Building the perfect President

So many candidates, so many shortcomings. If we want an ideal president, maybe we're going to have to build one, piece by piece

In the world of comic books, it's easy to turn an orphaned, homeless newsboy into a superhero endowed with the finest attributes of the gods. Just ask any pre-baby boomer geezer who grew up with Captain Marvel. By simply uttering the magic word shazam!, Billy Balson was turned by a lightning bolt into "the world's mightiest mortal, armed with the wisdom of Solo­mon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury."

In many ways the president is our national superhero. It would be nice if we could select that man or woman by uttering a magic word and thereby endowing him or her with the out­standing virtues of the greatest gods. Unfortunately, the Con­stitution sets out a different process. Still, suppose you could fashion a perfect president by gathering the most laudable, significant virtues of the men and women you most admire, not necessarily or even preferably politicians but people, real and fictional, who demonstrate a character trait you'd want a president to have. To whom would you turn and why?

This exercise is a lot trickier than it may seem: A characteris­tic can be a strength or a weakness. .As Doris Kearns Goodwin shows in her book Team oj Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, one of Lincoln's greatest strengths was his empathy, his ability to put himself in the shoes of another. But empathy can also lead to paralysis. Think of Jimmy Carter, about to order a rescue mission to free the embassy hostages in 1980, fretting over the possible deaths of the Iranian captors and worrying over whether they were volunteers or conscripts. Or consider Senator John McCain's well-deserved reputation as a maverick. When he ran for president the first time, in 2000, only four of the 55 Republican senators—the men and

women who had served with him and presumably knew him best—endorsed his run. Was this proof of McCain's inability to work with his colleagues or proof of his independence, his refusal to play the same old bankrupt political game? (He's doing a lot better with the Republican establishment this time. Is that proof of maturation or surrender?)

Conviction is always a much-admired trait in a president; it's always damaging when a candidate for the office can be portrayed as someone who twists in the wind, whether it's George McGovern as a weather vane in 1972 or John Kerry as a windsurfer in 2004. "You may not always agree with me," George W. Bush said during that campaign, "but you'll always know where I stand." Yet when a president "stays the course' right into a brick wall—a brick wall called Iraq, for example—that "moral clarity" looks more like pigheaded stubbornness blindly following the path that leads straight to the Big Muddy.

How about "thinking outside the box" (to use one of cor­porate America's wretched contributions to the not quite English language)? In President Kennedy: Profile of Power. Rich­ard Reeves's splendid day-by-day account of that abbreviated administration, the author suggests JFK's impulsive instincts and "a certain love of chaos" played out not just in his pri­vate life but in his impatience with bureaucratic niceties. This impulsiveness, this impatience with the normal chain of com­mand. Reeves suggests, may have led |FK to end-run the bureaucracy and look for out-of-the-box fixes in Vietnam. But that same distrust of protocol and the chain of command caused him and his brother to doubt the assurances of the military chiefs during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It led them

to respond to a conciliatory first letter from Soviet premier Khrushchev rather than to a later, bellicose note. It allowed them to use backdoor diplomatic channels to Moscow. And these decisions may well have averted World War III.

This is no doubt why prize-winning historian David McCullough, whose work includes biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, had a short, crisp, blunt answer when I asked him if one can judge potential presidents. "You can't," he said. "You can't know what kind of leader they're going to be." What you can do, McCullough said, is see if they have the traits that will serve them well "when the chips are down." And those traits may not be all that obvious.

For instance, what about intelligence?

"If you gave all the presidents an IQ test," says McCullough, "the highest score would probably belong to John Quincy Adams, the most purely intelligent of all the presidents. He was a fine man, but he wasn't a particularly strong or effective president." Woodrow Wilson—author, professor, president of Princeton University—is another president who would have scored very high on an intelligence meter but whose capacity for political navigation was on a par with the skipper of the Exxon Valdez. Contrast that with, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seemed so superficial to his friends and family that they joked his initials stood for Feather Duster Roosevelt. But he had, in the classic words of Oliver Wen­dell Holmes, "a second-rate intellect but a first-rate tempera­ment," which matters a whole lot more.

So what traits to assemble for an ideal president? If you look at just our past leaders, you would want Lincoln's vision, Theodore Roosevelt's energy, FDR's optimism, Truman's

plainspokenness, |FK's cool detachment and Ronald Reagan's sunny disposition. If you look at the current field, you would pick McCain's courage, Barack Obama's eloquence, Rudy Giuliani's tough-minded leadership and the experience of Governor Bill Richardson and Senator Hillary Clinton.

