Alone At the Top: the Problem of Isolation

Perhaps only twice in the past half-century have we had Presidents who did not become, in one way or another, cut off from the country. Those two, and both | served briefly, were John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, vigorous men, not backslappers but they liked to get around, fond of sports, parties--Kennedy cool but alive with intellectual curiosity, Ford stolid and very comfortable with all kinds of people. Both tapped in often on the judgment of friends outside the White House.

All the other modern Presidents came to be seriously isolated. Franklin Roosevelt's mobility was restricted by his polio and then by wartime security. For Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, political adversity, in the form of Viet Nam and Watergate, made it painful to move around much in the country. (Four decades earlier, Herbert Hoover had suffered similar imprisonment by the Depression; he was not much of a mixer even in good times.) Nixon and Jimmy Carter were more or less reclusive Presidents by temperament. Reagan's curiosity is well contained. Eisenhower was somewhat less gregarious than the famous grin suggested; age and illness cut down his energy and perhaps his curiosity. Harry Truman was a parochial President in his friendships.

We have an image of American politicians as crowd-working, people-loving extroverts, but it takes a burning intensity of ambition and ego to seek the presidency today, to undergo the brutally long campaigning, the probing eye of the press. There are surely tensions between the driving purpose inside the man and the requirement for surface affability and calm. Jimmy Carter was something of a loner even when he played host to several hundred Georgians on the South Lawn of the White House. The Reagans, with all their graceful entertaining and the President's old-shoe geniality, are said to be "very private people." The ability to tune out on many occasions, simply not to notice, not to listen, may be part of the armor that carries a candidate through the campaigning. He may have been running for President twelve years as Reagan had in 1980, four years as Carter had in 1976, and that experience may have given him at least a layer or two of insulation from his fellow Americans.