Splendid Isolation
How uncoupling presidents from their parties has given us less dynamic leaders.

Reviewed by Jon Meacham
Sunday, November 19, 2006

RUNNING ALONE

Presidential Leadership -- JFK to Bush II:

Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It

By James MacGregor Burns

Basic. 278 pp. $26

Forty-six autumns ago, in the final chapter of the 1960 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy, who was running his brother Jack's operation, made it clear what his family's priorities were. As the distinguished political scientist James MacGregor Burns tells the story, Bobby spoke "brutally" to a group of New York Democrats: "I don't give a damn if the state and county organizations survive after November, and I don't give a damn if you survive." His sole interest -- the thing he did give a damn about -- was his brother's election. The suspicion that the Kennedys were more ambitious than substantive troubled more than a few devout liberals. The candidate's Catholicism was not the issue, historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported to JFK. "It isn't what Kennedy believes that worries me," one liberal had told Schlesinger. "It's whether he believes anything."

In his impressive new Running Alone, Burns traces the origins of the collapse of broad party politics back to the rise of Camelot, which he sees as a court that was too focused on its king and not enough on the knights in Congress, in the states and in the neighborhoods who could help the monarch convince the realm of the wisdom of his program. The Kennedy drive -- JFK's appetites, curiosity, charisma and charm -- is the stuff of great biography, but in this book Burns is more concerned with the story of a nation than with the story of any one individual. And the stories of democratic nations, he argues, are determined by a leader's capacity to mobilize large numbers of people -- not only to elect the leader to office but to enable the work of government to begin when the work of electioneering leaves off.

Though this is not an especially original or startling point, Burns, who remains the preeminent historian of the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has written a colorful, intelligent and thoroughly engaging book about America as it has been and as, in his view, it should be. One need not agree with every point Burns makes to savor the stories he tells and to appreciate the passion he brings to the question of presidential effectiveness. He is an unabashed reformer: He wants, for instance, to remove what he sees as antiquated 18th-century constitutional checks on government (such as by abolishing the electoral college and requiring concurrent terms for presidents, senators and congressmen so that all would face the voters on the same day in the same year). On this point I respectfully dissent: One man's obstacle is another man's salvation, which is what the Framers intended.

It is difficult, however, to argue with Burns's central thesis: "America needs better leaders . . . . Since Thomas Jefferson, great leadership has emerged from strong parties, from leaders who have run together with such parties and presented Americans with genuine alternatives." To Burns, the proliferation of presidential campaigns centered on the candidate, not on a larger party, has turned politicians into free agents more interested in their own survival on election day than they are on governing once they are in office. Burns is not naive; he knows better than most that politics is about ego and ambition. But he rightly recalls old campaigners such as FDR, who could credibly call on America's Democrats to rally round in a way JFK could not. And, to Burns, therein lies all the difference. The packaging of candidates to make them appear to be free of the demands of their party's base -- the insistence, for example, that candidates have a "Sister Souljah" moment in the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 -- is, to Burns, counterproductive when it comes to the business of government, for what works on the trail does not necessarily translate into effective leadership once in office, when a leader needs the base of that party.

In this light, the talk in recent years -- particularly since Clinton's 43 percent victory in 1992 -- of a hopelessly divided nation seems less serious than we usually take it to be. Burns finds division good, for division implies passionate factions contending for supremacy in the life of the country. Though Burns himself might not put the matter quite this way, Running Alone makes an implicit case for market-driven politics: Competition works, and while civility is a virtue to be nurtured, it is not necessarily the virtue that a politician or a party should put above all others. But victory is victory, one hopes, for the right motives and in the service of making life in a fallen world more secure and more humane.

For Burns, the Ur-example of transformative leadership is that of FDR, a politician who intuitively grasped the significance of party discipline. In 1938, the president attempted to purge reactionary Southern Democrats, arguing that those truly committed to the party's cause should be "willing to stand up and fight night and day" for those common principles. Roosevelt's test: "First, has the record of the candidate shown, while differing perhaps in details, a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the Government as they are constituted today; and secondly, does the candidate really, in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in those objectives?"

The only moments in the last half-century or so in which a decisive number of Democrats or Republicans could answer yes to both those questions, and thus help a president pass transforming legislation, came under Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. One may argue with what these men did with the power they marshaled, however briefly, but there is no escaping the fact that in the mid-'60s, the early '80s and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Johnson, Reagan and Bush were able to change the terms of American life.

Always a mystery, leadership -- a subject Burns, now 88, has spent nearly a lifetime pondering -- is a delicate blend of different ingredients, some strong, some mild. Burns is an idealist in the finest sense of the term: He longs for party polarization to sharpen choices and produce a better America, and he wishes that every citizen would see himself as a soldier on active duty in the wars of democracy. Politics, though, will never be as neat as idealists hope; even a great man like Roosevelt once said that a leader could not get too far ahead of his followers for fear of looking back and finding that no one was there.

The utility of Burns's book lies in its clarity and high-mindedness, and Lord knows we need plenty of both in our time of murkiness and hardball. As Burns says, presidents may well run alone too often in pursuit of personal rather than collective ambition. But with the dark comes the light. Kennedy, the architect of this kind of self-centered national politics, ultimately did the right thing on civil rights. In a White House meeting in the summer of 1963 with African-American leaders, Kennedy said, "This is a very serious fight. What is important is that we preserve confidence in the good faith of each other." Sound words for all of us, leaders and followers alike.

Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek and the author of "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation."