• U.S.

Taking the Temperature

3 minute read
Richard Stengel

In March 1933, A few days after his Inauguration as President, Franklin Roosevelt left the White House to pay his respects to 92-year-old former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The amiable Roosevelt and the dour Holmes chatted, and after F.D.R. left, Holmes supposedly remarked that the new President had a “second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.” Many historians now believe that Holmes was talking about Teddy Roosevelt rather than Franklin, but the story is oft told because it suggests a larger truth: that the most important attribute of a President is not intellect but something both more familiar and less knowable–temperament. The job of the modern presidency is so complex, so taxing, so intense that one’s disposition even more than one’s mental bandwidth may be the key to handling the job.

The anecdote has fostered a mix-and-match parlor game. Nixon: first-rate mind, second-class temperament. Reagan: second-rate mind, first-class temperament. Perhaps only Lincoln tops the class in both categories. But as we go down the homestretch in this presidential election, voters seem to be making up their minds as much by evaluating the dispositions of the candidates as their position papers. Voting for President is the most intimate vote we ever make; we’re deciding whom we want in our living room for the next four years.

To try to find the keys to presidential temperament, our assistant managing editor Michael Duffy, along with Lisa Todorovich from the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, organized a roundtable of presidential historians: Richard Norton Smith, who has run five presidential libraries, Beverly Gage of Yale, and David Coleman and Russell Riley of the Miller Center. Excerpts from their conversation follow Nancy Gibbs’ wise and penetrating cover story. You can listen to the whole thing on TIME.com

The Presidential race was the subject of a fascinating media conference Oct. 13-14 presented by Time Warner and co-hosted by TIME and CNN. A series of roundtables probed everything from political advertising and polling to the role of media. The event featured names such as TIME’s Joe Klein, Romesh Ratnesar, Mark Halperin and Karen Tumulty and CNN’s Campbell Brown, Christiane Amanpour and Wolf Blitzer–as well as dozens of other heavyweights from the worlds of media and politics, including Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter, New York Times columnist Frank Rich, former ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Republican strategist Mark McKinnon.

On Oct. 14, TIME published planet Earth: An Illustrated History, a captivating visual journey of the world’s sciences and unending beauty. Earth is for the living, said Jefferson, and this book is for you. And speaking of books, congratulations to TIME contributor and former correspondent Aravind Adiga, whose astonishing first novel about India, The White Tiger, won this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

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