AMERICAN NOTES: Leading and Following

“I think I’m on pretty solid ground,” said President Gerald Ford at his press conference last week, citing a poll snowing that 81% of Americans shared his opposition to a gasoline tax increase. Actually, the President was on very dubious ground in invoking public opinion to buttress a view that most experts — ranging from his own in the White House to even those in the automobile industry who will be hurt by such an increase — now believe is wrong. A President who simply followed public sentiment would be a cipher in the office, as Harry Truman recognized: “It isn’t polls or public opinion alone of the moment that counts. It is right and wrong, and leadership.”

For that matter, consider Ford him self in the matter of pardoning Former President Richard Nixon. He knew it would be an unpopular act, and even when he found just how unpopular, he still defended it before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the right thing to do in his judgment for the best interests of the nation — something he would even do again. Whatever the merits of the pardon, in that case his perception of his leadership duty and his role as President was exactly right. As Woodrow Wilson put it: “A President whom [the country] trusts can not only lead it but form it to his own views.”