saw himself as a follower of TR-but not as an imitator of the TR style...
...I know that every soldier understands it...
...He missed combat in World War I and kicked around for a good many years in staff jobs and football coaching: he served seven years on the staff of that flamboyant self-dramatist, Douglas MacArthur, for whom Eisenhower learned to make a newly-developing kind of military administration work...
...the nomination and then withdrawal of Peter Bove to be Governor of the Virgin Islands...
...What do they want...
...he is simply turning away from them, leaving them alone, refusing to interfere...
...In 1968 he had said: “Publicity would not center at the White House alone...
...Many for whom he’d done much more than he ever did for me ran out on him when the going was rough...
...in later years he seemed to confuse standing by Harry Vaughan when he was under fire from Drew Pearson with standing by the men of the 35th Division when they were under fire from the Germans at Meuse-Argonne and Verdun...
...The well-known staff system Eisenhower put into the Presidency was designed to leave him free to coordinate at the highest level...
...Roosevelt .” The crisis came a piece at a time...
...An order announced (after however much coordination) was an order to be executed...
...The orientation is toward performing duty with modesty: the political adaptation is characterized by protective retreats to principle, ritual, and personal virtue...
...Recognizing the national mood as calling for peace and quiet, empowered by a narrow, minority victory in the election, and confronting a Congress and a bureaucracy dominated by Democrats, he opted for an undramatic beginning...
...Following a childhood marred by accident, severe illness, the deaths of two brothers, and much family financial insecurity, Richard Nixon made his way to the Law School of Duke University, where he succeeded as a student but failed in his fervent desire to land a position in New York or Washington upon his graduation in 1937...
...He introduced school assemblies, inter-school public-speaking contests, spelldowns, baseball games, track meets, parental car pools for transporting children, coached debating and basketball at the high school, organized a literary society, courted a girl who taught 35 miles away, and took courses at the Cotulla extension center...
...I have always thought of myself as one who has been moderate in approaching problems,” he said...
...that is, by taking a strong stand against the suggestion that he take a strong stand...
...Truman seems to have been slowly, and then radically, disillusioned with men in whom he had placed his trust...
...Of Eisenhower’s refusal to stand up for Marshall:] “You don’t kick the man who made you...
...Like Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon in the early months of his Presidency seemed happy in his work...
...I think that if Nixon is ever threatened simultaneously with public disdain and loss of power, he may move into a crisis syndrome...
...At West Point he was a minor hellraiser (eventually ranking 125th in a class of 164 in “conduct”) and a dedicated athlete until an injury, incurred because he would not tell a sadistic riding instructor that he had a weak knee, removed him from competition...
...The bully-ragging, the humiliations visited upon the men around him, are nearly as familiar as his rages against the Kennedy clan...
...The political strength of this character is its legitimacy...
...We came in here together and, God damn it, we’re going out together...
...The details are not important here...
...Both Presidential candidates in 1952 promised to clean up what Eisenhower called “the mess in Washington...
...It was natural for him to revert back to those times when he was again in charge...
...The definition of democracy he liked best was “simply the opportunity for self-discipline...
...Was he under attack in the press...
...When does anybody get any time to think around here...
...Not so in the political “order” where the national purpose is continually questioned and redefined...
...he found the President's 1956 hesitations about him "an emotional ordeal...
...From the family Bible readings, from the sportsmanship of a boy who wanted nothing more than to be a first-rate athlete, from the West Point creed, Eisenhower felt, amid questions about many other things, that duty was a certainty...
...That summer he tried a clerical job for a few weeks but got discouraged and came home...
...Every key official would have the opportunity to be a big man in his field...
...they were married in May of 1940 and took an apartment over a garage...
...But it is not that simple...
...his friend Finch had decided not to accept the Vice Presidential nomination...
...This idea of the President of the United States going personally abroad to negotiate-it’s just damn stupid...
...the shelving and then unshelving of the “hunger” question...
...the Knowles appointment...
...As Pringle says of Taft’s mood: He was heartsick and unhappy...
...Put crudely: Johnson’s style failed him, so he fell back on character...
...Ambition is an uncomfortable companion many times...
...I was closer to John Miles than a brother...
...Eisenhower disliked speechmaking (he had once been struck by lightning while delivering a lecture...
...And despite occasional discouragement, he relished his experience...
...At the same time, faculty members came to the conclusion that it was essential for them to be friendly to Lyndon, for they believed he could influence the president on their behalf...
...And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you back right now...
...he had not yet been through the fires of large-scale political crisis...
...Despite his current air of happy calm, similar in many ways to the early Presidential experience of others of his type, Nixon belongs, I think, among the active-negative President...
...Johnson, How are you...
...That style was defined, in its main configurations, at the time of his first independent political success in 1946...
...By his Yale days he was a big, handsome campus favorite, with many friends but no really intimate ones...
...His friend Arthur Larson wrote that Eisenhower found patronage “nauseating” and “partisan political effect was not only at the bottom of the list-indeed, it did not exist as a motive at all...
...Johnson was off and running...
...Johnson, How do you do...
...Urged to address some meeting, he would typically say, “Well, all right, but not over 20 minutes...
...this, for better or worse, Truman was not...
...Once he compared the criticism he got with the “vicious slanders” against Washington, Lincoln, and Andrew Johnson...
...His style was centered in speaking and in hard work getting ready to speak...
...Truman to Harry Vaughn:] “Harry, they’re just trying to use you to embarrass me...
...But as criticisms from TR’s followers mounted, negative references to Roosevelt crept into Taft’s correspondence...
...Crisis engages all a man's talents...
...It must have galled Truman that he owed his political success to the corruption-ridden Pendergast machine...
...His editorials were full of positive thinking...
...and participating in debates with my better-known opponent .” From then on, Nixon was primarily a man on his own-a hard-working, careful student of one issue or case at a time, continually preparing for a public presentation, highly sensitive to his , rhetorical style and the reactions of audiences to him...
...the distrust of political allies...
...Senators and scientists opposed to the ABM sought out Kissinger, who prepared a “devil’s advocate” paper...
...Forget yourself and personal fortunes...
...It may see& that the danger of the Nixon Presidency lies not in exaggeration but in timidity, that his administration will turn out to be more Coolidgean than Iohnsonian...
...Taft stuck by his legal guns...
...He devoted much of his attention in these early days to gathering around him the men who would help him shape a program, and in arranging them in relation to his own style of operation...
