The frailties of age have afflicted several presidents. Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke during his second term. Warren Harding died of a heart attack and Franklin Roosevelt of a stroke. Dwight Eisenhower survived a heart attack. Ronald Reagan showed early signs of the Alzheimer's disease that eventually claimed his life.

But Joe Biden’s aging affected his presidency in an especially poignant way. During the 2020 campaign, which brought Biden the prize he had sought for decades, the former vice president characterized himself as a bridge between generations of Americans and intimated that if elected he would serve but one term.

Victory changed his mind. Biden no longer spoke of a single term. Increasingly he indicated he would try for a second term. He had defeated Donald Trump once, he said, and he would defeat Trump again.

Staffers talked up a second term for Biden, and for themselves in many cases. They disguised his decline in energy and his lapses of memory by not telling what they saw in the White House.

They did so with good intent. A Biden operating at 80 percent would do more good and less harm to American democracy than a Trump at 100 percent, they reasoned.

The Biden team kept its boss sequestered. As a young politician, Biden had liked to jawbone reporters. He occasionally got carried away, yet little harm occurred. But as the 2024 election approached, his failure to engage produced the very doubts the staff were trying to prevent.

They couldn't avoid a debate. It proved a fiasco. Biden stumbled, lost his thread and appeared shockingly old.

Democrats panicked. Many concluded their party had no chance of victory with Biden atop the ticket. Yet most assumed there was nothing they could do to force him to withdraw.

There was the additional problem of choosing his replacement. Kamala Harris as vice president was the presumptive choice, under the spirit of the 25th Amendment. And her nomination would be historic, as the first black woman and first person of Asian descent to head a major party ticket.

But she had fared poorly in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Most Democrats deemed her a strong candidate only by comparison with the faltering Biden. Yet to pass her over might seem a slap at women and people of color, constituencies Democrats needed in order to win.

While the party as a whole was paralyzed, Nancy Pelosi, longtime leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, refused to accept Biden's repeated vow to fight to the end as his final word on the subject. As often as he declared the matter closed for discussion, she reopened it.

Her determination eventually penetrated the staff-constructed shield around Biden, who somberly announced his withdrawal from consideration for renomination. In almost the same breath he endorsed Harris.

So relieved were the Democrats at Biden's withdrawal that none seriously challenged Harris, who soon secured sufficient endorsements to guarantee her nomination.

For a week or two the Democrats reveled in their narrow escape. Harris got the usual nomination bounce in public opinion polls.

Then reality set in. Harris turned out to be almost as uninspiring in her second campaign as in her first. Democrats bled support from blacks and Hispanics, and though Harris kept Trump from winning an absolute majority in the popular vote, he rolled up a decisive victory in the electoral college.

The outcome confirmed the adage that for presidents, as for many other leaders, actions are judged by consequences, not by intentions. If Harris had won, Biden’s decision to step aside would have been accounted a great act of selflessness, a placing of the national interest above personal interest.

But she lost. His decision was condemned as having come too late, precluding a primary contest that would have let the Democrats put forward a better candidate.

Some of this was scapegoating by Democrats who refused to acknowledge how toxic their brand had become with half the country. Quite possibly no Democrat could have defeated Trump in 2024.

Regardless, Biden’s delay underscored a crucial aspect of decision-making. Good decisions have to be not only right but timely. The window of timeliness is broad for some decisions, narrow for others. Either way, miss the window and the best decision becomes no better than the worst.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whether foolish or not, consistency was something every president from George Washington to Barack Obama tried to portray the world. They had good reason. The president of the United States is a powerful individual. Most people prefer power not be exercised capriciously. A president's actions ought to be predictable, and consistency is part of predictability. Presidents have changed their minds, but when they have done so, they have tried to characterize the change as in keeping with some larger continuity. Abraham Lincoln changed his mind during the Civil War about his authority to emancipate slaves. But he asserted that emancipation had become necessary to achieve his enduring goal of saving the Union.

Donald Trump broke the mold in this as in other aspects of the presidency. Trump was a businessman and reality television star before becoming president. In both roles he cultivated a reputation for unpredictability. He kept his business counterparts off balance by switching positions unexpectedly. Last-minute flip-flops made for riveting TV.

How much of Trump's inconsistency was conscious and deliberate, and how much instinctive and spontaneous, was hard to say. Actors grow into personas they play repeatedly. It was probably a bit of both.

But whatever its origin, Trump's inconsistency became a tactical strength. As a candidate he was impossible to pin down. His opponents would quote him saying X and then saying Y. Which was it?, they demanded. Z, he would blithely reply.

His supporters weren't bothered by this. It showed his disdain for convention. During the 2016 campaign someone sympathetic to Trump said he should be taken seriously but not literally. The media caught on and gradually stopped reporting each new contradiction, at least with such shock as before.

The result was that Trump came to occupy an unprecedented position among presidents. He was immune to charges of inconsistency, because his inconsistencies were so common. His supporters shrugged off complaints that he lied. He was simply being Trump. Or he was joking. He was trolling the libs.

All of this gave Trump greater freedom in choosing his courses of action than any president before him. During the campaign of 2024, and during the months after the election, no one knew what a second Trump term would bring. Mass deportations? Or not? An end to American aid to Ukraine? Or not? An all-out trade war against China? Or not? Army troops in American streets? Or not? Annexation of Greenland? Or not? A third Trump term? Or not?

A president of whom there are no expectations is as free to indulge his instincts and whims as a president can be. Democrats railed against him, to no effect. Republicans awaited his decisions, which they proceeded to defend, regardless of what the decisions were. Trump voters remained as loyal as ever.

As a matter of tactics, Trump’s conspicuous inconsistency made him the envy of other politicians, and leaders in other fields, who chafed under the constraints of expected consistency.

As a matter of strategy, the Trump approach was more ambiguous. His unpredictability may have helped him negotiate trade deals with other governments, but the uncertainty his threats of punitive tariffs injected into the decision-making of national and corporate leaders created a drag on the American and world economies. As of the late summer of 2025 he hadn't followed through on threats to renege on America’s commitment to NATO, but the threats alone caused European leaders to begin to look to their own devices, at cost to the coherence of America's oldest alliance.

What every president before him recognized was that America's president, by virtue of his office, is held to a different standard than other individuals. Trump refused to accept this as a limit on his actions. He appeared pleased in the short run with the freedom this gave him. Whether Americans would be pleased in the longer run awaited that longer run.

Elderly Democrats in the early 21st century could have been forgiven for thinking they were cursed by a cycle of excitement and disappointment. They had cheered Franklin Roosevelt only to have him die in office. They had been charmed by John Kennedy, who was slain by an assassin. They were smitten by Bill Clinton, to be jilted in favor of a White House intern.

Even so, many couldn't help thinking that the young senator from Illinois was the one who would lead the party back to the promised land. When Barack Obama burst onto the scene at the 2004 Democratic national convention, Democrats swooned. Obama was young, handsome, energetic, eloquent — and black! Democrats were so taken with Obama that at next opportunity they gave him the party's nomination for president, pushing aside Hillary Clinton, who would have been the first woman to win a major party nomination. History-minded Democratic feminists grumbled that it was 1870 all over again. At that time advocates of women's rights wanted to include women in the 15th amendment, which granted black men the vote. They were told to wait their turn. In 2008 it seemed they were being told the same thing again.

Obama understood the historical burden he was laboring under. He carried the hopes of black people in America that someone who looked like them could achieve the highest office in the land. For liberal Americans of all races, an Obama victory would provide evidence that their country might finally transcend its racist past. For Democrats as Democrats, Obama was their party's ticket back to control of the executive branch and the opportunities this entailed.

The Obama campaign came up with a brilliant slogan to encompass the hopes surrounding his historic candidacy. “Yes we can,” it said. And in Spanish, “Si se puede.” The slogan was uplifting. It was inspiring.

And it was utterly vacuous. Yes, we can what? Obama let voters fill in the blank with whatever they chose.

It might not have worked had Republican prospects not taken a nosedive with the financial crisis that seized the country in 2008. Until then, America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to be the problems that would most engage the next president. The Republicans nominated John McCain, a former navy officer, whose background seemed well suited to dealing with such problems. If the most salient issue had been national security, McCain almost certainly would have defeated the inexperienced Obama. But the financial crisis negated McCain's advantage and shifted the odds in favor of the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she might have been.

