The Gipper at 100

Myths are Part of Politics I only had the chance to see Ronald Reagan in the flesh a handful of times. I distinctly remember when he came to Idaho to campaign for then-Rep. Steve Symms in 1980. He had incredible stage presence, a great voice, mannerisms, an almost unprecedented ability to connect with the audience. The Great Communicator. With his 100th birthday this past weekend, the Canonization of Reagan has - perhaps - reached its zenith. Reagan is the one Republican all Republicans can rally to. In his approach to the presidency, he has become - even for Barack Obama - a touchstone, an example of how to use the awesome public powers of the office to move the country, the Congress and the world. It's both good politics and good historical analysis on Obama's part to look to The Gipper for inspiration. In a piece in USA Today, Obama said of Reagan: “At a time when our nation was going through an extremely difficult period, with economic hardship at home and very real threats beyond our borders, it was this positive outlook, this sense of pride, that the American people needed more than anything." There is a theory among presidential historians that it takes 25 years after a president leaves office to begin to come to grips with the man, the accomplishments and the shortcomings. If that is correct, we're about to have the historical distance to look back on the Reagan Era and make some judgments. As much of the Reagan at 100 reporting has pointed out, much about Reagan is - no nice way to put it - a myth. In 1981 he did push through the greatest tax cut in history to that time, but he also raised taxes 11 times during his presidency. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan's diaries, says: "There's a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn't happen that way. It's false." The Tea Partiers who genuflect at his memory conveniently ignore that the federal deficit ballooned on his watch and the federal government grew. Reagan advocated, passionately advocated, the Star Wars missile defense scheme, but also went to the summit with Gorbachev determined to try to eliminate all nuclear weapons. He pulled U.S. troops out of Lebanon after an attack on Marines there and he did trade arms for hostages. In short, the man's record is more complex and ultimately more interesting than the Reagan myths. Myth making in politics is a bipartisan game. Democrats have long clung to their Roosevelt myth, of example. FDR's sunny disposition, great communicator talents and fundamental faith in the American system are the self same attributes most find so endearing about Ronald Reagan. Yet, Roosevelt's sunny personality hid a tough, even mean, streak that played out in his efforts to "purge" the Democratic Party of conservatives in 1938. His reverence for the American system didn't prevent him from trying to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937. If George W. Bush played fast and loose with the truth in the run-up to the Iraq War, FDR did the same in the run-up to World War II. Had Roosevelt's presidency ended after the 1940 election, with the country deprived of his splendid leadership during the war, we might only remember him today as the man whose policies made too little dent in the side of the Great Depression and who blew up his second term trying to "reform" the Supreme Court. Timing counts for a lot in politics. Like FDR, Reagan created and maintained an uncanny ability to shape the symbols and power of the presidency into an American narrative. They both stood for the America of boundless opportunity; the shining city on a hill. They spoke to the aspirations of Americans, never fully achieved, but important nonetheless. They were, in a word, inspirational leaders. It didn't hurt either man's reputation that their presidencies fell between the tenure of other presidents who never seemed to measure up to the job. Both Reagan and Roosevelt share one other trait, I think, that makes them - myths and all - endure. Both were unlikely leaders, neither really born to the success they achieved. Their success was not inevitable. True enough Roosevelt came from great wealth and enjoyed the benefits of a powerful name, but unlike his distant cousin, who also became a great president, Franklin was, in the famous words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, equipped only with "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." FDR's struggle to overcome polio is a measure of the man's determination and temperament. Reagan rose from Hollywood, B-movie actor to GE pitchman, to Governor of California. As Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of his best lines - lines he practiced and delivered so well - wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "He ran for president four times and lost twice. His 1968 run was a flop—it was too early, as he later admitted, and when it's too early, it never ends well. In 1976 he took on an incumbent Republican president of his own party, and lost primaries in New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois (where he'd been born), Massachusetts and Vermont. It was hand-to-hand combat all the way to the convention, where he lost to Gerald Ford. People said he was finished. He roared back in 1980 only to lose Iowa and scramble back in New Hampshire while reorganizing his campaign and firing his top staff. He won the nomination and faced another incumbent president." Reagan, like FDR, had a great sense of humor; something that will get you a long way in life and in politics. Roosevelt could joke about "my little dog Fala" and tweak his political opponents in the process. Noonan recounts a classic Reagan joke, "a man says sympathetically to his friend, 'I'm so sorry your wife ran away with the gardener.' The guy answers, 'It's OK, I was going to fire him anyway.'" There is at least one, big, practical political lesson in the lives of the two men - Reagan and Roosevelt - who more than any others have shaped American politics for the last 75 years. Optimism, charm, humor, the ability to communicate from the head and the heart, and the gravitas of that hard to define quality "leadership" are all attributes we value in friends and family. Big surprise: we reward those same qualities in our politicians. Much of what we think we know about great figures in our history just isn't so, but still the myths survive, even as the complex truth is much more interesting and ultimately more important.

