Harlan Cleveland: Is Obama Ready?
[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota) and as President of the University of Hawaii. He has authored 12 books and hundreds of articles in journals and magazines, mostly on executive leadership and international affairs.]
To hear Senator Barack Obama say on “Meet the Press” that he was thinking about running for President was not a surprise. It would only have been surprising if he had said it hadn’t occurred to him. What intrigued me was the chorus of punditry that followed. Most commentators rubbed their beards, pursed their lips, and doubted that he is “ready.”
Nobody is “ready” to be President of the United States. Our best presidents – Washington, Madison, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman, are my favorite half dozen, but you are welcome to your own list – combined high intelligence with unusual endowments of common sense, and were thus “readier” than most. But except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, none of these had already had much experience as an executive.
Our instinct that favors governors over legislators for the American presidency is sound. It’s a huge executive job, requiring a sense of politics besides. Harry Truman had certainly been in politics. But his prime executive experience had been as a haberdasher. Coming to the vice-presidency from the Senate, he was cut out of most Executive Branch functions; he wasn’t even in on the secret of the atomic bomb he later became the first president to use.
But he was very bright, he had a most unusual endowment of common sense — and he took the U.S. Constitution seriously. Take one of many examples: When it came to General Douglas MacArthur’s act of insubordination, he both thought and acted as a chief executive officer, who was also Commander in Chief, should think and act.
The story is worth remembering. General MacArthur was frustrated by his instructions not to pursue the North Korean troops all the way to the Yalu River (North Korea’s northern border) – because that would likely provoke the Chinese to enter the Korean War in force. So he wrote a letter to the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, objecting to his military orders.
MacArthur didn’t send a copy of his letter to the Joint Chiefs or to the President, so Harry Truman first heard of it when his press secretary, Roger Tubby, tore a news bulletin off the AP wire in the White House press room and rushed to the Oval Office. Truman was there alone, and Tubby, without a word, laid the wire story on his desk.
According to Tubby, who told me this personally, Truman read the story, grunted, then came up with an instantly accurate constitutional interpretation – expressed, of course, in Trumanesque informality: “Well, the son-of-a-bitch can do that to Harry Truman, but he can’t do that to the President of the United States!”
The famous general was promptly removed. He came home to parades arranged by his many friends and admirers, spoke to a joint session of Congress, toyed with the idea of running for president — and soon disappeared from view.
When John F. Kennedy became president, he was younger than Senator Obama is now, and his last executive job had been skipper of a PT boat, the Navy’s tiniest warship.
Kennedy had to learn on the job that an executive with a wide span of control governs much more by asking questions than by giving orders. He didn’t, for example, press the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a professional judgment whether the plan to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs – the chief CIA planner was a brilliant economist – would work as a military operation. When it didn’t, he sensibly took full responsibility for the “mistake.”
Fortunately for the United States, he was a very quick study, and his learning curve was abnormally steep. When the Cuba Missile Crisis erupted eighteen months later, he participated personally in the staffwork, sifting the alternative responses through his own good mind. He knew by then that if the executive doesn’t thoroughly understand a plan of action he authorizes, he’s not making decisions but merely presiding while others decide.
So, although I have written much about the educational value of executive experience, it somehow doesn’t bother me that Barack Obama doesn’t yet count that among his blessings. He is only 45. He has at least two more years – or six, or ten or more — of pre-presidential learning. He already has much of what he would need in that unique job.
He is bright and studious. His public utterances exude common sense. He seems to have more natural charisma – the capacity to electrify people who are with him — than anyone else now in the field. And, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested the other day, the time is near when many Americans would welcome an African-American in our presidency.
Is he “ready”? No, but neither is anybody else.
Read entire article at ILF Post
To hear Senator Barack Obama say on “Meet the Press” that he was thinking about running for President was not a surprise. It would only have been surprising if he had said it hadn’t occurred to him. What intrigued me was the chorus of punditry that followed. Most commentators rubbed their beards, pursed their lips, and doubted that he is “ready.”
Nobody is “ready” to be President of the United States. Our best presidents – Washington, Madison, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman, are my favorite half dozen, but you are welcome to your own list – combined high intelligence with unusual endowments of common sense, and were thus “readier” than most. But except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, none of these had already had much experience as an executive.
Our instinct that favors governors over legislators for the American presidency is sound. It’s a huge executive job, requiring a sense of politics besides. Harry Truman had certainly been in politics. But his prime executive experience had been as a haberdasher. Coming to the vice-presidency from the Senate, he was cut out of most Executive Branch functions; he wasn’t even in on the secret of the atomic bomb he later became the first president to use.
But he was very bright, he had a most unusual endowment of common sense — and he took the U.S. Constitution seriously. Take one of many examples: When it came to General Douglas MacArthur’s act of insubordination, he both thought and acted as a chief executive officer, who was also Commander in Chief, should think and act.
The story is worth remembering. General MacArthur was frustrated by his instructions not to pursue the North Korean troops all the way to the Yalu River (North Korea’s northern border) – because that would likely provoke the Chinese to enter the Korean War in force. So he wrote a letter to the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, objecting to his military orders.
MacArthur didn’t send a copy of his letter to the Joint Chiefs or to the President, so Harry Truman first heard of it when his press secretary, Roger Tubby, tore a news bulletin off the AP wire in the White House press room and rushed to the Oval Office. Truman was there alone, and Tubby, without a word, laid the wire story on his desk.
According to Tubby, who told me this personally, Truman read the story, grunted, then came up with an instantly accurate constitutional interpretation – expressed, of course, in Trumanesque informality: “Well, the son-of-a-bitch can do that to Harry Truman, but he can’t do that to the President of the United States!”
The famous general was promptly removed. He came home to parades arranged by his many friends and admirers, spoke to a joint session of Congress, toyed with the idea of running for president — and soon disappeared from view.
When John F. Kennedy became president, he was younger than Senator Obama is now, and his last executive job had been skipper of a PT boat, the Navy’s tiniest warship.
Kennedy had to learn on the job that an executive with a wide span of control governs much more by asking questions than by giving orders. He didn’t, for example, press the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a professional judgment whether the plan to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs – the chief CIA planner was a brilliant economist – would work as a military operation. When it didn’t, he sensibly took full responsibility for the “mistake.”
Fortunately for the United States, he was a very quick study, and his learning curve was abnormally steep. When the Cuba Missile Crisis erupted eighteen months later, he participated personally in the staffwork, sifting the alternative responses through his own good mind. He knew by then that if the executive doesn’t thoroughly understand a plan of action he authorizes, he’s not making decisions but merely presiding while others decide.
So, although I have written much about the educational value of executive experience, it somehow doesn’t bother me that Barack Obama doesn’t yet count that among his blessings. He is only 45. He has at least two more years – or six, or ten or more — of pre-presidential learning. He already has much of what he would need in that unique job.
He is bright and studious. His public utterances exude common sense. He seems to have more natural charisma – the capacity to electrify people who are with him — than anyone else now in the field. And, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested the other day, the time is near when many Americans would welcome an African-American in our presidency.
Is he “ready”? No, but neither is anybody else.