Where are you, Warren G. Harding?
To govern is to choose, and for presidents choices are almost always untidy, inconvenient, and fraught. But that’s what president do: their job is to protect America, and Americans.
They frequently do so reluctantly, weighing personal political costs against the national interest. And afterward, they explain themselves by laying out the reality of the situation, as they see it, and the dangers. They ask their fellow citizens to follow along. Sometimes this works out well. Sometimes not. But the president – whatever his name or party – at least did his job.
Presidential leadership in a nutshell: Here’s the problem. Here’s my decision. Here are the costs.
Until now. President Trump, as he revealed in taped conversations with famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, knew early-on the dangers posed by COVID-19. But he chose to ignore those dangers for a form of happy talk.
“Like a miracle,” he said, referring to the virus, “it will disappear.”
“I think this is a problem that will go away.”
“It’s going to fade away.”
The president chose not to level with the American people; he refused to take them into his confidence, to explain. The president told Woodward that he didn’t want to “create a panic.” If history is any guide, the American people do not panic. They are made of pretty stern stuff.
Examples of presidential leadership in action? Here are just a few.
President Warren G. Harding is not a highly regarded chief executives. In the view of presidential historians, he was one of the worst. Nevertheless, he had his moments.
In 1922, with the nation facing a crippling and perhaps fatal coal strike, President Harding tried to wring a settlement from the contending parties, beginning with several White House conferences.
His failure to bring the sides together prompted talk that he might be denied renomination for president in 1924. (Harding died in 1923.) His party lost ground in the 1922 midterm elections.
President Harding suffered politically, but he acted. He did his job.
Following the Japanese attack on Peril Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt told the nation that “American soldiers and sailors have been killed…. American ships have been sunk. American airplanes have been destroyed.”
The war America was entering, the president said, “will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war…. The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time to do so much.”
In December 1950, after the Chinese intervened in the Korea War, President Truman asked “every citizen to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country. All energies must be directed to the tasks ahead of us.
“Workers will be called on to work more hours. More women and more young people and older workers will be needed to increase production.”
The president asked striking workers to return to their jobs. He imposed wage and price controls.
“In the days head,” President Truman said, “each of us should measure his own efforts, his own sacrifices by the standard of our heroic men in Korea.”
In 1961, in response to Soviet moves on West Berlin, 110 miles inside communist East Germany, President Kennedy said he wanted talk to the American people “frankly” about the “courage and perseverance” required “in the years to come” to meet the Russian threat.
President Kennedy asked Congress to raise defense spending and to authorize increases in the size of the armed services – the Army by 125,000, the Air Force by 63,000, and the Navy by 29,000. He doubled and then tripled the size of the draft. He called up National Guard units.
Under the Constitution, he said, as president he was the responsible officer in the government. “But I’m sure we will all do our best for our country, and our cause. For we all want to see our children grow up in a country at peace, and in a world where freedom endures.”
You might say Peril Harbor, the Korean War, and Soviet threats against Western Europe were problems too big to ignore. You might say the same thing about COVID-19. Some 200,000 Americans have now died of the disease.
The country is in a real pickle. Disarray, disorder are the nation’s calling cards.
Imaginative and consistent presidential leadership could have – would have – made a big difference. But President Trump took the attitude, “Sometimes you don’t have to be, as you say, totally ‘presidential.'”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.