We Are Off on a Special Adventure

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

A few days before the election, Cartoonist Garry Trudeau extracted from his vivid imagination a huge cross section of Ronald Reagan's brain, in which he placed the intrepid television reporter Roland Hedley Jr. With microphone and camera, Hedley Jr. searched for behavioral patterns in the cortex and the cerebellum with its maze of neurons and their dendritic spines.

Some editors detected a certain prejudice against Reagan, and they threw the cartoon out or put it on the editorial page. Trudeau was guilty as charged, a practitioner of marvelous bias and political deviltry. But any serious student of why Presidents say what they say and do what they do knows that Trudeau, who comes from a family of physicians, had his observer in the right place pondering the ingredients of leadership.

Our system, of course, is designed with its web of checks and balances, and open scrutiny that can halt a good deal of presidential caprice and anger, and prevent excess and foolishness. Yet, in our time, the need for quick, authoritative action is so important that we have piled up more power in the Oval Office than those who designed the system ever imagined. That power is unleashed by the sequence of events inside the very individualistic mind of the President--any President. So it will be with Ronald Reagan.

Many wonder if we poke and prod too much at Presidents, speculating on their moods, their IQs, grasp of history, courage and honor. That may be so, but the search is not likely to cease. Too much rides on the man's conclusions for it to be otherwise. Yet at the same time we must recognize the discomforting fact that the analysis of presidential intelligence and wisdom remains a difficult and error-ridden public sport.

Franklin Roosevelt was hardly envisioned as the midwife to social revolution nor was Harry Truman suspected of being the resolute student of history he turned out to be. Lyndon Johnson, the most brilliant legislator we have ever had in the White House, flopped when he tried to apply the techniques of compromise to a war. Jimmy Carter, who collected more facts than his predecessors about the problems that came to him, could not put them together in a way that gave direction to his presidency.

What all this proves is that we can make a pretty good judgment about the individual qualities of a man before he gets to the White House, but we cannot confidently predict how these characteristics will finally interact within the presidential context.

On a Friday night in April 1961, John Kennedy gathered a handful of his close advisers in the Cabinet Room and pondered what to do about the Soviets' space challenge. Only two days before, Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to go into orbit. Kennedy was 43 then and seemed 30, a man of little scientific knowledge who listened to his technicians describe a ten-year, $40 billion race with no guarantee that America would get to the moon first. Like a boy, Kennedy put his foot on the edge of the Cabinet table, fiddled with a loose rubber sole on his shoe, ran his hands through his hair, ended the meeting with his jaw set. Fifteen minutes later he sent the word out: "We are going to the moon."

This was not a military imperative. There was no overwhelming clamor from the public or Congress for such an effort. Something special happened in the mind of Kennedy. The poet in him glimpsed the future, perhaps, or the Irish combativeness responded to the prospects of a race. What we do know is that John Kennedy decided finally in those few minutes to take the nation on a peaceful and creative journey the likes of which this world had never known.

After a lifetime of fighting Communists, none more odious in his eyes than the Red Chinese, Richard Nixon saw something and heard something in China that few other statesmen detected. The outcast nation was getting ready to ask for entry into the modern world. The precise chemical change in Nixon remains something of a mystery, even to him. On his trip around the world in July 1969, he dropped hints like confetti that he was ready to talk. While most of the rest of the world was slow to detect the vast potential for change in geopolitics, Nixon got the scent. That singular mind of Nixon's, which in its Watergate convulsions would cause our system so much grief, seized on the China opening with ferocity, producing one of the most dramatic diplomatic maneuvers of the century.

We have pondered all of these years Jerry Ford's impulse that led to the pardon of Richard Nixon. It came after a Wednesday afternoon press conference in which he received several questions about the legal status of the resigned President, and then walked back to his office where a newspaper headline on the same subject confronted him. The pardon freed the Government from its Nixon obsession, though it may have cost Ford the presidency. Ford's years in military matters on the Hill, his observations of world crisis and his athlete's instincts for action from his boyhood led him, by his own testimony, to turn to his commanders on Wednesday May 14, 1975, and say "Go ahead," thus launching the Mayaguez rescue operation.

The journey that Ronald Reagan has taken from his prairie hamlet of Dixon, Ill., to the White House, via Hollywood and the Governor's mansion in Sacramento, is an astonishing American pilgrimage. Reagan is not brilliant in any sense, but his mind had to be practical and persistent in a special way to bring him this distance. Those instincts nurtured in simpler times and places seem to have served him well so far. Football, swimming, campus politics, sportscasting and acting are the strata in his evolution. He mimicked real life until he became Governor of California, and then he amazed many people by performing credibly.

But no test of his skills has been like the one he now faces. Not even Reagan fully understands how far his new world is from those old haunts where every talent a healthy person had could be developed and opportunity was as wide as the horizon. There is no way now to fix Reagan up with new genius or to rearrange his convictions. The interaction of the events of this world with the mind of this genial progeny of the heartland will affect us all. As with other Presidents, we are off on a special adventure for which there is no travel guide and no reassuring precedent.

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