A World of Ideas; 117; Forrest McDonald

BILL MOVERS' WORLD OF IDEAS Air Date: October 4, 1988 Show #117

Forrest McDonald

BILL MOYERS: {on camera} Good evening. I'm Bill Moyers. The debate goes back to the earliest days of the presidency; when George Washington chose for himself the modest title "Mr. President," John Adams was furious. Any fire company has a president, he said, our highest official ought to have a title that reflects the pomp and circumstance of his position; "Your Mightiness," maybe, or at the very least "Your Elective Highness." Even today, we can't always decide whether it's more important for our chief executive to stand tall and look high and mighty, or to know how to keep the fire trucks and snowblowers rolling. My guest tonight has weighted the evidence of history and made up his own mind. Join me for a conversation with historian Forrest McDonald.

{voice-over}: Forrest McDonald's home base is the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, but wherever he's writing and teaching, McDonald is never far from the world of the founders of the American republic. He has spent much of his life as a scholar, plumbing the intellectual origins of the American Constitution. His book on the subject, Novus Ordo Seclorum, won wide acclaim last year, and almost won the Pulitzer Prize. The National Endowment for the Humanities chose Forrest McDonald to deliver the 1987 Jefferson Lecture, the nation's highest honor in the humanities. We talked in the mansion built before the Civil War for use by the university presidents.

{interviewing} You have said that the presidency requires two functions so different from one another that the ability to perform them both is rarely to be found in a single person. What are those two functions?

FORREST McDONALD: Well, one is the function of the king, the ceremonial, the ritual, the head of state, the father of his people, that sort of thing. And the other is the chief executive officer. Now, the one requires presence, it requires bearing, it re-quires-it's show biz, right?

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

FORREST McDONALD: And the other requires attention to detail, hard-nosed practical sense, twisting of arms, grubby work, right?

BILL MOYERS: One is ruling and one is governing?

FORREST McDONALD: Yes. Now, the British, you see, had worked-there's an irony here -the British had worked out their system of handling the executive in the 18th century by dividing the functions, right? The crown became the symbolic office. They were able to do this because they imported German kings, right, who didn't speak the language, and were not much interested in governing as long as they got the goodies, and so on. They developed a prime ministership, and a ministerial system, to handle the actual governing part, the executive part. Ironically, just as the-almost exactly at the same moment as the British were opting to go that way, to have a viable kind of executive, we opted to go the historical way, demanding that the two be in the same person. Now, Washington could do both, right? Jefferson could do both. But the number of people who could do both has been extremely, extremely rare. Normally we get-all right, in our lifetimes, indeed, in fact, your own experience, the difference between Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Jack Kennedy did the first magnificently. I mean, you know-

BILL MOYERS: He performed the ceremony. He was the showman. '

FORREST McDONALD: Camelot and all that. Right. He didn't get diddly done in Washington. In the three years that he was there-two and a half, whatever, that he was president, nothing happened. Johnson was more able at running the government of the United States than, probably, than anybody who ever held the office. But he was a turkey when it came to the monarchical aspect of the function.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I was surprised to read in your essay, in Requiem, surprised to read you claim that the ceremonial function of the presidency has often been more important than the actual responsibility of governing the country.

FORREST McDONALD: Oh, it actually is. But to go back historically, Washington really embodied it, in a way. People said of Washington-everybody compared him to a king, that he moves with more dignity and grace than royal George, and so on. Abigail Adams just gushed, moon-eyed, when she saw him. She said, "I was not told the half." And so on. But Washington worked very hard, you see, to strike a balance between dignity and aloofness, and so on. And excessive inaccessibility to the people. His predecessors, the presidents of the Continental Congress, had had - people just regarded their houses as open at all times, just wandered in off the streets and expected to be fed, and so on, and they tried to mob Washington at first. And for the first - you know, this is a good example - for the first nine months of Washington's presidency, there weren't any laws to administer.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

FORREST McDONALD: Congress is just beginning, and there's no execution to be done. And Washington was greatly concerned. He sought varied opinions from Hamilton and from Madison 'and from John Jay and various other people. "How do I strike the appropriate balance? What is suitable for a republic?" you know. And he hated it, but he understood that it was important

BILL MOYERS: You go on to say, though, that no small number of gifted men -you give them their due; gifted men -have failed as president because they ignored or misunderstood the purely ceremonial office, part of the office.