On This Day

FDR's Arsenal of Democracy Speech Seventy years ago this evening - December 29, 1940 - Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of the most important speeches of his presidency and helped set in motion a vast expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign affairs. Fresh from re-election a month earlier to an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt used one of his tremendously effective "fireside chats" via radio to proclaim America "an arsenal of democracy" determined to aid a beleaguered Great Britain that seemed to be on its last legs against Hitler's powerful army and air force. Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, Roosevelt said this would not be "a fireside chat on war," but rather "a talk on national security." He proceeded to lay out what he saw as the threats to the United States if the British, blockaded and bombed, were forced to capitulate to the Germans. While the speech was widely praised and well accepted, not everyone, to say the least, agreed. [You can hear the full speech, including the fascinating CBS announcer's introduction here.] The non-interventionist bloc in Congress remained very strong in 1940 and 1941. Roosevelt was concerned enough about the anti-war sentiment in the country that he made comments near the end of his 1940 campaign against Republican Wendell Willkie that he would have to eat. He famously said "our boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war." Montana's progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler condemned Roosevelt and his advisers as "warmongers" and Wheeler urged the president to utilize his position and leverage to seek a negotiated end to the fighting in Europe. (Idaho's William E. Borah, a Republican, who had died in January 1940, surely would have agreed with Wheeler and other leading non-interventionist like Ohio's Robert Taft and California's Hiram Johnson, both Republicans.) Roosevelt followed up his "arsenal of democracy" speech with legislation - forever known as Lend-Lease - that gave the president, in Wheeler's view and it was a credible view, vast new powers - even dictatorial powers - to aid those countries, debt free, that the president deemed vital to America's national security. By the end of the war in 1945, Lend-Lease had supplied $50 billion (more than $750 billion in today's dollars) in material to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China. There is little debate that the aid was essential to the war effort. No less an authority than Josef Stalin confirmed that when he told FDR that American equipment had allowed the Allies to win the war. There is also little debate around the fact that Lend-Lease, and Roosevelt's administration of the program, finally and forever shed the American foreign policy cloak of non-intervention or isolationism. With Lend-Lease, the country was committed to full and unrelenting international engagement and the country has seldom looked back since the act was signed into law in March 1941. Fundamentally, what Montana's Wheeler and Idaho's Borah, among others, were objecting to was the inherent expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign policy. Wheeler repeatedly warned of the rise of "an American dictator" who would run over the top of the Congress in the establishment of foreign policy. History has recorded that FDR, while not always candid or even completely honest about his intentions, used his vast foreign policy power with restraint and with a deep commitment to democracy. But those who opposed Roosevelt, even if now mostly forgotten, have also been validated by history. The steady expansion of presidential power in the area of foreign policy that, in many ways, began on a December evening 70 years ago continues to this very day. The United States has spawned no dictator as Sen. Wheeler feared, but we do have a commander in chief whose power to involve the country militarily in every corner of the globe is routinely unchecked and often not even really debated by the Congress. Franklin Roosevelt's legacy is well recognized for its sweeping impact on domestic policy, but the 32nd president's legacy in foreign policy is just has profound and it began with a speech on this day seven decades ago.

Is 2010 Really 1938?

