The Test of True Leadership

By Hugh Sidey

Public opinion polls on what to do next in Lebanon or Grenada are fantasies, arising from sudden emotions of shock, grief or relief. The scholars and experts search for faults, contradicting the Government and one another in hasty judgments. The Congress is 535 shattered pieces of political authority, most of whom are frightened and bewildered, reverting to the safe ground of doubt and complaint. The presidential candidates scrutinize and wait, ready to pounce. White House aides bicker among themselves, tempers superheated, judgment clouded by fatigue. Leaks and counterleaks fill the air. The choices for action in both places are not between good and bad, but between terrible and dreadful.

For times like these we have a President.

His loneliness is his strength and his mandate for swift, decisive action. Fear momentarily is his ally, giving pause to foreign enemies and holding domestic public opinion in suspension for vital hours. In the ashes of failure and death, in the uncertainty of crisis there almost always lies opportunity for strokes of great leadership. It is one of the perverse and melancholy facts of the presidency, not wished by any White House occupant but as certain as night and day. Effective Presidents move quickly beyond mourning, beyond events.

Ronald Reagan has entered that hallowed ground. Some would suggest he got there through his own lack of understanding in Lebanon and his itchy trigger finger in Grenada. Right or wrong, he is there.

The risks to Reagan's presidency and to the nation and indeed the world are formidable. But that is the case in meaningful action. Some interest or some authority must be opposed, thwarted. And in such times, only success will succeed. A long time ago Abraham Lincoln summed it up in the greatest crisis this nation has ever faced. "If the end brings me out all right," he said, "what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."

Bryce Harlow, the very wise aide who served Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford, developed a theory that the mettle of a President and his Administration is never really taken until there is a failure, whether from within the Government or thrust on them from the outside. How these people shed their jealousies and fears, how clearly they see ahead, how they come together and embrace the national interest instead of their own ends is the true measure of a President and his aides.

Reagan has never really faced this kind of test before. His crises have been legislative, administrative and political, dealing with party theology, dollars and personnel. Now, lives and land have been claimed, the two ultimate objectives when the power game is played to the end. Ronald Reagan's world has changed.

So it has been with every one of the recent Presidents, no one of them facing greater failures and coping with them better than John Kennedy in his first year in the White House. Within a few months, the Soviets sent the first man into space, Kennedy's Cuban invasion failed at the Bay of Pigs, access to West Berlin was threatened and then the Berlin Wall was built by the Communists. When he looked back, Kennedy could say that he had been fortunate to learn the harsh dimensions of leadership in his first days. Regrettably, there is no way to pass these lessons on to new Presidents. Sacred beliefs too often must be shattered, old comrades too often must be judged harshly. That is not something Presidents do voluntarily.

When the Bay of Pigs was long in the past, Kennedy wondered aloud one night how such a collection of bright, experienced people could produce such a calamity. "Some day," he instructed a friend, "study that and write how we could have all fooled ourselves." That book has never been written, nor is it likely to be. Nobody really can know. And what matters more is how a President turns crisis to his advantage. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.