But why confine ourselves to the world of politics? If we broaden our field of vision, we can find men and women outside of politics who embody qualities we'd want in any president of any party.

You'd surely want a president who is unflappable, who knows how to put the crisis of the moment in perspective, who doesn't take out his or her frustrations by lashing out at sub­ordinates who can't fight back. (Bullying was one of Lyndon Johnson's most prominent, least appealing traits.) You'd want the kind of steadiness embodied by Joe Torre, now in his 12th year as manager of the New York Yankees. When the camera focuses on Torre in the dugout, it is impossible to know if his team is leading by 10 runs or trailing by a dozen. Watercool-ers and batting helmets are safe from physical abuse. More significant, his players are safe from verbal abuse. Torre will wait for a private moment for a tough conversation. "I don't want someone striking out and then having the TV camera on me throwing something, because I've been in that posi­tion," Torre told me in an interview. "And I've been in the dugout when managers have done that. To me, players don't appreciate it, because they're doing the best they can."

Torre also has the ability to find a grace note even in the toughest moments. In 2004 his team suffered the worst melt­down in sports history: losing the pennant to the Boston Red Sox after taking a 3-0 lead and then dropping four straight games, the last two in front of shell-shocked fans at Yankee Stadium. After the game, in what must have been the

worst moment of his career, Torre somehow remembered Tim Wakefield, the Red Sox pitcher who had given up the pennant-losing home run to the Yankees a year earlier, and called the visitors' clubhouse to congratulate him. Later, at the press conference, Torre acknowledged the crushing nature of the Yankees' collapse but philosophically pointed out that the veteran Wakefield would get to pitch in the World Series for the first time. Besides, if you've successfully dealt with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for more than a decade, dealing with tyrannical congressional com­mittee chairmen and foreign dictators should be a snap.

One of the most difficult combinations to find in a leader is a blend of determination and breadth of learning: something between the take-no-crap attitude that can sometimes lead to bullheaded blindness and an appreciation of complexity that can sometimes lead to paralysis by analysis. Offered for your consideration: Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine Corps gen­eral who once headed U.S. Central Command, the unit that is responsible for all U.S. military operations in the Middle East, and who served as a peace envoy, promoting discussions between Israel and Palestine.

Zinni is not likely to be mistaken for the chairman of an Ivy League political-science department. A "big-shouldered, weight-lifting working-class Philadelphian," as The Washing­ton Post once described him, Zinni has spent a lifetime deal­ing directly and forcefully with adversaries. He was wounded and almost bled to death more than 37 years ago in the Que Son mountains in Vietnam, west of Da Nang. He still believes there are "parts of the world that need their ass kicked." But

from the beginning of his career he has tried to understand the terrain on which he was working—or Fighting. When he first went to Vietnam, 40 years ago, Zinni lived not with Americans but with the Vietnamese; he learned their lan­guage and culture, much as he did years later as a military commander and diplomat in the Middle East.

Zinni is a critic of the Iraq war. but his doubts about it did not begin after Saddam was deposed and things began to turn sour. "I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq... is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Sad­dam is now," he observed in 1998. His contingency plan for invading and occupying Iraq, drawn up in 1999, called for a detailed province-by-province civilian occupation author­ity to guarantee civil order, the sort of force that was utterly absent in 2003, to disastrous effect.

Like Torre, Zinni has another trait a president would do well to emulate. To quote The Washington Post again, "Zinni has a reputation as a patient and good-humored commander, popular with those who serve under him. 'You have to stay level,' said Zinni. 'Everybody triggers on the emotions of the commander. If you're steady, they're steady.'"

