The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Somebody described it as the character caravan. Four big buses rolling out of Gotham City at the end of the grandest Democratic political spectacle in 32 years, taking presidential aspirant Bill Clinton and his happy entourage, including vice-presidential candidate Al Gore, the wives of both men, plus assorted kids and camp followers, to the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis. Heartland, here they come!

They planned rallies in the shaded wayside parks, town-hall assemblies, potluck dinners, "everything really down-home," said a bubbling Clinton tour director. An immersion in America.

The newly anointed presidential contender brought along the standard heavy texts on education and health care, but mostly he and his new partner just wanted to see and be seen, to talk about "putting people first," to point out idled steel mills and troubled coal mines. They also wanted to exult in the glories of the farmers' markets and sample the roadside watermelons and peaches, survey the shoulder-high cornstalks and emerge -- after New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri -- at least partly cleansed of the dread questions about Bill Clinton's character. Clinton is not free of the issue, no matter how well he can spit watermelon seeds. Indeed, before the motorcade lurched out of New York, Democratic national chairman Ron Brown claimed that accusations about character -- Clinton's alleged womanizing, his draft evasion -- might be "the only arrow in the Republican quiver," destined to be fired at the challenger as George Bush comes out of the Wyoming wilderness and summons his war party.

The ringing convention testimony to Clinton's strength of character seemed a little too orchestrated for comfort. Yet when a virtuoso curmudgeon such as Mario Cuomo extolled Clinton's resilience and unflappability, there was the hint that the idea of just what character might and might not be was up for re-examination.

Even the demise of Ross Perot illuminated the debate. Perot, the man of towering rectitude in his personal life (by his testimony), turned out to be a liar about a lot of public matters and a businessman given to questionable tactics and ethics. For a few wild months, he had been Mr. Character himself. But character, it turned out, was a lot more complicated than billionaire Perot's bottom line.

Character is one of those things few people can describe but many apparently feel they can identify when they live in its presence long enough. At the end of David McCullough's splendid new biography of Harry Truman is a quote about Truman from Eric Sevareid. "I'm not sure he was right about the atomic bomb or even Korea," said Sevareid. "But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It's character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now." It should be recalled that when Truman was playing poker with questionable cronies, defending influence peddlers, there were many who judged him a man of less stature.

Historian Thomas Bailey once wrote that Warren Harding had "a spongy interior" while George Washington had "Olympian grandeur." Some journalists wrote after Harding was elected that he surely would be one of the great Presidents. And one wonders what they might have said about the early Washington, who read little but tracts on manure and animal husbandry. Tricky business, this character assessment.

Like it or not, we are launched on a season of character analysis. Certainly in this business of judging a potential President there is a general standard, though vague, of decency, intelligence, honesty and courage that the person must have. But watch out after that. There is a portion of the character of any President, never glimpsed before, that emerges under the pressures of his office. How was it that Lyndon Johnson, a man of monumental talents and passions, became a captive in Vietnam of military leaders he had distrusted and scorned for 30 years in public life?

Among the convention patriarchs was historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He has a 50-year rearview mirror. Maybe, he suggests, politicians have different shades of character for the different dimensions of their lives. He takes his text from the election of 1884 between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine. Cleveland, who had fathered an illegitimate child but had also been an effective and upright mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York, beat Blaine, the Speaker of the U.S. House and later a Senator from Maine, who was a true family man but was involved in numerous railroad finance scams. Schlesinger recalled the counsel of one wit from that era. "Since Cleveland's public character was exemplary and his private character questionable, and Blaine's private character was spotless but his public character corrupt," said Schlesinger, "it was suggested in an editorial that Cleveland should be put in public life and Blaine consigned to private life."

That doesn't fit today's Clinton-Bush matchup, of course. But one sturdy old Democrat, out of power too long, can be allowed a little poetic license until Bush turns his mind and men to the question of character.