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What makes a leader?

Like the old field hand who's seen 'em come and seen 'em go--good, bad and indifferent--the political commentator develops a certain perspective. Or should. So that the first thing that comes to mind when he hears the usual complaints about a current leader are all the criticisms that were made of earlier ones, and how well they've stood up over time. Not to mention how easily fooled he was when he went along with them.

Now it's Asa Hutchinson who's drawing fire from the True Believers in his party for being less than a "real" Republican, whatever that is, because he's not jumping up and down in protest against the Supreme Court's decision in favor of homosexual marriage. Instead, Governor Hutchinson was supposed to follow the example of an earlier governor of Arkansas--Orval Faubus--when the high court was ruling against racial segregation in the public schools. He was supposed to defy the law of the land, or at least find a slick way around it.

In our own era, that kind of mischief-making can safely be left to a demagogue like state Senator Jason Rapert of Conway, a Richard Nixon without the charm.

There is something about careful, law-respecting leaders that the more fervent partisans among us find unspeakably reasonable. I can remember, way back in the High Middle Ages, or circa 1953, when I was a fervent Young Republican and voicing much the same doubts about a leader named Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was showing streaks of moderation that didn't accord with my idea of what a real Republican president would do.

Ike was turning out to be what used to be called a Me, Too Republican--one who goes along with the opposition whenever he can rather than fight it tooth, nail and veto. In the fight for the GOP presidential nomination the year before, I'd much preferred Robert A. Taft, Mr. Republican himself. Now there was a man of principle--brittle principle. It occurs to me now, more than half a century later, that Senator Taft would have made a disastrous president, an isolationist abroad and uncompromising partisan at home.

But back then, I knew that this was the same General Eisenhower who only four years before was being touted as a Democratic presidential candidate. Now, as a Republican president, he wasn't rejecting the New Deal and all its works but was accepting its major programs as a done deal. He was, in short, being a realist.

What's more, Ike did all this in a mysterious tongue only he, if anyone, could understand. Eisenhowerean was a language made to conceal thought rather than reveal it, which may have been just what its speaker intended. His was a "hidden hand" presidency that left the confrontations to others while he stayed above the fray, shielded by an impenetrable lingo all his own.

What fun we young "intellectuals" had imitating Ike's convoluted statements on the issues of the day, which left them even more confusing than they had been before he addressed them. His press conferences needed simultaneous translation. Americans just scratched their heads and wondered what th' heck their president had meant. At the same time they trusted him to know best, as he usually did. Trust took the place of understanding. ("I Like Ike").

At one point Ike's press secretary, a sober-sided gentleman named James C. Hagerty, feared that just one careless word out of this president would lead to World War III over a couple of obscure little islands, little more than rocks, really, just off the Chinese coast. They were called Quemoy and Matsu, and Ike didn't seem at all worried about discussing their fate. "Don't worry, Jim," he said as he went out to take questions from the press about this latest little crisis. "I'll just confuse 'em."

He did. He also avoided war. Just as he would avoid another Great Depression during the remainder of his term in the White House, which ended with peace and post-war prosperity preserved. The tumult of the Truman Years gave way to the placid Eisenhower Era, for which I had good reason to be grateful. Serving in Ike's peacetime army, I never heard a shot fired in anger.

Ike was widely criticized in those years for his inarticulate language, but what Eisenhowerean lacked in clarity, it more than made up for in cunning. Or as the savvy Murray Kempton of the Baltimore Sun noted at the time, Ike was "inarticulate like a fox."

It was another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who was known as the Great Communicator and deserved to be. His years as an actor stood him in good stead--as did his speaking tours for General Electric spreading the doctrine of Free Enterprise and The American Way in appearances all over the country. The Great Communicator's talent for rhetoric, for making complicated ideas sound simple, thrilled his party (and country).

The only thing Ike and the Gipper had in common as rhetoricians was their refusal to countenance any defiance of the law. President (and General) Eisenhower used the 101st Airborne to make his point in the historic Little Rock Crisis of 1957. President Reagan made it clear that if the country's air traffic controllers defied the law by walking off the job, he would fire every man jack of them. And women, too. When most of them decided to strike anyway, they were promptly fired. To both those presidents, the law was the law--and would be enforced.

Oh, the leaders I've seen come and go over the years, and the poor excuses for leaders, too. Jimmy Carter springs to mind. So does poor Lyndon Johnson as his presidency fell apart along with South Vietnam--not to mention the current occupant of the White House, who's said to believe in leading, all right, but from behind.

What are the prospects for a great leader coming to the fore today? That's an easy one to answer. Just ask again in 10 years, or maybe 50, after perspective has set in. Intelligence, determination, sophistication . . . all those may be fine when it comes to assessing leadership. But nothing can take the place of time, the stuff of which history is made. And sound judgments.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 07/15/2015

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