Obama won decisively. His inauguration attracted the largest inaugural crowd in American history. Some came so they could tell their grandchildren they had seen America swear in its first black president. Others, counting on the yes-we-can motif of the campaign, hoped for a progressive renaissance after eight years of conservative Republicanism.

The former went home satisfied. The latter had to wait . . . and wait and wait. They discovered something that any student of presidential politics knew quite well. Campaign promises are one thing, actual results quite another. Campaigns are all about raising hopes. During a campaign, “yes we can” is a compelling theme. But once in office, the operative phrase more often is “no you can't.” People come to a new president with all sorts of ideas and demands for policies and programs. Most of these are impractical or politically impossible. A president says no far more often than yes.

For this reason, new presidents are always a disappointment to many of those who voted for them. The higher the hopes raised in the campaign, the greater the disappointment.

Obama's presidency was not unsuccessful. His signature accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act, which greatly reduced the number of Americans without access to medical care. Yet the fact that it passed without a single Republican vote in Congress placed a target on its back for Republicans to shoot at for years to come.

In foreign affairs, Obama did withdraw American forces from Iraq, and he oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated an agreement with Iran regarding nuclear weapons. But he continued the feckless American war in Afghanistan. He permitted a bloody and destabilizing civil war in Syria to play out on its own terms. He responded with ineffective sanctions to Russia's seizure of Ukrainian Crimea. And his nuclear agreement with Iran generated such little support that it was repudiated by his Republican successor, Donald Trump, almost as soon as Obama left office.

To criticize Obama for raising expectations unrealistically would be politically fatuous. Candidates are always going to try to persuade people to vote for them. The more people who vote for them, the better for the candidates.

Beyond this, it might be the case that American politics had become so fractious by the time of Obama's inauguration that nothing he could have done would have made any difference in his dealings with the Republicans.

All the same, amid candidates’ concern about getting elected, they would do well to consider how their mode of campaigning might interfere with their governing once elected.

Something similar is true for any leader. Rev up the rank and file, but not so much as to make a letdown inevitable. Managing expectations is more art than science. But so is leadership in general.

When leaders of the Catholic church were considering someone for canonization, a traditional part of the process was the appointment of a “devil's advocate.” Sainthood was not bestowed lightly, and to ensure that it was not awarded incorrectly, the devil's advocate made the case against canonization.

Secular leaders don't have the power to put halos over the heads of dead people. But they can benefit from devil's advocates all the same. George W. Bush surely could have.

Not even the Republicans who nominated Bush in 2000, or the voters who elected him, expected great things from a second Bush presidency. George W. won by the virtue of his last name and by the vice of Bill Clinton, whose sexual shenanigans turned some Democratic votes into Republican. Notwithstanding, the election was very close, being finally resolved by the Supreme Court in a striking decision that was without precedent and was declared by the court to be no precedent for future cases.

Conscious of the circumstances of his election, Bush began his tenure modestly. But eight months in, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, caused him to conclude that more was required of him. To no one's great surprise, and against little opposition, Bush ordered American forces into Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the attacks.

Almost at once things grew more complicated. Osama got away, and the American invasion toppled the existing government, leaving the United States responsible for the government that took its place. Maintaining this government turned out to be a long, costly and ultimately futile affair.

Yet amid the complications in Afghanistan, Bush launched a second war. Iraq had troubled the sleep of the Bush family since the early 1990s, when the Persian Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power. Bush's father, the American author of that war, had hoped the American victory would so discredit Saddam that the Iraqis would overthrow him. They didn't. Nor did they prevent him from plotting to assassinate the elder Bush.

The younger Bush took this amiss and decided to finish the job his father had started. He made his public case against Saddam in terms of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) Iraq was said to possess or be on the verge of possessing. Administration officials gave briefings and speeches presenting evidence of the looming danger of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons at Saddam's disposal.

One problem with Bush’s approach was that he was operating with incomplete information. He had filled his administration with people looking for an excuse to attack Saddam. No one close to Bush pushed back against the building momentum for war. The president, with no personal expertise on Iraq or the Middle East, became a prisoner of his pro-war advisers.

The other problem was that there were no WMDs. Bush, believing his briefings, gave the order to invade Iraq. American soldiers searched high and low for WMDs but found nothing.

Bush was embarrassed, but rather than call off the war, he trotted out a new justification. The overthrow of Saddam, which was quickly accomplished, would allow democracy to take root in Iraq, with positive consequences for that country and the broader Middle East.

This line had problems of its own, starting with the fact that Iraq's population was an unstable balance of competing religious and ethnic groups. Democracy had never existed in Iraq, and an American military occupation didn't provide auspicious circumstances for its emergence.

American troops found themselves in a crossfire that persisted on and off until they were finally withdrawn by Barack Obama in 2011. The ironic result of Bush’s misbegotten war was the strengthening of Iran, America’s greater foe in the region, via a takeover of the Iraqi government by clients of Tehran.

Perhaps Bush would have chosen war in Iraq even if he had heard strong arguments from his advisers against it. But the fact that he didn't hear such arguments made the biggest blunder of his presidency all but inevitable.

Charisma is something that appears in politics every so often. But in America it rarely survives to the highest level, that of the presidency. The Constitution was written to filter it out. Ordinary people might be charmed by some likely fellow, but the electors who did the actual choosing among candidates would judge them by more objective criteria. Even after the electors became rubber stamps for the popular will in their states, which was to say by the one-third mark of the 19th century, the political parties controlled the nomination process. Like parents arranging marriages for their children, they determined nominees on the basis of what would further the interests of the parties.

As a result, personal magnetism hardly appeared in the White House before the 20th century. Andrew Jackson inspired strong emotions in his followers, but equally strong emotions in his foes. One test of charisma is that even opponents feel its force. They are charmed in spite of themselves. Jackson's opponents were not charmed by Jackson, and definitely not in spite of themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt had a kinetic fascination for his fans. Franklin Roosevelt had paternal appeal during the dark days of the Great Depression and the anxious moments of World War II.

But it wasn't until John Kennedy that genuine charisma figured importantly in a presidency. Television made it possible. Television allowed Americans to feel as though they knew their presidents personally. Ronald Reagan exploited the possibilities of television, but by the time he became president his appeal was grandfatherly.

Bill Clinton, by contrast, was still in his charismatic prime when he burst on the political scene in the early 1990s. Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton met John Kennedy in 1963 while in Washington on a trip for high schoolers. The experience confirmed an existing interest in politics, which Clinton entered not long out of law school. He was elected Arkansas attorney general and then Arkansas governor, taking the latter office at the age of 32. He ultimately served five terms as governor, by the end of which he had a reputation as one of the most promising of the post-Vietnam generation of Democrats.

He also had a reputation as a ladies’ man. His charm wasn't confined to politics, nor did he confine it to his marriage. While he remained in Arkansas, his philandering was of little interest to outsiders, but as his star rose and his fans talked of him as the next JFK, the stories spread.

They didn't derail his ambition. At the end of 1991 George Bush appeared unbeatable for reelection. Bush had guided America to victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, and over the suddenly defunct Soviet Union in the Cold War. The heavy hitters among Democratic prospects for president decided to sit out the 1992 campaign. Clinton volunteered and beguiled Democratic primary voters. While he was doing so, a recession took the shine off Bush's presidency and afforded Clinton an opening. “It's the economy, stupid,” became the catchphrase of a campaign which conspicuously ignored Bush's triumphs in foreign affairs.

The strategy worked, and Clinton defeated Bush and H. Ross Perot in a three-way race.

Clinton's Arkansas friends hoped the weight of the presidency would impose discipline on his love life. Perhaps it did to some degree. But it left room for an affair with a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, who was an intern at the White House before taking a paid job there. The story of the affair came out. Clinton denied it. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment. The Senate failed to convict, leaving Clinton in office but badly wounded politically.

Among Clinton's supporters there was much shaking of heads. How could so gifted a man, so appealing a politician, have been so stupid as to risk everything they hoped he would accomplish on a tawdry affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Did he really think he could keep it secret? Couldn't he tell the difference between Washington and Little Rock?

Few lamented the affair per se. They had learned to expect no better from Clinton. But the fact that he couldn't restrain himself in the interest of something bigger made them wonder if they had misjudged him all along.

Or maybe it was themselves they had misjudged. They had been as charmed as Lewinsky and the other women.

Charisma can have that effect.

John L. Lewis was a longtime president of the United Mine Workers. He won and held that position not least because he had a generous perception of his own gifts, a perception he made sure to share with the world. “He that tooteth not his own horn,” he explained, “shall not have his horn tooteth.”

