Essay: The Gravitas Factor

The 1988 campaign proceeds in a dreamy weightlessness. Multiple images of multiple candidates float through the night air — the bright auditorium, the shiny “hopefuls.” The audience almost unconsciously makes a ritual calculation. They do not judge the men on the issues, really, so much as on the unarticulated question of gravitas. Which of the candidates has the weight, the size, the something, to become President?

Gravitas is a mystery, just as the presidency itself is something of a mystery. Gravitas is a secret of character and grasp and experience, a force in the eye, the voice, the bearing. Sometimes — as with, say, Winston Churchill — it announces itself as eloquence, and sometimes it proclaims itself as a silence, a suspension full of either menace or Zen. The Japanese believe a man’s gravitas emanates from densities of the unspoken.

Sicilians speak of a “man of respect,” a phrase suggesting, at its darkest reach, a gravitas that can not only hurt but even kill in order to enforce that respect. Gravitas is a phenomenon of power, but the forms and styles of power are various. Dictators are forever strutting the tinhorn’s impersonation of gravitas. Brute power is only one of the cruder types, and it is sometimes subdued by other forms: a moral gravitas, for example. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his gravitas to bear against men of power who were morally vacant. Gravitas may be aggression, but it may express itself otherwise, as something withheld, as a dignity and forbearance.

A peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter.

And yet Mikhail Gorbachev, a figure of gravitas among world leaders, achieves his effect precisely by reversing the Slavic inevitabilities: opening the windows, airing out the old system. The earlier generations of Soviets (Leonid Brezhnev, for example) sat upon the world’s stage like dark boulders. Weight is not enough. Gravitas is weight with complexities of life and intelligence in it.

One can make a game of gravitas: who has it, who does not. Gorbachev, surely. Pope John Paul II. Jimmy Carter did not. Nor did Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon displayed a bizarre and complex gravitas that destroyed itself in sinister trivialities. Does Ronald Reagan have gravitas? In some ways, Reagan seems a perfect expression of the anti-gravitas America of the late ’80s, a place that can seem weightless and evanescent, as forgetful as a television screen. Gravitas, a deep moral seriousness, is not necessarily the virtue for an electronic age. And yet Reagan possesses a gravitas of authenticity. In any case, lame ducks always suffer from diminished gravitas. People don’t take them as seriously as before, when the days of power lay ahead.

Margaret Thatcher undoubtedly has gravitas. One thinks of Barbara Jordan as a figure of gravitas (the voice, the steady, strong intelligence).

In the long preliminary stages, the ’88 campaign seemed depressing, a drama in wan search of heroes and meanings. Such diminutive choices must mean that the nation itself has grown diminished. The Old Testament, that thunderous text inhabited by nothing less than the gravitas of God, recorded, “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Americans now alive remember Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy — not all giants in any consensus but men of weight and consequence. But history is full of optical illusions.

In 1861 President-elect Abraham Lincoln made his way East from Illinois. Much of the world regarded him as a coarse and faintly ridiculous country lawyer. Lincoln proved to be a complex historical surprise.

Something of the same error of premature judgment occurred with Franklin Roosevelt. As he took office in 1933, F.D.R. hardly seemed a savior to anyone. Edmund Wilson wrote at the time that Roosevelt was a decent man, but “was there anything durable?”

When Roosevelt died, the nation watched in horror as a depthless little haberdasher from Missouri, a seeming nullity out of the old Pendergast machine in Kansas City, moved into the White House. Over the years, however, Harry Truman acquired historical size and force.

George Washington invented the form of American presidential gravitas. His political successors lived with a perception of decline, of a falling off from the golden age. When Warren G. Harding (a falling off indeed) expressed doubt that he had the size to be President, an Ohio political boss named Harry Daugherty told him, “Don’t make me laugh . . . The days of the giants in the presidential chair is passed . . . Greatness in the presidential chair is largely an illusion of the people.”

Americans every four years have to talk themselves into something. They need to see a kind of plausibility in a candidate. The Nobel Prize committees go through the same exercise: the candidates have to be elevated to the general vicinity of the mythic in order to be worthy. But it may be a law of the drama that the presidential choices almost always seem inadequate. People feel an underlying anxiety, not necessarily because the candidates are no good, but because at a moment of such change, an entire society is suspended, awaiting the next act.

In a campaign with no incumbent running, a candidate’s presidential gravitas is hypothetical. Only the enactment of a presidency can make a President. Now, all is faith, or hope, or dispirited guessing.