The Prophetic President: Charisma in the American Political Tradition

H. Mark Roelofs New York University

Presidential leadership is commonly associated with the term "charisma." Some Presidents have it; some do not. But what exactly is charisma? This article clarifies the concept by drawing upon a Biblical paradigm of leadership in which American political culture has been steeped. Presidents,, the author contends, are called to be "charismatic heroes" who by their "prophetic" words "congregate" the people as a "covenanted" presence in "history." All of these words, in the Biblical tradition, are technical terms with stipulated meanings, and together they make explicit a role that is at once distinctive and creative of national solidarity, identity, and legitimacy. So conceived, the author concludes, the President’s role as "tribune of the people" is the most important and powerful in American politics but also dangerously and inherently unstable.

H. Mark Roelofs is Professor of Political Science at New York University. Author of several books and numerous articles, his related essay, "Hebraic-Biblical Political Thinking," appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Polity.

That the American presidency is the central and preeminent focus of leadership in the American political system1 is a truism beyond dispute,

1. E. S. Corwin’s The President: Office and Powers may still be regarded as the seminal work on the office. But note Corwin’s claim that his book was "primarily a study in American public law. The approach is partly historical, partly analytical and critical. The central theme is the development and contemporary status of presidential power and of the presidential office under the Constitution. At the same time, the personal and political aspects of the subject have not been ignored." (5th rev. ed., New York: New York University Press, 1984, p. xix). The concerns of the present essay are tilted away from the "powers" of the office, i.e., its capacity to govern, and toward the general charismatic leadership function of the office in recongregating and relegitimating the nation and its people in history. In this effort, the sharp contrast between the classic studies of C. L. Rossiter, The American Presidency (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), and R. E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: New American Library, 1964), was of central importance. Also important were H. Barger, The Impossible Presidency (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1984); J. MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt., The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); G. C. Edwards, The Public Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); E. C. Hargrove and M. Nelson, Presidents, Politics, and Policy (New York: Knopf, 1994); R. Hart. The Sound of Leadership (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); B. Kellerman, The Political Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); S. Kernell, Going Public (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986); B. Hinckley, The Symbolic Presidency (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989); T. Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); B. Rockman, The Leadership Question (New York: Praeger, 1984); and J. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Polity Volume XXV, Number I Fall 1992

for it has been the presupposition of virtually every scholarly account of the office, whether critical or laudatory. That this leadership function often narrows to essentially a speaking role is, at least by implication in many accounts, hardly more disputable. Certainly among contemporary scholars there is nearly unanimous agreement that, thrown in and among the familiar catalog of presidential responsibilities, the designation of America’s number one office holder as "Tribune of the People" and/or "spokesman of the nation" must be included.

Yet it is also a fact that the terms of this role remain little defined. We have been told little specifically about how this role relates (or does not relate) to the presidency’s other responsibilities. We have been told even less that would consistently elucidate the dais or platform on which a President should rise to defend the interests of the assembled people, or of the kinds of words he should utter in the nation’s name and why. It seems mostly left to common understanding to accept, without detailed specification or explanation, that what Presidents do in this role, sometimes well, often poorly, is a politically significant attribute of the office. But if there are no explicit specifications for this role, how and by what criteria is it determined that some have performed it well, others in? Most importantly, is this a role that is well assigned to the President, one which-if we knew with precision what it was-we would want given to the President in its present form?

This article attempts to answer these unattended questions by applying to this central speaking role in the presidency a paradigm of leadership drawn from Biblical sources. Given the depth and breadth of the Bible’s impact on American civilization generally, it should not be surprising

that the historical development of the core institution of the American political system might be supposed to have been influenced by Biblical

H. Mark Roelofs 3

thought. But what matters here is that there is a remarkable "fit" between the Bible’s leadership paradigm and what is from time to time expected of modern Presidents. Moreover, it is this fit between the ancient paradigm and modern expectations that both confirms and illuminates their relationship, that the first is both the source of the second and a reliable guide to its definition and analysis. And this confirmation and illumination will bring to prominence aspects of the modern presidency which now require urgent attention.

The immediate substantive claims of this article are these: (1) When the presidency is analyzed as proposed here, it will be seen to have become an institution concerned with and burdened by needs to reassess national identification and regime legitimation to a degree that at least sometimes overshadows its involvement in the actual practice of government (as Chief Executive, Chief Legislator, Chief Administrator, etc (2) this relegitimation function is a peculiar, dialogic, leadership role the American presidency has come to conduct in a language that is not only Biblical but also far removed from the language and provisions of Article II of the Constitution-or any other comparably familiar sour of political rhetoric.