George Bush (whose middle initials H. W. were included only after his son George W. Bush followed him to the White House) had a different philosophy of horn tooting. Success was expected in the household George Bush grew up in. Boasting was frowned on. It was unseemly. It was also counterproductive in that it provoked resentment that made further success more difficult.

There are two ladders to political success in America. The more visible is the electoral ladder. A person runs for local or state office. If elected, that person aims higher, perhaps eventually trying for Congress or a governorship. A few eventually try for the presidency.

The second ladder is the appointive ladder. The person is appointed to a government job by one or more elected officials. The person succeeds in that job and is appointed to a more responsible position. In time a cabinet post might open up, or even the vice presidency, which is effectively an appointive position.

George Bush spent the first part of his career mostly on the appointive ladder. He served two terms in the House of Representatives but otherwise depended on appointments for his government jobs. He was ambassador to the United Nations under Richard Nixon, chairman of the Republican National Committee in the wake of Watergate, director of the CIA following scandals at that agency, and chief diplomat to China during America's opening to Beijing. In each job he handled himself with quiet competence, serving the country first and himself second if at all.

He sought the Republican nomination for president in 1980 but lost to Ronald Reagan, who awarded him the consolation prize of second place on the ticket. His two terms as vice president were solidly undistinguished. His low profile helped him avoid the fallout from the Iran-contra scandal. His loyalty persuaded the party to give him the chance to succeed Reagan, whose residual popularity won him the 1988 election.

His primary task as president was dealing with the breakup of the Soviet empire. The reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev inspired the satellite states of Eastern Europe to escape Russian domination. A first critical moment occurred in the fall of 1989 when communist guards in East Berlin refused to prevent breaches in the Berlin Wall. A second came in late 1991, when the Soviet government voted itself out of existence and ceded power to the constituent republics of the Soviet Union.

At each instance the world held its breath. Never before had the Soviet Communist party failed to suppress challenges to its authority. What would the Kremlin do?

What would the White House do? From the beginning of the Cold War, American policy had sought to contain Soviet communism with the goal of causing its implosion. Now that the implosion was occurring, would the American president claim victory? Would he assert the final triumph of democracy over communism?

George Bush appeared to do nothing. He appeared content to let events follow their own course.

Many Americans were surprised. Many were disappointed. This was the greatest moment in the history of the generation that came after World War II. Only a few years earlier, Ronald Reagan had stood at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall and dramatically demanded that the Kremlin tear down the dividing barrier between East and West Berlin. Americans were confident Reagan would have made a victory speech. Why was George Bush silent?

Because that was his style. And because he understood that a peaceful end to Soviet communism was far from assured. This former spy chief knew that officers of the Red Army and the KGB were looking for an excuse to topple the civilian government and reverse the recent reforms. They would claim that Gorbachev was an American stooge and depose him as a traitor.

Indeed they attempted to do precisely that in the summer of 1991. But the coup failed, not least because Bush gave them nothing to work with. He took the position that the fate of the Soviet Union was for the people of the Soviet Union work out.

And when the people of the Soviet Union, acting through their leaders, decided to call an end to the experiment begun by Lenin seven decades earlier, the outcome couldn't have been improved upon, from the American perspective.

At this point Bush might reasonably have taken a victory lap. But it still wasn't his style. Besides, though the old guard in Russia was in retreat now, it might not always be. The generals and the intelligence man were awaiting a stumble by the successor government. There was nothing to be gained by handing them a nationalist card to play in a power struggle.

Actually, there was one thing to be gained by Bush in claiming credit for the American victory in the Cold War. And that was a second term in the White House, which Bush failed to win.

To be sure, there were other reasons for Bush's defeat in 1992: a recession, the independent candidacy of Ross Perot, an appealing opponent in Bill Clinton. But a candidate willing to exploit America's success in its generational contest with communism should have been able to overcome those obstacles.

George Bush was not that candidate. He had never been that person. America and the world were the better for his being who he was. His political career was the worse, or at least the shorter.

Ronald Reagan told a story about a conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev in which the Soviet leader was trying to convince the American president that Soviet citizens had freedom of speech. Reagan challenged him. “In America, anyone can walk into the White House and tell me to my face that I’m doing a terrible job,” he said. “Can people in Russia do that?”

“Why, yes,” said Gorbachev, in Reagan’s telling. “Anyone can walk into the Kremlin and tell me to my face that Ronald Reagan is doing a terrible job.”

The story always got a laugh, even from Gorbachev. It was vintage Reagan: short, teasing but not mean-spirited, and with himself as much the butt of the joke as anyone else.

To a convention of evangelical ministers he told of an odd coincidence. One day in a small town a minister and a politician died and arrived at the Pearly Gates at the same time. St. Peter greeted them and showed them to their quarters. The minister would spend eternity in a small room with a bed and a chair. The politician, seeing this, grew worried. But St. Peter showed him to a large mansion with handsome grounds. “How do I deserve this,” the politician asked nervously, “when that holy minister got only one room?” St. Peter answered, “Here in heaven ministers are a dime a dozen. You’re the first politician who ever got in.”

Reagan had learned to open with a joke when he was a hired spokesman for General Electric during the 1950s. His film career had fizzled and he needed work. GE, the largest corporation in America, wanted to promote electricity, for obvious reasons, and free-market capitalism, to protect itself against government regulation. Reagan hosted the weekly General Electric Theater on television, an electrical technology that was penetrating American homes, and he traveled the country speaking on behalf of GE and conservative American values.

He told of a gig in a small town where many people had forgotten him, if they had ever known of him. His luncheon host found himself in a quandary. He didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the man he was supposed to introduce. Was it RAY-gun or REE-gun? He’d heard the Irish name pronounced both ways. He was pondering the matter when he bumped into a friend walking a small hound with floppy ears. The friend said the host seemed worried. What was the problem? The host explained. The friend said, “It’s RAY-gun.” “Are you sure?” asked the host. “Yeah,” said the friend. “He used to be an actor. Ronald RAY-gun.” The host thanked the friend, relieved to have his problem solved. “By the way,” the host said. “That’s a nice dog. What kind is it?” “A BAY-gle.”

Reagan had learned on the luncheon circuit that the best way to warm up an audience was to tell a joke, preferably on himself. A person who can poke fun at himself can’t be a bad guy. And laughter relaxes people who might otherwise be standoffish or suspicious, say of a Hollywood celebrity come to a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Reagan took the lesson and applied it to politics, after his GE job ended and he needed to make another career change. An actor Reagan knew, George Murphy, had gone into politics and been elected to the Senate from California. Reagan thought he’d give politics a try himself. He ran for California governor in 1966 and won. He won again in 1970.

He thought himself ready for a bigger stage, namely the presidency. He challenged incumbent president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 and lost a close contest. Most observers assumed they’d heard the last of Reagan, who was sixty-five. But he tried again in 1980, winning the Republican nomination and defeating Jimmy Carter in the general election.

Reagan was the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge. His philosophy jarred with fifty years of liberalism and might have been expected to make him enemies. It made very few. Many people disliked Reagan’s policies, but almost no one disliked Reagan.

His humor was a central part of the explanation. In his 1984 reelection campaign, questions arose regarding his age. In a debate against Democrat Walter Mondale — a former vice president who was fifty-six to Reagan’s seventy-three — he was asked whether age was a legitimate issue in a campaign for president. He responded that he was above such things. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he said. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The laughter triggered a landslide that swept Reagan into a second term by one of the largest margins in history.

When people run for president, they say many things in the course of their campaigns. Should they win, they’re tempted to think voters elected them for what they said.

When Jimmy Carter announced in 1974 that he was running for president, he pledged full honesty. “I'll never tell a lie,” he said. “I'll never make a misleading statement. I'll never betray the trust of those who have confidence in me.” Carter's promise resonated with Americans in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal. Carter was elected in 1976 mostly because he was the candidate farthest from the scene of the crimes.

Following inauguration, Carter acted on his pledge to tell the truth. In a speech at Notre Dame University he declared the Vietnam war to have been a mistake — a moral lapse as much as a military fiasco. “For too many years, we've been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs,” he said. “We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Many listeners and readers nodded agreement. But Carter's critics realized his words could be construed as casting aspersions on those who had fought in Vietnam. When Carter proclaimed amnesty for Vietnam era draft resisters, the case against him as unpatriotic became more potent.

