What Kind of Temperament Is Best?

TIME recently gathered four presidential historians–George Mason University’s Richard Norton Smith, Yale University’s Beverly Gage, and Russell Riley and David Coleman of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia–to discuss presidential temperament: what it is, who had it and how much it matters in the White House. An excerpt of their conversation:

Gage: What people are trying to get at when they use the word temperament is something along the lines of instinct–how someone approaches a situation and particularly, I think, how someone approaches a crisis.

Riley: It’s a little bit easier if you’re talking about an 8-week-old child to figure out what temperament is. There are two basic questions: Does she fuss a lot? And how does she sleep at night? … You could do worse than starting with that if you’re talking about a President or a presidential candidate. Does this person fuss a lot? … Do the demands of the office wear on this person in a way that makes it difficult for him to think straight? Obviously, you don’t want a Calvin Coolidge, who reportedly slept 11 hours a night and took naps in addition to that. But you want somebody who can take the burdens of the office, especially in an environment like we’re in today, and manage those in a way that is smart, is well informed but doesn’t break the person.

Smith: Post-Reagan, there’s a whole school of thought that says the Coolidge model of the presidency at least can be taken seriously … I have problems with this word because I find it terribly elusive. As a biographer, I’m tempted to say [temperament] is a distillation of life’s experiences that leaves a residue, if you will … There are Presidents for whom it is very easy to say what their temperament is. Harry Truman is a classic example. Probably Lyndon Johnson would be another example. Ronald Reagan [is another], but there are others for whom I’m not sure it works quite as well.

Coleman: I’d also probably add an interactive element, in the sense that it’s a guiding way of how a President–or for that matter, anyone–interacts with people, information and events … The President’s temperament really defines the kinds of information that’s going to come to him, the kinds of advice he’s going to get, how people are reacting in the room.

Gage: Well, maybe the question is … To what degree does it matter? So we think of someone like L.B.J., who everybody knows had this very … volatile temperament. He liked to kind of intimidate his staffers, bring them close, and you had this whole approach. And the question is, So to what degree did that matter? To what degree did that change political outcomes?

Coleman: L.B.J. did like to twist arms, to say the least–the so-called L.B.J. treatment. But this was usually done on a very private level … Now, the L.B.J. who got up onstage in press conferences wasn’t that L.B.J. at all, and a lot of people would say that the L.B.J. in press conferences and in public was not nearly as effective. That L.B.J. probably couldn’t get a lot done. But the L.B.J. in private was able to get things done, and you could–you can credit that type of personality, that kind of temperament, where he was sort of hot and cold to Congressmen and Senators, that he would sort of reel them in, push them back, reel them in. I mean, it wasn’t just intimidating them; it was also reeling them in. The number of times we hear him on the telephone tapes telling friends and enemies, “I love you.” This is an unusual thing to hear … Nixon, I think, is another good example, where in public he could, with some exception, be quite statesmanlike. He could be the world statesman. You listen to him in private, and it’s a very different person.

Smith: In a more benign way, I would point to Eisenhower … It was famous around the White House that if [he] was wearing a brown suit that day, stay away, because you didn’t want to be around him. George Washington spent a lifetime trying to control his temper, not always successfully. Eisenhower probably did a more successful job, but that’s not public … On a brown-suit day, he was irritable. He could be curt, but … most of the time, [he was] much more politically sophisticated than he wanted the public or the press to believe.

Coleman: [Ike] had this reputation of being hands-off, that he wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty into policy, the standoffish meetings. And then once the papers come out in the ’80s, you start to realize, Hang on–this guy knew what was going on.

Gage: The question of temperament can come to stand in for when there just don’t seem to be a lot of other ways to predict someone’s behavior … and you’ve seen this much more in campaigns. George W. Bush is a good example. [He appeared] to be just very flat during the campaign. It was hard to tell what he thought ideologically. And how he behaved in office, of course, was different in those terms … I was just trying to think of examples of moments that have become kind of our iconic moments of ideal presidential temperament. The Cuban missile crisis seems to be one. [Franklin] Roosevelt’s first 100 days, I would argue, particularly because so many people are making comparisons with the present day, is another one that I think [is] often held up as a moment in which temperament, personality, the ability to lead and remain calm in crisis really matters.

