In 1991, Wisconsin history professor Thomas C. Reeves wrote a book entitled A Question of Character about John F. Kennedy. What was interesting about the book is that Professor Reeves wanted to write a book praising President Kennedy as he’d worked for the Kennedy campaign. What he discovered as he was gathering information was that the man he worked for was nothing like he was presented. He was a serial adulterer, had very little care for Dr. Martin Luther King, and had a family that was as crooked as the number 2. He was given credit for writing Profiles in Courage as well, a book in which he wrote only one chapter, not to mention the PT-109 incident which was, according to Professor Reeves, mostly false. Mr. Kennedy was nothing like the hero he was depicted.
Professor Reeves, through his book’s title, does bring up an interesting question. What role does character play in the role of the presidency? Reeves says character is defined by integrity along with, “compassion, generosity, prudence, courage, loyalty, responsibility, temperance, humility, and perseverance.” Anyone reading this article would see all of those collectively and deduce that few, outside of Marcus Aurelius, and maybe not even him, could manifest them all. We might even agree that if only we had a leader imbued with a few of them, that would be acceptable…but which few?
For some, character and leadership are not one and the same for great leaders, while certainly possessing certain of the character traits Reeves lists, they are also jettisoned on occasion when the situation demands. It is part of the leadership process, especially in times of war, be it hot war or cold. Present too kind, and one is open to being exploited; too cold, and many will flee, refusing to work with the leader, their steeliness and stubbornness turning even the most loyal against them. Too lukewarm and one will be left to deal with lackeys and sycophants, for they will be the only ones who will tolerate a soft-spine leader, using him or her to their own advantage while giving way when they need a backbone. Leadership is not easy, and for most people, a position of not desired, the faces in the crowd content to be just that…faces. It’s much easier to criticize from that position rather than live with the bullseye on your back.
Niccolò Machiavelli said, “Politics have no relation to morals.” In our time, at least in the West, it is the other way around, where morality seems to be the driving force for political decisions, and woe to the leader who acts truly in the interests of the nation without consulting the morality dictionary, a dictionary with ever-changing notions of the righteousness of humankind in the West. It seems morality is the hinge for so many, despite its myriad variations and considerations, and character an ever-shifting notion as stable as a house built on sand.
Espouse a view the mass media, often the self-proclaimed arbiter of our national morality, deems heretical, and one will find themselves the target of both tar and feather. Only the strongest willed among the leaders are able to survive the onslaught. Words become parsed, and in the end, the truth becomes hidden behind fear of reprisal. Few are willing to endure the slings and arrows to survive it. This does not mean to say one should accuse without proof or take a stand deliberately to injure another, but even that notion— injury and its accompanying concept, violence—has been bent and twisted and shaped to mean something else.
For many in the elite institutions of education where so many of these thoughts germinate, words equate to violence, and by proxy, the accompanying ideas. Say or think the wrong thing, and you’re committing an act of violence against another person— that act of violence worthy of retribution and reprisal. The predictable result is people unwilling to say anything at all, the loudest voices in the room or university demanding and receiving their way despite their often minority status,[1] much as a petulant child with permissive parents always getting its way.
The result of all this handwringing and carrying on? Leaders, in name only, more concerned with their perception than leading, more troubled and concerned with their reputations than doing the heavy lifting leadership often requires, a cold heart rather than a warm fire. The reason? They wish to get re-elected; they wish to be on the right side of their critics, they wish to be liked— the primary driver of their decisions in so many cases.
Yet, character itself is still something to be prized, though it seems so few exhibit it and its parameters so hard to define.
We might very well be living in an alternative timeline if the founders of this nation did not have the courage, the single-minded will, and the character it took to undertake the revolution required to secure this nation’s freedom. Indeed, as they so eloquently stated, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” One would be hard-pressed to find a greater example of character in leadership than those who founded this nation, no matter how many on the left side of the political spectrum wish to tear them down.
It is not that they are beyond reproach, for there is no one completely innocent in their actions, but there is much to be said for standing on conviction, unwavering in resolve, and willing to lose everything, including their very lives, for their position. I wonder how many in our current Congress are willing to do the same. Precious few, methinks.
This leads us back to the question of character and its importance to the highest office in our land…the Presidency. If we were to look for presidents without blemish, we would find none, only lesser degrees of disfigurement than others. Calvin Coolidge comes to mind as one of those “lessers,” although his administration was not without its scandal, Even the venerable George Washington suffered most during his second term with accusations of being a monarchist, the waters becoming so filled with sharks that he decided to return to Mount Vernon in retirement.
In our modern period, there are no presidents without scandal or actions revealing questionable character. None. Whether it be Franklin D. Roosevelt and his liaison with more than one woman, his disastrous New Deal policies, or his internment of Japanese-Americans for the simple sin of being Japanese, or Barack Obama and Benghazi, not to mention his willingness to subvert the constitutional process by the phrase “I have a pen and a phone,” or his allowing the IRS to target those of a conservative bent for audits, no president is above the fray. One doesn’t have to try very hard to come up with a cursory list: George H. Bush and the Iraq War, Bill Clinton and his many sexual escapades both in the Oval Office and out of it, Richard Nixon and Watergate[2], the many errors of judgement, policy, and effectiveness of Jimmy Carter, not to mention the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair, and the many accusations against Donald Trump, some of which are true, some not. No president is sacred nor as clean as the driven snow.
Even local voters don’t seem to care about personal character. Marion Barry was convicted of drug use and embezzlement yet got re-elected to the D.C. Mayor’s office. A poll was taken after Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, the longtime chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was found guilty of embezzlement and removed from office. In that poll, a majority stated they’d elect him again…and it wasn’t close.
Our current president, Joe Biden, has been plagued throughout his tenure in the Senate, as Vice President, and President with scandal after scandal, yet garnered the most votes of any presidential candidate in history in 2020, yet few mentioned the importance of character while he was running for office. Now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting the biggest, most newsworthy scandal in the history of the American republic: Mr. Biden’s unfortunate mental decline was evident in the spring of 2021. His staff made accommodations far beyond the pale for anyone in political leadership, least of all the President of the United States…and it was kept hidden from the very people who put him in office, putting the nation at great risk.
Where was the character there, or the character of his cabinet or Vice President to invoke the 25th Amendment when it was clear early on that it should have been invoked?
Character is a matter of convenience or political will, it seems.
The truth is this: Character sounds good in a soundbite, or for those professing to hold the moral high ground, whatever that means today. Both of those terms, morality and character, in their classic sense, have been torn, scuffed up, beaten down, remolded, and parsed to the point that there is no clear definition any longer. Character, like the classic definition of Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, seems to spin on the “I know it when I see it” axis, its true definition no longer viable, something of a tragedy.
Character must play a role, of this there is no question, but who among us, any of us, is without sin? Who among us can say they have never violated the standards of character we place on our Presidents? The answer is none, so insisting upon gold-plated character is truly a fool’s errand, one built on a bed of lies leading down the road to perdition.
The best we can hope for, and insist upon, is leadership unafraid to make the right decisions, or at least the best decisions in the moment to guide our nation and its people to be the best we can be, remaining steadfast and true to the United States Constitution in the process. That, if it can be achieved, would demonstrate character not seen in a while, and would be most welcome.
[1] Meaning, in this case, “lesser number of.”
[2] There is a growing body of evidence casting the entirety of the Watergate scandal into a different light, casting Nixon as the one set up for the fall. It is certainly interesting to read.