Two years later Carter gave a speech that caused him even more trouble. The Iranian revolution had jolted oil markets and sent prices soaring. Besides aggravating inflation, this latest oil shock underscored America's strategic vulnerability to disruptions of oil supplies. Carter judged that Americans needed to hear some hard truths. He said he had intended to talk about energy narrowly. “But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem? It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”

The deeper problems were what he chose to address. “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

Carter proposed to supply the missing unity. He gave Americans something to rally around: energy conservation. “I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never.” He would ask Congress for authority to mandate conservation and ration gasoline. Ordinary Americans must do their part. “I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

There was indeed common sense in Carter's recommendations. But there wasn’t much political sense. The critics who had questioned Carter’s patriotism now castigated him for blaming the American people for his own failures of leadership. The job of a president, they said, was to expand America’s horizons, not shrink them. The American future had always promised more. Carter threatened Americans with less.

Carter never lived down the “malaise speech,” as his conservation sermon came to be called. Challenged in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who told Americans not what they needed to hear but what they wanted to hear, Carter lost badly.

The man who had promised to tell the truth discovered that sometimes the truth hurts — the person telling it.

A bunch of small children are playing together. One child, perhaps a boy, talks a lot. But he does so with a fluency and animation that sets him apart from other talkative children. He tries to persuade his playmates. He wants to be the leader of the group. He wants to be liked. One of the parents or grandparents on the sidelines says, He's going to grow up to be a politician.

I don't know if this scenario is at all common anymore. But it used to be. The talkative kid, the one who wanted to be liked, was said to have a career in politics waiting for him.

That kid was not Richard Nixon. Nixon would become one of the most popular politicians of the 20th century, measured by margin of victory in a presidential election. Yet he attained this distinction not because of his personality but in spite of it.

Nixon was smart. Few presidents have had as keen an analytical mind. He could size up politics and international affairs and navigate them to good effect. He was ambitious. He started climbing from humble beginnings in southern California and set his eye on politics.

The fact that he chose politics was puzzling. He wasn't comfortable around people. Small talk was painful for him. If Nixon had settled for a career as a Wall Street lawyer, he would have become rich and powerful in that circle.

He did go to law school, but as a springboard to politics. Elected to the House of Representatives and then the Senate, he made a name as an ardent anticommunist Republican. This recommended him to Dwight Eisenhower when the former general received the Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower and Nixon won, and they won again in 1956, making Nixon only the fourth vice president to serve two full terms. For doing his duty he received the Republican nomination in 1960, but he lost in a close race to John Kennedy.

He lost again in a 1962 campaign for governor of California. He felt badly used by the media. After the election he bid the press a bitter adieu, saying they wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

Yet he didn't retire from politics, as many thought he would. Instead he cultivated friends within the Republican party. And after conservative Barry Goldwater led the party to a devastating defeat in 1964, Nixon positioned himself as the moderate who had nearly won in 1960 and would win in 1968.

He persuaded the Republicans, who nominated him, and voters in general, who elected him in a three-way contest against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace.

Nixon thereupon embarked on a revolution in American foreign policy. Convinced that the monolithic thinking that treated all communist countries as the same had become counterproductive, Nixon shocked the world by opening relations with China. This gave him leverage with the Soviet Union, which agreed to arms control and a formal declaration of live-and-let-live with the American capitalists they had railed against since Lenin. In the bargain, Nixon announced a plan to de-Americanize the war in Vietnam.

It was brilliant. By cozying up to the communists of Moscow and Beijing, Nixon, the former red-baiter, flummoxed his opponents and amazed his allies. He diminished the specter of nuclear war that had hung over the world since the 1950s. He began extracting America from the morass of Vietnam.

He appeared unstoppable. None doubted that Nixon would win reelection by a large margin.

Yet it wasn't enough. He didn't want to win merely most of the electoral votes. He wanted them all. Absent any necessity and against all prudence, he authorized a campaign of political dirty tricks against the Democrats.

Some of his operatives were arrested in June 1972 at the Watergate complex in Washington. Nixon managed to delay discovery of the extent of the operation until after the 1972 election, in which he won 49 of the 50 states and 61 percent of the popular vote.

As the Watergate story unfolded, it revealed a penny ante operation that had no effect on the outcome of the election. If Nixon had never signed off on it, his victory would have been just as convincing. The socially awkward kid would have had his moment of glory all the same.

It was his desire to have it all that brought him down. The revelation of the operations themselves, and then of Nixon’s efforts to cover them up, forced his resignation in the summer of 1974.

Democratic elections are glorified popularity contests. One candidate wins because more voters like him or her than like the other candidate. This being so, it's understandable that people are drawn to politics who like to know that they’re liked.

A consequence is that many elected officials avoid taking actions that might diminish their popularity. They treat their popularity as political capital that must be conserved, even hoarded. Dwight Eisenhower was proud of the fact that he left office as popular as he entered it.

Lyndon Johnson had a different view. To Johnson, popularity was political capital that ought to be spent on worthy political projects.

Johnson understood that change in public policy doesn't come without a fight. The status quo always has stubborn defenders. Some can be won over but others have to be steamrolled. This takes a toll on the popularity of the person driving the steamroller. Eventually the popularity — the political capital — is used up. Someone else takes the controls.

Johnson became president in November 1963 with zero political capital, not having been elected to the office. But he borrowed some of the capital of John Kennedy, claiming a desire to complete the work the murdered president had begun. Johnson was most interested in a civil rights bill introduced before Kennedy’s assassination but currently languishing. Saying passage of the bill would be a suitable memorial to Kennedy, Johnson cajoled, shamed and threatened lawmakers with an effect Kennedy could never have had, and the bill became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Johnson proceeded to win the 1964 election by a large margin over Republican Barry Goldwater, amassing a pile of political capital he could call his own.

He gathered his top aides and told them to start spending it at once. He had big plans for the package of liberal reforms he called the Great Society. He said his administration had eighteen months, maybe two years, to get the laws they wanted. By the end of that time the opportunity would have passed. The country would be distracted by other issues. Whatever political capital he still held would be useless.

Johnson’s strategy unfolded as he directed. He passed out favors to wobbling legislators: a bridge for this congressional district, a plum appointment for a friend of that senator. He vowed retribution against opponents of his programs. The result was a burst of reform unlike anything Washington had witnessed. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid were merely the most visible of the historic changes Johnson persuaded Congress to approve.

By the end of two years, Johnson’s political capital was exhausted. It’s in politics and human nature that people are less grateful for what they get than upset for what they don’t get. A president who agrees with them is simply doing what is right. A president who disagrees is a fool or a crook. The fans of the Great Society were quietly happy. The foes of the Great Society were loud and angry.

Domestic reform wasn’t all that ate into Johnson’s stash. The war in Vietnam demanded more and more attention, and produced more and more opposition. American escalation failed to stem the advance of North Vietnam against South Vietnam. The communist Tet offensive of early 1968 made plain that victory for the American side was a distant prospect, if it was even still possible.

Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination. McCarthy came close enough that Johnson chose to withdraw from the race. A president without capital might as well go home.

Johnson wasn't surprised by the course of events. Nor did he much complain. His capital had bought the country the Great Society. Even if it couldn't get him another term, it was well spent.

John Kennedy still holds the title of youngest person elected president. At 43, he could reasonably anticipate surviving one or two terms in the White House. This didn't happen. He was assassinated at 46, not three years into his first term.

Kennedy's brief tenure limited what he could accomplish. It also raised questions regarding what he might have done had he lived longer. No such question has intrigued historians and general observers more than what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam.

Kennedy inherited from his two immediate predecessors an American commitment to the defense of South Vietnam against communism. Harry Truman had provided American aid to France while France fought a war against communist Vietnamese nationalists. Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the separation of Vietnam into a communist North Vietnam and an anticommunist South Vietnam. Eisenhower directed American aid to South Vietnam and characterized the government there as an essential American partner in Southeast Asia.

Kennedy deepened the American commitment. He sent military advisers to South Vietnam, bolstering the troubled regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. In foreign policy generally, Kennedy embraced the Truman doctrine of containing communist expansion. Vietnam seemed a venue of great danger in the early 1960s. There was little reason to believe Kennedy would abandon the commitment of Truman and Eisenhower to preventing a communist takeover of all of Vietnam.

Except that in September 1963 Kennedy told journalist Walter Cronkite that the United States was not giving a blank check to the South Vietnamese. “In the final analysis, it is their war,” Kennedy said. “They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the communists.”

