Who's in Charge?

By LANCE MORROW

Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman . . . ((A salesman)) don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back -- that's an earthquake.

-- Death of a Salesman

It was a mild October. But then the temperatures dropped, and the cold at dusk had the first wolf of winter in it.

One afternoon in Minnesota, near the headwaters of the Mississippi, the season arrived abruptly in a complex sky. Bright sun fired through slabs of blackish clouds -- tremendous lights and darks at work -- and then a dense snow pelted horizontally through the sunlit air. The American weather was transitional, bewildering. In Washington, leaves drifted from the trees in Lafayette Square. Across the street, there was a vacancy in the White House.

It was a strange vacuum, a palpable absence. Ronald Reagan, for so long a vivid presence in the American consciousness, seemed, for a time at least, to be lost, almost vanishing. One thought of a line from A Passion for Excellence by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin: "The number-one managerial productivity problem in America is, quite simply, managers who are out of touch with their people and out of touch with their customers." The President and his customers were living on different planets.

Americans, dazed by the seizures on the world's stock markets, looked to the White House for . . . what? At the least, for an acknowledgment of the reality and the fear. Suddenly a door to the future had been blown open, and what the world saw (or was it mere hallucination?) seemed frightening. A glimpse of monsters out there in the dark. People looked for a stirring of presidential energy, for both substance and symbol to announce that the most powerful office in the world was alive to the danger. What the world needed was focus, intelligence, communication. It needed to hear the voice of an adult. Editorial writers, columnists, businessmen and politicians cried in chorus, "Leadership! Leadership!"

Perhaps they were being illogical in the expectation. Ronald Reagan's agenda when he came to Washington was to undo as much as possible the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, after 59 months of consecutive economic growth in Reagan's Roaring Eighties, trouble arrived, and everyone (even businessmen who hate Government interference) expected Reagan to start sounding like F.D.R. They may even have wanted him to get on television after the crash and say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Suddenly they wanted activism from a President who has always believed Government should essentially be passive. Reagan's political philosophy does not have a tool with which to repair this kind of breakdown.

The crisis in the world's markets was driven by psychology as well as by objective economics. Rational business and irrational panic are separated by the thin membrane that confidence in the nation's leadership sustains.

The economic trouble, complex and long in the making, resists rhetoric and simple -- or even difficult -- solutions. The air last week was thick with contradictions, with speculative shadows and smoke. Were the nation's huge trade and budget deficits really the problem? The point was expertly argued both ways. Would raising taxes now help the economy or send the economy into a recession? Reagan was expected to lower the budget deficit, soothe the markets, bring down interest rates and keep the dollar steady. At the same time, he must be careful not to discourage consumer spending and capital investment. Reagan, believer in the genius of the free market, instinctively recoils at Government fixes, especially in a tangle as dense as this. Still, fatalism in the face of complexity is not part of Reagan's job description.

Fate nonetheless has often been on Reagan's side, and may be again. Last week he arranged a summit with Gorbachev and nominated a new Justice to the Supreme Court. Reagan has always had luck and a sunny talent to bounce back.

In the '30s Ortega y Gasset wrote, "Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command." The world was not exactly howling last week, just casting its gaze around anxiously.

If Reagan's leadership seemed to be failing, where else would the nation look for guidance? The race of leaders seemed to have vanished like the Maya. "It's a very bad time in the political cycle to expect leadership from either branch of Government," observed Political Analyst Kevin Phillips. "Under the best circumstances, Ronald Reagan would not be the best manager of a crisis, with his feel-good economics. And you can't expect Congress to anticipate the outcome of the next election and act boldly."

In the American scheme of things, Congress should have a powerful voice. Congress has drearily been undistinguished, afflicted by the spirit of the age. It is a much fragmented assortment of 634 individuals, each with separate interests and agendas. Party discipline is slack.

Congressmen rail against the Pentagon budget in the morning, and then in the afternoon make it clear that the military base in their district must not be closed. Leadership at that level finds it hard to decide between the general abstract and the personal local.

