LOS ANGELES — President Obama, in an impossible position, decided to take a page from the Harry Truman-John F. Kennedy playbook as oil fouled the Gulf of Mexico and the second year of his presidency.
“The Buck Stops Here” read the sign on Truman’s desk in the Oval Office.
“I am the responsible officer of this government,” said Kennedy at a press conference after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
In fact, or in private, Kennedy felt he was the victim of the incompetence and hubris of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Back in his office, he sputtered: “What the hell do they want me to do? Say we took the beating of our lives? That the CIA and the Pentagon are stupid?”
His attitude about such things was expressed dramatically, and privately, again two years later during the terrible summer of civil rights in 1963. He lost his cool when the dean of the Harvard Law School, Erwin Griswold, offered this opinion: “It seems clear to me that (the president) hasn’t even started to use the powers available to him.”
“That son of a bitch!” said Kennedy when he read the Griswold quote. “Let him try.”
When he calmed down, Kennedy laughed and quoted his favorite bit of Shakespeare. It was from “Henry IV, Part 1” — where Glendower says, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” And Hotspur replies: “Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call them?”
I thought of that as I watched the pictures of President Obama looking out toward the vasty deep of the gulf and saying his administration was in control of the oily havoc out there.
He’s not in control, of course, no more than he was a day later when he was to speak at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery for Memorial Day back in Illinois, when the skies opened up and lightning took over the day. What a piece of work is man, but he’s no Mother Nature!
And what a piece of work is leadership. It seems to me that Obama has shown real leadership in his year-plus in the White House. But it is not the kind of leadership many Americans want. Some are turned off by his cool and deep intellectual approach to the problems of the day — and there are more problems than usual these days because of economic disarray and, frankly, because his predecessor was a fool.
Beyond the talents of individuals, as Kennedy perceived, and propagated, too, we have come to overrate the powers of the presidency. The idea that the country’s racial divides could be closed with a few pen strokes, or that Haiti could be healed before or after an earthquake, or that the history of the Middle East could be changed in a few years, or that a political leader could stop an oil leak a mile under the waves — those ideas are ludicrous. But we want to believe them, and political leaders encourage us to do just that.
It may be that what we want now is political leaders who cannot solve our problems but do feel our pain. That translates into demands that the president go to every disaster and look sad and angry. That seems to be what was demanded of Obama and of George W. Bush, too. A photo op looking toward the vasty deep. It’s not easy in a time when people are chanting that there is too much government, but when something bad happens, people want to know why government can’t fix it — right now!
So, what’s a president to do? All he can do: react. Fulminate about bad guys to buy time. Then fire people who screwed up, punish corporations or institutions or individuals that violated the public’s trust and ignorance. Put in new regulations and regulators and enforcers to ensure people play by the rules. Make them pay. No one is too big to fail.
Call the cops!