Abstract
By definition, the president of the United States is a leader. But leadership signifies something apart from the obvious rights and appurtenances accompanying the office. What do we want to know when we ask what presidential leadership is? I do not believe there is a single question we are trying to answer, and I think a variety of confusions lurk in the questions we pose and the answers we offer to them. Here I try to sort out some of the questions, answers, and confusions. I begin with some basic puzzles.
Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POWs, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel’s life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?
Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime.
Ben Stein1
He was a criminal president. Go listen to the Nixon tapes…. Nixon regularly orders lying to law enforcement, to the grand jury, to use the FBI, the IRS to screw … his opponents…. Not only is this criminal and abusive—and that is the basic foundation of our government, it is a government that is answerable, and Nixon became unanswerable—he became a power unto himself. Wiretap, break-in … the list of things that went on that are horrifying doesn’t stop….
Listen to the tapes…. no one says, including Nixon, … what would be right, what would be good … what does the country need, what is the high purpose of the presidency…. It’s always about Nixon…. in the end it’s about the smallness of this man.
Bob Woodward2
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Notes
Ben Stein, “Deep Throat and Genocide,” The American Spectator, June 1, 2005, http://www.Spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8242 (accessed July 7, 2005).
Bob Woodward, responding to Ben Stein’s statement, on Fresh Air, WETA, National Public Radio, broadcast July 7, 2005.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and tr. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 5.
See Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 25–79
Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 1–19
Stuart Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 101–125
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” in War and Moral Responsibility, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 62–82. These writers may not agree about all the details of Machiavelli’s view or about what we should take away from it. For the sake of simplicity and clarity my discussion may cover over some differences among them, but I think the central features of their views are similar.
Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 359–360. This edition translates the essay title as “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.”
David Luban, “Integrity: Its Causes and Cures,” Fordham Law Review 72 (November 2003), p. 281. I rely here on Luban’s summary and discussion of the literature, pp. 280–293.
For the classic experiments on cognitive dissonance, see Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).
Quoted in David Kennedy, “Crossing the Moral Threshold: Why U.S. Leaders Never Questioned the Idea of Dropping the Bomb,” Time 166 (August 1, 2005), p. 50.
For a more thorough appraisal suggesting that Truman felt some ambivalence about the matter, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 562–570. Still, any regrets on Truman’s part seem rather small under the circumstances.
See Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
For a defense by a philosopher, see John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cambridge, 2002).
See the version of the essay found at Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford, 1946), pp. 77–128, available at http://tiunet.tiu.edu/acadinfo/cas/socsci/psych/SOC410/Readings/Weber/Works/politics.htm (accessed August 9, 2005).
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford, 1947), pp. 358–359.
George Ritzer, Sociological Theory, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1992), p. 134. I noted the “it’s true if you think it’s true” quality of leadership in the first section of the paper.
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© 2007 Terry L. Price and J. Thomas Wren
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Lichtenberg, J. (2007). Presidential Dirty Hands. In: Price, T.L., Wren, J.T. (eds) The Values of Presidential Leadership. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609334_10
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