The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” President Obama explained to the author Michael Lewis. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a thirty to forty percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”9 Thomas Jefferson explained this to his secretary of the treasury: “What is good in this case cannot be effected. We have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.”10 Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, points to the discussion over intervention in the Syrian civil war as typical of a presidential-level decision with tough outcomes. Syria’s President Assad had killed almost two hundred thousand people and displaced three million.11, 12 “Do you intervene militarily and try to take out Assad?” she says, reeling off the set of questions. “You can’t really accomplish that from the air, so that’s a ground invasion again in the Middle East. But then if you don’t, you’ve seen what happens. [Assad continues to slaughter his people.] Do you focus on those threats that are directly threatening the United States and our allies like ISIS? Yes, that’s what we did, but then you leave other stuff unattended. I could go on and on, but the point is, that’s an example, one of many, of a case where the sins of omission and com...