Kennedy's statement was remembered years later, after his death and after the dramatic escalation of American involvement in Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson. His statement was placed alongside a decision he made to withdraw a thousand American advisers from South Vietnam, as evidence that he would not have followed the path Johnson did.

As the argument unfolded in the 1970s, Kennedy was wiser than Johnson. He would not have committed the United States to a clearly losing cause. Perhaps waiting until after reelection in 1964, Kennedy would have ended American involvement in Vietnam and spared America most of the deaths and injuries its soldiers suffered there.

Historians and others have debated the counterfactual question ever since. If Kennedy had lived, would he have avoided the trap Vietnam became?

The question is as unanswerable as all counterfactual questions. This hasn't tempered the vehemence of the arguments. The historians have tended to be skeptical, finding little in Kennedy's record to support the idea of a radical break with longstanding American policy toward Southeast Asia. Alumni of the Kennedy administration and fans of the charming young president have clung to the idea that he would never have allowed Vietnam to spoil the Camelot they made the Kennedy White House into.

Lost in the debate is a larger question of the nature of Kennedy's leadership. If he had indeed intended to get out of Vietnam, why didn't he go ahead and do it? If Vietnam was a bad bet for the United States, why not cut losses at once rather than throw more money and lives down the hole?

The Kennedy loyalists say he started the withdrawal by ordering the thousand advisers out. And they assert that a second-term Kennedy would have had more freedom to make a change.

These arguments may or may not carry the weight the loyalists place upon them. But they’re cold comfort to family and friends of Americans killed in Vietnam while Kennedy was awaiting a convenient moment, if indeed he was.

Kennedy didn't expect to be assassinated. He can't be blamed for not foreseeing his early violent death. Yet as a general principle, people in positions of leadership need to allow for the uncertainties of life. If a decision is a good one, it's as likely to get worse with age as to get better.

Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas but grew up in Kansas, in the small town of Abilene. He identified Kansas as home, and though he never lived there after leaving for West Point and a career in the army, he chose to locate his presidential library in Abilene, beside the small house of his boyhood.

His identification with Kansas was strategically shrewd, whatever its emotional origins. While Texans occasionally claimed him — for instance during the 1950s, when Lone Star Staters asserted a Texas troika in Washington: Eisenhower as president, Lyndon Johnson as Senate majority leader, Sam Rayburn as speaker of the House — Ike understood the political edge Kansas held over Texas in the minds of most Americans. Kansas was the Midwest, the heartland, while Texas was the South, the realm of Jim Crow.

Yet it was Kansas that originated the case that dealt the first blow to the system of legally mandated segregation. The Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka overturned the separate-but-equal formula of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that had justified segregation in the first place. The Brown decision applied only to schools, but because schools were among the most visible arenas of segregation, the change seemed monumental to supporters and critics alike.

Eisenhower at first was on the critics’ side. He was a cultural conservative, inclined to leave longstanding practices alone. He was a Kansan, and though Kansas had not been part of the Confederacy, it shared some of the southern outlook and practices of neighboring Missouri, a former slave state, including the school segregation that inspired the Brown case. Not least, Ike thought placing schoolkids on the front lines of a fight that was bound to bring out the worst in people was a lot to ask of the children. If American society was going to be desegregated, let the adults go first.

But he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. He was president of the United States. And he was the leader of the free world.

This last role was decisive in Eisenhower’s thinking on race and segregation. During the 1950s dozens of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa were emerging from the crackup of colonialism. They sent ambassadors to Washington, only to discover that people who looked like them were treated as second-class citizens in the nation that called itself the beacon of democracy and equality. Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, warned the president that the Soviet delegation there was having better luck winning the allegiance of the new countries than he was. Lodge pleaded with Ike to take a clear position in favor of desegregation.

Eisenhower listened. He awaited a chance.

It came in 1957 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied efforts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, encouraging violent protests and employing the state’s national guard against several black students trying to attend Central High School.

Eisenhower responded with words at first. “At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that Communism bears toward a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world,” he said of the events in Arkansas. “Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations. There they affirmed "faith in fundamental human rights" and "in the dignity and worth of the human person" and they did so "without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

When Faubus continued defiant, Eisenhower seized control of the situation. He federalized the Arkansas guard and sent troops of the army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. The army soldiers escorted the students into Central High.

He took no pleasure in the action, he wrote to Richard Russell, a senator from Georgia and critic of Ike’s action. “Few times in my life have I felt as saddened as when the obligations of my office required me to order the use of force within a state to carry out the decisions of a Federal Court.” But he had no choice. “When a State, by seeking to frustrate the orders of a Federal Court, encourages mobs of extremists to flout the orders of a Federal Court, and when a State refuses to utilize its police powers to protect against mobs persons who are peaceably exercising their right under the Constitution as defined in such Court orders, the oath of office of the President requires that he take action to give that protection. Failure to act in such a case would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy and the dissolution of the union.”

Eisenhower’s handling of the Little Rock affair didn’t resolve racial tension in America. Far from it. But it showed — to the country and the world — that the president was prepared to enforce the laws of the United States, even laws whose wisdom he questioned.

“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now,” Harry Truman said to reporters in his first press conference after Franklin Roosevelt's death. “I don't know whether you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”

“Good luck, Mr. President,” one of the reporters said.

“I wish you didn't have to call me that,” Truman replied.

He consoled Eleanor Roosevelt, the late president’s widow. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

She responded, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”

No accidental president ever had to grow into his job more quickly than Truman. The end of World War II in Europe was in sight. But tensions were already emerging in the American alliance with the Soviet Union. The war in the Pacific appeared likely to go on for another year.

Truman's training was in domestic politics, not foreign policy or military affairs. Yet all at once the responsibility for ending the war and establishing peace rested on Truman's shoulders. No wonder he felt as though the heavens had fallen upon him.

He assumed he would be tested, by America's allies as much as its enemies. Roosevelt had been the peer of Britain's Winston Churchill and Russia's Joseph Stalin. They had pushed him and he had pushed back. Each knew where the others stood. They would push Truman. He would have to push back, likely harder than Roosevelt, for being new on the job.

The testing would come at home too. Roosevelt had been tested four times at the ballot box, and he won every time. No president before him, not even Washington, could claim such popular endorsement. Truman had not been elected president at all.

Truman braced himself. He put on his desk a small sign that read, “The buck stops here.” He dared the test to come.

It did so first in Iran, Soviet forces had occupied that country during the war, but Stalin pledged to evacuate them by March 1946. The deadline came and went, and the Soviet troops remained.

Truman decided to get tough. “Members of my Cabinet came to me and asked if we were ready to take the risk that a firm stand involved,” he recounted later. “I replied that we were. So we took our stand. We made it clear to the Soviet Union that we expected them to honor their agreement, and the Soviet troops were withdrawn.”

Possibly Truman remembered too much. The paper trail records nothing like an ultimatum. And Stalin had his own reasons for not making a fuss over Iran.

Yet precisely the fact that Truman remembered things this way afforded insight into his thinking. However the Iran crisis actually unfolded, the lesson Truman took was that toughness prevailed.

Another crisis emerged in 1947. The rightist government of Greece was beset by leftist rebels. Before and during the war, Britain had assumed responsibility for maintaining order in the Balkans, where unfriendly regimes might threaten the route to the Suez Canal and British India beyond. But the war had bankrupted Britain, and changes in world attitudes compelled the British government to agree to Indian independence.

The British government told Truman that if Greece were to be saved from communism, America would have to do the saving.

Truman acted decisively. He ordered the state department to prepare an aid package for the Greek government. He went to Congress to urge a positive vote for funding. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he told the lawmakers.

Truman got the money he wanted. But it came with a commitment that was more than Truman or Congress bargained for. American presidents have always shied from anything smacking of realpolitik: foreign policy reduced to material interests. They feel better casting diplomacy in the language of ideals. They believe Americans will be more likely to support an idealistic policy.

The result of Truman’s elevating aid to Greece into a diplomatic doctrine was that what was intended as a rescue of an anticommunist regime in one country became a promise to rescue anticommunist regimes in all countries.

In 1950, when communist troops of North Korea invaded anticommunist South Korea, Truman reflexively committed the United States to South Korea's defense. This was despite the fact that American strategists had declared South Korea to be beyond America's defensive perimeter. During the next several years Truman and then Dwight Eisenhower committed the United States to the defense of an anticommunist regime in South Vietnam.

Active fighting in Korea lasted three years and ended in a stalemate. Seven decades later American troops remain in South Korea, which technically is still at war with North Korea.

