Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/072792/0727unk.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5KB | 114 lines

                                                                                THE PRESIDENCY, Page 46 

What Defines Character?


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.