And thus the congressional system seems stacked against fiscal prudence, against putting the national interest over special interests. There are votes to be had for talking about spending restraint, but not for exercising it; each member, in the end, feels judged by what projects he can bring home to his district, by what pet programs he can protect for his constituency groups.

The twelve presidential candidates in both parties are going through their auditions, exhibiting themselves in the postures of leadership. But only those who are least likely to be nominated show any willingness to talk realistically about ways to cut the deficit. Says one of those, Democrat Bruce Babbitt: "We've evolved a cycle of dishonesty in our national discourse. Politicians don't tell the necessary but unpleasant truths because they are afraid that the voters will kill the messenger. So people learn not to expect the truth from politicians."

Politicians, of course, are not America's only leadership class and not the only ones to have failed in their responsibility. Leaders of business, finance, academe and the news media knew intellectually that the Reagan Administration had replaced the Democrats' tax-and-spend with the hugely popular but unsound practice of spend-and-borrow, and that the nation's prosperity in the '80s was being stolen from its children and grandchildren.

It was naturally to the White House, however, that Americans turned. At a time when the global economy was vibrating violently, a sense of panic from + down deep in the infantile reaches of the psyche rose to the surface. People wanted a sign from Daddy that someone was in charge and working to set things right. They expected words from the Great Communicator. They expected a presidential Rising to the Occasion. They waited beseechingly.

Reagan's tepid and grudging reactions -- reluctant and uncomprehending -- confirmed a suspicion in many minds that Reagan, a lame duck with 15 months to go in his second term, was presiding over an Administration bereft of ideas and energy. It was a custom a generation ago for people to remark, "Well, we must trust the President in that decision -- he has more information about it than we do." No one says that in the second term of Ronald Reagan. In fact, one unstated anxiety during the stock-market crash was that Reagan would inadvertently say something to make the panic worse.

The President seemed bizarrely disengaged or possibly merely conflicted and resentful. The world was telling him that he must change. Reagan had gone very, very far in the world on a smile and a shoeshine and on his almost majestic stubbornness. "I've believed this too long to change my mind now," he would tell aides who were trying to turn his views on some program that conflicted with his tenets. His persistence was always one of his virtues, part of his political genius: Americans thought he believed deeply in a few simple principles, including low taxes and high defense budgets, a configuration that helped turn the U.S. into the world's biggest debtor. But now that stubbornness, almost a denial of reality, worked toward his undoing.

When he was inaugurated in 1981 -- at that triumphal January moment when the American hostages were at last flown out of Iran -- Ronald Reagan became the sixth President to enter the White House in 20 years. That was an alarming turnover and a sort of enigmatic commentary on the problems of leadership in America in the late 20th century. John Kennedy: assassinated. Lyndon Johnson: driven from office. Richard Nixon: forced to resign. Gerald Ford: an unelected President, rejected at the polls. Jimmy Carter: buried in a landslide. Commentators began to wonder whether Americans had a streak of the regicide in them. Going into Reagan's fifth year, however, Americans began to think he would be the first President since Eisenhower to leave Washington after two terms with a smile on his face.

Leadership is always somewhat mysterious. Ronald Reagan's leadership was fascinating. The author Garry Wills wrote, "Reagan runs continuously in everyone's home movies of the mind. He wrests from us something warmer than mere popularity. A kind of complicity. He is, in the strictest sense, what Hollywood promoters used to call 'fabulous.' We fable him to ourselves, and he to us. We are jointly responsible for him."

Americans loved Reagan because he was genial and optimistic, not a molecule of the neurotic in his body. He liked to tell a slightly peculiar story about a boy who on Christmas morning finds a pile of manure in his room and says brightly, "I just know there's a pony in here somewhere." He was coated with Teflon: blame never attached itself to him.

The historian Carl Friedrich once wrote, "To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact." A Frenchman knows what it means to be a Frenchman. Americans constantly wonder about themselves, about what they represent, about their purpose and their virtue and where they stand in the world. Americans are constantly reinventing themselves.