America's support of South Vietnam lasted a quarter century and ended in failure in 1975 after the loss of 60,000 American lives.

Korea and Vietnam were not in Truman's thinking when he asked Congress to endorse the Truman doctrine. They should have been. Or other countries like them: potential candidates for the uncapped commitment Truman was making on America’s behalf.

A commitment by a president is a big deal. Which is why it shouldn’t be any bigger than necessary.

Franklin Roosevelt had witnessed one kind of leadership under Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt was Wilson’s assistant navy secretary, and he watched Wilson lead America into World War I by proclaiming a vision of a world made safe for democracy. Americans followed where Wilson led, and the American side won the war.

But then Wilson asked too much. He summoned Americans to take responsibility for the peace of the world after the war—to break with America’s tradition of diplomatic distance from Europe and other continents. Americans said no. Republicans in the Senate led the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, and far from being punished for the rejection, they were rewarded in the 1920 election with a rousing victory. Roosevelt remembered that part particularly well, having been on the losing Democratic ticket.

The lesson Roosevelt took was that progress comes slowly. A president can afford to be a bit ahead of the public, but if he pushes too fast he risks a backlash that might undo progress already made.

Despite the defeat he shared with James Cox in 1920, Roosevelt supposed he still had a future in politics. Vice presidential nominees aren't blamed for the loss of the ticket. With patience and luck, he might be at the top of the ticket one day.

Roosevelt had the patience. But luck appeared to desert him in 1921 when he contracted polio and was compelled to retire from politics. He spent much of the next several years at Warm Springs, Georgia, trying to regain use of his paralyzed legs.

He failed in that but succeeded in something else. He acquired an appreciation for the plight of the hard-working poor people, white and black, who lived in the rural South, people he never would have come in contact with if not for the polio.

He attempted a political comeback in 1928, running for governor of New York. He won, taking office in time to watch the most prominent sector of the New York economy, Wall Street, suffer the worst crash in its history. He was reelected in 1930, earning the chance to test methods to ease the suffering of people caught in the Great Depression.

Enough of the methods worked that the Democrats nominated him for president in 1932. He coasted past Herbert Hoover, who unfairly got the blame for the country's troubles.

Upon inauguration in 1933, Roosevelt launched the New Deal, an unprecedented extension of government power into the economy. Congress, controlled by the Democrats, gave him everything he asked for and then some. The legislative accomplishments of his first hundred days became the benchmark against which future administrations would be measured.

Liberals among the Democrats wanted still more. They sought to ensure that black people, who lived mostly in the South, were able to exercise the rights accorded them by the 14th and 15th Amendments. As a down payment the liberals sought passage of a federal anti-lynching law. They appealed to Roosevelt to put his reputation behind a bill.

To their puzzlement and dismay he declined. He supported the idea in theory. Lynching was a scourge in the South, and a federal law was the only way to secure convictions state courts wouldn't deliver.

But if he declared in favor of a lynching law, he’d lose the support of southern white Democrats, who were adamantly opposed to federal intrusion into their states’ domestic affairs.

Those white southerners were a pillar of the New Deal coalition. Yet they were a wobbly pillar. More conservative than the urban liberals who formed the other pillar of the New Deal, the southerners let Roosevelt know they’d had enough of big government. Many were looking for an excuse to start opposing him.

Roosevelt reckoned that if he gave them that excuse by backing a lynching law, he’d lose them on the New Deal. Key parts of the New Deal were running afoul of the Supreme Court. Roosevelt would need every vote he could get if he hoped to rewrite the laws to pass court muster.

He sent his wife Eleanor to mollify the liberals. He was with them in spirit, she said. But political realities made him put other things first. The New Deal was about economic rights. Civil rights would come later.

And so they did, though not until after Roosevelt's 1945 death.

Was the delay justified?

He would have said yes, emphatically. Progress comes one step at a time. Move too fast, ask too much, and you get nothing.

In a different world this might not be so. The effective leader takes the world as it is.

As a boy, I might have been forgiven for thinking of Herbert Hoover as a fellow Oregonian. The route from my home in Portland to the Oregon coast, where my family vacationed during summer, ran through Newberg, a small town in the Willamette valley. An old house bore a sign that declared it to be the 1880s boyhood home of Herbert Hoover.

In fact Hoover was born in Iowa. But his father died of a heart attack at thirty-four and his mother of typhoid fever a few years later, leaving Hoover, ten, and his brother and sister as orphans. Hoover was sent to live with an uncle and his family in Newberg.

In later years, Hoover remembered Oregon fondly. “Oregon lives in my mind for its gleaming wheat fields, its abundant fruit, its luxuriant forest vegetation, and the fish in its mountain streams,” he wrote. “To step into its forests with their tangles of berry bushes, their ferns, their masses of wild-flowers stirs up odors peculiar to Oregon. Within these woods are never-ending journeys of discovery.”

Until the late 1920s Oregon was as fond of Hoover as he was of it. On reaching college age, he headed south to enroll in the inaugural class of the Leland Stanford Jr University in Palo Alto, California, chiefly because the new college charged no tuition. Hoover earned an engineering degree and after graduation traveled the world making a fortune as a mining engineer.

During World War I he gained international renown by heading relief programs to parts of Europe devastated by the fighting. He returned to America to become commerce secretary in the administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. When Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, Hoover seemed to a working majority of Republicans to be just the man to replace him. The party nominated him, and the country elected him.

At inauguration in March 1929, Hoover appeared perfectly suited for his moment in American history. The economic boom of the Roaring Twenties continued, and who better than a self-made millionaire to preside over its persistence into the next decade?

But the boom didn't persist. The stock market crashed in the autumn of 1929 and during the next three years dragged the economy down with it. Hoover didn’t cause the crash. Nor did he cause the depression. Yet he was president, and if Americans looked to anyone for leadership in ending their troubles, they looked to him.

He didn’t do nothing. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, established in early 1932, provided hundreds of millions of dollars of government support for beleaguered businesses. This was more than the American government had ever done before.

But it came late, two years into the depression, and grudgingly. Hoover’s heart wasn’t in it. He believed in the business cycle. Good times are followed by bad times. The latter are necessary to trim the fat that accrues during the former. Americans must be patient. The cycle must run its course. Good times would return—if government didn’t foul things up. Hoover claimed to see signs of recovery during the summer of 1932.

But then Franklin Roosevelt spoiled everything. Roosevelt promised to shower money on Americans, and in their distress they couldn’t resist voting for him. Roosevelt’s election spooked investors and stalled the recovery, Hoover held. Without Roosevelt’s meddling, the economy would have bounced back much sooner than it did.

Was Hoover right?

Economically, maybe. We’ll never know. Being counterfactual, Hoover’s argument was nondisprovable. He could, and did, go to his grave repeating it.

But whatever the economics, Hoover’s argument was dead wrong politically. People live not by bread alone but also by their hopes and fears. Hoover’s counsel of patience made him seem heartless to the millions of unemployed and the many millions more who feared becoming unemployed. Between their fears and the hopes that Roosevelt preached, there was no contest.

By the rules of economics, Hoover perhaps should have won the election of 1932. By the rules of politics, he deserved to lose in the landslide he suffered.

Oregon was part of that landslide. Hoover carried only one county in the state, and it wasn’t Newberg’s county.

Calvin Coolidge acquired a reputation for being thrifty with words before he entered public life. A friend introduced him to Grace Goodhue, a young teacher at a Vermont school for the deaf. Coolidge was intrigued. “Having taught the deaf to hear,” he remarked, “ Miss Goodhue might cause the mute to speak.” She succeeded sufficiently that he asked her to marry him. She said yes.

Coolidge's father, whose name — John Calvin Coolidge — he shared, was of two minds about his son's upbringing and future. John Coolidge valued the sturdy independence of rural Vermont life. But he also valued education, and he made sure that Cal received the best the family could afford. School took Cal away from the village and into the profession of law. Law took him to Massachusetts and into politics.

Decades earlier Massachusetts had proudly elected Daniel Webster to the Senate, carried away by the torrents of eloquence that flowed from the mouth of the “God-like Daniel.” Coolidge impressed oppositely, causing people to infer depth from his silences. When he did speak, people remembered what he said.

He became nationally famous as governor of Massachusetts during a Boston police strike, when he made a firm stand against the strikers. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, anytime,” Coolidge said.

On the strength of this popular position, the Republicans in 1920 placed Coolidge on the ticket with Warren Harding. The ticket won, and when Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, Coolidge became president.

