Energy in the Executive: The American Presidency and the Lessons of Leadership

Good afternoon. What an honor to be with you here today. I appreciate, so much, you being here, and I appreciate that gracious introduction. I am in this room a lot. We use it a lot. Different purposes, we had hundreds of students in here Tuesday night watching the debate together and then had a panel just to respond to it. I trusted our panel more than I did the media to talk about what it meant, and it was just filled with, just the most wonderful students, so excited to be thinking about these things together. And I was in this room several months ago talking to 14 and 15 year olds from all kinds of churches, and they had come here for a D3 camp and they’re louder than you are, I’ll just tell you that, and they’re a tougher crowd than you are, but they were sweet kids, Christian young people sent for this camp, and so I was talking to them and I mentioned the passage of time. And I said, I just want to tell you how time passes. And these kids are all looking at what they’re going to see. And I said, I want you to look at that portrait right there. I want you to look right here. That’s 30 years. You want to know what 30 years looks like? Look there, look here. And it was just fascinating seeing these 14 year olds go—I thought, well, hey, it’s as shocking to me as it is to you kids. That’s the way this works. 

What a privilege in particular to be with so many friends of the seminary and then guests who are here. And it’s fun to think about some of the things we’re going to get to think about and talk about today and with a very serious intent. And that very serious intent is to ring out of, an historical review of the American presidency, some of the lessons of leadership that will be helpful to us, applicable, I hope in our own context of leadership, but also particularly applicable as we think about the decision Americans are facing in the 2024 presidential election. 

So, I want to suggest that Americans think about leadership in cycles. The average American does not self-consciously think much about leadership, doesn’t even much think about the kind of leader that should be put in place, but the cycles, not coincidentally, tend to follow American presidential elections. And so a lot of people don’t think about leadership at any other time, think about leadership when it comes to a presidential election, because that’s what such an election is all about. And the background to that is I think something that we’re well reminded of. It’s good for us to go back and wonder once again, how did we get the American presidency? How in the world do we end up with a system of government with the separation of powers as we have in the United States under a constitutional system and the development of a branch of government so strong—it is the executive branch and it’s headed by the nation’s chief executive who is simultaneously commander in chief of the armed forces. The story behind that, let’s just remind ourselves, is really interesting. It’s really interesting when the United States declares its independence from Great Britain because Great Britain has a chief executive who thinks of himself by the divine right of kings to be not only the king of England, but also the monarch over the British empire of which the United States is a part. George III was an executive. He was not an elected executive, but he was an executive. He was also not an autocrat. In the British system of government, there was a form of constitutional monarchy. By the time you get to the late 18th century, it was becoming a very well established form. So the nation, England, and the British Empire had a monarch, but it also had, in London, a prime minister because in London was seated parliament. Now the British monarchy is a unitary monarchy—that’s going to become very crucial in a few moments—which is to say that even parliament is not according to the British constitution, which by the way, remember is not written. One of the great advances of the American constitutional system is our constitution’s a text, you can Google it. You Google the British Constitution. What you’re most likely to get is Walter Bagehot’s 19th century commentary on the British Constitution. That’s the closest thing to a text, is the commentary on the text. It’s like not having the Bible, but having a commentary on the Bible. Not a good system. But anyway, let’s go back to Britain for a moment. You have a unitary monarch. So constitutionally parliament is not fully separate from the monarch. As a matter of fact, the parliament is considered the crown in parliament.

How does one become prime minister? The monarch has to ask an individual to become prime minister. And you say, well, that’s kind of a formality now. Well yeah, but the whole British monarchy is kind of a formality now. But I’m not talking about Charles, I’m not talking about Charles III, I’m talking about George III. It’s a very different monarchy in that sense. The unitary sense is very important. But Britain’s had Prime Ministers since 1721. So there’s a head of state, but there’s also a head of government. And so when you look at Britain, you have a head of state, you have a head of government, those are two different individuals. Now who’s more powerful in that system? Well, I mean after all you have a monarch. But let me just say that when Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch and Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister, there is no doubt that the power was in Parliament. The power was named Margaret Thatcher. But this is where Bagehot in describing the British constitutional system, by the way, if you are looking that up, it looks like it should be pronounced “baggy hote”. It’s not. It’s an Anglicized French name, Bagehot, obviously. If it’s obvious to you, I missed the point too. It’s one of those things you say, well, I got to hear this said. But Bagehot described the distinction between the British roles as the dignified and the efficient. So the monarchs, the dignified, but the head of government, the Prime Minister, is the efficient, okay, just hold that thought for a moment. When the United States, when the colonies declared independence and thus they launched the Revolutionary War as it has been known, I argue this is a different talk. I argue that it’s not really appropriate to think of the American Revolution without having to qualify the word revolution. Because in the American Revolution it was a revolt against a crown, but it was not a revolt against the entire order because arguably what the United States did was to improve the British order in the American constitutional system. Something recognized and acknowledged, for instance by Winston Churchill in the 20th century. But hold that thought. 

