The Forge of Leadership

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey

For 34 months Jimmy Carter has been in training for these hours. There is nothing else that Presidents do that depends so much on the collected wisdom and the seasoned instincts of one man. Nor is there anything so lonely.

Those feet-up gab sessions, those earnest White House breakfasts that are so much a part of domestic politics, are of no account in a dilemma like Iran. It is almost pure decision making from dawn to dawn. There are meetings constantly, but there is always something oddly uncollegial about them. When power is employed, the resolve and foresight of the President are the main ingredients. Without those the apparatus does not work.

For all of the coziness of the White House, the men and women who come there for conference represent narrow interests in other parts of the Government. Only the President can define the national purpose and galvanize his people to pursue it.

He is the man who has heard the voices of foreign leaders and looked into their eyes, and must judge their words and meanings and their resolve. He is the only person with the power, the information and the duty to judge that moment when the interests of the U.S. and the free world weigh more heavily than the safety of the hostages. It is an awesome responsibility, understood only by

those few men who have had to order others to risk their lives.

The President is sovereign because the law makes him that way, but also because time forces him to be. He is the only person who can move fleets and make diplomatic challenges. The U.S. is the only power in the free world that can orchestrate some events around the globe to bring pressure on the sore point.

The silence from Congress and the media has been deafening and gratifying. The word is that the President is upset at the timidity and hesitation of some of his foreign policy advisers, that he is disappointed in the reluctance of allies to give help more openly, that he is appalled by the irresponsibility of the Ayatullah Khomeini. There is nothing new in any of these crisis elements, only in their degree and the context in which they occur.

Henry Kissinger once wrote that in almost every crisis there was never enough information available at the time action was required.

Presidents had to move on instinct. And with every President since Harry Truman, when the orders went out and the troops moved, the U.S. was very much by itself. "Where are my friends?" Lyndon Johnson used to wonder on many a night when he was bogged down in Viet Nam after having been urged on by Asian allies. Richard Nixon, once described as being tougher than a boiled owl, knew better. He never expected much help in anything he did.

While Carter's steadiness in this crisis is outwardly apparent, what has happened inside him during these past days will have a profound effect on U.S. policy once we emerge from this trauma. Because Jimmy Carter, like all Presidents before him in recent years, has had to come back in the end to rely on plain old American military might. The men like John Foster Dulles, who restructured international relations after World War II, never had any doubts about the use of power, since they had seen how weakness invited aggression and defiance. President Carter, and a lot of others, thought he might modify that idea a bit. His notion that he could reduce our garrisons abroad, cut our defense spending and relax our vigilance over the world's troublemakers, like Fidel Castro, is surely being mocked by today's events. The betting here is that Carter is among those who have changed the most.

Indeed, the glimpses we have had of a creased brow and angry eyes may be some of the best news yet from the White House. For too long in this Administration and too often in the past, we have been given pictures of a President in crisis who was cool and collected standing at the helm. Now we see a man who is hurt and wrathful about what the world has dealt him and wondering about those he had counted on. Such flashes of truth can be the final forge of leadership.

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