Getting an Economic Consensus There are no perfect historical parallels. Nothing is ever precisely like it was in another time. At best, history can help illuminate the present and should, if we're paying attention, help us avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Take 1938, for example. But, alas we are Americans. We can't get agreement on how to crown a national college football champion, how can we possibly get consensus on what to do with the economy? President Obama went to Cleveland this week to roll out a plan for more stimulus spending on infrastructure and small buisness tax cuts as a way to get people back to work. He was greeted by reactions ranging from ridicule to yawning. Meanwhile, House Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner, developing economic policy while he measures the drapes, started dropping hints about what a Republican Congress would do with spending (cut it, including unspent stimulus dollars), the economy (grow it) and taxes (leave the Bush cuts in place). All the while leaving room for a few well placed subpoenas. These two versions of economic policy couldn't be more at odds. It does sound a good deal like 1937 and 1938. As Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats faced the mid-terms in his sixth year in office, the Great Depression was in its eighth year. Wall Street was restive. Labor unions were sitting down on the job. Democrats were frantic and the president's counselors were divided. Should FDR double down on spending and fiscal policy aimed at reducing unemployment or should the administration send a message to the markets and business that it was determined to get a ballooning budget under control? Confronted with what historian David Kennedy has described as, "repeated budget deficits, escalating regulatory burdens, threats of higher taxes, mounting labor costs, and, most important, persistent anxiety about what further provocations to business the New Deal had in store," business confidence was sapped. "Capital," Kennedy said, "was hibernating." Sounds familiar, eh? At a pivotal Cabinet meeting late in 1937, FDR fumed about his advisers constantly telling him about the sorry state of the economy, but "nobody suggests what I should do." His economic and political advisers eventually won the debate. The president's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, a balanced budget advocate, put it succinctly. "What business wants to know is: Are we headed toward state Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?" FDR's chief political lieutenant, Jim Farley, chimed in. "That's what they want to know," that the administration would reduce spending and balance the budget to reassure business and the markets. "All right, Jim; I will turn on the old record," Roosevelt responded. A new fiscal policy aimed at reducing spending and balancing the budget was ordered. The New York Times' Paul Krugman argues that FDR's decision brought on the "Roosevelt Recession" of 1938, caused unemployment to top out at 20% and contributed to stunning Democratic losses - six Senate seats and 71 seats in the House - in the 1938 mid-terms. What's more, Krugman asserts - and he's critical of Obama from the left for being too timid with his stimulus efforts - the public in the late 1930's took exactly the wrong lesson from FDR's shift in policy. Americans became convinced that stimulus spending and job creation efforts hadn't worked and wouldn't work. That debate, check the morning paper, still rages. I keep thinking there must be some middle ground somewhere in the current debate, but I've been wrong before. Couldn't we get something approaching national consensus around two or three major issues? One, Wall Street and investment banking excesses must be brought under control. Does anyone really think that what happened in the run up to the financial collapse shouldn't be avoided in the future if at all possible? Regulating greed and excess is not a partisan issue. Two, spending on well-conceived public works (OK, infrastructure) is both a good long-term investment and good short-term job stabilizer and, one hopes, job creator. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said recently that the stimulus has - big surprise - increased the deficit and reduced unemployment. And, three, the deficit needs to come down, but maybe in a planned, systematic way. Maybe the timing on the expiration of those Bush-era tax cuts is really not very conducive to getting capital out of hibernation. Perhaps a compromise is in order? Someone, the president or John Boehner or the ghost of Henry Morgenthau needs to find a way to knit all the pieces together into a 2010 whole cloth of economic growth, job creation and fiscal sanity. Not holding your breath? I understand. There is a poem entitled "Nineteen-Thirty-Eight" by Andrea Hollander Budy. It's about a young woman who lies about not graduating from high school in 1938: yanked out when her father lost his job. Now it was her turn to make herself useful, he told her. Nineteen-Thirty-Eight was not a particularly good year and not one to repeat. That much history tells us very clearly.

