The highest calling, p.1
The Highest Calling, page 1
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
To Ted Sorensen, who inspired me to work for a president, and Stu Eizenstat, who gave me the chance to do so.
PREFACE
Whenever I interview an author who has written a book about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, my first question is always “Why do you think the world really needs another book on this president?”
Someone interviewing me about this book might, fairly, ask the same type of question: “Why does the world really need another book on the U.S. presidency?”
There are plenty of books on the presidency. What I wanted to do with this one, however, is to provide some hopefully unique insights into the accomplishments, failures, personalities, and characters of many of our best-known presidents, through interviews I have conducted with many of these presidents’ biographers and with some of the presidents themselves.
My hope is to remind readers how truly different our presidents have been in their backgrounds, personalities, goals, and perspectives, and how these differences can really shape, for the good or bad, the country and the world. Although a president is just one person, an entire country (and indeed the world) can be moved in one direction or another by what that one person decides.
And thus, I would like readers to think about the significance of the decision to vote, since about a third of eligible voters do not even vote in presidential elections.
In June 2024, as this is written, the differences between the two main candidates for president—Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump—are stark. And the country is likely to go forward in vastly different directions depending on who wins the election. A small number of votes in a few of the “swing” states can decide the election.
Every American has a real interest in how the country proceeds, and those eligible should exercise their right to vote, and in doing so exercise the right that so many Americans have died protecting for almost 250 years.
INTRODUCTION
For the past hundred years, the position of the American presidency could well be argued to have been (and continue to be) the single most important position in the world.
Despite its importance, most Americans seem to know a good deal less about the position—its history, strengths, and weaknesses—and about the 45 individuals who have held this position—and who have thereby played a major role in shaping the United States and the world—than might be desired by an informed citizenry.
As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, a worthwhile goal for America is for citizens to learn more about the country’s history and government, including the position that has become the central one in the U.S. government in so many ways: the presidency. I have tried, through interviews with living presidents as well as scholars and journalists on particular presidents, along with my own perspectives on the office and personal experiences with it, to contribute toward this goal of providing a better understanding of our presidency.
Over the last few years, in public speeches and interviews, I have often said, obviously tongue-in-cheek, that my career path—private equity—is humankind’s highest calling. In truth, the U.S. presidency deserves that appellation—an incredibly difficult job done in the service of the country and, in many ways, large parts of the world.
The Presidency of the Last Century
When President Woodrow Wilson went to Paris in 1918 to negotiate the treaty designed to end the Great War, he was received with public adulation and acclaim that exceeded anything even Julius Caesar experienced upon returning to Rome after a conquest.
In that moment, the world saw for the first time just how large a colossus the U.S. president had become on the global stage. That stood in stark contrast to when Thomas Jefferson walked by himself—no security, staff, or family—from his boardinghouse to his first inauguration. What was once intended by the Founding Fathers to be a position heading one of three essentially equal branches of a republican government had clearly become, by Wilson’s tenure, the most powerful office on the planet, with its occupant seen as the undisputed leader of the Western world.
That larger-than-life presence shrank not long after Wilson came back from Paris. He was unable to get his beloved creation in the treaty, a League of Nations, approved by the Senate, despite a train tour throughout the country designed to develop public support for the concept. During that railroad trip, Wilson suffered a stroke, which, when followed by at least one more severe stroke, essentially ended his visibility (and viability) as president, as he became a complete recluse at the White House during the remainder of his second term. Wilson’s wife, Edith, acted as his eyes and ears and essentially became the de facto president.
Wilson was succeeded by the charming but ineffectual (and less than honest) Warren Harding, who died in office and was followed by the most laconic and low-key of American presidents, Calvin Coolidge. He was succeeded by Herbert Hoover, who had an impressive and global reputation as a gifted engineer and public servant; but the Great Depression ultimately overwhelmed him, and he came to be seen as a helpless, if not clueless, leader in dealing with the Depression. So the office of the American president was no longer seen as the behemoth it had once seemed when Wilson entered Paris.
And then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stricken by polio in midlife, not considered much of an intellect by his peers, and indeed widely viewed as an effete, born-to-the-manner patrician still heavily influenced by his domineering mother. But, in time, Roosevelt, like Wilson, became larger than life, due to his reinvention of what the federal government could do to get the country out of the Depression. And by serving an unprecedented third term, during which Pearl Harbor occurred and the U.S. fought and largely won (by the time of his death) the greatest war the world had ever seen, Roosevelt clearly surpassed Wilson as the undisputed leader of the Western world, reinstating the position of the American president.
