The making of presidents

What makes a great president? Our answer will depend on our politics and values, on our standards for who holds that office. History will be the second arbiter of any given president’s legacy, highlighting the good and revealing the bad. JFK defined a generation, put men on the moon, and is credited with bringing us back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. He was also a serial womanizer, even a predator by today’s standards.

Richard Nixon was reviled in his own time and resigned from the presidency in disgrace, but he also ushered in a rapprochement with China and began the Environmental Protection Agency. He presided over historic nuclear-reduction treaties with Russia, and supervised the ongoing desegregation of schools in the South. He also approved a military coup that toppled Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected president and brought a reign of terror and death to thousands of Chileans.

Lyndon Johnson signed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, expanded Medicare and Medicaid and succeeded, by most accounts, in his War on Poverty, bringing millions of Americans into the middle class. He also took America into the costly and failed morass of the Vietnam war.

Do we sense a trend here? Presidents succeed and fail, are guided by their values and judgment into mistakes and historic accomplishments. They are also grievously human, in public and private. No president is going to survive history’s gaze without high and low marks — in varying measure.

What do we look for then, in temperament or experience, to tell us how failed or successful an aspirant to the presidency will be? Barack Obama possessed little political or leadership experience when he took office, and yet his character defined a presidency of sobriety, seriousness, intellect and inclusion. He was a landmark president because of his race, and yet his actions and identity belonged more to the man.

Richard Nixon had been a congressman, senator and vice president before he became the chief executive, and yet paranoia, cynicism and ruthlessness are what we remember of his tenure in the White House.

One thing the intaglio of history does reveal is that somehow presidents and the times they inhabit seem to go hand in hand, to define, demand or create each other, to be creatures of the same zeitgeist. This does not, unfortunately, speak well of today if Donald Trump is our president.

Finally, it is the what ifs of history that should haunt us — what did we miss in failure or accomplishment, direction or tenor as a nation, if we had chosen differently and elected John McCain instead of George Bush? Mike Dukakis? Hillary Clinton?

One thing is certain: We would not be embarrassed for our country, for the presidency itself, for the abasement and dissolution of the institution at the core of our way of government. We would not worry about who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office.

The Chinese, in the Taoist philosophy of the I Ching, a book of change and prognostication, speak of progress from the greater to the lesser, from increase to decrease, and back again. We will, it would say, find sanity and safety and dignity again in a president. In time.