Things of the Past

The Internet Isn't the Same In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt made the long, dangerous journey to Tehran for a wartime conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. En route he stopped over in Cairo to huddle with the British Prime Minister and Chiang Kai-shek. The president also did a little sightseeing as he noted in a letter to his long-time assistant Grace Tully. FDR wrote that he had made friends with the Sphinx and, like every president before or since, concluded that "Congress should know her." The lighthearted, intimate letter to Tully is among a new treasure of letters to, from, and about a president that is the subject of a massive collection of books, but about whom we seem to only want to know more. The National Archives gained possession of the 5,000 rarely or never before seen letters, notes and scraps and they most surely will add to the already rich trove of material about the president recently voted the nation's greatest by a group of more than 200 scholars of the presidency. “You actually see F.D.R.’s thought process,” Robert W. Clark, supervisory archivist of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., told the New York Times. “(FDR) never wrote memoirs, he wasn’t a reflective kind of guy. This shows him instinctively making decisions that he knew would be for the betterment of the country and the world,” Clark said. Roosevelt conceived of the modern presidential library and the building and grounds at his home along the Hudson north of New York City is a national treasure. FDR, even without his own diary or memoirs, knew the value of keeping and using an archive. His notion was that all of his principal aides would house their papers at Hyde Park and many did. The collection of materials squirreled away by FDR's devoted assistant Grace Tully will add to the richness of what has long existed. The materials include a letter from Benito Mussolini, pre-war musings from Joseph P. Kennedy about the war in Europe and the documents that coordinated the logistics for Roosevelt's meeting on the day he died with his one-time mistress. You wonder what the Internet age is doing to this kind of material. Actually, I don't wonder, I know. The nature of the nation's historical record has already changed dramatically. Politicians don't write letters any more. Practically speaking you can't get a piece of mail into the White House or a Congressional office. All business is done on the phone or my email. Still, one hopes that George W. Bush's or Barack Obama's version of Grace Tully - every politician worth a darn has a Grace Tully - is slipping a few choice notes and letters into a "confidential file" that one day scholars and the rest of us will get to see. As the FDR archivist says, such things show us how leaders reason, worry and joke. The dry, factual record is only part of the story. History - and our country's story - lives in the small, intimate details.

A Passion For Anonymity

When the Staff Becomes the Story What we now think of as the modern White House staff dates back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Before FDR - Woodrow Wilson, for example - presidents had a White House staff that basically included a secretary to handle correspondence and scheduling and maybe a typist or stenographer. Roosevelt changed all that just as he changed almost everything about the modern presidency and the operation of the White House. When fear was expressed that FDR was engaging in executive empire building by expanding the White House bureaucracy, he famously responded that his assistants would be characterized by a "passion for anonymity." What happened to that idea? I'd be the first to concede that the demands of the 21st Century White House, at least in some respects, pale in comparison to those of FDR's day. FDR didn't have to deal with the 24 hour news cycle and most everything moved more slowly. Still, Roosevelt battled a depression and won a war with a handful of personal staffers who for the most part didn't become household names or the subject of long profiles in the New York Times. There wasn't a Rahm Emanuel or Karl Rove in the group. I got to thinking about this while reading what was, at least for political junkies, the admittedly fascinating piece on Emanuel in last week's Times Magazine. If the piece was intended to restore a certain calm to the No Drama Obama operation and tamp down the storyline that the president's Chief of Staff is - take your pick - tired, discouraged, out of sorts or sync with his boss, too visible, too overbearing, a lightening rod, etc., it doesn't seem to have worked. Emanuel has been the subject of a Letterman Top 10 List, countless stories and even a sole-subject blog Rahmblr. The Rahmblr will be profiled, along with his brother, on "60 Minutes" on Sunday. Can you say overexposed? I'm admittedly from the old school. FDR had it right. In my old school view, political aides, generally speaking, best serve the boss when they aren't always part of the story. While there is something to be said for a political aide taking the arrows for the boss when the going gets tough, there is not much to be said for political staffers becoming the story. After a campaign in 2008 where turmoil among Hillary Clinton's staff and John McCain's advisers seemed to define the out-of-control nature of both their campaigns, I had a naive notion that an Obama White House might not succumb to the usual inside the beltway fixation on who is doing what to whom among the president's closest advisers. Naive indeed. Political operations are unique beasts organizationally and culturally. There is nothing quite like them. Nonetheless, in at least one way, a political operation, be it the white hot White House or some backwater congressional office, are like corporate boardrooms or big league baseball locker rooms. When the antics of the CEO's underlings or the third baseman's relationship with the shortstop start to get more attention than the substance of the business or the score of the game, then the boss or the manager usually has a big problem. Considering the qualities and intelligence of the people involved, it is amazing to me that Clinton and McCain didn't immediately put a stop to the dysfunction in their staffs during the last campaign. Their failure to do so speaks volumes about their own management and leadership abilities. Stay tuned to see if Obama tolerates more of what seems to be the building drama in his organization. I think I know what FDR might have done. He had a few trusted advisers - Louis Howe, Steve Early and Harry Hopkins, for instance - but he never let any one adviser totally dominate the administration or his thinking. He kept his own counsel, often not sharing his thinking while keeping his own staff guessing and agile, and he made sure that he, and he alone, made the big decisions. A little more anonymity, and frankly modesty, from people who haven't been elected to anything would be a good thing. My old boss, Cece Andrus, the only fellow elected governor of Idaho four times and someone, as even his detractors admit, who knew how to work the levers and make decisions, used to remind his Statehouse staffers - me included - that "there are lots of names on doors around here, but only one name on the ballot." In other words, I'm the boss and you work for me. Keep your head and your profile down and tend to business. Words to govern by.