The colonies operated by the Articles of Confederation, under the system of government of the Articles of Confederation, there wasn’t much government, there wasn’t much system. There was no chief executive—that turned out to be an issue that not only made government inefficient in the United States under the articles, it also made the military role very complicated. And the commander of the continental armies, George Washington, would later make very clear that the lack of a chief executive had threatened the ruin of the American revolutionary forces. He could not turn to one person as head of the government. There was no head of the government. He made very clear how bad it was. He said, quote, “No man perhaps has felt the bad effects of it, meaning the lack of a chief executive more sensibly, more than half of the perplexities I’ve experienced in the course of my command, and almost the whole of the difficulties and distress of the Army have their origin here.” So that was written to Alexander Hamilton at a crucial point during the Federalist debates about whether or not there would be an executive branch. And if so, how should it be constituted. That debate turns out to be really crucial. When, after the revolution was won and there was a sense that this is a new nation now born, the Articles of Confederation were woefully inadequate. That government just was not going to hold the colonies together, nor was it going to be efficient. Now there’s more on the horizon here because there are external opportunities and there are external threats.

It’s hard for us to remember how fragile what we call the United States of America was just after it won liberty from the British crown. It is because this is a very dangerous world. And remember how many European nations had been striving for command and possession of North American territories. Just consider what the British depended upon and the French observed, which was the coming of commerce as a North Atlantic trade between Europe and the United States of America in particular. And there was a lot of United States of America yet to become a part of the United States of America. The threats internal and external were great. Externally, there was also the understanding that the United States as a new nation desperately needed a way to relate to other nations, and there was just no strong government that could speak on behalf of the colonies and it was implausible. So that’s why we ended up with a constitutional convention, that’s why we ended up with the energy behind the creation of the US Constitution. Now, two parts of the Constitution were easy. Article one has to do with Congress, and it is very long and it’s very detailed because people knew how legislative assemblies should be run, should be organized even by the time you get to the late 18th century. So the legislative part’s pretty well understood. It’s Article one, and it’s very specific. You have two houses. Who came up with that? That would be called the British system, where you have the House of Commons and you have the House of Lords. And in the British system, House of Lords is of course an aristocracy. And so what’s the Senate? The Senate’s an elected aristocracy. There are 50 states. There are only a hundred senators and their main job is to stop the house from ruining the country. The House of Lords was the cooling saucer for parliament, the House of Commons, I mean after all, bunch of rabble, no telling what they’ll pass. And it was the responsibility of the House of Lords to just slow that down. The United States Senate has much the same role, six year terms, not two year terms, and of course not even direct election of senators in 1789 in the first constitutional system. So, even as you look at this, you recognize, okay, that was pretty easy to understand. And so even as you look at the House of Representatives and you look at the House of Commons, they’re not the same thing. It’s a crucial difference. But the legislative process works in a very similar way. If you had the experience, Mary and I have had the experience several times of sitting in and watching parliament in session, different accents, you have the opposing benches, but it’s the same kind of conversation you would hear in the United States Congress.

So the legislative branch was fairly easy to figure out in the federal system. It was a question of how you come up with a representation. The judiciary was easier to put together. But of course the great American innovation was a judiciary and a Supreme Court that had defined powers but also undefined powers, but was defined as a co-equal branch of government. So what becomes crucial there, of course in Marbury versus Madison, and the development of the early Supreme Court, is when it claims the right of judicial review to strike down legislation or actions, it declares to be unconstitutional, that there is no British court with such power. Even what is now called the Supreme Court in Britain has no power to render an act of parliament unconstitutional. It can simply rule by those actions of parliament. So that’s a crucial difference. So again, the Americans were really putting pretty much back in place a British system, but improved.

