(The following is the second part of Richard Norton Smith’s lecture, “Ten Rules to Judge a President,” from Nov. 23, 2003. See the first part)

Ronald Reagan was scarcely more introspective. And yet…for one so wedded to simple truths, Reagan’s midlife conversion from Roosevelt liberal to Goldwater conservative represented a spiritual crisis hardly less wrenching than FDR’s searing bout with polio. Both men would be the targets of would-be assassins, their graceful responses exposing the steel behind amiable exteriors. In the wake of his shooting Reagan became more fatalistic than ever, telling New York’s Terrance Cardinal Cooke that “whatever time I have left belongs to God.” FDR wouldn’t have said it, but he might well have felt it.

Their similarities do not end there. Each man served as Governor of the nation’s largest state. Each entered the White House in a period of grave economic crisis. Each brilliantly used the mass media of his day to enlist public support for his agenda. As “The Great Communicator” President Reagan employed television to go over the heads of Congress and special interests seeking to frustrate his efforts to reduce the size and cost of the Federal establishment. Like Roosevelt, he raised the nation’s mood through the force of his personality and unquenchable optimism.

In his first run for the White House Roosevelt declared, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” Which brings us to Rule Number Seven: Besides political acumen and gyroscopic balance, the presidency requires a talent for making useful enemies. Therein lies a paradox. Whether it’s Andrew Jackson denouncing the Bank of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt savaging “malefactors of wealth,” or Harry Truman upholding civilian supremacy by firing General Douglas MacArthur, history’s most admired presidents are often contemporary polarizers. Certainly no one was more divisive than that ultimate Unionist, Abraham Lincoln.

In truth, both Roosevelt and Reagan had a genius for exploiting opponents – whether the European dictators against whom FDR maneuvered in the 1930’s, or the Evil Empire that haunted Reagan’s vision of a world precariously balanced on the narrow window ledge of nuclear destruction. On the home front, Roosevelt ran against big business, while Reagan railed at the excesses of big government. Each man defeated a predecessor who knew considerably more than he did about the governing process, and understood far less about the American people. What Justice Holmes said of Herbert Hoover’s successor March 1933 seems equally applicable to Jimmy Carter’s, half a century later. Roosevelt, declared the old Brahmin, possessed a second-rate intellect, but a first class temperament.

Not even their greatest admirers would call Roosevelt or Reagan a slave to consistency. Roosevelt entered office guaranteeing a 25% cut in federal expenditures, only to lay the foundation for the modern welfare state. Reagan believed he could cut taxes and grow his way out of the resulting deficit without sacrificing either his cherished military buildup or the social programs that even conservative voters wished to conserve for their children. Nor did classic administrative theory hold much appeal for either leader. FDR had three Vice Presidents; Reagan had six National Security Advisors. Early in his second term Reagan casually allowed his White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury to swap jobs, with disastrous results. At one point the president joked about the controlled chaos in his administration, claiming that its right hand didn’t know what its far right hand was up to.

For his part, FDR welcomed the clash of ideas and personalities that went with duplication and overlapping responsibilities. In an effort to bolster farm prices, he cavalierly set the international price of gold each morning while breakfasting on soft-boiled eggs in his White House bed. One day he decided on a rise of 21 cents, telling his advisors that three times seven was a lucky number. Other decisions had more fateful consequences. Roosevelt presided over the creation of the first atomic bomb; Reagan envisioned a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularity dubbed Star Wars, to end the nuclear nightmare. FDR boldly recognized the Soviet Union in 1933; Reagan shocked the foreign policy establishment in 1982 by consigning the Marxist experiment to the asheap of history.

Roosevelt put the first woman in the Cabinet; Reagan named the first woman to the Supreme Court. Each man was married to a controversial wife, whose immersion in admirable causes was not enough to overcome the resentment she inspired among White House staffers. Roosevelt was the patrician with a common touch, Reagan everyman with more than a touch of Hollywood glamour. Figures of elusive temperament, each was accustomed to being underestimated by his contemporaries. Of FDR, Walter Lippmann cavalierly observed that “he is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Still harsher things were said about Ronald Reagan, mocked by opinion leaders for his presumed intellectual and ideological shortcomings.