The significance of these arguments can be given preliminary illustration by noting this example of a critique of current presidential leadership selected almost at random: On May 25, 1989, a New York Times editorial castigated President George Bush for failure to develop a strong lead in American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The editorial’s opening sentence ran as follows: "President Bush yesterday delivered his fourth, final, flat and flimsy speech on East-West relations. The editorial claimed that the President’s deficiencies were particular distressing because of a string of striking initiatives propounded by the Russians led by Mikhail Gorbachev that left the Americans looking dull and intransigent. The Times found this situation all the more remarkable since, in contrast to his predecessor, Mr. Bush had surrounded himself with a team of unusually able and experienced advisors. The editorial concluded with this paragraph:

Mr. Bush and his key advisors are moderates. For most situations, that’s a virtue. But in present circumstances, seeing different sides to every argument has become stifling. Their very moderation tends to blind them to the vast changes unfolding around the world, and to the power of language and bold goals.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the social thinking presupposed by editorials of this sort, and especially by the demands buried in its last phrase.

4 The Prophetic President

American civilization is complex and counts many point of origin. The bible in particular rarely appears in it except as one influence among many, even in religious matters. But it has, at least until recently, been a pervasive influence throughout American culture, including specifically

American political culture. We can be sure that Biblical thought patterns about the specific issue of leadership, insofar as they can be defined, will be prominent in American conceptions of the same subject, whether the issue is the role of fathers in the family, the role of teachers and athletic

coaches in schools, or the role of heroic presidents in the political system.

In this article, the Biblical leadership paradigm is identified with Moses. It could just as well have been identified with Joshua, or David, or Josiah, or even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-or simply called the Hebraic Leadership Model.2 This is not because the model is so loosely defined that it can be easily slipped over any of these examples and more, but rather because all these Biblical examples are seen being called to account in the Bible’s pages against an original paradigm that is applied with extraordinary consistency to all of them with considerable specification. In a word, they are all expected to be "prophetic." This is their primary role. All other roles are secondary. But the Hebraic prophetic role is complex and the product of a mind set that is both distinctive and essentially alien to the self-consciousness of the modern academic mind. It must be educated with care.

The Biblical prophetic role is concerned essentially with words, with language, with dialogue. The prophetic leader must utter words and the people must hear them and respond to them. The centrality of this characteristic of the prophetic role does not arise from the general fact that all politics, and especially power relationships, are centrally based on talk. The prophetic emphasis on words arises directly from major features of the Hebraic understanding of human psychology, from its understanding of what customarily has been termed the human "soul," and of the impact words could have upon it. Unlike the Greek philoso

2. The Hebrews were not as didactically male supremacist as were, in contrast, the Greek philosophers. The Bible knew women as distinctive personalities and honored some of them, such as Deborah, as outstanding leaders. Nevertheless, especially for the Old Testament, leadership was almost exclusively defined in masculine terms. Beginning with some of the later prophets, especially Isaiah, and then emphatically in the ministry of Jesus, a distinct "feminization" of leadership roles took place. To pursue this important point would, however, take us far beyond the limits of the present paper. American attitudes on political leadership remain rooted firmly in the oldest books of the Old Testament.

H. Mark Roelofs 5

phers, who thought of the soul as something distinct and, in death separable from the body, the Hebrews assumed that the soul was simply the alive-ness of the body, its warmth, energy, thrust. In death, the soul drained out of the body, leaving it cold and stiff. But while alive the body’s soul could be aroused by, above all, words directed to it by name. By words and associated gestures, more than by any other means soul and thus also the body which contained it could be inflamed or depressed, terrorized or calmed, attracted or repelled. Proof of all this the Hebrews saw every day of their lives in every kind of situation. Words were like heavy weights, hammers, bashing the body and its soul -or like petals of flowers or soft breezes, caressing it. What mattered was which words were used, who said them, to whom, where, why and how.