FORREST McDONALD: I submit William Howard Taft, a disaster. I submit Richard Millhouse Nixon, an extremely able man, but a disaster. I submit Lyndon Johnson. What was it like at the end? It was calamity, for all of Johnson's abilities.

BILL MOYERS: But in both Johnson's case and Nixon's case, wouldn't you say that their policies; the policy of war in Vietnam on Johnson's part, the bombing, the continued escalation of casualties with no, except marginal, return, in Nixon's case, the policies of secrecy in Cambodia, the war policies again. Was it their failure to be showmen, their failure at ceremony and ritual, or was it their policy?

FORREST McDONALD: It was absolutely not their policies. Remember, in February of 1968, the New Hampshire primary - and that's what so shocked Lyndon, that he was being rejected and so on, and he announced that he was not a candidate, etc.?

BILL MOYERS: Even though he had won the - he'd beaten McCarthy in the primary.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes, but he had done so badly relatively.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

FORREST McDONALD: The 1968 equivalent of exit polls, somebody did a survey. Is it because of this policy, this policy and so on? Three-Quarters of the New Hampshire people polled couldn't even name a policy of Lyndon Johnson's. They just didn't like the man. And you may remember an article that -when was it, in 1964, 1965 -Richard Rovere, is that his name, wrote for The New Yorker. Remember the article that he did about Lyndon? And he went through and compared Johnson with Kennedy. And the bottom line was, look-or the essence of it was that Johnson got things done that Kennedy didn't dream about, or he did dream about getting done but never could have. The man is infinitely more able than Kennedy. Now, why don't I like him? I don't like him be-cause he's a cornball. I don't like his style. Rovere said that in The New Yorker, right?

BILL MOYERS: I remember the conversation. Lyndon Johnson was in the cabinet room and he was very morose. The polls had shown him down, it may have been the Rovere article, and he looked across the table to his unofficial adviser, Dean Acheson, and said, "Dean, I just don't understand why people don't like me." And Acheson, who had the courage of candor, or the candor of courage, said, "Well, Mr. President, maybe because you're not a very likable man. " Doesn't that mean that people of a certain kind will not be able to perform the ceremonial offices of the presidency?

FORREST McDONALD: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: No matter what their gifts are?

FORREST McDONALD: Absolutely. I submit that the two present candidates may -you know, I haven't been exposed infinitely to either one of them, but from what I have seen of them, it may be that neither of them is able to fulfill the ritual, ceremonial, head-of-state kinds of functions.

BILL MOYERS: But there is the argument that the country wants a little competence and less charisma. Do you buy that?

FORREST McDONALD: That often happens, I mean, we've had a lot of presidents who went the other way around. They had all charisma and no competence. But-I don't know.

BILL MOYERS: It's not television alone that does this, is it, Forrest, because-

FORREST McDONALD: Oh, no.

BILL MOYERS: -because you mentioned Taft, I think you also would probably put Hoover in as a failure of ceremony and ritual.

FORREST McDONALD: Right.

BILL MOYERS: They failed before there was a television, before there was a media age.

FORREST McDONALD: Oh, it goes--it goes way, way back. It goes back to Washington, it goes back to Jefferson. Look at the difference between those two giants and the pipsqueak in between, John Adams -who wasn't a pipsqueak, he was an enormously fat man-but anyway, he was an intellectual giant, but still, as president he was zilch. And he was zilch because he didn't have any kind of presence. And Jefferson did. Presence in per-son and presence in being able to come across in the newspapers. In the media, the medium, of the day.

BILL MOYERS: Of the day. Why is it important for a country to have a ceremonial leader, to have someone who can perform this role?

FORREST McDONALD: I think it's programmed into humankind. I think it's a basic, deep-seated, genetically rooted human craving, to have a leader with whom one can identify, to have a leader for whom one is willing to fight and die, to have-have the aspirations and the hopes and the values of the country symbolized and personified.

BILL MOYERS: Of the country.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Of the whole.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes. I think that's where it comes from.

BILL MOYERS: And of course, George Washington set the precedent. He was the first president, so he had to represent, in effect, the country.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: He had to become the symbol of the country.