...As his Presidential aide wrote, “I have never known a man to dislike discord as much as the President...
...But he kept quiet, he kept his hands clean, he learned to mind his own business...
...I can never forget,” he wrote to Roosevelt from the White House, “that the power that I now exercise was a voluntary transfer from you to me, and that I am under obligation to you to see to it that your judgment in selecting me as your successor and in bringing about the succession shall be vindicated according to the standards which you and I in conversation have always formulated...
...He met William P. Rogers in the Navy...
...Lyndon jumped up to talk to everyone who came to the office to see Evans, and before days passed, he was asking the purpose of the visit and offering solutions to problems...
...His campaign became an aggressive rhetorical performance in which he won with little help from anyone else...
...If so, their reputations would be made, largely, within and through the Nixon Administration...
...We are not going to get into their business...
...When Democratic spirits hit the bottom in the 1948 campaign, Truman . said, “Everybody around here seems to be nervous but me...
...Consider William Howard Taft...
...But he appears to have come through it with an unusually strong store of self-confidence, ready to endure what had to be, ready to reach out when opportunities presented themselves...
...To say that the first theme traces to his mother and the second to his father is but the beginning of an explanation of a pattern in which alternation has substituted for resolution...
...Evidence in hand, he retires to his chambers (usually a small room off the Lincoln bedroom), where he may spend hours in complete solitude reaching his decision...
...In 1948, when he finally managed to stop the boomlet for his nomination, he said he felt “as if I’ve had an abscessed tooth pulled...
...Throughout his political life Truman reiterated this for-me-or-against-me theme: “We don’t play halfway politics in Misouri...
...He “heatedly gave the Cabinet to understand that he was sick and tired of being bothered about patronage...
...Too often loyalties are breached in Washington in the rivalries for political advantage,” [Truman on Tom Pendergast:] “I never deserted him when he needed friends...
...No master is so cruelly exacting as an indulged appetite...
...Add to that an explicit theory and system of decisionmaking in which the President listens inquiringly to his committees of officials (who have been encouraged in their own independence), then retires to make his personal choice, then emerges to announce that choice...
...Willie Mae Rogers’s appointment as consumer consultant...
...In 1928, Johnson left college with a two-year teaching certificate...
...Truman’s style exaggerated these characteristic vulnerabilities...
...The curses that poured out contained some of the vilest four-letter words heard on the Western Front...
...the man with a striking personality can accomplish greater deeds in life than a man of equal abilities but less personality...
...Sill canteens had heavy losses, but the Truman-Jacobson enterprise returned 666 per cent on the initial investment in six months...
...The initial issue was the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy over conservation policy...
...On a great many occasions in the biographies, Eisenhower is found asserting himself by denying himself...
...The White House staff called him “Billie Spunk...
...To govern self is a greater feat than to control armies and forces...
...After the war, he was a failure as a businessman...
...So far as its effect on Harry Truman was concerned,” his biographer writes, “World War I released the genie from the bottle...
...his grandmother said, “It’s very strange that a two-year-old has such a sense of humor...
...In 1912 the Republican party split apart and the Democrats captured the government...
...Sentiments which would sound false for most political leaders ring true for Eisenhower: My only satisfaction in life is to hope that my effort means something to the other fellow, What can I do to repay society for the wonderful opportunities it has given me...
...Truman would not recognize it...
...He had worked in a bank, farmed, taken a flier on an oil-drilling enterprise, joined the Masons, and fallen in love with Bess Wallace...
...here Harry Truman misestimated him...
...By his twenties he was a fat man...
...His temper flared whenever he felt that he was either being imposed upon or interfered with on matters he wanted others to handle...
...They came out for courtesy, “honesty of soul,” and the Fourth of July, along with some more personal sentiments: Personality is power...
...By September, this system had already produced some Presidential stumbles...
...The Nixon Fund episode in 1952 left him "gloomy and angry...
...Later he began to win office: president of the press club, senior legislator of his class, student council member, secretary of the Schoolmakers Club, editor of the newspaper...
...Furthermore, on many occasions he has experienced profound depression and disappointment, even when he was succeeding...
...It is at that point that the President’s friends can help him most...
...In 1924, he graduated from high school at 15, the youngest of the six-member senior class as well as its president...
...In 1911, Taft still hoped to avoid a fight, though he saw Roosevelt as “so lacking in legal knowledge that his reasoning is just as deficient as Lodge’s...
...Passive-positive’’ types come through as receptive, compliant, other-directed persons whose superficial hopefulness masks much inner doubt...
...Should he engage in personal summitry on the international front...
...He took his greatest pride in the fact that there had been eight years of peace during his administration...
...I think Patrick Anderson, in Thk President’s Men, is right when he sees the key to Truman’s loyalty troubles “in the man himself, not in those who so poorly served him...
...In 1958 the President said, “Frankly, I don’t care too much about the Congressional elections...
...a decision that I have never recanted or regretted [was the decision] to perform every duty given me in the Army to the best of my ability and to do the best I could to make a creditable record, no matter what the nature of the duty...
...Conflicts, misunderstandings, scandals, and dismissals piled up: Byrnes, Wallace, Ickes, Louis Johnson, J. Howard McGrath, Morgenthau, MacArthur, Baruch, Clifford vs...
...In several ways, Nixon appeared to have adopted a judge-like stance: He takes up one case at a time and tries to dispose of it before moving on to the next case...
...Now you behave yourself up there, Harry...
...In 1938, he proposed to Pat Ryan the night they met...
...Johnson’s remarkable effectiveness in situations where the social environment provided direction is not to be doubted...
...The shape of Nixon’s style, confirmed in his subsequent success with the Hiss case, was clear in its general outline at this point...
...There his beseeching for knowledge of “what they really want,” his feeling that “no President ever had a problem of doing what is right...
...You go up there, and tell ‘em to go to hell...
...You behave yourself...
...He wants every man’s approval, and a row of any kind is repugnant to him...
...He was "dissatisfied" and "disappointed" in his Vice Presidency...
...Now as before, the endless speculation about who has a President’s confidenceand who is losing it or gaining it as issues shift-reflects a general recognition that the way a President defines and relates to his close circle of confidants influences policy significantly...
...Although he was in his sixties throughout his long stay in the White House, he put in 16 to 18 hours a day at Presidenting, but “was fresher at the end than I was at the beginning,” according to Charles Ross...