Roosevelt’s death brought the relatively unknown, though quite decisive, Harry Truman into the White House, a turn of events few had once imagined as possible and even fewer thought desirable (including his mother-in-law). While Truman has in recent years come to be appreciated by scholars, he left office with a low approval rating; indeed, the man who made the bold, historic decision to drop two atomic bombs was not seen during his tenure as a larger-than-life figure. Maybe a bit of a smaller-than-life figure.
Truman was followed by the hero of D-Day, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Despite the worldwide acclaim that Eisenhower had achieved in his military service, his presidency was, by his design, a low-key affair. He was no Douglas MacArthur in his desire for public attention, and he was pleased with serving his country in this role; but he did not seek the glory or fame that he could have readily attained by virtue of his prior accomplishments (or by the unprecedented growth of the federal government’s power from the time of World War II).
In the Public Eye
A fair question might be asked: Why did a man like Eisenhower, who did not relish the limelight, and who had already devoted his life to his country, want to be president? And indeed, it might well be asked, why would anyone want to be president? Just look at what has happened to presidents over the past hundred years. Hoover was blamed for the Great Depression and decisively lost his reelection bid. Roosevelt died in office at 63, his health no doubt harmed by the considerable pressures of the job. Truman left office after deciding not to seek reelection (his approval ratings having gone as low as 22 percent). Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson was largely driven from office by the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. Nixon was forced to resign. Ford survived two assassination attempts and was defeated for reelection. Carter was defeated for reelection. George H. W. Bush was defeated for reelection. Clinton was impeached. George W. Bush fought two unpopular wars and was barely reelected. And Trump was impeached twice, lost his reelection bid, and was later indicted multiple times by the very government he once led.
Three presidents since World War II who were reelected left office with no lasting damage to their personal reputation: Eisenhower, Reagan, and Obama. But Eisenhower will likely be remembered more for his pre-presidential reputation, having led the D-Day invasion and winning the war in Europe. While Reagan almost died because of an assassination attempt early in his time in office, he later also had a major scandal—the Iran-Contra affair. His staff had illegally sold weapons to Iran, using the profits to fund the contra forces against the leftist government in Nicaragua, and for a few weeks at least it was not clear if his reputation could ever recover from it. However, Reagan did survive because the public didn’t think that he paid enough attention to details to have actually known what was happening. And he ultimately left office with relatively high approval ratings.
Obama may be a rare president who came to office with a comparatively unknown public reputation and left with an enhanced public reputation (hard-core Republicans notwithstanding)—even though he had relatively few epic or transformative accomplishments other than the Obamacare legislation. Obama will always be remembered most for having been the first African American to have been elected president—no sma ll feat in a country where African Americans are about 14 percent of the population and the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow made the election of a Black president seem unlikely.
With few exceptions, the odds of becoming president and emerging after eight years alive, healthy, and with an unscathed reputation are modest. The greater prospect, unfortunately, is that a president will die in office or will leave either disgraced in some way or defeated for reelection—which, while not exactly a disgrace, does impair one’s public reputation and perhaps future effectiveness. (Jimmy Carter spent more than forty years working on global peace and health challenges, won a Nobel Peace Prize, and was generally able to rehabilitate his public image—but it took more than four decades.)
Despite this record, people still line up years in advance to run for president, committing themselves for at least two years to relentless travel, constant fundraising, essentially no family time, often inedible food, reduced sleep and exercise, and the abandonment, for some time, of an existing position or career.
The presidency is the ultimate job in the world that one can hold (and can seek) without having to work one’s way up a ladder over 30 to 40 years. Anyone who is a native-born citizen and is 35 years of age can serve, and the fact that previous long shots—like Carter, Obama, or Trump—made it encourages others to run. The opportunity to be at the center of the universe, with the power to affect the lives of so many fellow citizens and so many individuals around the world, is like a drug, and a normal cost-benefit analysis is thrown aside. And, if one survives the rigors and challenges of the presidency, being a former president can be better in many ways than actually being president—no national responsibilities, popularity tends to increase, compensation (through speeches and books) can be extraordinary, and there is lifetime Secret Service protection.
Traditionally, individuals who have contemplated seeking the presidency tended to have a reasonably well-known public reputation and some level of meaningful accomplishment. Of course, there were always exceptions: Lincoln had only served one term in Congress, was later defeated for the Senate, and outside of the Lincoln-Douglas Senate debates of 1858 was little known in much of the country until he secured his party’s nomination in 1860.