The Survival of the Republic

FDR and "the Jew Deal" and Obama "the Kenyan" "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that ain't so." - Mark Twain OK, I admit it. I don't need more evidence that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after Aloha land became the 50th state. I am convinced the president is native born and therefore qualified to exercise the executive power of the government under the Constitution. It is a closed case for me, but apparently not for many so called "birthers" and even, at last count, eleven members of Congress who are sponsoring legislation requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates. All of this talk of birth certificates comes hard on the heels of the persistent rumor that Obama is a secret Muslim. What's going on here? A Constitutional crisis? An updated version of UFO sitings? None of that. The Obama "stories" are, I submit, in league with a long, colorful and frequently disquieting chapter in American presidential history. It is the chapter where some Americans never quite get to the point of accepting the person in the White House. Presidential history is full of "facts" from the fringe that, if true, would surely "disqualify" the offender in the Oval Office. The president in modern times most aggressively vilified in this way was surely Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson document in their book - All but the People - Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics - FDR was - pick your poison - mentally ill, unable to handle the strain of office due to his polio, a shadow Communist (or Fascist), a warmonger and a Jew. A contemptible collection of crackpots, including the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin who commanded an audience that Glenn Beck would envy, and a southern demagogue by the name of Gerald L.K. Smith, rumor mongered the anti-FDR lies constantly. As Wolfskill and Hudson note, Smith's Christian Nationalist Crusade mailed out thousands of copies of a phony Roosevelt genealogy, purporting to "prove" FDR's Jewish ancestry, during the presidential campaign of 1936. A footnote read: "Every sensible Christian and loyal American will fight the campaign of Leftist, Communists, Jews and Internationalists to return the Roosevelt dynasty to power." Roosevelt won that 1936 election, by the way, in an historic landslide that only convinced his critics that he was determined in a second term to advance not the "New Deal," but the "Jew Deal." In earlier times, the detractors of President John Adams contended he harbored secret ambitions to declare himself King and, despite Adams role in the American Revolution, as president he was determined to tighten bonds with England. Andrew Jackson came to believe that the death of his beloved wife, Rachel, was a direct result of the vicious attacks directed at him, but aimed at her. One charge - the Jacksons were bigamists. More recently, John F. Kennedy had to counter the widespread belief, advanced effectively by his political opponents, that his election as the first Catholic president was sure to install the Bishop of Rome - the Pope - as White House chief of staff. George W. Bush had to contend with conspiracy theorists in the wake of September 11th and some Americans will never get over his "illegitimate election" by a 5-4 vote of the United States Supreme Court. "Politics ain't bean bag," as they say, and for sure the game has always been played as a full contact sport. Good advice to any politician: Don't climb in the ring if you can't take a punch and a low blow has always been part of our politics. You want fair play - go to a cricket match Still, the speed and viral nature of today's rumor spreading, fueled by the Internet, 24 hour cable news, and bloviators like Lou Dobbs and Beck is nearly impossible to fathom or refute. Spreading rumors in the age of instant communication makes "old media" reporting, the kind that actually seeks out the facts, even more important as an antidote to the nonsense. But, there is another old adage - the truth never catches up with the allegation - that keeps theses stories alive for days, weeks and beyond. Considering all the rascals who have occupied the White House - from a secret Jew to a secret non-citizen - it is a real wonder the Republic has survived at all.