The Values of Presidential Leadership

Leadership is an elusive concept. It is sometimes used in an institutional sense—for example, “House leadership”—but more often it is used in a personal sense to describe the activities of an individual in some designated position of power—for example, “the leadership of Senator Proxmire.” Yet this does not fully capture what leadership really is: a mutual influence process among leaders and followers. In this process, each participant harbors his or her own complex motives and constructions of reality, and each participant also operates as part of a collective. The result is a complicated and ever-shifting environment in which people work in concert, and sometimes against each other, in an effort to achieve desired goals.

Especially since the events of September 11, 2001, political leaders in the United States—importantly including the president, recent presidential candidates, and congressional leaders—have regularly invoked patriotism (or loyalty, national pride, love of country) to motivate public support for (and to attempt to justify) various decisions and policies. Often these policies have involved quite substantial human and economic costs, so the moral weight being borne by the value of patriotism has been correspondingly considerable. The shared understanding that appears to lie behind these appeals to patriotism is that patriotism is either an obligation of citizenship or a virtue that citizens ought to possess (or at least display). As a consequence of this understanding, it is no longer politically feasible for a U.S. political leader to deny that he or she is a patriot, and political appeals to patriotism have come to have a rhetorical force that they have not possessed since “the last good war.”

Frequently during the first six years of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency (1869–1877), white Southerners in the former Confederate states attempted to reassert their total control over black citizens. Grant responded very forcefully on several occasions, crushing the newly formed Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in 1872 and, that same year, sending troops to support the recently elected Republican governor of Louisiana against a militia mutiny and mob riots. But support for Grant’s actions in defense of blacks grew increasingly unpopular in the North and within the Republican Party. Defending blacks when their own state governments failed to do so represented an unprecedented expansion of federal power. Maintaining troops in the South was also very expensive. Grant steadily lost political support. After three rapid interventions, Louisiana in September 1874, Mississippi that December, and Louisiana again the following January, even Grant’s pro-Reconstruction vice president described him as “the mill-stone around the neck of our party that would sink it out of sight” (Garfield, 1981, p. 6). When the governor of Mississippi asked Grant to send in more federal troops to stop the harassment of blacks later in 1875, Grant initially refused. In a 2002 American Experience television production, historian Don Carter summarized Grant’s refusal at this moment by saying “in the end, he blinked” (Bosh & Deane, 2002). This statement clearly characterizes Grant’s behavior in this particular instance as a failure to protect black rights and black lives and also as a turning point that led to the subjugation of blacks in the South that lasted until the 1960s.

By definition, the president of the United States is a leader. But leadership signifies something apart from the obvious rights and appurtenances accompanying the office. What do we want to know when we ask what presidential leadership is? I do not believe there is a single question we are trying to answer, and I think a variety of confusions lurk in the questions we pose and the answers we offer to them. Here I try to sort out some of the questions, answers, and confusions. I begin with some basic puzzles.