Be Wary of the Cautious

By Hugh Sidey

One worry about the great Washington shout-out over how the U.S. should stand tall in the world is that we could soon produce a feckless breed of political leaders who would spend their time debating how best to do nothing.

Secretary of State George Shultz fretted about that in his office the other day. He is partisan, of course, but his concern over America's tendency to be gun-shy about world involvement reflects a broader perspective. "I think you have to be willing to be engaged where you think you might make a difference," he said. While he talked, the arguments about our involvement in Nicaragua raged on Capitol Hill, and the memories of our withdrawal from Lebanon were all too fresh.

Shultz accepts that such failures are an inevitable part of his job. But any U.S. leader, he believes, must take these types of risks or the world will overwhelm us. "I think the Lebanon situation was one that we almost necessarily had to get into," says Shultz. "So we didn't succeed in attaining the objectives that we sought, but we haven't failed completely either." In short, the willingness to try was an important part of the policy.

There is about Shultz a little of the Princeton halfback he once was: a bit battered but more determined than ever to keep running. He views the Democrats who assault him every day as unrealistic. Gary Hart, who wants the U.S. military out of Central America, "has the stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off idea," the Secretary says. Criticism from allies as well as foes will always be a leader's lot, says Shultz, and so too will be internal doubts and frustrations. But much of what he hears now, he protests, is "a way of saying we should never try anything that is difficult."

There are echoes of Shultz's position in former Secretary of State Dean Rusk's accusation that Congress meddles too much in foreign policy, rarely giving a presidential initiative a full and fair chance. A former National Security Adviser to a Democratic President fears that the Democrats may this year produce a presidential candidate, a party platform and a campaign mood that will be strongly isolationist. Both Walter Mondale and Gary Hart shy too much from risk, which is always a part of leadership, this man believes.

The enfant terrible of the House floor, right-wing Republican Newt Gingrich, 40, of Georgia, scales the rhetorical heights by quoting Winston Churchill about the years before World War II: "The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous."

Churchill had a string of spectacular failures as well as successes. So did Franklin Roosevelt in domestic policy during his struggle to lift America out of the Depression. John Kennedy's first year was one of almost continuous defeat, but fortunately, it was a year also marked by unceasing experiment in diplomacy and military improvement. In the American legend, the discouragements with men and War heaped on Abraham Lincoln in his early years of the Civil War sent him into fits of melancholia. But he always climbed out and tried again. He did something. That is not the least of the characteristics that kept Richard Nixon at the center of our political life for nearly 40 years. Even today he runs a kind of shadow presidency that speaks with the tempering that has come from defeat after defeat but still endures, urging the likes of Shultz to come back stronger after each rebuff.

The one thing worse than unsuccessful efforts in the Middle East, Central America or anywhere might be to do nothing at all, a pleasant prospect in the short run but a course that often invites the ultimate disaster.

A long time ago, students of power concocted a formula that has yet to be disproved: "An army of stags led by a lion would be better than an army of lions led by a stag."