FORREST McDONALD: And then Jefferson came in. He objected to the nature of the presidency as it was being established, under Washington. As it was being established, we were working out something resembling a ministerial system. Now, you look at the Constitution and it looks as if you can't get there from here. But the fact of the matter is that Alexander Hamilton was doing the executive part; he was the prime minister. He thought of himself as the prime minister, right? And Washington was head of state-although Washington did take an active hand in administration as well. But, it really was a dividing of the functions.

The Jeffersonians attacked this as monarchy, imitation monarchy, right, and we're going to really, genuinely, restore the Constitution. So when Jefferson became president, he delivered his inaugural address to Congress, but he never appeared before Congress again, right? And established a precedent which was not broken until Woodrow Wilson, by the way. Presidents never entered the Congress, because that was a monarchical thing to do; it was a ritual that had been worked out in Great Britain. And in a lot of other ways, as well, Jefferson undid the example. So Jefferson pulled himself way apart from-and the count was separate, and the Congress was separate.

But Jefferson, you see, was a man of infinite personal charm who was shy of large groups anyway, but around a dinner table he was magnificent. And he gave dinner parties. And when the Congress was in session, he routinely invited everybody to dinner.

BILL MOYERS: Good wine.

FORREST McDONALD: Magnificent wine.

BILL MOYERS: Great conversation.

FORREST McDONALD: Great conversation.

BILL MOYERS: At which he was-

FORREST McDONALD: Great food-he had a French chef. He affected homespun simplicity; he wore frayed slippers and jackets with-the country squire, right, at home. And in this-Gouverneur Morris said of him that he was a concealed voluptuary, but anyway-it was elegant food, elegant wine, and magnificent conversation in which they talked about everything-art, architecture, Greek poetry, oh, you know.

BILL MOYERS: And since he was the master, this made him essentially-

FORREST McDONALD: He was the master of all these.

BILL MOYERS: -this made him first among equals.

FORREST McDONALD: Right But they never talked politics, they never talked policy. But some-how, when the people went away, they had the notion that they were going to vote for whatever it was that they knew that the President was for.

BILL MOYERS: They didn't know they were being had at the time.

FORREST McDONALD: Right And he manipulated them, he masterfully-he ran Congress more effectively than anybody until Lyndon Johnson.

BILL MOYERS: But he-

FORREST McDONALD: But he never-you see, he maintained the principle of the separation of powers.

BILL MOYERS: -but he more or less disdained the ceremonial function, didn't he? I mean, he had no pomp and no circumstance.

FORREST McDONALD: What he did was, he democratized this monarchical function. He was the man of the people. When he entertained the British minister, in the same way that he entertained the senators and the congressmen, this was a wonderful simplicity affectation. He was the man of the people, right? He democratized the institution. And though actually he was the concealed voluptuary, there was a man of great intellect, and in-describable learning, nonetheless, he was the man of the people, and he made the office an office of the people.

BILL MOYERS: I think you said in your book that he kept his office open to all people, at al-most all times.

FORREST McDONALD: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And he held no court for foreign visitors, that he told people not to celebrate his birthday, where Washington's birthday was a national holiday, even then?

FORREST McDONALD: Right. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Was this deliberate on his part?

FORREST McDONALD: Oh, yes, quite deliberate. It wasn't simple affectation of simplicity. It came easily to him. And it fit in---it was a public character that he could play, country squire and all that. But he really did deliberately set out to humanize and to republicanize or democratize the office of president. It had to go another step. I mean, a generation later, it got thoroughly democratized with Andrew Jackson, and he was the man-he was truly the man of the people. Cor, blimey, the inaugural! He had to be-there was such a mob in the White House, they broke all the china, they broke all the-stole all the silver, got so drunk they were tearing up the building. Jackson had to be carried out by well-wishers to get him out of the building, because he might have been crushed to death. You know, he was not a young man at the time.

BILL MOYERS: Inconceivable to Washington, and even Jefferson.

FORREST McDONALD: Right, right.

BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that this office is so elastic, it's so plastic, it's so chameleon-like that any incumbent can make it over in his image?

FORREST McDONALD: No. No. It is not that at all.

BILL MOYERS: You don't think so?

FORREST McDONALD: I think it's been a-well, within limits, yes. I mean, every presidency is different from every other presidency, this is true. But it takes a real, genuine master to be able to make it something appreciably different from what, you know, substantively different. But I see a pattern in the course of things, two patterns, two courses of things. And one is downhill. I mean, it's not downhill absolutely in a straight line. But it has been downhill from Washington to Jefferson to Jackson, and beyond.