Reagan gave them one version and, doing that, restored much of the nation's battered morale. "Actually, he was the Great Interpreter," says Ralph Whitehead, a public service professor at the University of Massachusetts. "People used his public persona, his resolve, his upbeat spirit, his patriotic vitality as a tool to help them make better sense of their own experience. Now Reagan's framework seems simplistic and out of date."

Americans, it may be, now need a leader to give them a sense of their coherence and their role in the world. "In those rare moments when the American people feel that the direction of their country is going to affect their private lives," says the historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin, "they are engaged at a far deeper level." They need to reinvent themselves once again on a planet that has enormously changed in just a few years.

Many Americans sense that the nation has been out of control, indulging in an escapist fantasy, consuming too much, saving too little, not paying the bills, not paying attention to global realities. They have lived on credit cards, while the Japanese and other foreign investors have been buying up their assets. We are not us anymore, they tell themselves, not the nation as it was in the triumphant postwar years, the American Century. They know that they live now in a global economic village in which they must learn to compete and re-earn their grace. As Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt tells his campaign audiences, "Reagan made us feel good. Now we've really got to be good."

Mussolini once remarked, "It is not impossible to govern the Italians, it is merely useless." It is not impossible to lead Americans as a nation. It is just that the Founding Fathers did not think it was a particularly good idea. Says Historian James MacGregor Burns: "Leadership itself is one of the most mentioned and least understood processes in the American system. What we have in this country is an antileadership system bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers because they feared overly strong Government. It is quite ironic that we end this bicentennial year with a dramatic example of how our constitutional system inhibits long-range planning and collective action."

The Japanese, virtually tribal in their consensual citizenship, have a fairly smooth decision-making process. The Prime Minister, a product of the Diet (Parliament), reports weekly to the legislature in what Columbia Law School's Michael Young calls an "environment of interaction, conciliation and accountability." In addition, Japanese politicians "engage in continual and intense negotiation with the private sector." In America, the President and Congress constantly collide, as do the Government and business.

America is individualistic and pluralistic, alive with thousands of competing constituencies and interests, and every one of them, it seems, is flanked by a team of lawyers. Leadership is difficult in a litigious society that also tends to want everything spelled out in contracts. Legalism is the enemy of innovation and improvisation. Yet it will be extremely difficult for Americans to compete in the new world markets unless they get much better at both innovating and improvising.

Henry Adams remarked after the Civil War that anyone wishing to disprove Darwin's theory had only to trace the evolution of the American presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Grant. Americans have often cherished a sort of golden-age theory of the presidency. They look back on, say, Harry Truman and John Kennedy as historical giants. In fact, neither man looked all that imposing when he was in the White House. Truman was often vilified as an undistinguished little haberdasher, utterly unfit to succeed a demigod like Franklin Roosevelt. Those underwhelmed by the current presidential candidates might remember that much civilized American opinion in 1860 regarded Abraham Lincoln as a half-literate backwoods disaster.

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has joined with Edmund Muskie, Elliot Richardson, Harvard President Derek Bok and others to form a National Commission on the Public Service. The commission's hope is to develop leadership for the public sector. A member of the group is John Brademas, a Congressman for 22 years and now president of New York University. Says Brademas: "Leadership can be summed up in two words -- intelligence and integrity, or to use two synonyms, competence and character. We don't see those characteristics in Government today. Reagan and his Administration have established a national attitude of 'Get what you can get for yourself while you can.' A sense of values does not permeate this Administration."

A political scientist, Michael Nelson, has observed that the Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy were generally portrayed as Saviors. Johnson and Nixon were cartooned as Satans, and Ford and Carter as Samsons -- weak Presidents shorn of their strength. Reagan seems to invite the thought that he has found a new model, the Salesman, in the last act, standing on a stage about to go dark.

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With reporting by Hays Gorey and Barrett Seaman/Washington and Melissa Ludtke/Boston