It all depended, subjectively, on what the words were about. For the Hebrews were nominalists, i.e., existential experientialists, of an extreme sort. Without even a remote capacity for philosophical reflection detachment, they spoke and wrote exclusively about experience, their

own, personal and subjective. They wrote of experience directly, as remembered it, had it, anticipated it. Words, designating subjects objects, actions and attributes, brought experiences to mind, evoked them in all their vivid particularity, and thereby compelled hearers to relive those events, to suffer and endure them again, or, alternatively feel them in the offing, impending, and disturbing.

The essential Hebrew literary structure is, therefore, a narrative. The essential problem the Hebrew story teller leaves with his hearers or attempts to solve for them is always the same: what does the story do to the hearer, where does it put the hearer in the story, how does it demand that he respond to its telling? Without detachment, always, invariably, and resolutely subjective, every story is told and heard as if about hearer. Every story therefore has three parts: an account of a past with which the hearer was associated, and is again by the hearing of it; an experiential now, a moment of crisis, occasioned if only by the hearing the story being told; and an unfulfilled future of what the hearer will do now that the story has been told and heard.

The Hebrew prophetic leader is, thus, essentially the teller of a story, the hearers are his people, and the story he tells is the story of their life together. By his words, the prophetic leader recalls the community’s shared past; he reminds them of how they became a people, of the experiences and commitments that defined their communal identity, and of the trials and victories that brought them to their present place and time. This is their saga. Then the leader defines the people’s present, their moment of crisis, their present circumstance. And, finally, by his words

6 The Prophetic President

he tells them their future, their direction, their mission, the fulfillment of which will endow their history with moral legitimacy and meaning. This in outline is the prophetic form. In essence, it is prophesy defined as an interpretation of the experiential present set subjectively between a past recalled and a future anticipated.

Working from within this outline, we can perceive three major characteristics of the Mosaic prophetic leader: by his charisma, he congregates the people in a moment of choice. These three characteristics underscore prophetic leadership as, once again, a speaking role, and one, potentially, of enormous, challenging power.

The prophetic leader, ideally, is no ordinary person. Obviously, he must be able to tell the people’s story better than anyone else-and be trusted to have done so believably. He will come to this capacity in part if, while obviously an exceptional, powerfully dramatic person, he is nonetheless clearly identified with the people on an intimate, personal level. The intersubjective relationship here must be warm and substantial. The prophetic leader must demonstrate personal, intimate understanding of the people’s hopes and sorrows, of their songs and sagas, of their communal myths and their meanings. There has to be obvious evidence that his life and their lives, their vitalities, their souls flow in one stream, in one life. But of far more importance than these mutual identifications between the leader and his people is the capacity of the heroic leader to demonstrate his exceptionality, his heightened powers. In the Biblical literature, this comes from the revelation of his extra-human relationship to the divine.

In a word, the prophetic leader must show that he is blessed, that somehow the word and spirit of God have entered deeply into his soul, magnified it, and made him larger, stronger, more commanding and assertive than any ordinary mortal. In the Hebrew tradition, to be blessed is to be naturally or even preternaturally fulfilled, as a blessed grape is ripened so full of juice it all but bursts. Thus, with the blessed man, he is so filled with vigor, his talents are so heightened, his wisdom is so unsurpassed, that his military prowess makes him a legend, his humor rocks the nation, his every word and gesture overflows with meaning. In time, stories of his exploits will cluster in the people’s mind around his name so much that the mere mention of it will stir their collective soul. As he lives, the power of his soul is so great that it flows into theirs and they become in his presence one life, a history. He is their incarnation.

This is to say, he congregates them. The word is technical and is used in a transitive sense. The prophetic leader is not one to stand before his people to parse an argument, to analyze both sides of an issue, to solicit

H. Mark Roelofs 7

the people’s views on resolving an open question. He is not there to debate or to negotiate. Rather, by his call, he assembles all within his hearing-they become a company listening to him. He confronts them with himself and, through himself, themselves. He identifies them as a people who with him have come from where they were to their present circumstance. This is their shared experience, their common life, the ground for their national fear and hope. This is what makes them a people, distinctive, one. By nursing these memories and interpreting these dreams, by words and signs, the prophetic leader becomes as a father to the people. He generates their unity. He is the patriarchal hero, gathering them into the ambit of his instruction of their story.

