A Thin Line Between Love and Hate

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the August/September 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Nevertheless, the book is not terrible. It starts with the sensible argument that Americans have invested "too many meanings within our presidency." They want presidents to embody the nation and reflect its majesty, but they also want them to symbolize a commitment to democracy. Americans want great men and common men all at once.

They also want presidents to lead the "civil religion." Americans have long seen their country as a special place with a providential destiny, so presidents often describe the United States in spiritual terms, invoking God's blessings and praying for His guidance. While Langston broadly describes the intellectual and political difficulties of civil-religious leadership, he gives too little attention to the practical problems that such leadership entails. For one thing, there's a fine line between spirituality and sanctimony. Jimmy Carter crossed that line, which is one reason why people remember his presidency the way they remember a tedious sermon in a crowded church in the middle of August.

If a president wants to acquire an air of godliness by quoting the Bible, he'd better get it right. Langston cites a line from Clinton's 1992 acceptance speech: "Scripture says [that] our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard, nor our minds imagined what we can build." Langston then moves on without noting something important: Clinton misquoted the verse. Says 1 Corinthians 2:9: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" By substituting earthly endeavor for divine providence, Clinton deeply offended fundamentalist Christians.

Langston also errs when he says that Reagan's employment of civil religion was relatively passive: "In the 1980s, there was no demon bank to be subdued, no Senate censure to condemn, no party to build from scratch." What about the Evil Empire? Significantly, Reagan introduced that term in a 1983 address to the National Association of Evangelicals. Reagan told the evangelicals that he hoped the Soviets would someday discover God. "But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world." He urged them not "to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil." That speech was among the most significant and revealing of Reagan's career, and Langston's book suffers badly from neglecting it.

Reagan was trying to get the evangelicals to oppose the nuclear freeze, which suggests another point that Langston misses. For decades, the danger of nuclear annihilation shaped the relationship of the people and the president. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Americans prepared their fallout shelters, stocked up on canned goods, and came to grips with the idea that their world could burn up within a few hours. At the end of the crisis, many believed that John F. Kennedy's skillful leadership had literally saved their lives.

The commander-in-chief thus became the Man Who Kept the Missiles Away. Naturally enough, presidents exploited this stature to rally support for their foreign policy. They also used it to rationalize the growth of the national security apparatus and the invasion of civil liberties. Nixon even used it to justify the sacking of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. "Elliot," he told Attorney General Richardson, "Brezhnev wouldn't understand if I didn't fire Cox after all this."

In another way, however, the prospect of nuclear war made life tougher for presidents and presidential candidates. The chief executive could prevent a nuclear war, people realized, but he could also start one. Politicians and reporters thus gained an airtight reason for probing deeply into a would-be president's character. After all, anyone seeking the White House was asking for the power to kill every human being on earth. Any aspect of his public or private life that could hint at poor judgment was now fair game.

Not coincidentally, the first presidential campaign after the Cuban Missile Crisis featured vicious attacks on Barry Goldwater's stability. Four years later, Richard Nixon's campaign pamphlets said: "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it." In 1972, revelations of electroshock therapy instantly disqualified Sen. Thomas Eagleton as the Democratic vice presidential nominee. And in the following decades, a number of campaign commercials would feature the legendary "red phone" and the message that we needed a steady hand to answer it. As late as 1987, questions about judgment and character could still wreck a candidacy, as Gary Hart learned in the Donna Rice episode.

Bill Clinton, whose personality flaws were just as blatant as his unconcern for foreign policy, could probably not have won the White House during the Cold War. But by the time he geared up his 1992 presidential campaign, the perceived threat of nuclear war was fading, and people expected a good deal less from their president.

In evaluating the chief executive, perhaps we've gone too far in defining deviancy down. Even though we're not on the eve of destruction, a president can still do really bad things, such as collecting hundreds of confidential FBI files on political opponents. In this light, it's disturbing to read Gil Troy's description of how Bill and Hillary reacted to criticism: "The Clintons united in rage. Theirs was the angriest administration since Richard Nixon's."

It's tempting to stretch the Nixon analogy and start speculating about impeachment, but that's beside the point here. Regardless of who's president, abuse of authority will always be a danger as long as the federal government is too big, too complicated, and too intrusive. We should try to keep the power graspers out of the White House whenever we can, but above all we should drain the bureaucratic swamps that gave rise to Watergate and Indogate. The appropriate attitude toward the White House is neither reverence nor contempt, but watchfulness.

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