The opening of access to the nominating process in the 1960s and 1970s—making a lack of traditional qualifications less relevant—has made many individuals believe that they could become president by directly appealing to voters. John Kennedy probably initiated that thought process in modern times. Although the son of a wealthy businessman, he was young and relatively unaccomplished as a representative and senator. But he went on the road, built a strong grassroots organization, appealed directly to voters rather than the backroom political bosses (with some exceptions), and managed to capture the nomination and the presidency in what seemed like an almost effortless manner. (His father’s money—there were no spending or reporting requirements then—no doubt helped a great deal. But if a father’s wealth were enough to make one president, there would be more presidents, rather than just one, whose father was a Forbes 400 member.)
The concept of going on the road, taking one’s case to the American voters, and being a force for change in Washington no doubt propelled Jimmy Carter into the presidency. Although he had not been an overly popular governor of Georgia, he did attract a fair amount of national attention for being a New South governor. Reelection was not then permitted in Georgia, and thus Carter, with no reelection prospects, considered his future political options and thought a long-shot run for president was not so ridiculous. He had met others who were thinking of running and he felt he was as competent as all of them, if not more so. And what was the downside? His peanut farm and warehouse businesses were not going anywhere. So Carter began the ultimate bare-bones campaign, surrounded by a group of young Georgians, and developed a novel concept—running as someone who was not from Washington (and not a lawyer), who was not part of the Watergate mess in Washington, who could bring the South back into the Democratic Party mainstream, and who would change Washington in a way that only a true outsider could do. And it worked. He essentially won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and the rest is history.
Since then, every fresh face in the political world thinks he or she can do what Carter did. And some have. Obama is the best example. But Trump essentially had the same idea—a fresh political face with business experience who could clean up the Washington “swamp.” And Trump’s march toward the nomination in 2016—anticipated by virtually no one at the campaign’s outset—worked almost flawlessly, despite campaign staff infighting and Trump’s at times incendiary comments and unusual behavior.
That someone with no government experience could get elected does show the problems of a system where anyone can run and traditional qualifications are not really a prerequisite. On the other hand, my sense is the American people like to believe that any person has a chance to rise up and run (in part because of the “American Dream” mythology), and that the American people should have the widest possible selection of candidates.
The job does not come without its challenges. Congress might be controlled by another party. Even if not, Congress may well not support a president’s programs. Foreign leaders are no longer as willing to follow the U.S. lead on geopolitical and military matters. The job has health risks—aside from possible assassinations, every president seems to age considerably—and that is not surprising, for they have to deal with the toughest problems, the ones that cannot be solved by anyone else in the government.
And the press exposure, especially with the advent of around-the-clock television news, the internet, and social media, essentially means that every mistake is magnified and transmitted instantly around the world. The minute-by-minute exposure to the media, and thus the public in the U.S. and around the world, places so much pressure on a president that it is a wonder anyone really wants the job. But we’re lucky that some talented people still strive for the highest office.
A Lifelong Interest in the Office
My first memory of hearing about a president directly was Eisenhower. I was born in 1949, and I am not sure if my memory is accurate, but I vaguely remember watching what must have been the 1956 Republican National Convention on a small black-and-white television in our modest row house in Baltimore. I realized, even then, that the U.S. president was an important person—maybe the most important person.
In a few short years came John F. Kennedy, the charismatic, handsome young senator from Massachusetts, candidate for the 1960 Democratic nomination, and a person that my blue-collar, dedicated Democratic parents thought was the ideal candidate. I was delighted when he won, and followed my sixth-grade teacher’s instructions to watch the inauguration. School was even closed for the occasion. I am not sure that I honestly recognized Kennedy’s inaugural address as the most eloquent of the twentieth century at the time, or a model of speech craftsmanship the likes of which we have not really seen since. But the day after the inauguration, my teacher took two hours to go through the speech line by line, and I got it—this was truly a masterpiece of oratory.
Perhaps the memory of “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” is what led me several decades later to want to work for the man who helped to author that speech: Kennedy’s former special counsel, Ted Sorensen, who later became a partner at a New York law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. And I did precisely that in 1973 upon graduating from the University of Chicago Law School. (My admiration for Kennedy has remained: since then, I have served for fourteen years as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the living memorial to our 35th president. I have also been deeply involved with the Kennedy School at Harvard, serving as its capital campaign chair and longtime chair of its executive council. And I have been a large donor to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, as well as to the organization started by Jacqueline Kennedy, the White House Historical Association.)