Riley: [I would add] Reagan’s survival of [an] assassination attempt, which had a profound effect on budget policy at that time, because Reagan was foundering a little bit during the early phase of his presidency … He’d come out of an election–he had won an election that was closer than the score indicated … but his grace literally under fire in that event, joking to the doctors as he was going under, and his recovery, I think, is a very good illustration of how, in an extreme set of circumstances, one’s temperament can have an influence on politics.

Smith: But that’s also a great example of a President in effect not simply exercising crisis management but coming out of that crisis having established a kind of emotional bond with people and banking political credit that he can call upon down the road when things inevitably become more difficult. Maybe think of F.D.R. in March of 1933–I would argue that there really was never a majority of Americans who bought into the right-wing notion of Stalin Delano Roosevelt, because at a critical moment, F.D.R. established a kind of credibility … God knows he was controversial. God knows he was polarizing. God knows he made mistakes. But that credit and credibility stayed with him all the way.

Riley: Two other examples: with Richard Nixon, I mean, it’s impossible to think about Watergate without thinking about Nixon’s temperament, his sort of dark sense of enemies everywhere. And Bill Clinton–[his] failure was a deeply personal failure with Monica Lewinsky, and it’s a failure of discipline. I mean, this is a man who knew that … for years there were people out to get him, and he, even in that environment, didn’t have the personal discipline necessary to avoid creating a problem that … for all of history will dog him.

Coleman: Would you say that his instincts failed him or his instincts led him to that?

Gage: We’re getting a little mixed up with character and temperament. They’re really hard to distinguish, but I think there is a way in which what Clinton seemed to lack was … a personal filter or the ability to filter his own desires.

Riley: [Clinton] knew this was a wrong thing to do. All right, that’s a character failure. But there is also a temperamental failure, which is a lack of discipline and a lack of what for a better term would be an inability to learn from past experience, an inability to adapt to a hostile environment. I mean, this is somebody who’s extremely, extremely bright and yet in this particular instance could not see that all of the previous failures or all of the previous difficulties that he had had with this issue would come crashing down around his head if he didn’t remain loyal to his wife and his family.

Smith: Except, in a public-policy sense, you could argue the success of the Clinton presidency stemmed from his ability to adapt rather brilliantly to the hostile climate created by a Republican Congress.

Gage: The moments, again, that we seem to come back to … when we’re talking about temperament are moments of crisis. Right? And so, to the degree that being President means that you are experiencing moments of crisis, moments of responsibility that very few people ever have to experience and that you are tried in ways that you have never been tried before, there are aspects of an individual that come out in those moments that have been unseen before and untried before.

Coleman: I would argue that voters expect temperament to matter more now. And that you could trace back to the compressed timelines for decisions now and look at the nuclear age, the push-button age … There is a reason now that the whole 3 a.m. phone-call test resonates.

Smith: But we have to draw the line between the issues … and television and the fact that these people come into our homes now 24/7. They become adjunct members of the family. One reason why I think we have lots of one-term Presidents is because they wear out their welcome like any sitcom character … The single greatest problem confronting the presidency is overexposure.

Riley: I didn’t hear the first presidential debate–I was coming back from abroad–but I saw a picture of [Obama and McCain] afterward … I thought, This is an interesting example of a case where you would sort of want to see both of those personalities or temperaments blended together. You’ve got a kind of a hot and a cold, and maybe this is an example where the framers of the original Constitution had it right and the framers of the 12th Amendment had it wrong. Before we adopted the 12th Amendment, the President was the candidate who got the most votes, and the Vice President was the candidate who got the second most votes. And because of the advent of political parties, that turned out to be a very bad idea. But in the current environment, I thought this may be one of the few times in American history where the original framework actually was right. Maybe we would benefit from having both of these guys in the White House at the same time.