...He became a star debater, significantly in a system where he and his partner had to prepare both sides of each question because the assignment of negative or affirmative turned on the flip of a coin just before the debate...
...Eisenhower is not attacking or rejecting others...
...As principal (over five teachers and a janitor), Lyndon was in his first chief executive position...
...His biographer, Henry F. Pringle, wrote that: Indeed, one of the astonishing things about Taft’s four years in the White House was the almost total lack of men, related or otherwise, upon whom he could lean...
...But in the ordinary conduct of the Presidency (and there are long stretches of that), Nixon's personal-relations style may interact with his character to produce a different kind of danger, a kind the President and his friends could, I think, steer away from...
...The family was having financial difficulties again...
...By mid-1966 it was hard to find an independent voice among his intimate advisors...
...When “those damn monkeys on the Hill” acted up, he would stay out of it...
...There have been a few piano-thumping exceptions, but the general tone of Nixon in politics-even when he has not been in a crisis- has been the doing of the unpleasant but necessary...
...Always sensitive to criticism several illnesses and a severe accident during childhood...
...In charge for the first time, Truman had shown that he could succeed through careful management...
...the big problem is knowing what is right,” and especially his plea to his advisors that “all you fellows must be prudent about what you encourage me to go for,” indicated the disorientation of an expert middleman elevated above the ordinary political marketplace...
...Why do you want to destroy me...
...I would do it, but you know he has held himself so aloof that I am absolutely in the dark...
...There was some beer and girls and fights...
...But his main energies went into operating, getting on top of the institution...
...Most important, his style developed around intense loyalty in personal relations: everything depended on the stick-togetherness of imperfect allies...
...It was a flop," and then he cried...
...Steelman, and the ragtag crew of cronies and influenceables typified by Harry Vaughan...
...his performance in that office reconfirmed his faith in hard personal campaigning and in careful, honest business practice...
...Truman believed that he had made clear to the other fellow just how he must change his behavior...
...I think he was spoiled...
...He relies on formal, official channels for information and advice...
...However, I experienced a sense of letdown which is difficult to describe or even to understand...
...He and “a group of local plungers” gambled $10,000 to start a frozen-orangejuice company which went broke after a year and a half...
...For the most part he faced his troubles alone...
...I have seen him stick to his guns when Frenchmen were falling back...
...These crude clues tend to symptomize character packages...
...Again there is the pattern of his earlier years: many friends, no intimates...
...In the Presidency, Johnson had around him, not a circle of Senatorial barons, each with his own independence and authority, but a circle of subordinates...
...We’ll do it if we can, We’ll stand by you to a man...
...He insisted that Mexican children speak only English, and he required his teachers to keep constant supervision of the students...
...His first memory was of his laughter while chasing a frog across the backyard...
...In the legislative setting, Johnson had to work that way...
...the colonels were dependent on the generals...
...in trying to explain to you a situation that has been tossed in my teeth more than once (my lack of extended troop duty in recent years), all I accomplished was to pass up something I wanted to do, in favor of something I thought I ought to do...
...But Taft’s character-rooted affectionate loyalty to Roosevelt inevitably came into conflict with Taft’s legalistic style...
...His folks were amazed...
...Always sensitive to criticism and anxious for approval, he repeatedly entered new offices with a feeling of personal inadequacy to the tasks before him...
...He may, as Wilson did, seek escape by turning inward, with a private declaration of independence...
...He was of the right stuff, and a man who wouldn’t vote for his comrade under circumstances such as these would be untrue to his country...
...Through his style, a President relates himself to three main elements: the national audience (through rhetoric...
...When Nixon begins to feel pleasantly relaxed, or playfully enjoying, I think, some danger sign goes up, some inner commandment says no, and he feels called back into the quest for worlds to conquer...
...he cannot share the responsibility...
...I heard it all...
...He had learned that his angry voice could turn the tide and that he could decide what to do if he got the facts himself and paid’attention to the details...
...Why, then, did Eisenhower bother to become President...
...As it was, Taft nearly tore himself apart - and did help tear his party apart-by hanging onto his leader long after Roosevelt had, in Taft’s eyes, broken the law...
...He laughed at himself...
...It is often helpful for a President to be a ruthless son-of-a-bitch, particularly in his personal relationships...
...But a few features emerged that seemed likely to persist...
...Could FDR do better...
...And he played the piano...
...Suddenly Richard leaned across the table and cursed the old man out...
...Yet Taft remained in the contest...
...Running for the Senate in 1950 he was a "sad but earnest underdog...
...if you keep him, you can continue to deny it...
...He creates discontent with present surroundings and achievements...
...his advisors, enemies, and subordinates (through personal relations...
...But even the less demanding 1968-69 Nixon schedules leave him on the side of activists, in contrast, to, say, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Eisenhower...
...Clearly Johnson belongs among the activenegative characters...
...He was, and remained, a loner...
...in "semi-shock" at Eisenhower's heart attack...
...The man who had written in 1909 that “my coming into office was exactly as if Roosevelt had succeeded himself,” wrote in 1912 of “facing as I do a crisis with Mr...
...Belligerence is the hallmark of insecurity...
...What had happened to a political style whose cornerstone was the expert manipulation of personal relations...
...He was a humane friend of the men and women around him...
...The other Ft...
...There is no ut3e trying to be William Howard Taft with Roosevelt’s ways,” he wrote...
...If I am defeated,” he wrote, “I hope that somebody, sometime, will recognize the agony of spirit that I have undergone...
...It was as an army captain under fire in France that Harry Truman first learned that he was as brave and as capable as the next man...
...By his Yale days he was a big, handsome campus favorite, with many friends but no really intimate ones...
...His family was remarkable for its close, affectionate relationships...
...He served as a supply officer in the South Pacific, where he ran a kind of commissary, called “Nixon’s Hamburger Stand...
...Truman expressed his bouyancy under attack in these words (quoted in William Hillman’s Mr...
...That year he had lost an important debating contest (“I was so disappointed I went right into the bathroom and was sick...
...He emphasized his independence...
...Yet unless there has been a fundamental change in his personality (as Theodore White and others think there has been), Nixon has within him a very strong drive for personal power- especially independent powerwhich pushes him away from reliance on anyone else and pulls him toward stubborn insistence on showing everyone that he can win out on his own...
...What lends drama to Presidential performances is the interplay of character and style...
...This is precisely the possibility against which Nixon could defend himself by a stylistic adjustment in his relations with his White House friends...