And by the way, our British friends, written down in words. But what about the presidency? The presidency, the American presidency is a very modern invention. There is nothing like it in the world. So when you’re thinking about the American system of government, our constitution is now the longest operating written constitution in human history. No small achievement. Our constitutional order is, though always threatened— a constitutional order is always threatened; It’s a hostile world and it’s an agreement. Agreements can be broken, but it has endured nonetheless. But the presidency as an invention is only as old as the United States Constitution. So we’re just looking at the very last years of the 18th century going into the 19th century. How did they come up with the presidency? Well, in one sense by genius and in another sense, by accident. 

So you may remember The Federalist Papers, one of the earlier of The Federalist Papers entering in the argument for the constitutional convention was written by James Madison and he presented what became known as the Virginia plan for the presidency, for the executive branch. And being Virginian, it’s a very important thing just in terms of American history, different political tradition than say New York or Massachusetts. And the Virginia plan appeared to be the coming thing, the dominant plan. It was for a weak executive. The Virginia plan was for an executive basically to administer on behalf of Congress. It was not a unitary executive as the British monarchies, a unitary monarchy or claims to be. It was a position in one sense, more administrative. Now, there was to be a dignified diplomatic head of state function to this, but if you go to some countries today, such as if you were to go to Germany, there’s a president of Germany and what does he do? He takes nice pictures. I mean he is the head of state. He has a nice residence and he has some constitutional responsibility, but he has no constitutional power. It’s the Chancellor of Germany acting through the government who is the head of government and that’s where all the power is. Well, something like that was envisioned in the Madison Plan: conscribed responsibilities for a president. And why does that appear to be the coming thing? Why does that appear to be the natural way to go? It is because the last thing Americans want is a king. They just fought and shed blood for a revolution against a king. We don’t need another king, and yet we sort of need a king. And that becomes the great tension on the other side of James Madison. And the Virginia plan is Alexander Hamilton and in Federalist Papers 67 through 77, he articulates a strong executive. My title today is “Energy in the Executive: the American Presidency and the Lessons of Leadership”. It was Hamilton’s plan that won. 

Now you can wonder how in the world did that happen? Because a lot of this is not known to us. We have deliberations, we have proceedings, we have the writings of the Federalist Papers, but we don’t have what’s going on in the minds of those who were leading and participating in the constitutional convention. But it also became very clear, even as the constitutional convention was meeting that even as the constitutional convention is meeting, you need a strong leader. Now who became the strong leader for the most crucial portion of all of that? Well, the man who won the war as the general of the armies and then at the moment of victory had retired to Mount Vernon. 

Okay, another little subplot here. Who are the heroes of the American revolutionaries? Okay, so that’s an interesting question. Who are their heroes? Their heroes tend to be the heroes of classical antiquity. Why did they go to classical antiquity? Well, because it’s the very origin and root of Western civilization. Yeah, but politically it was a really savvy move. Because that means you jump over all the kings and emperors and idiots between now and then. You can go back and claim a classical tradition because they’re not here to argue with you. You go to Washington DC—what is Washington DC? It is a new Rome. And I don’t mean that as in the Vatican. I mean that as in Roman, Greek classical architecture. You go to the most strategic statues of George Washington, he’s dressed like a Roman. He did not preside as president wearing robes, but he lives in history wearing robes. He was a new Cincinnatus, the famous Russian, excuse me, Roman General, who having won the victory went back to his farm. It’s a model of humility. It’s a model, actually, of Republican virtue. And George Washington embodied that Republican virtue. And thus, he was indispensable to try to bring the constitutional process together. And as you know and you can figure out, the American presidency was designed around not just a set of ideas, it was developed around one person because everyone knew George Washington was going to be the first president.

Article two, the presidency, it’s horrifyingly brief. Constitutionally, not enough is said about the presidency. Now, what’s said is important, but constitutional scholars believe that what’s said could be contradictory. It would take someone actually working this out to develop what the presidency would become, and that someone was of course George Washington. So Madison wants a strong legislature with a weak executive. Hamilton’s plan—explicitly and honestly, he confessed as modeled on the British monarchy. It actually won. That’s the most amazing thing. They toppled a king and then created one. But a republic, a republican chief executive, an elected monarch, so to speak. Now again, the American left hates this language. So I mean that’s a part of the constitutional and political tensions of our day. But Hamilton put it in print. So I mean The Federalist Papers are there. A unitary executive, energy in the executive. That’s what Hamilton called for. He said, it’s not going to do. We’re not going to be a nation if we don’t have a president who can preside and a president who can act independently, and not without the bounds of the Constitution, bound by the Constitution, but authorized by the constitution. I mean, in military action, the American President, as commander in chief, has to put American military forces in action before Congress has the opportunity even to schedule a meeting. And if that was true in the 18th century, how much more true is it now? Now we just take for granted that there’s a button and the people with a lot of uniforms, with a lot of stars on their shoulders are 24/7 in proximity to the American president. There’s a situation room in the White House and we expect the situation room to be monitoring situations and responding to situations. We also understand we don’t want to know about a lot of them. We just want the right things to happen, which means that by the way, there’s a split personality in the American public and in our constitutional order when it comes to the American presidency, we want him to follow the law. We want him to abide by the Constitution except when it’s quite necessary he do something different. And then, you don’t need to tell us about it until you do. Then you have to explain yourself.

