DOERS & GREETERS IN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2020
I mean no disrespect in what I am about to say, but the thought came to me as I watched the PBS program last night (September 22, 2020) profiling President Donald Trump and former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden, now candidate Biden for the Office of President of the United States, who is leading in all the polls across the nation as we move into the final days before the election.
In my long life, it occurred to me that I have lived through the presidencies of presidents who could be described as “doers” – meaning takers of bold often controversial and sometimes disastrous actions that were singularly noteworthy of their presidencies.
Then there were what I would call “greeters” or “administrators” who act as president essentially as caretakers or facilitators for the most part. Should they take precipitous action they often fall on their own sword.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president as I came into the world, who accepted the challenge of The Great Depression by turning our capitalistic country into essentially a social democracy that has continued in that form to the present day.
FDR entered WWII which historians now show was inevitable and for that president not much of a shock despite the surprise attack of the Empire of Japan on December 7, 1941.
We won that war largely as the “twin doers” of FDR and Great Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which also lifted us out of The Great Depression, as FDR’s social agenda had failed to do so.
FDR died shortly after being reelected for a fourth term on April 12, 1945, only months before the end of WWII with Vice President Harry S. Truman assuming the presidency. Truman was considered essentially a “greeter,” but once in office we soon learned there was a tiger in his tank with him authorizing the dropping of the atomic bomb twice on Japan in August 1945, ending WWII.
General Dwight David Eisenhower became president who had essentially been a “greeter” as a general, first as aide de camp to General Douglas McArthur, then as a tactful and gracious administrator for General George C. Marshall who chose him as Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces in Europe prior to the D-Day invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, leading to the end of the European theater of that war.
Eisenhower coordinated and facilitated the invasion and was given credit for being a “doer” when clearly he remained a “greeter,” and able to continue that role successfully as he had Great Britain’s General Bernard Montgomery and his own General George Patton and General Omar Bradley as his “doers” among other generals.
As President, Eisenhower returned to the status of “greeter” balancing the 1950s after WWII into something resembling an economic and peaceful paradise for the American people as the United States became the caregiver and supermarket of the world, which had been decimated by the war. Americans felt very good about themselves in that altruistic role.
Then a strange thing happened. A new era was commencing in 1960, what Eric Hoffer called “the terrible 60s” as parents behaved as children and children behaved as if their own parents taking all kinds of licenses to do just whatever they wanted to do. This included living in a psychedelic high, dropping out of college, rushing off to Canada to avoid the military draft, or living in communes showing a refusal to grow up and therefore never have to grow old. Abbie Hoffman coined the phrase, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” failing to realize how quickly that status ends.
Enter the new rock star as president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or as Camelot revisited, with a beautiful wife and two beautiful children at his side, with the patina and temperament of a Hollywood leading man. Kennedy’s news conferences were spectacles of fans and admirers, not journalists, and his dinner parties in the White House were like celebrity balls.
JFK was by disposition a “greeter” but wanted desperately to have the gravitas of a “doer.” Because of the charismatic splendor of his personality, scribes and historians, academics and philosophers ceremoniously tabbed him a “doer,” which clearly he was not. He did not even write his Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book, “Profiles in Courage” (1956). Ted Sorenson, an aid wrote it.
He however attempted with a modicum of success to model his administration as that of a “doer.” He was going to do so much for Civil Rights, but never got around to it; he was going to do the same for the Space Program, which didn’t get beyond his approving the NASA finances for such an effort (of course John Glenn and his crew would land on the moon in the next decade); he was going to put Castro and Cuba in their place, and instead orchestrated the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis, getting high marks, however, for the Soviet Union withdrawing its missiles from Cuba. But then there was Vietnam, and as a “greeter,” he supported the Vietnamese democratic government, which was weak and corrupt, with “advisers” consistent with that of a “greeter,” only to be assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, 1000 days after taking office.
In that climate, Lyndon Baines Johnson rose to the presidency, a man of modest academic credentials and even a more modest pedigree, certainly nothing like his president, JFK. But LBJ was a “doer.” He was a “doer” as a young congressman, whom FDR met as a member of the House of Representatives, and told his then Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, “That boy is going to go places, mark my words,” and of course FDR was right.
The Civil Rights Program is LBJ’s legacy, but so is the escalation of the Vietnam War where he soon had 400,000 American military personnel on its shores with ultimately disastrous results. His policy of “guns & butter” came crushing down around his ears, while crowds outside the White House protested the Vietnam War and taunted his administration daily. It found him finally announcing, “I will not run for reelection; and if nominated, I will not serve.” This was a sad end for a marvelous “doer.”
