We Argue About Courage Again

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Jimmy Carter pondered the barbs from Mexico's President Jose Lopez Portillo a few days ago, and momentarily wondered if he should respond. Then in a fraction of a second he decided that the better part of wisdom and the greater part of courage for the leader of a superpower was to sit calmly and quietly. In Mexico there was some grudging appreciation. In America, beset by too many inner doubts, there was plenty of criticism.

The President had expected a difficult time in Mexico, but he was surprised by the intensity of Lopez Portillo's salvos, the deep emotional hostility rooted in a century of history. The easy thing, and maybe even the politically advantageous thing, would have been to talk back. Or would it? Newly minted Presidential Candidate John Connally, who comes out of the assertive Southwest border tradition, probably would have handled the matter differently. Or so he indicated last week as he roared through his native land, proclaiming that "we seem to have lost our zest for strong leadership--we have to recapture our pride and self-respect before others can feel it for us."

But Connally's mentor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had a courage hang-up too. It lay in another direction. He talked about how he resembled Matt Dillon riding into town on his big horse. How Texas Rangers, men he admired, just kept coming at you even though they were shot. How he could not be a man to back away from a fight. There are some historians who believe L.B.J.'s narrow view of courage led us deeper into Viet Nam.

When to pause, lower one's voice; when to thrust out one's jaw in defiance?

There simply is no easy answer. President Carter has combed through the cables from Afghanistan concerning the death of our ambassador, Adolph Dubs. The handling of the incident by the Afghans and the Soviet advisers on the scene he found appalling and he spoke out. Yet even in that tragic tangle there is the dilemma of courage. The White House does not believe that the Soviets deliberately intended to harm the ambassador. It was simply their brutish sense of how strong--and, yes, courageous--men respond in a crisis. Crush the offenders and all those in the way.

John Kennedy used to read books about courage. What took more guts, he asked himself and a few around him: To stay out of a war on the mainland of Asia, as General Douglas Mac Arthur had told him to do in 1961, or to charge on in with the U.S. flag flying? He never had a chance to fully make up his mind about that.

Another of Carter's despairs right now is the hardened state of the Israeli mind. In his secret moments the President has examined and re-examined his own attitudes, and he believes fervently that his background and his heart--religiously, intellectually--would never allow him to turn away from Israel. What to do? Speak out in indignation against the intransigence of Menachem Begin? Or quietly go back to Camp David and talk and wait? Even while suffering dramatic domestic political losses, Carter comes down on the side of patience--the essence of courage for these hours.

Terminal meekness, one of his critics has charged. Carter hears, but with a biblical stoicism he turns a good part of the other cheek. He may not be capable --as Johnson was not in his contrasting way--of anything else. The question is whether that works for Presidents as well as preachers.

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