This article consists of excerpts from the University Lecture given by historian Robert Dallek at Boston University in the fall of 1999. Copyright 1999 by Trustees of Boston University, reprinted with permission. Subheads have been added.
During most of the twentieth century, we have lived with the assumption that presidents are miracle men or very nearly so. As former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker has argued,
Americans like to think — and a history insufficiently studied or understood persuades them — that for everything that's wrong there's bound to be a solution, only needing to be found; and the quicker the fix the better. … So it tends to be with our presidents. If we just elect the right … person, we can get this country moving again. Throw the rascals out, vote in the miracle man, and we can all stand tall; it'll be morning again in America.
Eager to maintain as strong a hold on the public imagination as possible, presidents have not resisted the impulse to encourage such illusions. Indeed, they have had few qualms about encouraging a belief in their omniscience and omnipotence. From [Theodore] Roosevelt to Clinton, most presidents have embraced the role of miracle worker. Woodrow Wilson's war to end all wars and Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty are just two of the most striking examples of this impulse. Some presidents have been more modest: William Howard Taft, for example, complained bitterly that his countrymen had excessive expectations. He saw them assigning “all the sins of omission and of commission in society at large” to him, and cautioned that “the President cannot make clouds to rain, he cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business to be good.”
Rather than being miracle workers, presidents have been greatly burdened by the office, and only fifteen out of forty-one have managed to win election to more than one term. The job, as Thomas Jefferson described it, has been “a splendid misery.” No president leaves office with his reputation intact, Jefferson also asserted. The writer John Steinbeck saw the office as an impossible challenge that made all its occupants potential victims of a physical and/or psychological collapse. Wicker quotes Steinbeck: “We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. … We wear him out, use him up. … He is ours and we exercise the right to destroy him.”
Even when they have acknowledged these strains, presidents have not helped us in making sensible judgments about what chief executives can and cannot achieve. They have been even less helpful in leading the public to reach sensible conclusions about presidential disability. No president has ever acknowledged that medical or psychological problems have significantly limited his capacity to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities. To the contrary, presidents have made every effort to hide any problems that might lead the country to see them as less than able to do their job or as being in need of long-term relief from the demands of their office.
To date, the Twenty-fifth Amendment [adopted in 1967 to clarify procedures for succession in the event of presidential death or incapacity — Ed.] has been no panacea for resolving dilemmas about a presidents physical incapacity. Even more difficult are problems attending a president's psychological difficulties. Our present state of knowledge and the track record of presidential performance in response to emotional strains make it almost impossible to say when a transfer of power might take place. After all, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill (to take one foreign example) were beset by depressions that added to their burdens. But who wouldn't have been depressed by the demands of sending so many men to their deaths in the Civil and Second World Wars? Moreover, who can imagine replacing such great leaders as Lincoln and Churchill with inferior subordinates? Any consideration of a president's psychological incapacity has to be made with these examples in mind.
Yet psychological difficulties are real and can and have played havoc with a president's capacity to meet his official duties. Consider the cases of Calvin Coolidge, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. As governor of Massachusetts and during the first year of his presidency, Coolidge had been an assertive and effective leader. But in the summer of 1924 his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., died. The loss devastated Coolidge, who suffered a clinical depression. In contrast with his earlier political career, inactivity and passivity characterized his remaining five years in office. In the words of historian Robert Murray,
Coolidge's administration began to crumble after the summer of 1924. The President withdrew almost completely from interaction with Congress and showed little inclination even to participate in the activities of the departments of his own government. His workdays began to shrink in length, and his naps grew considerably longer and more frequent. Sadly, his shrewdness turned to lack of interest, his involvement to indifference and his well developed leadership skills were abandoned.
Can anyone doubt that the country would have been better served by a transfer of authority to a more attentive vice president, the highly competent Charles Dawes? But with no clear constitutional mandate for such a shift of power and a traditional reluctance to unsettle the country by acknowledging any sort of presidential disability, Coolidge presided over essentially a four-and-a-half-year crippled presidency.
There are reasons to believe that LBJ's, Nixon's, and Clinton's respective presidencies suffered as well from the emotional upheavals besetting the three men. Lyndon Johnson was infamously volatile, grandiose, and dominating. He was notorious for his abuse of subordinates, notable for everything from verbal attacks to humiliating incidents of requiring their presence in the bathroom while he satisfied the call of nature. Johnson's intemperateness seemed to find full expression in response to the Vietnam War. Judging from what White House aides historian Eric
Robert Dallek, Ph.D, was made an honorary member of the American in 1997. He is a professor of history at Boston University and has written extensively on American presidents and foreign policy.
Goldman, speechwriter Richard Goodwin, and press secretary Bill Moyers have said, Johnson became depressed and paranoid in response to criticism of his war policies. Goldman described Johnson as “downright frightening,” ranting about opposing senators and journalists whom he described as taken in by the Russians. As far as LBJ was concerned, Senator J. William Fulbright and journalists Walter Lippmann and James Reston were either secret communists or Soviet dupes. Goodwin and Moyers remember Johnson as so unbalanced that they discussed consulting a psychiatrist about the president's state of mind. In 1966, after a meeting with the president, Fulbright told members of his staff that he believed Johnson was “beyond a rational discussion of Vietnam.” Fulbright believed him “capable of almost any recklessness, including the bombing of China.” Johnson of course never went that far, and his irrationality is open to debate.
Published reports of Nixon's erratic behavior — speaking to the paintings of past presidents on the White House walls, for example — are insufficient to allow us to make a sensible judgment on Nixon's fitness to continue in office. But his three thousand hours of unreleased tapes should be of considerable Help in allowing us to arrive at more measured conclusions as to this president's psychological capacity to deal with the pressures playing on him.
And what about Bill Clinton's fitness to govern as he went through his impeachment ordeal? Some commentators suggested that he should have temporarily surrendered his authority while he sought psychological help. But the current state of public feeling about a president seeking therapy worked against any such suggestion. Hillary Clinton's statement in the summer of 1999, for example, that the president's behavior grew out of a troubled childhood, did not sit well with the public. While it was acceptable for the president to seek religious counseling in the midst of such troubles, there was little sympathy for the idea of a president in psychotherapy.
I certainly don't wish to make the case for presidential and vice presidential candidates who suffer from depression or any other serious psychological illnesses. But since even the healthiest of public officials can succumb to the pressures of their offices, shouldn't we accept the proposition that treatment of such problems with therapy and medication, if needed, makes more sense than hiding them for public view?
We can little afford to continue to turn a blind eye to physical or psychological problems that to one extent or another limit a president's capacity to function with full effectiveness.
Presidents need to remember that the national well-being must always come first. No president would deny the proposition, but it is belied by presidential actions. When Wilson, Coolidge, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Reagan refused to consider any temporary or longer-term suspension of their authority on the assumption that to do so meant undermining the country's sense of political stability, they were also protecting their presidential reputations. Lyndon Johnson, for example, believed in the Vietnam War, but he also kept insisting that he was not going to be the first president in U.S. history to lose a war. Johnson could not separate the public good from his personal concerns. And so it has been with most presidents.
The solution to the American dilemma over presidential disability, then, may best be found not in far-reaching institutional changes, but in the ability of presidents to step back and put national needs above their own. The powers of the presidential office and the large egos of those who believe themselves suited for the job make it difficult for them to give vice presidents significant work that will promote public confidence in them. But presidents, always keeping their mortality in mind, should anticipate a possible succession by giving greater forethought to the selection of running mates and to their schooling for the day they may have to assume command. Even more difficult than the vice presidential problem is the reluctance of presidents to step aside when afflicted by medical problems. They need the help of detached experts in a White House medical office. [We need] a concerted effort to meet the national dilemma of presidential disability before we confront another, more disturbing crisis over a disabled president who jeopardizes the national well-being by failing to step aside.