...it was then, he wrote later, that “the meaning of crisis [took] on sharply expanded dimensions”- a fine paraphrase of Alexander George’s concept of the expansion of one’s “field of power...
...the energies devoted to controlling aggressive feelings...
...Soon this student assistant was slapping the president on the back, accompanying him to the state capitol, answering mail, and writing reports to state agencies...
...Eisenhower’s political style, particularly his style in personal relations, channeled these character forces in an interesting way...
...Everybody is trying to cut me down, destroy me...
...His father died in 1914, when Harry was 30...
...doing my homework...
...He began criticizing Roosevelt in less and less private circles...
...For it is not true in the Presidency that, as Nixon wrote of 1960: “In the final analysis I knew that what was most important was that I must be myself...
...when they broke they broke...
...a small-time lawyer just out of the Navy...
...I have seen him in places that made hell look like a playground...
...He was a sucker for duty and always had been...
...When it came time to end his four-pack-aday cigarette habit, “I found that the easiest way was just to put it out of your mind...
...As a military man he had detested and avoided politics at least since his first command, when a Congressman had pressed him for a favor...
...He asks questions...
...style would play a secondary part...
...He was, he said, “the loneliest man in the world,” “the most denounced man in the world,” for whom “nothing really seems to go right from early in the morning until late at night,” who was “not sure whether I can lead this country and keep it together, with my background.’’ Even at the height of his successat the close of the remarkable first session of the 89th CongressJohnson, convalescing from a gallstone operation, complained: What do they want-what really do they want...
...Like most people past middle age, a President tries to use his experience...
...The “activenegative” tends to emphasize ambitious striving, aggressiveness, and a focus on the struggle for power against a hostile environment...
...He was not able to realize that the loyalties around a President are not black and white-as they are in battle or in a Missouri political campaign - but rather shade off from Vaughan-like sycophancy at one end of the spectrum to MacArthur-like independence at the other...
...The President, he said, must know the general purpose of everything that is going on, the general problem that is there, whether or not it is being solved or the solution is going ahead according to principles in which he believes and which he has promulgated...
...His severe vision problem kept him out of school until he was eight, and at nine he nearly died of diphtheria...
...He didn’t mean it this way, but when Eisenhower said that “our system demands the Supreme Being,” he was probably right...
...The type is also vulnerable to betrayal when he assumes that others who seem to share his purposes will see those purposes precisely as he does and govern their actions accordingly...
...This was more than a matter of intellectual principle...
...Then there wss an unexpected outburst: at a homecoming luncheon for some 30 family and friends, an elderly cousin gave an arm-chair analysis of the war...
...As Secretary of War under Theodore Roosevelt , he won the President’s approval by complying willingly with every assignment and by repeatedly expressing his devotion to him Taft’s political style developed in his career as a lawyer and judge...
...Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous...
...the backing and filling regarding desegregation guidelines...
...He did not feel a duty to save the world or to become a great hero, but simply to contribute what he could, in the best way he was able...
...but if he does, he will find no way out when their counsel is divided...
...Obviously personal relations was at the core of his style...
...The most simple, most harsh explanation of Truman’s tolerance is just this: You can take the politician out of the county courthouse, but you can’t take the county courthouse out of the politician...
...Nixon’s Presidential style was not entirely clear as of September,l969...
...But “moderation”- like Eisenhower’s middleof-the-road- is a relational concept definable only in terms of the positions others take...
...Onthe other hand, he has been a fighter, a rip-snorting indignant, a dramatic contender for his own moral vision...
...No President is born again on Inauguration Day...
...Throughout his life he has experienced sharp alternations between periods of quiet and periods of crisis...
...Decisions or near-decisions taken in this fashion had to be reversed or abruptly modified as they set off political alarms...
...In his ABM decision, for example, “Although he instructed his aides to seek out all sides of the argument, the President appears to have had little direct contact with opponents or advocates of the missile system outside his own circle...
...Nixon thought no one there would ever forget this uncharacteristic outburst...
...In Sam Iohnson’s Boy, Alfred Steinberg continues the story: According to Nichols [the secretary], what next unfolded was flabbergasting...
...It is the tone, the flavor, the aura of self-denial and refusal that counts in these comments...
...when he was four years old she persuaded the local schoolteacher to let him attend classes...
...His energy was incredible...
...The recruitment process had its difficulties -Nixon received refusals from his first choices for Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury and Attorney General...
...The people that cause me trouble are the good men who have to take these brickbats for me...
...Taft endured several illnesses and a severe accident during childhood...
...Truman did his own reconnaissance at the front, to get his information firsthand...
...In all these respects, and also in his personal comradeliness, Eisenhower fits the passive-negative (or “reluctant”) type...
...he was not withdrawn...
...Not so in politics, where promulgation is just the beginning...
...President): So I don’t let these things bother me for the simple reason that I know that I am trying to do the right thing and eventually the facts will come out...
...The resignation of Clifford Alexander and the appointment of Senator Strom Thurmond’s protkg6 as chief White House political troubleshooter seemed to indicate inadequate consultation, as did certain exaggerations by Secretary Laird on defense and Attorney General Mitchell on “preventive detention...
...each of the others believed that Truman had endorsed him in the course he was pursuing...
...Robert Donovan said of Eisenhower: “Nothing gets him out of sorts faster than for a subordinate to come in and start to hem and haw about a decision...
...Enough...
...What are you trying to do to me...
...There was the $30,000 job for Nixon’s brother Edward...
...Roosevelt attacked “legalistic justice” as “a dead thing” and called on the people to “never forget that the judge is as much a servant of the people as any other official...
...During the campaign he was charged with voting for a member of the other party and he answered with this speech: You have heard it said that I voted for John Miles for county marshal...
...Truman had a strong father (nicknamed “Peanuts” for his short stature) and an affectionate mother...
...There he found no clear-cut ideology, no particular direction other than the compulsion to secure and enhance his ,personal power...
...He stood apart, made F his own judgments, relied on his own I decisions...
...The temptation for one of his character type is to follow a period of self-sacrificing service with a declaration of independence, a move which is necessary exactly because it breaks through the web of dependencies he feels gathering around him...
...Johnson in charge used domination successfully, forcing subordinates into conformity...
...But in the White House, he abhorred the heat of the kitchen...
...Instead, his mother arranged a place for him in a small Whittier firm, where he spent the late 1930’s in a practice featuring a good deal of divorce and criminal law, holding town attorney office, and serving as a trustee of Whittier College...