This set, the prophetic leader can now force upon his people their moment of choice. They have come this far in their history, they have achieved what they have, because they have been true to their natal commitments and loyal to their god of destiny who has been with them in all their trials. But now troubles heap up on every hand. There has been a falling away of commitment, a weakening of identity, a dispersion of social and psychic energy, a loosening of community. The patriarch demands the people’s attention, that they meet the need to choose again the objects of their highest loyalties, to reach again for a life with their tribal god and his chosen hero, the national leader. Or, on the contrary, they can choose to go their separate ways, to abandon their founding commitments, loyalties, and social meaning. The choice is historic, existential, and moral. When it is made positively, the soul of the heroic leader will meld again with that of the people, magnifying them, unifying them, and they and he will together be renewed, reinvigorated, historically ennobled to go forward with their god. The covenant between god, man, and people has been renewed: god will protect, man will lead, and the assembled people in love will obey.

This Hebraic paradigm of patriarchal prophetic leadership is drawn in part from the earliest stories about Abraham but more directly from scenes depicted in the Book of Exodus of Moses’ leadership of the people out of Egypt across the Red Sea and into the desert to Sinai. The account of the great covenant ceremony at the foot of that mountain is especially important, but so, too, is the account of the similar ceremony conducted by Joshua at Shechem after the conquest of Canaan. Both are given relatively detailed accounts in the Biblical literature (Exodus 23; Joshua 23, 24).3 Reliance has also been placed on the stories leading up to the coro

3. All Biblical references are to the Revised Standard Version. The best secondary sources, from the perspectives of this paper, covering this material are B. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1957), Parts I & I1, and J. Pederson, Israel (London: Oxford University press), vol. 111, pp. 33-106. See also my "Hebraic-Biblical Political Thinking," Polity (Summer 1988); M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and A. Wildavsky, The Nursing Father (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1984).

8 The Prophetic President

nation of Saul and then of David, and on the exceptionally vivid stories of David’s reign that make up the bulk of the second book of Samuel. There is a wealth of material in these Passages and any number of them could have been cited in support of the points made in this general description of Prophetic leadership. But among all this material, vivid as it may be, there is one story whose point is so related to this article’s thesis that it needs direct quotation.

This is the story of Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, and of his visit with Moses in the desert after the escape from Egypt. Jethro finds his son-in-law sitting among his people, burdened down by the tasks of tribal leadership from morning to night, judging the disputes and complaints of the people in their daily lives. Jethro speaks sharply to Moses:

What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you; you are not able to perform alone. Listen now to my voice; I will give you counsel, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God, and bring their cases to God; and you shall teach them the statutes and the decisions, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. (Exodus 18: 17-20)

Jethro urges Moses to appoint tiers of honest administrative assistants to take care of all the small matters of tribal leadership. It is clear that for Jethro-and for the Biblical paradigm of charismatic leadership-playing the part of interlocutor between the people and the god of their history is a full-time job, one worthy of exclusive attention.

It is clear, in sum, from this analysis, that the paradigm of Biblical prophetic leadership delineates a role that, in its communal significance, is both powerful and important. To an extraordinary degree, it can cultivate community solidarity and then, reflective of that, a sense of community identity and a belief in community legitimacy. But for all its power-and in part because of it-it is a profoundly hazardous role, and the record in the Bible of Hebrew leaders is on balance an unhappy one.

The problems center on the leader’s ego, on the twin claims he must make in order to be, uniquely, the spokesman of the whole people and bearer of their true, assembled enthusiasms and, at the same time, to be, again uniquely, the voice of god to the people. These are inherently dif

H. Mark Roelofs 9

ficult and dangerous claims. They are made doubly so by the fact that there is little in the Hebrew tradition to give them rational, principled, and, above all, restrained content. All too often they are to be filled by pure faith, love and hope, anger and fear, by daring, exalted intuition. Combinations such as these make for high drama, and, almost as certainly, for extremes of paranoia and megalomania, however disguised. When Moses came down from the mountain and found the people worshiping the golden calf, his anger was kindled. He ground up the calf into powder, put it in water, and made the people drink it. More than that, he made the sons of Levi go to and fro through the camp and slay every man his brother and every man his companion and every man his neighbor. Thousands fell (Exodus 32:19-29). Is this what a modern critic would call a proportionate response-or vengeance of the Lord?

In the Biblical record, prophets rise up to oppose kings, as Nathan did David, as Elijah did Ahab, and Amos did Jeroboam. These prophets thought in terms as profoundly prophetic as the great leaders, from Moses on, but they came to different conclusions and pointed the people in different directions. Their words were delivered with an overwhelming power. The record leaves one wondering, however, who heard the prophets, and were they heard in time to be politically effective? More profoundly, what if a would-be Moses-or Amos-could be shown a generation later to have not been speaking for the Lord?

