Presidential Leadership: What Makes a Successful Leader? An Interview with James Taranto

James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com and former deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. He and Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard Leo recently produced a fascinating new book, Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House (Free Books). (Click here to order your own copy of the book.) The volume draws on the insights of historians and commentators to discuss the strengths and weakness of each of our American presidents. Leader Links editor Michael Duduit recently visited with Taranto by phone and talked about leadership and the American presidency.

Leader Links: Presidential Leadership is an excellent book and you've assembled a great team of writers. Could you tell me how this project came about?

Taranto: This book grew out of a survey that the Federalist Society conducted and The Wall Street Journal published in 2000. This practice of reading the presidents has gone on for decades, I believe it was Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. — the father of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. obviously — who did the first one in the 1940s. Schlesinger, Jr. has picked this up and does his ratings every now and then. In 1996 he did a ranking with about 30 historians — I think it was actually 28 historians and 2 retired politicians, Mario Quomo and the late Senator Paul Simon. He asked them to rate all the presidents. Ronald Reagan came up number 25 out of 39 and four of the scholars said that Reagan was a failure.

The problem with this, of course, was that Schlesinger had gone to people he knows who were in various universities and he had gotten a very liberal sample. And we thought, wouldn't it be interesting to get a different sample, a group of scholars adjusted for balance so that it would reflect more closely the population of the country as a whole rather than just university professors, among whom the spectrum generally tends to run from left to far left. So the Federalist Society did this, and expanded the survey to include law professors and political scientists as well as historians, just to give it a little more breadth.

The Federalist Society got a panel of six scholars, two in each of those disciplines — one liberal and one conservative — and asked them to suggest people to include in the overall survey. This generated a list of 132 names. The survey was sent out to all these people and 78 responded. So what we ended up with was a more ideologically balanced group of scholars. The results were very similar to what they usually are with these surveys except the main difference was that Reagan went from number 25 to number 8, by virtue of having a more ideological balance, and also perhaps by virtue of another four years having gone by and a certain fading of partisan patterns. We published this in The Wall Street Journal and on OpinionJournal.com, the website that I run, in November 2000. We actually that it was a going to be a slow time for news and we needed something to sort of fill the space and keep people interested. It didn't quite work out that way. Nonetheless we thought it was a nice package.

We had selected essays on presidents and why they were overrated or underrated in the views of certain scholars. A couple years later, we were looking for ideas for Wall Street Journal books, and we thought: why not take this presidential leadership survey and expand it into book form? So we started with the survey, then we commissioned an essay on each of the presidents, plus about a half dozen essays on broader themes involving presidential leadership, including the forward by William Bennett.

Leader Links: You've got some great writers involved with this project. Are there some particular essays that stand out as favorites for you?

Taranto: I love Paul Johnson's chapter on Bill Clinton. We had a little trouble deciding who to write about Clinton, because you know Clinton is a very recent president and there are very strong feelings about him on either side of the aisle. While we — the Federalist Society and The Wall Street Journal editorial page — both tend to lean conservative, we wanted this book to have a broader appeal; we didn't want it to be just for our fellow conservatives. So we didn't want somebody who was a partisan, anti-Clinton type to write it, or a partisan pro-Clinton type. And we finally thought, why don't we get someone who's not an American, who has a bit more detachment here, and the best historian we could think of who wasn't an American — and a wonderful writer — was Paul Johnson. So we called him up and he agreed to do it.

A couple of others that I like . . . Chris Buckley's chapter on James Buchanan. Buchanan was the worst president according to our survey; he finishes number 39. And we thought we'd better get somebody funny to write about the worst president, because otherwise it's just going to be depressing to read. And Buckley did a wonderful job; it's really laugh-out-loud funny at points. It's one of the best unserious essays in the book. I shouldn't call Buckley's unserious, what I should say is, it's one of the best unscholarly essays in the book.

The chapter on Andrew Johnson by Jeffrey Tulis is one of the best serious, scholarly chapters in the book. Tulis is a political scientist at the University of Texas. I learned a lot about Andrew Johnson as a president from reading this. His argument is that Johnson was a very effective president, but he was a failure because what he did was so bad for the country: he insured that black Americans wouldn't enjoy full civil rights for another century. And of course Peggy Noonan's chapter on JFK is another great one. She looks at how JFK basically ushered in the age in which a president was an image first and a man second, and he was really the birth of that sort of modern age of politics. So those are my favorites, but they're all wonderful.

Leader Links: Are there certain presidents that stand out for you as favorites in terms of their leadership?

Taranto: In my lifetime, certainly President Reagan, who accomplished three really major things. He won the Cold War, of course; he restored the morale of the country that had been brought low by Jimmy Carter; and one that he gets less credit for than he deserves, he really changed the structure of taxes for this country. When Reagan took office in 1980, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent, which means if you were on the top bracket and you made a dollar, you only got to keep 30 cents of it. And that's even before state taxes and other taxes. When Reagan left office, the top marginal tax rate was 28 percent. Now it's true that his successors George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both raised taxes, but the top rate never got higher than 40 percent and now it's down to 35 percent. So since Reagan it's been consistently closer to the post-Reagan levels than to the pre-Reagan levels. When people say Bill Clinton deserves credit for the economic boom of the 90s, I think you've got to give Ronald Reagan a lot of the credit, not only for the 80s but for the 90s.

Leader Links: As you look at these different presidents, are there some leadership traits that tend to be seen in those whom we would consider successful presidents?