Richard Milhous Nixon became the next president, who suffered a paranoia complex since a boy, finding his family having to sell their land before oil was discovered on it, only to have to live subsequently in a climate of disgrace being always a day late and a dollar short.
Small and slender, Nixon went out for football in high school and was known for his guts on the gridiron but not for his finesse or athleticism. He took that demeanor into all his scholastic activities being an outstanding student at Whittier College in California, and finishing third in his class in Law School at Duke University.
At Duke, he was known as “iron butt” for being able to sit and study without seemingly ever to have to get up to pee. But Duke proved another albatross with his paranoia securely wrapped around his head. He and his friends broke into the Administrative Building at Duke to see their grades before they were posted, and were caught. Years later there would be déjà vu to this obsessive mistrust with “The Watergate Scandal” and the “Nixon tapes” that personified his insecurity in gross terms, forcing him to resign the presidency in the middle of the Vietnam War in disgrace. This negated the singularity of his accomplishments which included opening relationships with Communist China, putting Nikita Khrushchev and other Russian leaders in their place, and reducing the national debt while putting Americans back to work again.
Nixon, a quintessential “doer,” has not been actually acknowledged for one of his greatest moments as a man, an act that historians have failed to highlight, which was his refusal to authorize a recounting of the votes in Chicago when clearly Mayor John Daly had stolen the election for Kennedy. Carrying the State of Illinois was crucial to JFK in a very close 1960 election.
Once Nixon resigned, his vice president Gerald Ford became something of a custodial president for the remaining two years of the Nixon presidency. President Ford returned to the role he had previously exercised in the House of Representatives which was that of essentially a “greeter.” He pardoned former President Nixon and limped through the remaining Ford presidency including the embarrassing end of the Vietnam War.
Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, and a peanut farmer, but a man known for the quality of his mind both in the US Navy and as governor, brought that cerebral presence to the presidency but not as a “doer,” but as a “greeter” as much as he would detest that designation.
Carter never gained traction as president much as he loved the office, operating as Plato would have approved as a wannabe philosopher president. This stance came crashing down on him as the nation was going through a bit of a funk with double digit inflation and double digit unemployment, a situation that was not totally of Carter’s making by any stretch of the imagination, but representative of a nation that had lost its enthusiasm for hard work while refusing to grow up and take responsibility for its collective actions.
In this climate, he was ill advised to make a speech to the nation from the Oval Office in an open neck shirt and a cardigan sweater, telling the nation as if a scolding parent, that the American people had “A Crisis in Confidence.”
The nation did in fact have such a crisis, and clearly not a word of his speech departed from his role as administrator of that malaise as “greeter.” Yet the American people had no stomach for the truth or for being scolded by their paternal leader, the President of the United States, casual dress notwithstanding.
Americans like to hear only that they are the best workers in the world and certainly not to be told they have a crisis in confidence. Indeed, they don’t want to hear that while the United States spends twice as much for public education as any other Western nation, American students are near the bottom in scholastic achievement; that Americans are the poorest savers in the Western world; or that the predominance of a juvenile mindset has crippled the nation while Americans insist that “these troubling situations are not of their making,” but caused by the Russians or the Chinese or the Europeans or illegal immigrants or the Iranians, but surely not them.
When this very decent man, Jimmy Carter, who represents the best in Americans, attempted to step out of his role as “greeter,” it was like he was facing Pontius Pilot as surely as his Sacred Savior had so many years before.
Incidentally, much as former President Herbert Hoover attempted to be a “doer” and instead brought on The Great Depression as president, as an ex-president, he did all sorts of good things including being instrumental in the “Lend Lease Program” of WWII and the subsequent “Marshall Plan” and “Truman Doctrine” after that war.
The same has been true of Carter, as an ex-president. He created Habitat for Humanity, building homes across the globe for the needy; forming the Carter Center to work with Emory University to advance health and peace worldwide; having previously as president promoted the Camp David Accords to bring peace to the Middle East, and along the way receiving the United Nations Human Rights Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with his wife, Rosalyn Carter.
President Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, a B-movie film actor, but also former Governor of California, who never quite got Hollywood out of his system, as films he had been in or had viewed became like players in the back of his conscience moving him to be an explosive “doer,” as if “Star Wars” were real, and he was the main actor, director, producer and distributor of the product in the drama.
Incredibly, these jigsaw puzzle pieces made Reagan into the quintessential “doer” preventing “The American Century” from slipping from its grasp through his boldness and moxie returning the 20th century Ship of State back on an even keel.