The Bible’s paradigm of patriarchal, prophetic leadership was widely available to Americans from the earliest settlements to the peopling of continents, and became an irremovable part of their political vocabulary. But to move from assertions of this sort to an examination of the prophetic character of the American presidency is awkward. The prophetic stature of particular Presidents, Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, and sweeping generalizations about prophetic politics in America come so easily as to seem not to need justification. But the point of this essay will not be served unless it can be shown in some detail how the ancient Hebraic leadership paradigm in all of its complexity worked its way into the concept of the modern American presidency. When and why it seeped into the Oval Office is not our business. That it arrived there must be shown convincingly. We must define the ancient Hebraic paradigm in presidential terms.4

4. For a useful and contrasting emphasis on charisma in presidential roles, see Lowi, Personal President, P. 19, and Hargrove and Nelson, Presidents, p. 124. For a useful survey of Americas "civil religion," with some references to the special role of the President in it, J. Fairbanks, "The Priestly Functions of the Presidency " Presidential Studies Quarterly, 11 (1981): 214-32; R. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1-21; and Hinckley, Symbolic Presidency.

10 The Prophetic President

In this perspective, George Washington is a critical figure, not only because he came first, but more importantly because of the reasons for his coming first. He was first because his contemporaries, virtually unanimously in a judgment confirmed by historical memory ever since, believed that uniquely he possessed the qualities of personality and social standing to be first, to be "the father of his country," our national Abraham. As such, Washington both filled and defined the office of the President. He gave it a transcendent meaning, for himself, for each of his successors, and for the American people, then and now. In Washington’s historical shadow, the presidency became the focal point of the American People’s emerging national identity.

Beyond Washington, the whole of the American presidential tradition opens up in all its empirical particularity. What we are looking for is not some average or mean or norm of actual practice, but a paradigm, an image of expected perfection sometimes in the actuality of the tradition plain enough, other times heavily occluded by intervening activity, sometimes not visible at all for decades at a time. Most confusing is the fact that, while many recent Presidents have tried to fulfill the paradigm’s standards for greatness, only a few have come close to success.

Judgment is required to select evidence for detailed examination and, for our purposes here, two blocks of evidence are especially useful in defining the prophetic paradigm in presidential terms: one is the commentary on the presidential office written by Woodrow Wilson, and the other is two major speeches by Abraham Lincoln. Wilson is especially pertinent because, as intellectually the most articulate and erudite of our Presidents, he may be expected to spell out what all the others could only presuppose, even in a commentary before he took office. Likewise, Lincoln is of interest because he is recognized, at least in retrospect, as a paradigmatic President. He took office at a crucible time, one guaranteed to test and reveal the core character of the office. In both cases moreover, the evidence focuses narrowly on the role of the President as spokesman of and for the nation.

The statement on the presidency most often quoted from Wilson is his assertion that, "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can." The language is obviously metaphorical, but even allowing for that, what does it mean? What does it mean to be as "big" a "man" as the "law" and/or "conscience" allows? Has

H. Mark Roelofs 11

Wilson here attempted to recapture in his own vocabulary what the Hebrews meant by a blessing?

The standard interpretation of Wilson’s words suggests that they are commentary on the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and specifically on Roosevelt’s belief, later formulated in his "stewardship" theory of the office, that the President could and should use whatever powers of the office he can fashion on behalf of the interests of the nation, and that he should be constrained in their free use only when specifically barred by law. Clearly, Wilson supports the conception of a free-ranging presidency. But when his words are placed in the larger context of the arguments in the book from which they are taken, it can be seen that Wilson was in fact urging on the presidency an even grander historical role than the standard interpretation suggests.