BILL MOYERS: In what sense?

FORREST McDONALD: Let me put it this way. Washington's favorite play was Joseph Addison's play, Cato. And in that, there's a fellow named Jubal, who's a Numibian, and therefore not a Roman. But he seeks the approval of Cato. He would rather have the approval of that man, he says, than anything, any riches, anything. And one of the things you did in the 18th century to make yourself better than you were was to cultivate the approval of the wise and the just, right? It's the very opposite of Polonius's advice to Laertes, re-member, Polonius is a fool, and it's a foolish advice: "To thine own self be true, and thou canst not then be false to any man." What's-such hogwash, right? Be true to others, and most particularly to the wise and the just, among others. Now, that was the guiding criterion in Washington's public conduct. That was the guiding criterion in Jefferson's conduct. By the time you get to Jackson, you're seeking the approval of the rabble, right?

BILL MOYERS: Rabble?

FORREST McDONALD: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: People?

FORREST McDONALD: The mob. Everybody.

BILL MOYERS: Demos, the people.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes. Oh, our founding fathers, believe me, they thought of the demos as a great beast, right? They believed in the public, but the public, remember, is a very narrow concept, we would say an elite. We would say an aristocracy or something-not a hereditary one, but the public was a very limited concept. Who was a member of the public? White, free, adult males who had shown that they could bear the responsibilities of citizenship, meaning they had character, and they had information as well. All right. And everybody-the people included everybody. The public only included the group defined, all right? And this is the group to whom early presidents appealed. When you start appealing to everybody, you get the kind of presidents we've had lately.

BILL MOYERS: But it was inevitable, wasn't it, that you had to enlarge the meaning of the people, of the public, to include those very excluded ones, such as the slaves, and women.

FORREST McDONALD: Probably.

BILL MOYERS: You can't begin saying all men are created equal and speak about virtue and justice without eventually changing your definition of men to include women, and your definition of men and women to include non-Whites.

FORREST McDONALD: Oh, it's true. It's a Pandora's box. Once it starts, there's no logical stop-ping place. But let me quote you a Scottish philosopher whose name I cannot remember. Very obscure one from the 18th century. He said, "Democracy cannot last long. It is not a durable form of government It can last only so long, can last only until the people discover that they can reward themselves from the public treasury, and then they become dependents of the public treasury, and they are tyrannized over. "

BILL MOYERS: So your point is that the first presidents believed in seeking out, if I under-stand it, believed in seeking out the wisdom, the collective wisdom of experience and of other men acknowledged to be wise and just, and that as democracy came, as the people began to rule, they began to seek out whatever the people wanted at that particular moment, and that transformed the presidency into a flatterer, into a demagoguery?

FORREST McDONALD: Essentially. Now, once having said that, in the terms of the original terms, it's been downhill. It's got worse and worse. The government today, of course, is a hopeless mess. '

BILL MOYERS: You brought me back to Jefferson and Washington, and let me-let me re-turn to the presidency for a moment Something happened to both Jefferson and Washington in their second terms. What was it?

FORREST McDONALD: The lame duck syndrome. See, I read back in the summer something that came out of the White House maintaining that, "No, Ronald Reagan is not yet a lame duck; he may be a lame duck president." You're a lame duck from the moment you're reelected for your second term, and you're a lame duck because of the structure of American politics and government. In his first term in office, the president deals with domestic affairs because he can work with Congress, because they need him to carry them when he's up for reelection. In his second term in office, they don't need him anymore, and he doesn't need them. And what-

BILL MOYERS: Because he's finished and they've got to be reelected.

FORREST McDONALD: -right. And so he's lame duck from the word go in the second term. And what that means is, regularly presidents begin to move in the territory of foreign affairs, right, because there they have a much more nearly unobstructed hand. That they don't have to-they find that now they've been reelected-they always get reelected by a bigger majority than the first time, and you count that as a great popular approval of everything that you stand for and blah-blah, and it's now debasing to have to deal with these congressmen, it's very difficult. And it's much more fun to go overseas adventuring. And almost every two-term president has done so. In the second term, that's what you do. And that's when you get wars, and that's when you get international troubles, and that's when you get all kinds of stuff.