To demonstrate how powerful fiction is to reality, Reagan’s eight years as president were like nothing compared to any other presidency with the possible exception of FDR’s. Reagan even had his little war in Granada. Then, too, he was exonerated from knowing anything about the Iran-Contra Scandal orchestrated by officials of his administration. These cabinet type officers secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Iranian Khomeini government to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Colonel Oliver North of the President’s National Security Council diverted funds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the Contras, a group of anti-Sandinista rebels. This drama played out on television with North being interviewed by a Congressional Subcommittee with the whole scenario taking on the absurd high jinx of a Laurel and Hardy comic opera.
Reagan was also blessed with fortuitous good timing for no matter what his administration did, while in another time such contretemps might end in an impeachment, he always seem to resurface unscathed. To wit, the puzzle pieces of his interventions didn’t always reveal the picture intended once assembled.
There was Budget Director David Stockton with his “supply side economics” and “trickle down benefit” policy which were attempts to replace the so-called “welfare state” that included reviewing the Social Security System. Stockton’s machinations instead of proving fiscally responsible saw the national debt soar, which has never stopped soaring to the present. The nation was close to full employment and the American people believed this smiling Irish American was on top of his game when he often was observed sleeping through his cabinet meetings.
Reagan did have his historical moments. There was “the clear and present danger of nuclear proliferation” that brought President Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev to the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland in 1986, which ended in a nearly successful agreement to completely eliminate nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev, who was clearly comfortable with Reagan at Reykjavik, returned to Russia and introduced to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986 his new policy of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) which had the unintended consequences of dismantling the 75 year history of the USSR and the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian state.
Only a year later, Reagan demanded theatrically in a “Berlin Wall Speech” (June 12, 1987), “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Berlin Wall was torn down in November 1991 with East and West Germany reunited as a nation.
Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, succeeded the Reagan presidency with the slogan of “a thousand points of light” and “no new taxes.” Clearly, George H. W. Bush was a nice guy, and wanted to have a quiet administration as a “greeter,” which was in his genes to be.
But smiling Reagan left him no option but to raise taxes, resulting in many Republicans deserting the new president. Then there was “The First Gulf War” in which Bush successfully prevented Iraq from invading Kuwait with the equally prudent decision not to topple the Hussein Iraqi government. His son, once president, with “The Second Gulf War,” however, tossed prudence aside and invaded Iraq, dethroned Hussein, and inadvertently destabilized the region to this day.
Caution is natural to a “greeter” and it proved the right strategy for George H. W. Bush. He however did invade Panama and did oust President Manuel Noriega, who subsequently was tried and convicted as a drug lord and imprisoned.
Bill Clinton denied George H. W. Bush a second term and for a time became something of an imposing shadow of his idol, JFK, whom he had met when JFK was president and he was in Washington, DC with a group of high school students from Arkansas as a boy.
It becomes complicated looking at Clinton as a “doer” or “greeter” as he vacillates back and forth between these contrasting roles. He stabilized the economy that George H. W. Bush had moving in that direction, but as with all presidents, none deserve all the credit nor all the blame on how things work out. That said, the United States was no longer a debtor nation under President Bill Clinton.
President Clinton launched “Operation Infinite Reach” with a cruise missile strike on Al-Shifa pharmaceutical, wiping out the factory in Khartoum, Sudan under that codename. He justified the strike with Article 51 of the UN Charter. It was his belief that Al-Shifa was processing the deadly nerve agent VX, and that this same facility had ties to the al-Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden that had been responsible for the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi.
Then there was the fiasco of the Clinton Impeachment Trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” or obstruction of justice for lying under oath. America became the audience of a parade of Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos back to when he was governor of Arkansas, including a lawsuit by Paula Jones for sexual harassment, but crystallizing in his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky recorded by a friend, Linda Tripp, who became a star witness for the prosecution with Independent Counsel, Ken Starr, in the impeachment trial.
The Clinton presidency thus retrogressed back to him as a “greeter” minimizing his contributions as a “doer” with the nation seemingly stuck in schadenfreude with journalism taking on the guise of The National Enquirer.
George W. Bush, son of former president George H. W. Bush, was a guy who had an insouciant disposition although a self-made millionaire as an oil field speculator, a former two term Governor of Texas, as well as a “born again Christian” after a bout with alcoholism.
Like most of his life before the presidency, Bush had managed to land on his feet no matter the nature of his pratfalls. He was honorably discharged from the US Air Force National Guard although known not always to attend mandatory meetings.