Wilson’s discussion of the presidency is the third chapter of his book, Constitutional Government in the United States.5 In the earlier chapters, he develops two central ideas, one a fulsome conception of American nationalism and the other a broadly Darwinian, even Hegelian, conception of social progress through stages of political maturation. In terms of these two ideas, Wilson ranks America with certain other nations such as Great Britain as having come to a fourth and final stage of political development, a stage marked by full national and community self-consciousness and an articulated capacity for organic self-government.6 At this level of political maturity, Wilson holds that the various major institutions of the government work in patterns of spontaneous cooperation, leadership springs immediately from the sweeping enthusiasms of the whole people, and individuals of their own mind transcend petty selfishness to work for the common weal. Wilson’s belief that the United States had attained this level of political development may seem less surprising when it is paired with his emphatic assertion that the Philippines, then recently acquired as an American colony, had not done so, but might in time under American tutelage. The same need to recognize context is necessary to understanding Wilson’s position that the President has various means for getting his way with Congress, such as bargaining over appointments, the details of legislation, and help in individual elections, but these are all "illegitimate." In his imperial, Hegelian, decisively moral perspectives, "such things are not only deeply immoral, they are

5. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908).

6. Ibid., pp. 28ff.

12 The Prophetic President

destructive of the fundamental understandings government."7

It is into the context of these grand ideas and high moralism that we must put what Wilson says about the role of leadership in America’s progress toward political maturity. That progress was, he thinks, swift but it had to cover much ground. A decisive point was reached, he asserts, in the Hayne/Webster debate, a moment in which "lay the fire of the central dramatic force of all our history." In their exchange, Hayne spoke for a day gone by, Webster for "a day that had come and whose forces were to supersede all others." Wilson adds, "There is a sense in which it may almost be said that Mr. Webster that day called a nation into being. What he said has the immortal quality of words which almost create the thoughts they speak."8

In this light, the core of Wilson’s conception of the American presidency lies not in any license it offers for the free use of power but in a responsibility it owes the whole nation. Note this paragraph:

The office of the President, as we have used and developed it, really does not demand actual experience in affairs so much as particular qualities of mind and character which we are at least as likely to find outside the ranks of our public men as within them. What is it that a nominating convention wants in the man it is to present to the country for its suffrages? A man who will be and who will seem to the country in some sort an embodiment of the character and purposes it wishes its government to have,-a man who understands his own day and the needs of the country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and the Congress.9

Then there is the following specifically on the role of the President as speech maker, where Wilson’s thought shows itself to be not only Hegelian but beyond that, Biblical:

For he is also the political leader of the nation, or has it in his choice to be. The nation as a whole has chosen him, and is conscious that it has no other spokesman. His is the only national voice in affairs. Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combina

7. Ibid., P. 71.

8. Ibid., pp. 4849.

9. Ibid., P. 65.

H. Mark Roelofs 13

tion of forces will easily over power him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insists upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber. Its instinct is for unified action, and it craves a single leader."10

A more literal summons for a charismatic patriarchal Moses would be hard to carve. The fit between the ancient paradigm and the modem one is precise and comprehensive. There is the same emphasis on prophetic force, on capturing the imagination of the whole people, on speaking in their name and need, on answering their craving for a single heroic leader who will restore their zest for common life and action. Was Roosevelt and his "bully pulpit" the immediate model for all this? More likely, it was Lincoln.

Wilson was in his boyhood when the Civil War broke out. He was nine when Lincoln was assassinated. We may assume that Lincoln’s death left a deep mark on Wilson’s consciousness. It is this which suggests that Wilson, for all his moralism and other idiosyncracies, was grasping in his reflections on the presidential office for something that came to him as permanent and essential in the office.

When Wilson looked back to Lincoln’s Administration, what did he remember? Surely he remembered what we all do, what "everyone" remembers, that Lincoln "saved" the Union. How Lincoln did that is mostly forgotten. Books that castigate Lincoln as an administrator, military strategist, and politician make not a dent on his basic reputation. As Wilson himself said, speaking of Presidents in general,

the duties apparently assigned to [the President] by the Constitution have come to be his less conspicuous, less important duties, and ... duties apparently not assigned to him at all chiefly occupy his time and energy. The one set of duties it has proved practically impossible for him to perform; the other it has proved impossible for him to escape.11

What Lincoln in our retrospective understanding did was, using the

10. Ibid., p. 68.

11. Ibid.. P. 67.

16 The Prophetic President

civil act, and implies public deliberation. It would be better, before examining the act by which a people chooses a king, to examine that by which it has become a people; for this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society. 12

In a Hebraic perspective, what Rousseau is saying is that before a people can have a king, it must have a prophet; before it can have a David, it must have had a Moses; before it can be ruled as a people, it must have historically become a people. These are important distinctions, and they are the basis of others as important, between civil society and the state, between creating the conditions for the existence of power and its actual exercise, between the original and endlessly recurrent need for the creation and legitimization of power and, on the other hand, its ongoing use in daily governmental operations. Politics, as a total process, covers both sides of these distinctions, the one primary, the other secondary.