...But two gross dimensions outline the main types...
...Taft had learned, as a lawyer and judge, to manage decisions by the application of legal principles: “Our President has no initiative in respect to legislation given to him by law except that of mere recommendation, and no legal or formal method of entering into argument and discussion of the proposed legislation while pending in Congress,” Taft said in a post-Presidential lecture in which he disagreed explicitly with Roosevelt’s view that the “executive power was limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution...
...The trouble was that the level got higher and higher, more and more removed from the political battlefield, until, in his second term, Eisenhower had to break through a good many layers and circles to get at the controls of policy...
...The “active-positive” type tends to show confidence, flexibility, and a focus on producing results through rational mastery...
...In terms of our character and style analysis, Truman shows one form of danger inherent in the political adaptation of the active-positive type...
...For Truman, loyalties were hard and brittle...
...The great men of the world are those who have never faltered...
...Sent away from home to Oklahoma, he became regimental canteen officer, with Eddie Jacobson as his assistant...
...He had no Cabot Lodge...
...At the outbreak of the war, he joined the National Guard and was elected lieutenant by his friends...
...Talk stopped...
...The landscape of the Truman administration was littered with political corpses...
...These experiences reinforced and confirmed an emphasis Truman had grown up with...
...Eisenhower’s tendency to move away from involvements, to avoid personal commitments, was supported by belief: “My personal convictions, no matter how strong, cannot be the final answer,” he said...
...His character is further illuminated by his complaints, which cluster around the theme of being bothered...
...As for his affect toward his experience, I would put more stock in the way I he has typically felt about what he was doing over a lifetime than I would put in his current euphoria...
...In the Presidency, rhetoric is immensely important, but preliminary: the product is a movement by the government...
...The conflict between Taft’s character and style was largely latent until after he became President in 1909...
...Later in France, he was put in charge of a rowdy flock of Irish pranksters loosely organized as a field-artillery battery...
...Where in a man’s past are the best clues to his Presidential style...
...He looked up to say, “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” and began to weep...
...he was not compulsive (though he showed some tendencies in that direction...
...Strangely, they may not come from the way he has acted in immediately pre-Presidential roles...
...Harry S. Truman: Active-Positive Harry S. Truman belongs among the active-positive Presidents...
...Upon assuming command, Truman recalled later, “I was the most thoroughly scared individual in that camp...
...Typically, the passive-negative character presides over drift and confusion, partially concealed by the apparent orderliness of the formalities...
...The year before the family had moved back to a farm in Johnson City and stayed “just long enough for Daddy to go broke,” Lyndon’s sister recalled...
...Add also hostile reporters given unusual access, an increasingly independent Senate, a generationally-polarized nation, and a set of substantive problems nearly impossible to “solve” and the stage is set for tragic drama...
...I’ll have to plead guilty to that charge, along with 5,000 ex-soldiers...
...He has under absolute control his passions and desires, his habits and his deeds...
...If Mamma Truman was for you,” he said, “she was for you, and as long as she lived I always knew there was one person who was in my corner...
...His reactions are highly individualized...
...He may try, as Harding did, to escape this tension by surrounding himself with advisors he can give in to...
...He was also characteristically discouraged much of the time...
...and, finally, he must say “yes” or “no...
...In the first he was the operator who repeated, as secretary to a conservative Congressman and as Senate party leader, the story of his San Marcos takeover, showing a remarkable ability to expand his roles-and his influencethrough energetic social manipulation...
...The “passive-negative” character tends to withdraw from conflict and uncertainty, to think in terms of vague principles of duty and regular procedure...
...It was Eisenhower’s command habit, of central coordination that shaped his behavior...
...What he had learned of himself when he was under 20 was shaped and channeled by what he learned of life when he was over 30...
...Restless, energetic, purposeful, it is ambition that makes of a creature a real man...
...They moved several times in Harry’s early years...
...There are no tyrannies like those that human passions and weaknesses exercise...
...They had the glowing vision of a noble work to inspire them to press forward, but they also had the inflexible will, the resolute determihation, the perfectly attuned spiritual forces for the execution of the work planned, The successful man has a well-trained will...
...elements of his old Eriksonian identity crisis jump out of the past...
...He learned, too, the rule that says an officer must always stand by his men...
...In the introduction to Six Crises, Nixon writes, "I find it especially difficult to answer the question, does a man 'enjoy' crises...
...and the details of policy-making (through what I shall call decision management...
...How, then, might we go about predicting a President’s strengths and weaknesses in his personal relations...
...He ran for county judge and won...
...Add to this character a style in which intimacy and consultation have never been easy and in which isolated soul-searching is habitual...
...In the White House he had to choose between loyalty and law...
...On the activity side there is little doubt...
...Evans...
...Lyndon’s tone and attitude somehow gave the impression he was far more than a messenger...
...Truman’s drive for decisions, his emphasis on results, his faith in rational persuasion, his confidence in his own values, his humor about himself, and his ability to grow into responsibility all fit the active-positive character...
...In a campaign, day by day, the product is a speech or other public appearance...
...He fought to the limit of his tootranquil nature because he envisioned the issue as more than a personal one...
...he himself rarely tosses out suggestions for critical comment...
...it was his first clearly political commitment in a personal sense...
...The year was 1945...
...Before he became President, he had, after all, been the chief of loyal subordinates only twice: in the Army and as a “judge” in Missouri...
...As his real troubles mounted, he compounded them by so dominating his advisors that he was eventually left even more alone, even more vulnerable to the exaggerations of his inner dramas,until he took to wondering aloud: “Why don’t people like me...
...Throughout his career, including his stint with Eisenhower, Nixon was never a full-fledged member of a cooperative team or an administrator used to overseeing the work of such a team...
...His activity is evident...
...At first Taft refrained from answering what he privately called TR’s “lies and unblushing misrepresentations,” but in April of 1912, confessing that “this wrenches my soul” and “I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt,” he defended himself in public: Neither in thought nor word nor action have I been disloyal to the friendship I owe Theodore Roosevelt...
...His beliefs were carved into epigrams: He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city...
...It was this style, the style of the modern administrative team-coordinator, that stuck with Eisenhower on into his White House years...
...On the ABM, Nixon emerged, despite his victory, with about half the Senate confirmed in opposition...
...More , than by politics, however, Truman seems to have been motivated by stubborn loyalty to his friends...
...In other words, he did not so much select problems upon which to concentrate as he selected an aspect of all problems-the aspect of principle...