In contrast to his casual ways, his father dropped out of Yale and joined the US Army Air Force when FDR declared war on Germany and Japan after Pearl Harbor. He served on combat in the South Pacific manning a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber capable of taking out aircraft carriers. He was shot down but rescued by the American fleet. Other American pilots in the raid were picked up by the Japanese and executed.
George W. Bush was born to be a lover, not a fighter; a “greeter,” not a “doer.” He had Vice President Dick Chaney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to be his “doers” and “hawks.”
The September 11, 2001 decimation of the Twin Towers in New York City and destruction of much of the Pentagon was the work of Osama bin Laden’s Islamic terrorists who took control of two commercial American airliners and used them as missiles, killing nearly 3,000 in New York City and scores at the Pentagon, which struck terror into the nation.
With his two hawks at his side, President George W. Bush authorized a preemptive strike on Iraq with the justification that they had an arsenal of nuclear weapons, which proved false. Compounding the situation, once Saddam Hussein was defeated, the United States military took possession of Iraq leading to all the miseries that would follow in the region for the next twenty years, including the rise of ISIS and the Syrian War.
Thus a “greeter” by temperament and inclination was hostage to these two doers, Chaney and Rumsfeld. This has crippled the American nation on the international front ever since. To be fair, obviously the American people liked having these two warlords in their midst for the eight years of the Bush presidency.
Barak Obama was our first president as an African American, and perhaps one of the most intellectually able presidents who has ever held that office with the maturity and erudite disposition to see situations from several perspectives before making a decision. This however handicaps a “doer,” which he wasn’t, and is not exactly the temperament of a “greeter,” which he proved himself to be as president.
Most of Obama’s administration, you could even say his singular dedication during his presidency was “Obamacare” or The Affordable Care Act. This act that became law is designed to provide health and medical care for Americans who might have no medical insurance. Obamacare has had a rocky life with the medical profession, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and politicians constantly bickering with each other over its coverage and legitimacy ever since. Unlike the Social Security Act that no politician would dare run against, this has not been the history of Obamacare.
As a “greeter,” President Obama preferred to contemplate rather than act, which is the inclination of a “Man of Words,” not a “Man of Action”; to wait for the dust to settle to ensure a clear vision of the horizon. Consequently, he failed to do anything significant for African Americans while in office, but did authorize the US Special Forces (Seal Team Six) to corner and kill Osama bin Laden which they did.
A side bar from presidents to Hillary Clinton: in a strange way, because she was more of a “doer” than her husband Bill Clinton, more feared by President Vladimir Putin of Russia than any other American official as Secretary of State, it was a counterintuitive handicapped for her as a presidential candidate and “doer” to find herself competing for the presidency with the quintessential “doer” in Donald J. Trump. A “Person of Action” is not usually a “Person of Words.” Putin knew Hillary wouldn’t telegraph her moves like Obama had. But it appears Putin was convinced Hillary knew Russia’s weaknesses better than any other politician. Hillary, a bona fide hawk as a “doer” had no fear of Putin’s saber rattling.
No doubt Russia did, indeed, attempt to intrude in the 2016 election while Hillary’s poor performance as a presidential candidate doomed her from the beginning to win the presidency. It is a contradictory idea but true. “Greeters” are often better campaigners for high office than are “doers”.
Donald J. Trump was also a “doer” with no “greeter” in his disposition, and definitely not a “Man of Words,” discounting his obsessive inclination to tweet. He however has a cynical eye for the vulnerable with a rather compelling message for “below the belt” consciousness with “Let’s Make America Great Again.” This constituency mistrusts intellectuals such as Carter and Obama, and are uncomfortable with the saccharine upbeat patter of a George W. Bush or the sly mendacity of a Bill Clinton. They want a meat and potato man as president, and they see Trump suiting that bill.
Now, this is where we are: Trump the “doer” with all his embarrassing tweets, and Joe Biden “the greeter” with all his inappropriate gaffs. They are all we have left. If the presidential candidates are meant to be mirror images of ourselves, well, this is obviously not too flattering a picture. As Eric Hoffer shows in his writing, we come from the insignificant of European society, not the upper crust aristocracy. Common man made this great nation, not the privilege classes. What we have, and always have had, in common man is an unlimited capacity for hard work with an equally engaging facility for good will.
What this brief and clearly imperfect reflection on the PBS Frontline Presentation of the two Presidential Candidates (Tuesday, September 22, 2020) shows, is that we as a nation have always survived our leadership because the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, as well as the Presidency of the United States often misstep but the American people have been known to take up the slack and soldier on with an unrelenting spirit to not only survive but prevail.