In the light of these distinctions, the American President, in his role as spokesman of the nation defined in Hebraic, Biblical terms, can be seen as deeply involved in the primary, legitimating side of the political process. Moreover, it should be stressed, the Biblical paradigm that has come to define this role for him demands that it be a formal one and performed to a standardized pattern. It should have these recognizable steps: (1) by his words, especially but not exclusively in election campaigns, the President must appeal to the people, speak to them, congregate them, generate the unity of their community in his hearing; (2) especially in moments of historic crisis, he must, dialectically, identify himself with the people; he must tell the nation its story in believable terms, and share with it his sense of its meaning in the moment of trial; and (3) above all, he must personally show the people a way forward, he must enunciate in broad terms the choices they must make for their future, and lead them positively in the making of those choices.

A president who negotiates these steps will have relegitimated and reidentified not only himself, but also the American people. He will have promulgated the American myth. He will have generated a "democracy" in America, for, on this side of politics, democracy is, quite simply, the unified enthusiasm of the congregated people for themselves, their political system, and its leadership. That is the inner, mythic meaning of the phrases, "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

In the American political system, the President alone is well and fully

12. J. J. Rousseau The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Everyman’s Library, 1973), p. 173.

H. Mark Roelofs 17

positioned to serve as spokesman for the nation in this mythic sense. The pageantry of the White House, the excitement of presidential elections, the solemnity of inaugural and State of the Union addresses, the use of national TV presentations for both speeches and press conferences at critical moments of the nation’s history, the paraphernalia of Air Force One, the fact that the office is the single national office in the gift of the people, all demonstrate this fact. Some Presidents have performed this prophetic role from time to time with high competence, e.g., beyond Washington and Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and, most recently, Ronald Reagan. Others, like Truman, have done it with far less success. Indeed, virtually all recent Presidents have self-consciously attempted to include this role in their repertoire, often with quite indifferent results, e.g., Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

The most interesting recent example is perhaps President George Bush in the Persian Gulf War. The record is too close for sure evaluation, but already the appropriate questions can be asked: did Bush in this episode rally the American people, congregate them, make them a "nation" at war? Did he by his words assemble them in the memory of their ancient commitments? Did he incorporate impending events into our national story? Did he thrust upon the people choices for the way forward? Did he reiterate that he would lead them in making those choices? When victory in battle came, was the primary positive domestic consequence of the war the reaffirmation of American solidarity, identity, and legitimacy as a power on earth, a nation in time? And with that victory did the American people as if with one voice then mantle George Bush with charismatic greatness-at least momentarily?

More difficult questions are raised by trying to determine the relationship between this prophetic, legitimating role as we have delineated it, and the other roles that law, tradition, and scholarship assign the presidency. More exactly, as the central figure in the American political system, with how much effectiveness can the President move from his power legitimating role as national prophet to his power exercising roles as Chief Executive, Chief Legislator, Chief Administrator, Manager of the Economy, etc.? Legitimacy is empty of significance if it cannot be translated with ease into capacity for action. Even in the Hebrew perspective, the prophetic leader must "breathe" life and power into the daily doings of the community.

To phrase the question in this way exposes major difficulties in the construction of the American presidency. Some of these are structural and institutional. The prophetic President, charismatic in mere presentation if not in personal fact, is awesome in every appearance. Majestically, he stands at the head of the people, in appearance overpowering.

18 The Prophetic President

Especially with modern Presidents since the two great wars, he has largely been surrounded by a court of advisors and assistants who, by being so various in stripe and stature, seem constantly to add to the imperial stretch of his dominion. Even the occupants of the office get carried up in this essentially mythic enthusiasm, and busy themselves at every turn to appear in the thick of all adventures, signing NSC directives, greeting foreign potentates, sending messages to Congress, announcing policy recommendations to the press, ordering troops into action, and above all, making, announcing, and promulgating decisions.