Subsequent news of scandals in Harding administration spared Coolidge, whose probity was unquestioned. Besides, the corruption was concentrated in the “ Ohio gang” that accompanied Harding to Washington. Coolidge, the New Englander, hadn't been invited to participate.

Coolidge's reticence complemented his reluctance to expand government authority. “The business of America is business,” he said, signaling the hands-off attitude he adopted toward the booming 1920s economy.

Silent Cal suited the temper of the moment. The bellowing of Teddy Roosevelt and the preaching of Woodrow Wilson still echoed in Americans’ ears. A president who let them be was one they could warm to.

Stories of his taciturnity elicited smiles. At a dinner he sat next to a young woman who confided that her friend had bet her she couldn't get three words out of Coolidge. Of course she took the bet. Without looking up from his plate, Coolidge replied, “You lose.”

Bernard Baruch, a financier, told of an explanation Coolidge gave for keeping mum. “Many times I say only yes or no to people,” Coolidge said. “Even that is too much. It winds them up for twenty minutes more.”

He ran for election in his own right in 1924 to keep the White House safe for Republicans. Part of him wanted to know if he could win.

After he did, he decided that political power had little charm. He took himself out of the 1928 presidential race in characteristically few words: “I do not choose to run.”

It was a good decision. His successor, Herbert Hoover, was the one caught in the collapse of the stock market and then the economy.

Coolidge lived long enough to witness the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt on a platform promising greater intervention in the economy than Coolidge ever envisioned. “I feel I no longer fit in with these times,” he said.

“America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

Warren Harding delivered these soothing comments to the Home Market Club of Boston in May 1920. The senator from Ohio was a long shot for the Republican nomination that year. But his sentiments struck a chord with his listeners and subsequent readers. Two decades of progressivism and war had left Americans weary of world-saving, just as two decades of Civil War and South-saving had wearied the grandparents of Harding’s audience. At that time Americans had turned from politics to business, as Reconstruction segued into the Gilded Age. Harding’s speech, and the Republican nomination and election victory it yielded, signaled a similar turning. The Progressive era gave way to the Roaring Twenties.

Warren Harding seemed the man for the moment. He was successful without being ambitious. He had had to be persuaded to run for senator, under the new dispensation of the Seventeenth Amendment, which moved selection of senators from state legislatures to voters. "I found him like a turtle sunning himself on a log, and I pushed him into the water,” said Harry Daugherty, an early Harding backer.

Harding made friends but not waves in Washington. And when Republican leaders in 1920 sought an uncontroversial candidate to capitalize on accumulated annoyances against the incumbent Democrats, Harding got the nod. The crucial decision occurred in a suite packed with cigar puffers at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, giving the country a president and the American lexicon a term — “smoke-filled room” — for conclaves beyond the public view.

Harding left the heavy lifting in his administration to Charles Evans Hughes, the secretary of state, who negotiated a landmark disarmament deal; Andrew Mellon, the treasury secretary, who revamped the tax code; and Herbert Hoover, the commerce secretary, who opened new markets for American exports.

Harding amused himself with, among other things, trysts with a woman not his wife. Nan Britton was twenty-three when Harding was elected. Already they had a child together, unknown to the world. Britton visited Harding in Washington three months after his inauguration. A Harding aide escorted her to the cabinet room, where Harding met her. He showed her to an adjacent room. “He explained to me that this was the ante-room, and crossed over to another door which led into his own private office,” Britton wrote later. “Once in there, he turned and took me in his arms and told me what I could see in his face — that he was delighted to see me. Not more delighted, however, than I was to see him. There were windows along one side of the room which looked out upon the green of the White House grounds, and outside, stalking up and down, face rigidly to the front, moved the President's armed guard. But in spite of this apparent obliviousness on the part of the guard, we were both skeptical and Mr. Harding said to me that people seemed to have eyes in the sides of their heads down there and so we must be very circumspect. Whereupon he introduced me to the one place where, he said, he thought we might share kisses in safety. This was a small closet in the ante-room, evidently a place for hats and coats, but entirely empty most of the times we used it, for we repaired there many times in the course of my visits to the White House, and in the darkness of a space not more than five feet square the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.”

Harding’s affair might have contributed to an atmosphere of secrecy in his administration. As in the Gilded Age, the about-face from reform to profit-making in the 1920s encouraged corruption. The chief malefactor was Albert Fall, the interior secretary, who took bribes to confer cut-rate leases of publicly owned oil fields, including one in the Teapot Dome formation in Wyoming.

Fall and his fellow conspirators kept their crimes secret as long as Harding lived. This wasn’t long, for the president suffered a fatal heart attack in San Francisco in August 1923. The popular president was laid to rest amid encomiums from both parties.

But the corruption soon seeped out. “Teapot Dome” became to the 1920s what “Watergate” would be to the 1970s. Nan Britton added her voice via memoir after Florence Harding, the president’s widow, canceled child-support payments.

The rewriting of the Harding presidency was still gaining steam when Wall Street busted at the end of the decade, casting a retrospective shadow over what had gone before. Harding’s affair of the heart was lumped with Teapot Dome as part of a narrative of decadence that culminated in the great crash and the ensuing depression. The censorious judged Harding to be a bad man. Nearly everyone deemed him a bad president.

Even “normalcy” was deployed against him. He was inaccurately said to have slipped in reading or writing “normality.” In fact Harding’s word was in common use. And its three syllables scanned better in his context than four syllables would have.

It helped win him the presidency. If it couldn’t guarantee the productive calm he called for, this was simply a reminder that a president’s words are no better than the deeds that follow.

Humility came hard to Woodrow Wilson. He was a devout Presbyterian, old school in his belief that God ordained everything that happened in human affairs. This was comforting when things didn't go Wilson's way. God had other plans for him, he concluded. It might have made him humble in victory. He might have said that the victory was God's, not his. In fact he spoke the words. But they didn't convey humility.

After winning the election of 1912 Wilson was approached by the chairman of the Democratic national committee, who reminded the president-elect that many people had worked hard for his victory and ought to be thanked and perhaps rewarded. Wilson shocked the man by his response. “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” he said. Those party loyalists had nothing to do with it. They were owed nothing.

The politician in Wilson could sometimes mask his arrogance. He staffed his administration with tested Democrats, whose party hadn't controlled the executive branch since the mid-1890s. Southern Democrats, a pillar of the party from the Civil War, got their share of jobs. Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas became postmaster general and thereby dispenser of the largest number of civilian jobs. Burleson insisted that the present policy of employing black people alongside white people in post offices in the South, where nearly everything else was segregated, was causing friction. Wilson accepted Burleson's argument and authorized the extension of the Jim Crow system to the federal workforce. Whether Wilson consulted God on this decision is not recorded. He certainly recognized his administration's need to keep the white South happy if he hoped to stay in power.

Wilson hadn't expected foreign policy to figure much in his presidency. Before entering politics he was a professor of history and government, and his work focused on domestic affairs. His political experience consisted of two years as governor of New Jersey, where his decisions were entirely in the domestic realm. The world was calm in 1912, and foreign affairs were rarely mentioned in the campaign. Shortly before his inauguration, Wilson told a friend, “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs."

Eighteen months later Europe went to war, after which Wilson's administration dealt overwhelmingly with foreign affairs. Although this didn't suit his expectation and experience, it did suit his temperament. Presidents have greater freedom of action in foreign affairs than in domestic affairs. During the period of American neutrality, Wilson acted as diplomat in chief. Upon American intervention in 1917, he asserted his authority as commander in chief.

The unfettered authority aggravated Wilson's arrogance and triggered the worst blunder of his political career. The war was winding down as American voters went to the polls in the 1918 congressional elections. Though Wilson himself was not on the ballot, he urged voters to treat the individual congressional races as a collective referendum on his handling of the war.

He should have known better. His study of American history revealed that the party that holds the White House generally loses ground in midterm elections, especially at the midpoint of a second term. Yet Wilson expected to defy the natural accumulation of grievances that afflicts nearly every incumbent president.

He failed. The Republicans won a decisive victory. And they prepared to use it against him. Wilson had asked for a vote of confidence, said Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican head of the Senate foreign relations committee. Instead Wilson had received a vote of no confidence.

Wilson might have salvaged something from the debacle. He might have included Lodge and other Republicans in his entourage as he sailed off to the Paris peace conference. The Republican-controlled Senate would have to ratify any treaty Wilson brought home from Paris. Senate Republicans would be more sympathetic if their party had a share in writing the treaty.

