The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

“The essence of decision making is opaque even to the decision maker,”

“Amazing things, good and bad, happened in the 1980s because President Reagan wanted them to happen. He knew how to be president.”17

The fact that basic presidential qualities have become a partisan matter shows how far off the rails the office has run.

The American presidency was created in a moment of desperation and uncertainty about the failing health of the new nation and its experimental democracy. Rival European countries cheered for its failure, awaiting its collapse. They were ultimately disappointed. The shared powers system created by the Constitution, with a chief magistrate chosen by a free people and partially responsible to Congress, has survived for 230 years. It has helped to build the most powerful nation in the world. The traditions and standards of the American presidency have produced heroes and been durable enough to withstand scoundrels, drawing strength and inspiration from the former, shaming and limiting the latter.

Today, we notice when the president doesn’t show up. We demand presidential comment or action on most events in American public life. We expect the president to hasten to the scene of a natural disaster and comfort the afflicted. We expect the president to administer needle and thread when the national fabric tears, or at the very least to reach for the sewing box of unity. We hope the president will strike deals—or at least strain for bipartisan solutions—by schmoozing with opponents over medium-priced wine in the Blue Room of the White House. We assume the president will promote morality in foreign affairs based on the idea that it makes America safer, and that a country founded on human liberty is obligated to promote it and protect it elsewhere.

Commander in Chief, Chief Executive, Chief Diplomat, Chief Legislator, Chief of Party, Chief Voice of the People, First Responder, Chief Priest, and World Leader.20

“Presidents are caught in a crisis-by-crisis response operation that undermines the ability of any modern president to get a handle” on the office.

executive branch of 2 million employees

Presidential leadership today is not so much the work of an individual, it is the work of an organization, but we nevertheless obsess over the individual.22

Congress, a president’s necessary partner, has increasingly relinquished its role as an institution that tackles the country’s big problems.

Just 52 percent of those age six to twenty-one are non-Hispanic whites.23 A president must know how to read and speak to a wider variety of backgrounds and experiences and a newly forming concept of America.

Jefferson said citizens make presidents the “safe depository of their rights,”24 but citizens today are fiercely divided. More of us settle into our corners, listening to partisan rants and nursing partisan grudges.

“It is harder to think than it is to feel,” Brownlow wrote in 1947. “And it is very much harder to think about things that seem to be but unimportant details than it is to feel about the things that seem most important to us.”26

Presidential campaigns are covered like sporting events, but as the presidential scholar James David Barber put it, “A ball game ends with the final score. The audience does not then put their power in the hands of the winning team.”

Given the distance between the talents, personal qualities, and skills required to win an election and the talents, personal qualities, and skills required to govern, it’s more like the voters are judging a football game and then putting the winning team in charge of synchronized swimming.

Lyndon Johnson made the point in his earthy way: “The office is kinda like the little country boy found the hoochie-koochie show at the carnival,” he said. “Once he’d paid his dime and got inside the tent, it ain’t exactly as it was advertised.”

We are also part of the problem in campaigns. We are addicted to distraction.

Fitness for office isn’t just a matter of whether a candidate can do the tasks they choose to take on, but also of whether they choose to take on the right tasks.

Gabriel Over the White House

It is not because I do less than I might do, but that I have more than I can do.2 —Thomas Jefferson

“Thousands of representatives of the ‘inarticulate middle class’ militantly descended upon the nation’s capital.”5

330,000—denouncing

The columnist Walter Lippmann suggested the same. The New York Herald Tribune wrote an editorial entitled “For Dictatorship if Necessary.”8 In 1933, William Randolph Hearst had tried to show the country just how appealing dictatorship might be.

“The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation,” he wrote. “To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property & all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”11

In a joke at the time, Hoover asked his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, “Lend me a nickel, I want to call a friend.” Mellon replied, “Here’s a dime, call all your friends.”15

“The power of directing and employing the common strength forms a usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority,”8 wrote Alexander Hamilton.

have found remarkably few examples of journalists or politicians seeking to exploit evidence that government was in some way complicit in a particular disaster,” writes the political and environmental historian Gareth Davies in his study of presidents and disasters.13

“I regard this as one of the great real disasters that threatens to engulf us, when we are unready as a nation, as a people, to meet personal disaster by our own cheerful giving,” Ike said in 1957. “Part of the reason is this misunderstanding that government is taking the place even of rescuing the person, the individual, and the family from his natural disasters.”