More modest than the average politician, Reagan said he didn’t mind the fawning media coverage accorded Mikhail Gorbachov after the Soviet leader conceded most of the president’s points to obtain a nuclear arms deal. As Reagan put it, “I don’t resent his popularity. Good Lord, I co-starred with Errol Flynn once.” Both presidents used humor as a shield and a weapon. Famously genial, Reagan could actually be quite astringent in putting down a rival. For example, during the 1980 campaign he claimed that Jimmy Carter was supposed to go on 60 Minutes to talk about his achievements “but that would leave 59 minutes of dead air to fill.” Reagan turned the tables on his critics by describing a mythical costume ball attended by a friend who “slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist.”

His joy in political combat echoed that of his Democratic counterpart. Once, warned by an aide that Republican Wendell Willkie had his eye on the president’s chair, FDR removed the omnipresent cigarette holder from his teeth and replied wickedly, “Yes but look at what I have on it!” For each man, a landslide re-election was followed by a political comeuppance. Roosevelt’s too-clever-by-half plan to pack the Supreme Court with justices friendly to the New Deal demonstrated the limits of his normally faultless political judgment. Reagan stumbled just as badly in the Iran Contra Affair, refusing to acknowledge his error with the same stubbornness that made him go through with his controversial visit to a German military cemetery containing the graves of men who had served in Hitler’s S.S. In both instances, he elevated intransigence to the level of principle.

Roosevelt promised his countrymen freedom through government; Reagan offered freedom from government. Each succeeded in the context of his times. Of course, the similarities between the two men, however striking, are outweighed by FDR’s pragmatism and love of experimentation. Roosevelt’s New Deal was an improvised response to the gravest economic crisis in the country’s history. The Reagan Revolution, by contrast, was firmly grounded in ideological convictions developed over more than 30 years. In the end, each man pursued fundamentally different objectives. FDR, the conservative radical, forged a new consensus in place of the prevailing orthodoxy of the 1920’s, one that accepted as irresistible the growth of the state and the overriding importance of the presidency.

By a curious twist of logic, Reagan, the radical conservative, refused to concede that his election in 1980 heralded a repudiation of FDR’s policies. “With the same energy that Franklin Roosevelt sought government solutions to problems,” Reagan told an audience early in his first term, “We will seek private solutions.” Speaking of logic, you don’t have to be a weary CBS programmer nursing a blackened eye to appreciate Rule Number Eight: that every great leader marches to the beat of his own drummer, and labels, and even logic, be damned. Consider the following…in the summer of 1985 the President of the United States entered Bethesda Naval Hospital, where surgeons successfully operated on him after discovering a malignancy.

In releasing this news to the public, the doctors made only one mistake: they didn’t confer with their patient. As Ronald Reagan saw things, he didn’t have cancer. “Something inside of me had cancer, and they removed it,” said Reagan, with the same willful disregard for the obvious that sustained his presidency and drove his political adversaries to distraction.

In the end, great leaders are essentially mysterious figures. Said Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert McFarland of his boss, “He knows so little and accomplishes so much.” Sound familiar? People have forgotten, but Reagan took office with relatively low public expectations – the Reagan legend was born on March 30, 1981 when the president cracked jokes after taking an assassin’s bullet. A generation later, many historians find it difficult to categorize the Reagan presidency. Some attribute this to political bias. I think it more nearly illustrates the difficulty of applying conventional rules to the most unconventional of modern presidents.

A conventional leader would have accepted the basic assumption which has governed American politics since 1933 – the belief that Washington must inevitably exert more control over personal and economic decisions. Reagan called that axiom into question. A conventional leader would have taken for granted the existing superpower relationship, balanced on the equilibrium of Cold War hostility. Reagan insisted that the Soviet Union was a historical aberration, and that the Cold War could be won by the West in his lifetime. A conventional leader would have been satisfied with incremental progress on arms control, slowing the rate of increase in the world’s nuclear stockpiles. Reagan believed that the arms race could be ended and the stockpiles eliminated.

For much of the 90’s pundits and academics alike debated the question “does character matter?” You bet it does – never more so than when life and death issues are at stake, or a president implicitly asks people to cut him a little slack. Which leads to Rule Number Nine. The challenge posed by any crisis is equaled by the opportunity for leaders to forge an emotional bond with the people they lead – to gain moral authority as well as expanded powers. Successful leaders don’t simply manage a crisis – they use it to establish credit to be drawn upon in the inevitable periods of testing that follow.

Lincoln’s detractors called him an incipient dictator, a charge that undoubtedly found favor among dis-Unionists. But there was never a critical mass of loyal Americans who were willing to believe that the common laborer’s son who scaled the ladder of success through his own efforts and who repeatedly defined the Civil War as the struggle to preserve popular government could scuttle the very experiment on which he had staked his life.