Wilson refused. He would write the treaty by himself, as far as the American contribution went. The Senate could take it or leave it.

Lodge’s neck stiffened. He stacked the Senate against the treaty, in particular its clause requiring American participation in the new League of Nations.

Wilson had a last chance. He might have accepted reservations to the treaty, statements of American understanding that would have preserved, for example, the authority of Congress in declaring war.

Again Wilson refused. The Senate must accept his assurance that he had achieved the best treaty possible for the United States.

Wilson toured the country by railroad to rally support for the treaty. He shared his vision of American world leadership. He seemed to be making progress when he suffered a stroke and had to be rushed back to Washington. Another stroke incapacitated him and silenced his voice.

Amid the silence the Senate voted and rejected the treaty. Wilson's vision of an international order headed by the United States died, killed by his conviction that he alone knew best for a country of 100 million people.

If the irony of fate was that foreign affairs played a dominant part in Wilson’s administration, it was the irony of history that America, having rejected Wilson’s thinking in 1919, adopted that very thinking a generation later. The United Nations, an update of the League of Nations, was guiltily endorsed by Americans who concluded that the second world war could have been averted if they had listened to Wilson after the first. From then until now, America has assumed the role of leader of the world, just as Wilson desired.

The flower called sweet william wasn’t named for Bill Taft, but it could have been. Son of Alphonso Taft, attorney general under Ulysses Grant, Taft grew up with one eye on politics and the other on the law. The latter appealed the more. He won appointment as prosecutor in Ohio and then judge on the Cincinnati superior court. Benjamin Harrison named him federal solicitor general in 1890. Taft moved with his family to Washington, where he met Theodore Roosevelt, at that time a civil service commissioner. Taft liked Roosevelt, and after the election of William McKinley in 1896, he lobbied the new president, an Ohio acquaintance, to give Roosevelt a job, which turned out to be assistant secretary of the navy. Meanwhile Taft was appointed to the federal circuit court of appeals for the Midwest.

Following the American annexation of the Philippines, McKinley named Taft to be governor general of America's new colony. Taft held that position until Roosevelt as president brought him back to Washington to be secretary of war.

Taft impressed Roosevelt as much as he had impressed McKinley and Harrison. He was steady, competent and unambitious for elective office. He wouldn't outshine Roosevelt. When Taft spoke about the future at all, it was to say that the Supreme Court rather than the White House was where his hopes lay.

After Roosevelt decided not to break his 1904 election-night promise not to run in 1908, he decided Taft should be the one to succeed him. Taft had been a loyal lieutenant, and Roosevelt imagined he would continue to be one, in spirit if not formal position. On Roosevelt's continuing popularity, Taft cruised to the Republican nomination and victory in the general election.

Roosevelt left the country for Africa and a big-game hunt. He was confident Taft would govern much as he — Roosevelt — would have governed.

But something happened to Taft that happens to all who become president. Regardless of how they get there, they wake up in the White House and realize they hold the highest office in the land. They can make up their own minds.

Taft's interpretation of progressivism was different than Roosevelt's. It emphasized antitrust prosecution over day-to-day regulation of business. It favored prudent use of natural resources over their preservation.

When Roosevelt returned from Africa, progressives who disagreed with Taft whispered in Roosevelt's ear that Taft was a traitor to the cause of reform. Roosevelt, restive in retirement, let himself be persuaded that the interests of the nation required that he return to the presidency. He challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination.

Critics asserted that Roosevelt was the disloyal one. He should have stood by his protege.

“What do I owe Taft?” rejoined Roosevelt. Debt ran the other way. “It was through me and my friends that he became president.” Roosevelt concluded that what he had given, he could take away.

Taft was distressed by Roosevelt’s reversal. “He has never ceased to avail himself of every opportunity to express his gratitude for all that you have done for him,” a mutual friend reported to Roosevelt. “He can never forget the old and happy relations of intimacy between you and him.” Taft expressed hope that “when all this turmoil of politics has passed, you and he will get together again and be as of old.”

Yet Taft wasn't going to meekly hand Roosevelt the keys to the White House. “I am a man of peace, and I don't want to fight," he said. “But when I do fight I want to hit hard.”

Things got ugly. Roosevelt called Taft a fathead and a puzzlewit. Taft called Roosevelt a demagogue, an egotist and a flatterer of the people. "I hate a flatterer,” Taft said. “I like a man to tell the truth.”

Primary elections were a novelty in 1912, newly allowing voters to register their preferences during the nominating process. Roosevelt was the favorite among Republicans, winning even in Taft’s Ohio.

But the party apparatus still controlled the nominating conventions. At the Republican convention in Chicago the party stuck with Taft.

Roosevelt bolted the convention for a third party, the Progressives. Their hosannas stroked his ego but the result was a Republican rift that delivered the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

The 1912 campaign was Roosevelt's last hurrah. Taft’s career had another chapter, the one he always wanted. In 1921 Warren Harding nominated him to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Senate approved. Taft headed the high court until a month before his death in 1930.

Theodore Roosevelt considered the Panama Canal to be his greatest accomplishment. The canal linked America's east coast to its west coast. It allowed the integration of America's Atlantic naval fleet with its Pacific fleet. It culminated the centuries-long quest of explorers and national leaders for a path between the world 's greatest oceans.

The one thing that bothered Roosevelt about the canal was the criticism he received over the circumstances of its origin. Americans had thought seriously about a canal across Central America since the California gold rush of the mid-19th century. But not until the beginning of the 20th century did the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Diplomacy with Britain removed that country's opposition. Construction technology measured up to the big dig. Medical science understood the tropical diseases that had hindered human activity in the isthmus.

All that was required was the cooperation of Colombia, which then controlled Panama, the most promising location for a canal. The Colombian government, appreciating its leverage in the matter, drove a hard bargain.

Too hard for Roosevelt, who considered the Colombians’ demands extortionate. “I do not think that the Bogota lot of jackrabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization," Roosevelt told John Hay, the secretary of state.

Roosevelt conspired to remove the bar. He encouraged a group of Panamanian nationalists who sought independence from Colombia, offering an American guarantee of Panamanian independence in exchange for permission to build a canal across Panama.

The deal was accepted and the deed done. The Panamanian rebels raised the flag of independence, and an American warship landed marines to preempt Colombian resistance. Roosevelt recognized the new government of Panama, which awarded the United States control of a canal zone across the country.

Few in America criticized the outcome of Roosevelt's diplomacy. But the president's critics couldn't resist sniping at the means. A Chicago paper owned by William Randolph Hearst called the Panama affair “a rough-riding assault upon another republic over the shattered wreckage of international law and diplomatic usage.” The New York Evening Post said, “The same result could have been achieved with some regard for appearances. The booty could have been bagged just the same, yet the burglar could have looked, to the casual eye, more like a church member."

Roosevelt resented the criticism. Colombia had gotten no more than it deserved, he judged. "The Colombia people proved absolutely impossible to deal with,” Roosevelt told a British friend. "They are not merely corrupt. They are governmentally utterly incompetent. They wanted to blackmail us.” They had failed to listen to reason. "In spite of the plainest warnings they persisted in slitting their own throats from ear to ear.”

Roosevelt couldn't let the matter go. He tried to. He professed to. “Whether the people of the United States as a whole do or do not approve of what I have done to the extent of making them wish to continue me in my present place, I cannot say," he told another British friend, referring to the approaching 1904 election. “But I am very confident that from the standpoint of the country's interest and honor, my actions have been both wise and right, and if the people do not take this view, why I shall be sorry, but it will not in the least alter my convictions."

By continuing to talk about the matter, Roosevelt risked spoiling the result. Congress still had to fund construction of the canal. Wiser heads in his administration counseled him to accept the victory and move on. At a cabinet meeting, Roosevelt directed Philander Knox, the attorney general, to recite the legal justification for the administration's actions.

Knox demurred. "No, Mr President, if I were you I would not have any taint of legality about it,” he said.

Turning to Elihu Root, the secretary of war, Roosevelt demanded, “Have I answered the charges? Have I defended myself?"

"You certainly have, Mr President,” Root replied with the sardonic tone he reserved for Roosevelt and unruly children. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape."

Roosevelt got the message. He shut up and let Congress find its way to funding. When it did, he turned responsibility for the canal over to the engineers and the workers.

Yet he couldn't resist a moment aboard one of the great shovels, captured for posterity on film.