But this is appearance, and it is important to expose its exaggerations. Structurally, institutionally, in American democracy, power is dispersed, with little of it genuinely concentrated in the hands of one or even a few individuals. By separation of powers, by federalism, by the deep-seated characteristics of a radically pluralist society, by the very principles of a liberal democratic community, the President can never be more than one political actor among many, louder than most, bigger than some, but always singular, checked and balanced at every turn. Even in the confines of the Washington community, too many of the practical levers of power are in the hands of actors distant from and independent of the President-to say nothing of each other- him to be in any direct, continuous, and realistic sense commander in "chief" of anything. He holds primacy only in brief episodes and over shifting particles of jurisdiction. In appearance he is king, and his office owes much of its constitution to the monarchical tradition; in actual practice, hemmed in by the contrary traditions and structures of American democracy, Presidents shrink to being vastly less than that.

These institutional contradictions between charismatic height and hope, and practical operational limitation, breed their own, consequent difficulties, most notably in the President who runs up against them hard, feelings of exasperation, frustration, betrayal, and even paranoia. In turn, these feelings can prompt a dangerous propensity to strike out alone, to go, in the Washington phrase, "solo" in some emotionally charged adventure, usually overseas, in which the President can appear at least for a brief moment truly "presidential," i.e., charismatic. But it is important here to note that these institutional patterns and their problems are matched and, indeed, grounded in another difficulty which may have even more severe implications. This is a problem of language, of both grammar and vocabulary.

The prophetic tongue that the American President speaks in his legitimating role is powerful, emotional, deeply evocative. Its mutually reenforcing and balancing concepts of national identity and heroic leadership, of assembled people and historic President, of shared experience in

H. Mark Roelofs 19

memory, present trial, and hope, of binding love and ready sacrifice, of union and courageous, meaningful purpose, answer to needs in the psychology of all Americans of every rank. And the grammar that strings these concepts together, the grammar of shared history, of a narrative in which we all, heroes and ordinary folk, have an honored place, is simple, direct, and enormously appealing. But compelling as it may be, the tongue of Biblical prophecy is narrow. To use it in its own terms and for its own ends is no great difficulty. To translate it, to move from it to other grammars and vocabularies without loss of meaning, without profound moral compromise is virtually impossible.

Yet this, given the general character of the American political system, is what Presidents are compelled to try in order to translate their national legitimating efforts into practical courses of political action. To the people, Presidents must appear morally resplendent heroes of the whole nation. To Congress and its allies in the political field of interests, Presidents must come as one more player in the game of bargain and negotiation and speak a very different language. The result inevitably is moral compromise and diminished stature. Again, when Presidents engage the bureaucracy in the formulation and implementation of public policy, a specific language is required, a language of principle and generality, of rationality and comprehensiveness. Where in this language is there room for transcendent heroes, for personality, intimacy, and the particularity of mythic existential history?

The dangers and discomforts that flow from these difficulties in the structure and language of the presidential office, i.e., the disconnection between the legitimation and exercise of power, are numerous and severe. Among the most obvious are the absence of a sustained tradition of principled, consistent executive management, the frustration of ambition and action, and a deep-seated propensity built into the office toward vacuous, disconnected, and irresponsible rhetoric whose intent often seems more to mystify and deceive than to inform and lead. It must be emphasized that these dangers and discomforts arise from contradictions in the very construction of the presidential office as it has been defined by the American political tradition. They are, in the broad Aristotelian sense, constitutional-an incongruence and incoherence of ideas.13

Finally, there is the most deep-seated and dangerous difficulty of all, the fact that the concept of the heroic, charismatic, prophetic leader is

13. For a fuller discussion of these contradictions, see H. Mark Roelofs, The Poverty of

American Politics: A Theoretical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

20 The Prophetic President

itself, inherently unstable, one congenitally given to taking those who would operate in its terms to the farthest extremes. Even Presidents who are themselves of mild and pacific nature can get caught up in its demands for clarion calls to exalted hopes. When crises loom, whether by historical accident or contrived design, Presidents must act with a willingness to undertake the work of the Lord in the name of a people. But, practically, an opera dei mentality is insidious, especially in situations threatening war, wherein it tilts those possessed by it to prefer decisive military solutions. Enemies are dehumanized, condemned not only for what they have done but also for the evil they represent. Their leaders are demonized. There can be no negotiations; surrender must be unconditional. In this perspective, the American President must be unflinching and unyielding, must prove himself and his nation worthy of the mantle of history. and by his words he will lead forth the people to an episode of glory. What in our constitutional and democratic traditions is there that can rein in creatures such as these?