The kind of effort Zinni made—to know the history, terrain and people of dramatically different cultures—is critical for a president and not only because it can help avoid disaster. It can also lead to the kind of thinking, at once modest and radical, that literally changes millions of lives for the better. In 1976 Muhammad Yunus was a freshly minted Ph.D. teaching economics in Bangladesh. After a nation­wide famine left the people in the village where he was living destitute and in debt to loan sharks, Yunus paid off their debts—the debts of 42 people—and told the villagers to repay him "when they could." (continued on page 123)

Perfect President

{continued from page 56) The total amount of his beneficence to the 42 villagers—the total amount—was S27. From that gesture was born the idea of microcredit: lending very small sums of money to people without any collat­eral or credit history but whose values ensure they will put those small sums to good use. Yunus had to throw out every assumption about lending to the poor; for example, he had the borrowers pay back tiny sums on a daily basis to build up their confidence step-by-step and help him spot potential trouble before it grew bigger. He also required prospec­tive borrowers to organize and become

collectively respon­sible for one anoth­er's debts. Initially a Bangladeshi bank helped manage the loans, and Yunus had it reach out to women. In a cul­ture that tradition­ally held women in purdah—i.e., kept out of the public arena—this may have been the most revolutionary idea of all. Still, Yunus understood the culture enough to encourage female employment inside the home—weav­ing, for example— which would pose less of a cultural threat to the com­munities. Today Yunus's Grameen Bank lends some $800 million a year in Bangladesh. The money goes for everything from seeds to farm imple-ments to sewing machines so that women can make and sell clothes. The

repayment rate stands at 98 percent.

"Conventional banks look for the rich," Yunus has explained. "We look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepre­neurs, but many don't have the opportu­nity to find that out."

Today the Grameen Foundation has spread beyond Bangladesh and is at work in 22 countries. Its efforts have spearheaded a movement that aims to reach 100 million families worldwide, a goal that will likely be reached before year's end. Even more significant for any potential president confronting the mad­deningly slow pace of American bureau-

governor named Bill Clinton wanted to try the idea in the mid-1980s, a bank offi­cial told him it would take six months to set up such a program. Yunus told Clin­ton it could be in action the next day.

Could such an impulse be replicated in the United States with the help of a president who has Yunus's vision? Could neighborhoods in the grip of endemic poverty, with all that implies—jobless men, broken families, children raised in a culture of hopelessness—be convinced that real ro | change is more than a pipe dream? That was the essence of Senator Robert Kennedy's attempts in his Bed-ford-Stuyvesant Restoration project.

Begun in 1964 and still operating, the effort has aimed to bring together the residents of a poor Brooklyn neighbor­hood with people of wealth and influ­ence from outside it in an ambitious enterprise that embraces everything from the rehabilitation of homes and the neighborhood to the nurturing of private enterprise. Had Kennedy lived to become president, this idea, in the form of community-development corpo­rations, would likely have been the cen­terpiece of his antipoverty campaign: an effort to avoid the failures of top-down government-run programs that run

eral impulse to treat the poor as helpless victims rather than as assets.

A president launching a new antipoverty effort today would do well to borrow heav­ily from the worldview of the Reverend Floyd Flake. As pastor of the Greater Allen AME Cathedral of New York, the 62-year-old Flake presides over the most significant economic presence in South Jamaica, the largest black neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. It boasts a Neighborhood Preservation and Develop­ment Center, a 725-plus-student private school and an 800-member workforce that makes it one of the top three private-sector employers in the borough.

More notable is Flake's contrarian ideas about what to do for the inner-city poor.

a view that put him at odds with most of his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus during the decade he served in the House of Repre­sentatives (he left in 1997). Flake's theme was empowerment: "Not forever seeing ourselves as victims, not forever seeing ourselves as having to be dependent on the social network, which will one day

go bankrupt__ If

we give them jobs, we create housing for them. If they develop an appreci­ating asset, which is called a home, then no matter what hap­pens, from that base they can go back in and borrow that money from them­selves to send their kids to school." This, he told me, is why he refused to take on the pastor­ate of his church unless the congre­gation aereed to

build its own schools.

"Of course they supported that idea," Flake said. "Then when I started seeing the results coming out of my school ver­sus surrounding schools, I realized it is not a matter of the kids not being able to learn but a matter of expectations and the historical problems in the system. And I saw that here I built homes and we put people in home ownership, and I saw the difference in attitude of people toward family and community and the whole stabilizing effect of ownership."