BILL MOYERS: But you would-

FORREST McDONALD: But another thing that happens is, toward the end, around the sixth year or seventh year or eighth year, Congress turns the dogs on you, you know, they go after you. They start yapping at your heels. Most of them, or a lot of them, are running again either for reelection -or for the presidency -and you become fair game. And the president tends to tum inside, and whimper, and cry, and all this stuff. Washington's cabinet meetings in the last year were just painful, because he would come in and he would swear for an hour at the accusations that had been made in the public prints about him, right. Jefferson would get so depressed -he had migraine headaches -and he would get so depressed at the viciousness in the attacks on him that he would literally lock himself up in a darkened room for days on end, and not see anybody.

BILL MOYERS: When I read that description in your book, I thought about Lyndon Johnson suffering after his reelection from the same syndrome, lying in bed early in the morning in a darkened room with the covers pulled almost up to his chin, the window shades on the White House bedroom pulled down. A dark room, almost not willing to get out of bed. And lying there saying, "I just don't-I can't read The Washington Post this morning," or "I read the bulldog edition last night, and I've been awake all night." Suffering a deep depression because of what was written about him.

FORREST McDONALD: And it began at the beginning, you know.

BILL MOYERS: You mean, it began at the beginning with Washington?

FORREST McDONALD: Yes. And we-

BILL MOYERS: Except we don't have this picture of Washington today. We think of him as a champion, as the father of a nation, not a man vilified by the popular press of the day. But he was.

FORREST McDONALD: But he was.

BILL MOYERS: And you go on, you say that both Washington and Jefferson tended to set themselves above the law, and to regard opposition and criticism as treason.

FORREST McDONALD: That's another thing that happens in the second term. You think this Ronald Reagan jazz, or the Watergate, or the Iran scam and all this stuff is anything new? It happens again, and again, and again, and again. You get vulnerable, you get to think of yourself as above the law. You know what you're doing is in the public interest, don't you? And the people know it, don't they, because they reelected you by a huge margin, didn't they? And these scumbags in Congress, why should I pay any attention to them?

BILL MOYERS: And they're almost always reelected by a larger margin than the first victory, so that causes the swelling to increase.

FORREST McDONALD: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And they begin to think of-

FORREST McDONALD: And you see, this is -as I say -not something new that happened with Ronald Reagan. It's not something new that happened with Nixon, or with Johnson, or whoever. It's a thing that's been programmed into the presidency from the word go.

BILL MOYERS: Haven't we been muddling through the presidency for 200 years now? Haven't we always been ambivalent about it? What happened at the Constitutional Convention? They finally gave up; they couldn't arrive at a, at a neat definition of the office. So they sort of left it to posterity to fill out.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes, and the reason they could leave it to posterity with some confidence is that posterity was sitting right there in the chair in Philadelphia with them, you know.

BILL MOYERS: George Washington.

FORREST McDONALD: They knew he would be the president, and they knew he could be trusted. And knowing that, then they could leave it as rather a blank check, to be decided upon by-to be worked out with the precedents of the early presidents.

BILL MOYERS: What did they fear in the presidency then?

FORREST McDONALD: Tyranny. The Continental Congress had no executive arm, and they went along for the next dozen years or so, convinced that executive power is the root of all evil. By '87 the farsighted among them had begun to realize you can't run a government without an executive arm. We've got to create a national government with a viable executive. But they were scared of it. Fully a quarter, at least a quarter of the delegates to the convention wanted a plural executive; two-, three-, four-, five-man executive, because they were afraid.

BILL MOYERS: They were afraid of this for several days. Considered this.

FORREST McDONALD: Yes. Yes. Well, there was more time spent on the Constitution in the executive branch than upon the other two branches combined, despite the logjam over representation, because they were scared of it. And the only reason they were willing to all right, we'll give it a shot -to have a one-man executive, was because George Washington was there. And they all knew it. And the whole country knew it. The only reason the country was willing to ratify a constitution with a president in it was because they knew Washington would be the first president.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think they would be surprised today at what's happened to the office?

FORREST McDONALD: Horrified. They wouldn't be surprised, though. They would say, "Yep."

BILL MOYERS:From the University of Alabama, this has been a conversation with Forrest McDonald. I'm Bill Moyers.