...Managing their anticipated reactions requires not only the development of “options,” but widening circles of consultation around a tentative Presidential decision- in other words, consultation after the President has reached a course of action satisfactory to him...
...I’ll probably be holding a conference with Saint Peter when that happens...
...In the Army, Eisenhower’s brand of coordination went forward in a context of command...
...With a new Cabinet, wouldn’t it make sense to oversee them rather carefully...
...There appears to have been a lapse in communication in each of Truman’s “breaks” with such high-level personages as Wallace, Byrnes, Baruch, and MacArthur...
...after the Checkers speech, he said, "I loused it up, and I am sorry...
...Why did he answer those phone calls on the golf links...
...As he wrote of the controversy at the time: “I get very impatient at criticism by men who do not know what the law is, who have not looked it up, and yet ascribe all sorts of motives to those who live within it...
...Yet it is made more likely than it need be by the way he appears to be designing his decision-making process in the critical early period of definition...
...Lyndon,” President Evans said, “I declare you hadn’t been in my office a month before I could hardly tell who was president of the school-you or me...
...What is significant to this discussion is that Taft attempted to solve a broad but in, tensely political conflict within his Administration through a strict application of the law...
...0 He emerges and pronounces the verdict...
...Taft’s nerves were shattered by the ordeal of attacking TR, that man “who so lightly regards constitutional principles, and especially the independence of the judiciary, one who is so naturally impatient of legal restraints, and of due legal procedure, and who has so misunderstood what liberty regulated by law is...
...A hard worker himself, Johnson expected others to work with equal energy and determination...
...Another President once dismissed Nixon as a “chronic campaigner...
...The “whole fate of constitutional government,” he said, was at stake...
...Each President distributes his energies differently among these tasks, and each shapes his style in a distinctive way...
...ANALYZING PRESIDENTS: From Passive-Positive Taft to Active-Negative Nixon by James David Barber The President is a lonely figure in a crowd of helpers: he must share the work...
...It failed him as Presedent If he had had a different character, he might have pushed Roosevelt aside as soon as he won the Presidency, as Woodrow Wilson did the New Jersey bosses when he won his governorship...
...On borrowed money, he set off for San Marcos...
...to a department head or a professor, he asked his part-time aide, rather than Nichols, to run over with a note...
...He returned a year later after having served, at the age of 20, as principal of an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas...
...I have no apology to make for it...
...After the war, Truman and Jacobson opened their famous haberdashery, serving mostly old Army buddies...
...His mother often said that “the love of approval was Will’s besetting fault...
...As President, a man emerges as sole king of the mountain-suddenly on top all by himself, no longer one of the many climbing the ladder...
...He is especially prone to this mistake with respect to the active-negative type who is, on the surface, like him in many ways...
...he attacked his courses “with an intensity he had never before revealed...
...Could anybody do better...
...I think he was spoiled...
...Perhaps most important is the independence dimension: he had tried several times to make it into the big time in a big city away from home and now he had achieved that...
...How do you do, Mr...
...Franklin Roosevelt had usurped Congressional powers, he thought, and he would not do that: “I want to say with all the emphasis at my command that this Administration has absolutely no personal choice for a new Majority Leader...
...Alfred Steinberg, in The Man from Missouri, gives this account of how Truman handled himself: “Men,” he told the sergeants and corporals, “I know you’ve been making trouble for your previous commanders...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower: Passive-Negative Eisenhower as President is best approximated in the passive-negative category, in which tendencies to withdraw predominate...
...Taft’s judicial stance workedas long as he was in judicial roles-toprotect him from the fires of controversy...
...and the various changes in the Job Corps...
...Amid many Presidential successes, most of his failures can be traced to a particular way in which style reinforced character trends...
...One thinks of Truman as Vice President, Kennedy as Senator, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce...
...By his twenties he was a fat man...
...When someone aggravated Eisenhower, he would “write his name on a piece of paper, put it in my lower desk drawer, and shut the drawer...
...How do you do, Mr...
...What did this emphasis on loyalty mean for the Truman Presidency...
...Never lose your temper except inten tionally...
...Truman attacked life...
...Detailed studies of such relationships as Wilson with House, Franklin Roosevelt with Howe and Hopkins, and Eisenhower with Sherman Adams, tend to confirm this view...
...Press conferences were another Rooseveltian mistake: “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing...
...Slowly he began to see the Roosevelt Presidency as less than perfection, flawed by irregular procedures...
...This erroneous idea developed because the school lacked a telephone system tying President Evans’ office with those of department heads, and when the president wanted to send a message...
...It displayed itself in two interesting variations: Johnson on the make, and Johnson in charge...
...one of those was clearly the conflict within Taft between his legalistic style and his submissive character...
...I didn’t do that-and I am President of the United States in my own right...
...he loses himself in a larger cause...
...In his letter of acceptance he said he planned to stress “a group of speeches...
...By February, 1927, Lyndon had had enough: “I’m sick of working with just my hands, and I’m ready to try working with my brain...
...Sometimes people quit me but I never quit people when I start to back them up...
...He was returning to be, in his own words, “Nothing...
...I guess you know about as much about the job as I do,” he told George Humphrey...
...Character has deeper and much less visible roots than style...
...Richard Nixon: Active-Negative The description accompanying Richard Nixoq’s figure at the Fisherman’s Wharf Wax Museum in San Francisco calls the President “industrious and persistent,” “ambitious and dedicated from childhood...
...he complained to Adams...
...One former officer who could not control the men had been thrown out of the Army...
...He fits the passive-positive category most closely, with his slow-moving pace and his optimistic grin...
...The danger of his “military mind” was not that he would be a martinet, a MacArthur...
...but if he does, he will risk mistake and failure in ventures where cooperation is imperative...
...Then Lyndon and two friends left home for California in an old car...
...First, divide the Presidents into the more active and the less active...
...His family was remarkable for its close, affectionate relationships...
...Nixon has always been a striver, an energetic doer who attacks his tasks vigorously and aggressively...
...Over more than 20 political years, Nixon has seen himself repeatedly as being just on the verge of quitting...
...Captain Harry” came out of the war with the respect and admiration of his men...
...Johnson sold more Real Silk socks than his customers had use for...
...The temptation to surprise them all and, when the issue is defined as critically important, to adhere to it adamantly is exacerbated by the mechanisms of decision...
...Nixon was 32...