Now imagine, Flake said to me, a presi­dent who was determined to demonstrate

in Bangladesh, the need for dramatic, visible evidence that the promise of change is more than an empty election-year pledge. Imagine a president flying into Newark early one morning, heading into one of the empty lots owned by the federal government and announcing an urban homesteading program to offer that land to entrepreneurs at rock-bot­tom rates—or at no cost at all—in return for their commitment to develop hous­ing or private enterprises that would put neighborhood residents to work. Imagine the president hopscotching across the country—from Cleveland's Hough neighborhood to the South Side of Chicago to Detroit or Watts or East Los Angeles by nightfall—with the same promise and with young inner-city entre­preneurs on hand to accept the first of these urban land grants. What would that do to help upend the culture of victim­ization that grips these neighborhoods? My conversation with Flake took place more than three years ago. It still sounds like a pretty good idea to put on the next president's first-month to-do list.

When historian McCuIlough looks at potential presidents, one of his touch­stones is adversity. "I think we should judge candidates for the presidency by how well they've handled defeat in their lives," he says. "It has nothing to do with prior affluence. Theodore Roosevelt was raised in the lap of luxury, but he knew the tragedy and the possibilities for injustice and grief and failure in life. He endured a boyhood struggle with asthma, which was supposed to kill him, and suffered the death of his wife and mother on the same day."

Franklin Roosevelt was enjoying all the perquisites of wealth and aristocracy when he was struck with polio in 1921. John Kennedy almost died in World War II, after his boat was sunk, and the injuries he sustained left him in almost constant pain for the rest of his life. George H.W.

Bush almost died in a World War II plane crash and lost a daughter to leukemia.

So how would we want a president to absorb the hammer blows that life has brought? Consider two very different examples: one a daily presence in millions of American homes, the other a fictional embodiment of grace under pressure.

To call Oprah Winfrey a television talk-show host is a little like describing Arthur Rubinstein as a piano player— accurate as far as it goes but without context. A more accurate measurement may be the 53-year-old Winfrey's inclu­sion on two Time magazine lists: as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and one of the most significant individuals of the 20th century. A poor Mississippi farm girl, a survivor of abuse and molestation, Winfrey has turned her television show into something of a secular religious-revival gathering, what Lee Siegel, writing in The New Repub­lic, has called "a racial Utopia based on the exchangeability of colorless human pain.... In Oprah's universe, democracy is defined by the number of people who are 'empowered' by knowing that their sadness and frustration are shared by other people—a lot of other people. Oprah has said, 'If there's a thread run­ning through each show we do, it is the message that you are not alone.'" She has also offered more tangible rewards, at least to those who see her in person. On more than one occasion she has stunned her studio audience with surprise gifts including vacations and automobiles.

To Winfrey's critics, her phenomenal success is all part of American culture's dangerous fascination with the self, an unhealthy focus inward. But in recent years Winfrey has extended outward, around the world. When a South African school that taught abused and violent children was threatened with insolvency, she wrote a seven-figure check to keep it alive—and shamed the government into providing support. Later she put up $40 million to build the Oprah Winfrey

Leadership Academy for girls south of Johannesburg (and was attacked for mak­ing the school both too lavish and too strict). It is, I think, another part of her overarching message: "I know what you are going through. I have been there myself. I have overcome; so can you." And before you mock the notion that a TV talk-show host has anything to con­tribute to an ideal president, ask yourself what happens to presidents who seem unable to connect with citizens on a vis­ceral, emotional level.

When John Kennedy observed that life is unfair, he was talking about a decision to deploy reservists to a European hot spot, thus disrupting their stateside lives. He had no idea he was providing an epi­graph for his own truncated story. In a larger sense he was speaking a truth we don't usually want a president to acknowl­edge. "We are by tradition an optimistic people," McCullough correctly says, but we need a president to understand that every one of us is at permanent risk from illness, injury, natural disaster, historical forces and the everyday malice of friends and neighbors. To recognize the tragic in life and to persevere in the hope of shaping something better is a necessary ingredient of greatness.

Thanks to the imagination of novelist James Lee Burke, who has been called the William Faulkner of crime fiction, we have the example of David Robicheaux to offer our next chief executive. Robicheaux, like his creator, is a child of the Texas-Louisi­ana Gulf; in the course of 15 novels, he has gone from a police officer in New Orleans to a sometime detective in New Iberia, enduring enough trials to make Job's life seem like a walk on the beach. His father, who worked on offshore oil rigs, is killed in an industrial accident. His mother abandons the family for life on the streets and is murdered. While in the throes of alcoholism, he loses his first wife to a rich man. His second wife is murdered by drug