In the course of a single day in March, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt transformed the psychology of an economically battered, spiritually spent people. Not for nothing did the actress Lillian Gish say of the new president that he appeared to be dipped in phosphorescence. An activist by temperament, FDR rarely shied away from confrontation. Having rescued democratic capitalism from itself, he was all but immune to rightwing sneers against Stalin Delano Roosevelt. In trying to purge conservative southern Democrats and remake the Supreme Court to his liking, Roosevelt overstepped his authority. But he never overstayed his personal welcome. The credibility banked in the desperate days of 1933 stayed with him all the way to Warm Springs.

Of course, every rule has its exceptions. We little note, nor long remember, the wartime leadership of James Madison – perhaps because his wife demonstrated greater courage than he did in the face of a British attack on Washington. A century later Herbert Hoover’s presidency became a synonym for good intentions gone disastrously awry. My tenth, and final rule of presidential assessment is grounded in Lincoln’s wartime dictium: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.” Greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We will not know for years whether George W. Bush has anticipated or misjudged the historical wave. But we already know that this is an important president, which is more than we have known three years into many presidencies.

Coming to Washington pledged to complete the Reagan Revolution, and diminish the role of government in our daily lives, he has instead presided over an historic centralization of power. Like Harry Truman, who redefined war in Korea as a police action, and victory as a return to prewar borders, Bush has staked his presidency on military policies that represent a radical departure from past experience. Like Jackson, he is no favorite of the intelligentsia. Like Calvin Coolidge, one suspects that he harbors doubts as to whether he is a great man – evidence of mental health for which many Americans, whatever their politics, are grateful. His ultimate standing, I suspect, will rise or fall – more accurately, it will rise and fall – depending on who writes the history and how they apply Lincoln’s formula for personal and political mastery when the occasion is piled high with difficulty.

So put aside the conventional academic models. The real question that should be asked of any President is, did he make a significant difference, not only in his time but for a long time to come? Did the force of his personality and the power of his ideas affect the way Americans live, how they see themselves, and how they relate to the rest of the world? Did he spend himself in causes larger than himself, for purposes nobler than re-election? Did he strengthen his country, as well as his office? Leaders who embody timeless principles will generally find time is on their side.

My time at KU has just about run out. Contrary to what you may have heard, I leave this place with a preponderance of happy memories, beginning with so many people who have offered their friendship, provided support, donated money or time or talent. Above all, I am grateful to all those who shared a vision, Senator Dole’s vision – of a truly public policy center. It is this vision that has inspired everything we have done, or attempted to do, over the last two years.

My greatest debt is to Senator Dole. It was twenty-five years ago this week that I walked into his office for the first time. As you know, he never finished his KU education. I sometimes feel as I have finished it for him. For example, you’d be amazed at how many feathers you can ruffle in two years. Someone said to me the other day, “You don’t ruffle feathers. You pluck the bird.” I don’t know about that. If we did, I assure you it was unintentional. Most of the time.

No American president had a greater understanding of the academy than Woodrow Wilson. A professor of political science before he was a President of the United States, Wilson wasn’t content to make the world safe for democracy – he also wanted to make democracy safe for intellectuals like himself. A tall order, then as now, but whatever his other faults, no one ever accused Wilson of complacency.

“We grow great by dreams,” he once said. “All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who hope that their dreams will come true.”

A university is a garden of dreams, in whose fertile soil possibilities take root every day. Here the pursuit of excellence is more than a platitude, and the status quo less than a religion. On this ground the most sacred tradition is breaking with tradition, and curiosity recoils from that deadliest of phrases: “We’ve never done that before.” Dreams don’t easily fit onto an organizational chart, and dreamers are by their nature impatient, chronically dissatisfied, demanding – ever unreasonable.

Kansas was settled by pioneering men and women who were unreasonable in their demands for human liberty. KU was founded to gratify unreasonable expectations. Generations of students have come to Mount Oread to discover that good is not good enough. Even today I have never met a Jayhawk who would be satisfied with a reasonably good basketball team or a reasonable number of Rhodes Scholars, anymore than the rest of us would settle for a reasonably competent doctor on the operating table, or general in time of war.

My KU education has reaffirmed that we do best when we demand the most – the most of ourselves and the most from those around us. That’s what we mean when we proclaim, to the stars through difficulties. Unfortunately, it is easier to raise tuition than to raise expectations. So I leave you with words from that eloquent dreamer, George Bernard Shaw:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”