...In that case, the important resonances will be direct ones between character and the political environment...
...Voorhis’s “conservative reputation must be blasted,” he said...
...Warren Burger was at least fifth on his list of candidates for Chief Justice...
...The two managed to maintain a surface amiability in their meeting when Roosevelt returned from Africa, but as Roosevelt began making speeches, Taft found more and more cause for Constitutional alarm...
...He goes on to say that he had not found his "fun," but that "surely there is more to life than the search for enjoyment in the popular sense...
...From now on, you’re going to be responsible for maintaining discipline in your squads and sections...
...His father expected his children to do well in school, and Will did...
...With the Hiss case victory, "I should have felt elated...
...Johnson spanked at least one boy who ridiculed his walk...
...I propose to examine the charges he makes against me, and to ask you whether in making them he is giving me a square dea1...
...Its political weakness is its inability to produce, though it may contribute by preventing...
...The academic side of life did not trouble him much at unaccredited Southwest Texas Teachers...
...I have seen him hold the American line when only John Miles and his three batteries were between the Germans and a successful counterattack...
...In other words, Presidents have to make speeches, conduct negotiations, and solve problems...
...Through them all, Nixon’s popularity with the public rose...
...He lost his temper on the golf links...
...Truman’s style developed in two main spurts...
...It is this lifelong sense that the burdens outweigh the pleasures which must be set up against the prospect of a new Nixon continuing to find the White House a fun place...
...I think Johnson’s character infused this stylistic pattern with a compulsive quality, so that he was virtually unable to alter it when it proved unproductive...
...His friendly biographers report he was “a firm administrator, a strict disciplinarian, and a good teacher...
...He developed a decision-management style based firmly in a narrow, literal, conservative concept of a judge’s relationship to the law...
...However, he confided to his chief aide, Archie Butt: “It is hard, very hard, Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand...
...It is the way this style interacts with Nixon's character which is of interest here...
...Johnson experienced his first independent political success as a student at Southwest Texas State Teachers College...
...The danger is that Nixon will commit himself irrevocably to some disastrous course of action, as, indeed, his preda ecessor did...
...When Roosevelt attacked property rights and then the Supreme Court, Taft became edgy and nervous...
...Close inter-personal relations were simply not very important to his success...
...By a series of family connections and historical accidents (Taft said he always had his plate turned right side up when offices were being handed out), he found his way into the judiciary and adopted the style of the legalist, the law-worshipper...
...once his mother looked at his bloodied face and said, “To think that my eldest-born should turn out like this...
...He wants the decision and not the thinking out loud...
...The story of Truman’s wrangles with aides high and low is well known...
...He had no Colonel House...
...I think a close examination of his stylethe political habits he brings to the office and his character-his basic orientation toward his own life-can reveal a good deal...
...He told a persistent reporter as the 1948 speculations continued: “Look, son, I cannot conceive of any circumstance that could drag out of me permission to consider me for any political post from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe...
...Another reason Truman stood by Vaughan and the others was no doubt simple political tactics: If you fire a man, you in effect admit wrongdoing...
...the substitution of technique for value...
...no, he would not stop the Cohn and Schine highjinks...
...his success came in politics...
...To oversimplify what is really much more complicated: the character who has overcome his own hang-ups, who has leaped over the barriers between himself and the real world, whose bent is toward rational mastery of the environment, is likely to forget, from time to time, that other persons, publics, and institutions maintain themselves in rather messier ways...
...It was a sadly misguided loyalty, for Presidents owe a loyalty to the nation that transcends any allegiance to erring friends...
...Samuel Lube11 caught the crux of this character when he saw in Eisenhower “one man’s struggle between a passion for active duty and a dream of quiet retirement...
...Blackballed by the dominant fraternity, he helped start a rival one, the White Stars, who won campus elections in part by Johnson’s energetic behind-the-scenes campaigning and in part by fancy parliamentary tactics...
...After Pearl Harbor he worked briefly in the OPA tire-rationing office in Washihgton before entering the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade-at which, Nixon remembered in 1968, his “gentle, Quaker mother...
...He flew back to California and appeared in his uniform before the Republican group...
...To bring that about Nixon needs to succeed not only with the national audience (where the danger of impromptu, “sincere” commitment is already great) and with the audience of himself alone (where the danger of self-deception is evident), but also with that middle range of professional President-watchers in Washington...
...Johnson’s intense ambition- and his style in personal relations, rhetoric, and decision management - took shape in his college years...
...On the wall of his Senate office he hung this quotation from Edmund Burke: Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the worst fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and worst of all, the presumptuous judgment of the ignorant upon their designs...
...he was "grim and nervous" in 1960, and he exploded bitterly and publicly after his 1962 defeat...
...Because he thought he ought to...
...Anderson continues: Truman once said that his entire political career was based upon his World War I experience, upon the friends he m3de and the lessons he learned...
...There are many more aspects of Nixon's character that fit the activenegative type: the unclear and discontinuous self-i~aget;h e continual selfexamination and effort to construct a "Richard Nixon...
...His march into the classroom each morning was the signal for the students to sing out: How do you do, Mr...
...His father expected his children to do well in school, and Will did...
...When his troops broke and ran under fire in “The Battle of Who Run”: “I got up and called them everything I knew,” said Truman...
...he brought along a collection of pictures he had had taken, in his lieutenant commander’s uniform, for use in the campaign...
...Style is what he built on those foundations...
...All this should have made it evident that Nixon in the Presidency would (a) develop a rhetorical stance carefully attuned to his reading of the temper of the times (and of the public's reaction to him), (b) work very hard at building a detailed case to back up each of his positions, and (c) maintain a stance of interpersonal independence and individual final authority with respect to his Cabinet and his White House staff...
...I am deeply wounded...
...Roosevelt continued to criticize...
...To Admiral Leahy:] “Of course, I will make the decisions, and after a. decision is made, I will expect you to be loyal...
...The raw materials were given: Johnson did not take a stand, he worked with the range of stands he found among other members, pushing here, pulling there, until he had a workable configuration of votes...
...The break between Taft and Roosevelt had numerous levels and dimensions...
...Later he attributed his victory over Voorhis to three factors: “intensive campaigning...
...beginning with a brisk walk early in the morning, he went at the job with all his might...
...A year and a half later, thin, broke, and hungry, he came back and found a job on a road gang for a dollar a day...
...I can’t trust anybody...
...he was not compliant...
...Nixon’s success at this period was independent of his family...