Taranto: The three presidents who make the cut as great — Washington, Lincoln and FDR — all have three things in common. They all faced unprecedented challenges. Washington had to invent the office, he had to define what it meant to be President of the United States; the Constitution was fairly vague on this. Americans had been Englishmen first and they were used to being ruled by kings. Washington could have become a king — he was that loved by his countrymen — but he resisted the temptation to be king and therefore helped insure that we had a lasting Republican form of government. Lincoln, of course, faced a country that was literally divided, that was at war with itself. He had to keep the Union together, and for added measure, get rid of slavery. FDR had the double whammy of the depression and World War II. So all three of them had unprecedented challenges. They all responded boldly to those challenges, unlike — in the case of Lincoln and FDR — some of the men who preceded them. And they all were seen by history to have succeeded.

If you look at the characteristics of the men, I think you have to say they had vision and determination. They all knew where they wanted to take the country and weren't going to be diverted from their vision. And they all had a certain reverence for the office, I think. If you want a contrast to that, look at Bill Clinton; look at all the coverage of his memoir, which turned out to be all about this weird psychodrama he had. Bill Clinton finished 24th in our survey; he turned out to be average. If you look at the coverage his memoir has gotten, you really get a sense of why he wasn't a great president. It's all about Bill Clinton the man, not about Bill Clinton the president. We don't hear anything about his accomplishments, and he had a few accomplishments; we just hear about his weird personal and legal problems. Whereas when Reagan died a couple weeks before the Clinton book came out, most of what we heard about was his accomplishments in office. I think that really gives some idea of the personal characteristics that differentiate a great president from a mediocre one.

Leader Links: Beyond the personal, are there some professional style elements that make a difference in terms of the way they relate to people and the way they are organizational? Are there some other elements beyond the personal?

Taranto: Certainly some of our great and near-great presidents have been impressive delegators. Washington comes to mind. Washington knew war and he knew politics, he didn't know much about economics. So he delegated that to his treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who was a brilliant man in his own right. Reagan also was a great delegator. He was sort of famous for not being a micromanager. Contrast him with his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who finished in the below average category at number 30. Carter was quite a micromanager; he famously managed the scheduling at the White House tennis courts. I think the ability to look at the big picture and delegate the details tends to make one a more effective executive in any field, including the presidency.

Leader Links: Although our current President was not included in the survey, can you take a spin at evaluating George W. Bush, in terms of his leadership characteristics?

Taranto: Well I think if George W. Bush were in this survey now, just knowing who the survey participants were, he would probably come in somewhere around the middle and would be even more controversial than Bill Clinton, who had the greatest variation among the scholars of their rankings of any president. That's just because things are very polarized right now, they're very partisan. Liberals can't stand the guy, conservatives love him. In terms of how history will judge him in the long run, it depends a lot on whether he is reelected.

I talked about the three characteristics that the three great presidents have: they faced unprecedented challenges, dealt with them boldly and succeeded. I think Bush has actually met the first two criteria. He certainly faced unprecedented challenges on September 11th. I don't think anyone denies that he's dealt with it boldly. Quite the contrary, the criticism of him is that he's been too bold. The question is: will he succeed? I think in order for him to succeed and for him to get the credit for it, he has to win reelection. If he wins reelection and he succeeds in this mission of combating terrorism by promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East — and I will say that's a big "if" — but if he succeeds he could become a great president. If he's not reelected, or his success is less than total, if he comes to be seen as overambitious, then he'll end up somewhere lower.

My guess would be — and I'm speculating about what's going to happen in the coming decades and how history is going to judge it, so this is pure speculation — if he's not reelected, he may come to be seen as a Woodrow Wilson-like character. Wilson was in some ways overambitious. After World War I he wanted to make the world safe for democracy and America wasn't really up to that challenge at the time. And Warren Harding ran for president in 1920, promising to restore some stability through a return to normalcy, which is kind of the campaign John Kerry is trying to run this year. So America turned inward after World War I and the tribulations of the Wilson years, but we did end up making the world safe for democracy — we just did it 25 years and another World War later. And it's possible that we would have been better off if Wilson had had his way. There's no way to know, maybe we would have been worse off. Wilson, I think, in retrospect was ahead of his time on this.

I think if Kerry ends up winning, somebody somewhere down the line is going to have to deal with this problem of the Middle East, these tyrannies that generate terrorism. I don't think this problem is going to go away, it can't be wished away. So somebody's going to have to deal with it. If the American people say, we're not ready to deal with it now, we want John Kerry to calm things down, Bush will probably end up being somewhere around where Wilson is in the near great or above average category, and whatever president in the future deals with it decisively will get the mark of greatness.

Leader Links: As long as you're speculating, suppose for a moment that John Kerry is in fact elected and we're having this conversation ten years from now. What kind of president do you think he would be?

Taranto: No, I don't think I can do that. I can talk about what kind of senator he's been and what kind of candidate he is. But you know, there's no way of telling what kind of president he'd be. I certainly feel uneasy based on the campaign Kerry's run, based on his ideology, based on what I take to be his character. But you know he could surprise us. If you would describe to me four years ago the kind of firm leadership President Bush was going to show, I don't know that I would have believed you. So I would say if Kerry if elected, I don't expect great things from him, but if he is elected, I would hope to be proven wrong just because I think it would be good for the country to have a great president. And I think we need one right about now.

Leader Links: If you could guarantee just one characteristic in future presidents, what would it be?

Taranto: Well that's an interesting question. One characteristic I would want to guarantee is a sense that the office is bigger than the man, a sense that you're assuming this office that has a long history and will have a long history after you've left it and after you're dead. That his job is to do the best he can in the circumstances with which he finds himself dealing. I think Bill Clinton was very conscious of his legacy, and I think maybe that made him not as good a president as he might otherwise have been, because it was all about him — it was all about how he wanted to go down in history. I think whether you go down in history is really up to history, not up to you. It's a question of what history throws at you and what you do with it. A certain humility before history is perhaps the most important characteristic in a president.

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