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit….The lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune….Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.15

Implicit in this understanding of the presidency is an inescapable cycle. The bigger the government gets, the more a president must show personal concern.

As the nation’s moral leader, the president is the one person in the country in a position to provide guidance, meaning, and stability when events make people hungry for consolation. It is a political opportunity and a governing obligation.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have born the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

According to the author and criminologist Grant Duwe, in the sixty-five years before the 1966 Texas tower shooting, there were just twenty-one public mass shootings in which four or more people were killed.19 In the fifty-four years since then, as of February 2020, the number has increased by more than eight times, to 175 public mass shootings, and the attacks have become increasingly deadly.20

“Part of the elevation of the presidential role points to how we’ve turned federalism on its head,” says Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under President Obama. “The primary role of responding is the governor’s and not the federal government. People expect the president to be in charge, and if something is wrong it’s the president’s fault, but you elected the governor. Blame them. The primary responsibility is not federal. In many cases it is unfair to say it is all the president’s fault when we’ve seen big failures and structural problems at the local and state level that the federal government can’t fix.”44

“I am President of the United States, and am sworn to execute the law. I would proceed against you or any of your combinations as quick as I would against a [labor] striker—but not because I am opposed to either capital or labor, except as either of them may be violators of the laws of the country.”

Our national capacity for hard work and intelligent cooperation is ample guaranty of the future of the United States.5

All communities are apt to look to Government for too much. Even in our own country, where its powers and duties are so strictly limited, we are prone to do so, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress. But this ought not to be. The framers of our excellent constitution and the people who approved it with calm and sagacious deliberation, acted at the time on a sounder principle. They wisely judged that the less Government interferes with private pursuits the better for the general prosperity.25

Any discussion of how hard it is to manage the presidency has to start with the weakness of Congress. You can’t have a president solve problems the legislative branch has not.

Members of Congress represent the diversity and breadth of America. Durable solutions to the toughest problems can come only through a system that passes laws informed by that diversity and in which the process makes everyone feel heard whether they win or lose.

When Congress does not address central questions on issues like healthcare, immigration, and economic policy, it lengthens the president’s to-do list.

If these fires of separation start to die down, media and interest groups that profit from conflagration hasten to slosh more gasoline on the floor.

In 2016, for the first time since 1916—which was the second election in which senators were chosen by popular vote—not a single state divided its political preferences.37

Americans tell pollsters they want bipartisan cooperation, but those who actually vote don’t value that as much. (Or they define bipartisanship as acquiescence by the other party to what their party believes.) In congressional elections, voters mostly pick the party and not the person, which means the member headed to Washington is encouraged to stick with the party and not behave like a person.

“Liberty never dies from direct attack. No man ever arises and says ‘Down with Liberty.’ Liberty has died in 14 countries in a single score of years from weakening its safeguards, from demoralization of the moral stamina of the people….If we examine the fate of wrecked republics throughout the world we find their first symptoms in the weakening of the legislative arm. Subservience in legislative halls is the spot where liberty and political morals commit suicide.”18

“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” said delegate Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. “The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. They are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.”

Patrick Henry warned, “If your American chief be a man of ambition, and abilities, how easy it is for him to render himself absolute.”

Samuel Adams also argued that power could not be contained by any man. “Such is the depravity of mankind that ambition and lust of power above the law are predominant passions in the breasts of most men,” he said. “[Power] converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.”

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”

While there is debate over how literally to take each utterance from the men who crafted the founding instructions, it is clear from the spirit of their debates that they were obsessed with balance. A government in which power was wrongly distributed could create a president who was at once too powerful and yet not powerful enough to bring the system back into balance. It would also make bad laws. Nowadays, instead of looking to bolster Congress’s powers and expect less from the president, we remain in thrall to the presidential habit. We still look to a president who, through force of will, can recalibrate the system and snap Congress into action.

“This election of a chief magistrate for the whole Union will never be settled to the satisfaction of the people,” said John Quincy Adams, a few years later.17