dealers, and he loses his third wife to dis­ease. He nearly dies in Vietnam, in a war he comes to believe is a venture conceived and guided by fools. The land he loves, its environment and its moral moorings are corrupted by greed. Vet he endures fearlessly. (No Robicheaux novel is com­plete without a scene in which Dave con­fronts a villain in the midst of his ill-gotten comfort in a mansion or country club and calls him out for the evil he has done.) He presses on, surrounded by ghosts of his and the country's past, with a full under­standing that even those he cares for, even those he loves, are capable of sinful, even criminal behavior. His politics blend a fierce love of country with a fierce anger at what has been done to it. His inherent patriotism, in fact, is what fuels his anger. As Burke once wrote, speaking for him­self, "The strength, resilience, courage and compassion that are inherent in every aspect of the American value sys­tem remain unchanged. Unfortunately, our greatest weakness and vulnerability are still with us too—namely, our will­ingness to place our faith in charlatans, flag-waving demagogues and upscale hucksters who would turn the Grand Canyon into a gravel pit."

If this is liberalism, it is liberalism ren­dered in a language we haven't heard from progressives since Truman was in office.

As it turns out, presidential qualities abound outside the political arena. Do we want someone who can energize the sclerotic federal bureaucracy, who can persuade, cajole or bully this leviathan to adapt, change and respond? What about Louis Gerstner, who came to IBM in 1993 when the once-mighty company was on the verge of disintegration and who quickly realized that the core cor­porate culture had to be reinvented, root and branch? When he left a decade later, IBM was a company with a com­pletely different structure, a completely different product and a healthy bottom line. Gerstner's account of his IBM life is called Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?— not a bad way of looking at the federal government. And what about Anne Mul-cahy? Unlike outsider Gerstner, Mulcahy was a 24-year lifer at Xerox when she became CEO in 2001, when the company had $17 billion in debt. After her mas­sive budget cuts, a wholesale reinven­tion of the product line and a decision to market instead of ignore the products its research labs had invented, Xerox is now in the black.

Do we want a president with a genuine sense of humor? It has been a powerful political asset, from Lincoln's store of backwoods tales, KDR's mocking defense of his "little dog Fala" from Republican attacks and the twinkle in JFK's eyes as he parried with the press corps to Rea­gan's solemn promise when confronted with the "age issue" during his debate

with Walter Mondale not to "exploit... my opponent's youth and inexperience." Humor works because it helps reassure the public that the finger on the button is not attached to the soul of a zealot. More than that, says McCullough, it demon­strates "that they can take the storms better; a sense of humor derives from an understanding of life."

II we want a president whose humor is laced with affection, then turn to Billy Crystal, whose one-man show 700 Sun­days reflects both the quirks and foibles of his family and friends with unabashed love. Or look to Bill Cosby, who has been working that same stand for close to half a century. Neither falls victim to false sentimentality; when Cosby compares the academic success of Vietnamese refu­gees with that of his own children, asper­ity is part of the mix. You'd also want a president whose humor shows a sharp appreciation of pretense and hypocrisy, who knows full well that the emperor's wardrobe is often skimpy. So throw in a healthy dose of Jon Stewart.

And even in this antirhetorical sound­bite age, we want a president whose words speak to the best of our aspira­tions. ("With malice toward none...," "The only thing we have to fear...," "Ask not what your country...," "Mr. Gor­bachev, tear down....") Mario Cuomo was right when he said, "We campaign in poetry." And if Shelley was right when he called poets "the unacknowledged legis­lators of the world," then why not turn to our contemporary poets—the best of our songwriters—to put some grace notes into the process? Imagine a president who could reach us with the lyrical power of a Paul Simon, a Smokey Robinson or a Bruce Springsteen.

This is a disparate group, to be sure, but it is united, I think, by one overriding quality: authenticity. Americans have always been willing to think the worst of their politicians. ("Suppose you were an idiot; suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."—Mark Twain) But if there is one conviction that stretches from left to right today, it is that the people who seek to lead us are as much products as people, pro­cessed into acceptability by an army of consultants, spin doctors, wordsmiths and marketers. By contrast, the men and women whose traits we've selected are in every sense real. The words they speak and sing, the ideas they advance, the way they deal with other people and with institutions large and small reflect an honest assessment of what they con­front, where they mean to go and how they mean to get there.

There may be a more important qual­ity to have in our next president, but 1 can't imagine what it would be.

A leader must blend determination and breadth of learning, a take-no-crap attitude and an appreciation of complexity.