...He began cautiously...
...The old structure of military commandthe hierarchy- was giving way to a system less like a pyramid, more like a floating crap game, a system of interdependent functional specialties - teams-that had to be brought together around new technological and strategic concepts...
...When Eisenhower had to deal with military matters as President, such as Lebanon and the Suez crisis, he could act with celerity and precision...
...Truman’s dilemma was complicated by the fact that his nature was more sentimental than that of any of the other recent Presidents...
...In an Army at war, coordination takes place behind the advancing flag: the overriding purposes are not in question...
...rhese bobbles may be seen, some years hence, as nothing more than the inevitable trials of shaking down a new crew...
...Johnson, How are you...
...Exhausted, depressed and shaken, Taft was found by a reporter with his head in his hands...
...No, he would not get down in the gutter with Joseph McCarthy...
...and, most of all, the perpetual sensitivity to the power dimensions of situations...
...Eisenhower felt that his 1955 heart attack was triggered when he was repeatedly interrupted on the golf links by unnecessary phone calls from the State Department...
...If you and Daddy can get me into a college, I’ll go as soon as I can...
...It is the isolation, the lonely seclusion adopted consciously as a way of deciding, that stands out in Nixon’s personalrelations style...
...Then cut across that with a division between those who seemed generally happy and optimistic and those who gave an impression of sadness and irritation...
...At official meetings, Nixon is the presider, the listener who keeps his own counsel while other members of the group present their cases and options and briefs, like lawyers in a court...
...His fantastic pace of action in the Presidency was obvious...
...That may be another lesson he learned too well...
...The character shows itself as an orientation, a broad direction of energy and affect, a tendency to experience self and others in a certain way...
...These discontinuities in his experience have contributed to the uncertainties nearly all observers have felt in interpreting the “real” Nixon...
...Lyndon B. Johnson: Active-Negative For this generation of Presidentwatchers, it would be tedious to document President Lyndon B. Johnson’s difficulties in personal relations...
...His character thus provided a foundation for the transcendence of his defenses, for devoting his attention to the realities beyond himself...
...After high school, Lyndon told all his friends he was through with school forever, despite his mother’s urgings to go on...
...another had broken down under the strain...
...And from his character came also his worshipful, submissive orientation toward Theodore Roosevelt, which he continued to express in letters and conversation as President...
...Taft’s decision-management approachthe application of principles to casesserved him well, both before and after he was President...
...It turned those boys right around...
...He tends to hark back to that time when he had an analogous emergence- to his first independent political success, usually in early adulthood, when he developed a personal style that worked well for him...
...President Taft had once told an aide that “if I only knew what the President [i.e., Roosevelt-for a long time Taft referred to TR this way] wanted...
...Laziness or misbehavior “was likely to bring some form of punishment...
...He has often driven himself to gray-faced exhaustion...
...When he telephoned his mother to ask if she had listened to his inauguration as Vice President on the radio, she answered: “Yes...
...Then,as he was winding up his service in Baltimore, he received a call from a Whittier banker asking if he would run for Congress against Jerry Voorhis...
...Sherman Adams writes that Eisenhower “focused his mind completely on the big and important aspects of the questions we discussed, shutting out with a strongly self-disciplined firmness the smaller and petty side issues when they crept into the conversation...
...President Evans got him a job collecting trash, but Lyndon soon cajoled his way into a position as assistant to the President’s secretary, with a desk in the outer office...
...On the one hand, he is a shrewd, calm, careful, proper, almost fussily conventional man of moderation, a mildly self-deprecating commonsense burgher...
...Johnson’s style- the whirlwind energy, the operator-dominator personal relations, the idealistic rhetoric, the use of information as an instrumentall of it was there when he emerged from road-gang bum to big wheel in the world of San Marcos and Cotulla...
...he draws from what has worked for him before in coping with new work...
...Johnson’s strength was in finding the opponents’ key weakness, and then exploiting it to the hilt...
...He intended to disperse power in his administration...
...In another context I have said this type may want a political institution “to deliberate like Plato’s Academy and then take action like Caesar’s army,” neglecting the necessities of emotional inspiration and peaceful procedure...
...Nixon contrasts enjoyment with "life's mountaintop experiences"-what he calls the "exquisite agony" of crisis...
...As a new Congressman, he said he had "the same lost feeling I had when I went into military service...
...And then there is that ultimate, almost implausible indication of persistent optimism: he’is said to have enjoyed being Vice President...
...In these cases “decisions” came unglued in the face of indignant and surprised reactions from the press, interest groups, and Congress...
...When we start out with a man, if he is any good at all, we always stay with him to the end...
...By the end of 1911, it was clear that TR would not support Taft for re-election...
...The effect was amazing, Padre Tiernan recalled with pleasure...
...Principles were applied to cases to give verdicts, period...
...The family had more than its share of difficulties, especially financial ones...
...Truman often got angry but rarely depressed...
...He tried to find a way out which would not offend TR...
...Character fed style, style digested character...
...Said Father Curtis Tiernan, the regiment’s Catholic chaplain, who was on the scene, “It took the skin off the ears of those boys...
...Listen,” Eisenhower said, “anyone who has time to listen to commentators or read columnists obviously doesn’t have enough work to do...
...As Senate Democratic Leader he reached the high point of success in consensus-building by catching issues at the right stage of development, mapping the terrain of Senatorial opinion, and manipulating members’ perceptions and expectations to get bills passed...
...He was persistent, sometimes high-tempered, energetic, aggressive, and creative...
...Perhaps he learned that rule too well...
...Lyndon’s mother pushed the boy to get an education...
...When he returned from the war, he struck acquaintances as unusually contemplative, “dreaming about some new world order,” possibly feeling guilty about his “‘sin’ of serving in the armed forces...
...he is never satisfied but always pressing forward to better things in the future...
...quietly wept...
...He found the bench comfortable and secure, stable and safe, honorable and respected...
...It inspires trust in the incorruptibility and the good intentions of the man...
...They took him as their candidate in what seemed like a hopeless campaign against the popular Voorhis...
...Margaret Truman, on her father’s philosophy:] “...‘the friends thou hast and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel’ . . . . ’ I [From Truman’s own memoirs:] “Vinson was gifted with a sense of personal and political loyalty seldom found among the top men in Washington...
...An Army friend who happened to be a Missouri Pendergast got him into politicsnot against his will...
Vol. 1 • October 1969 • No. 9