And that’s why, by the way, just in our contemporary moment, the Supreme Court decision about presidential immunity went the way it did. It wasn’t about Donald Trump. It was about the fact that if the court had ruled any other way, whether our political polarities will ever admit it or not, we wouldn’t sleep very well at night if a president, looking at situations—most presidents, indeed, I’m going to go out on a limb here, I believe it is unassailable, as a statement that I tell you, that every single president of the United States has broken the law repeatedly. I’m going to tell you that every single president of the United States has at some point, or I can say most, I’m not sure Calvin Coolidge did this, I’m serious, but most presidents at crucial points have exceeded their constitutional responsibility. Because they had to. Now some of them also exercised venality and did things for which there needs to be public accountability. But we live in a world in which the constitutional convention, I think, did the right thing in understanding that if we don’t have a president, this nation’s not going to exist very long. 

So anyway, George Washington becomes the first president, an elected monarch of a sort, a first citizen. One of the people who commented on this simply said, about the president, that this is the one, the energetic executive who will be a symbol for the nation. Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee referred to the president as the first man, a visible point serving as a common center in the government towards which the people will draw their eyes and attachments. Somebody’s got to represent the United States of America. Someone’s got to stand there with a flag on either side. Someone’s got to stand behind the podium and say, the United States is this, and we will do this. And this is where the United States stands. And by the way, the constitutional system came up with a unitary executive, which is fascinating in a number of ways. We have a head of state and head of government, the same man, who’s also commander in chief of the Armed Forces. That’s an entirely modern development. No such an elected official, no such office had ever existed in human political history until the invention of the American presidency. And there have been other political systems that have tried to modify the American presidency, and most of them have failed. Most of them have failed. Somehow the American presidency has survived. The unitary executive—and again, in the Reagan years, this became a vast issue of constitutional debate because President Reagan was operating on a political theory of a more unitary executive than the Democrats wanted to acknowledge—so when I say it’s a unitary executive, lots of people on the American left are about to go into apoplexy. But that is the word, one of the words that was used in The Federalist Papers and the first thing, but unitary, you need to think head of government and head of state, the same person. That doesn’t happen in most places, and that was a direct contradiction of the British order. But the unitary executive means something else and it means that he can fire everybody in the federal government. That turned out very early in American history to be an absolutely crucial issue, because there were those who said the Senate has to affirm, confirm, let’s just say an attorney general, and thus if you have an attorney general and the president fires him, well, he can’t fire him because it took the Senate to confirm him. So the Senate has to be consulted. If you’re going to fire the attorney general, well, number one, that just wouldn’t work. But number two, very quickly, presidents asserted, no, this is a unitary power. Everybody in the system works for me. The current American president when elected has a responsibility to appoint 4,000 positions directly—4,000 positions. Now, that’s just a sliver of the administrative state, which is a part of what’s strangulating the United States. But nonetheless, those 4,000 positions from cabinet rank all the way down, they’re absolutely crucial. By the way, the shortcut here is to say, my argument is that the American system is actually becoming more like the British system, even as the British system is becoming a bit more like the American system. So someone like a Margaret Thatcher or a Tony Blair emulated American presidential habits as a way of making very clear—I mean dramatically, Margaret Thatcher held a celebration of victory in the Falkland Islands and did not ask the crown to preside over it. Ooh, that didn’t go down well. That’s very presidential, right? Oh, yes. Someone forgot to invite the queen. 

Okay, the American presidency’s unitarian in another sense. If you look at the state of Kentucky—and by the way, this is true of all 50 states—to some degree, there are executive roles independently elected by voters without reference to the governor. So we elect an attorney general in Kentucky, we elect a state treasurer in Kentucky, but in the federal system, you elect a president, and now a presidential ticket, and what you end up with is a unitary government. So who is the commander in chief, who is the chief executive? It is the president of the United States, George Washington in assuming this, understood that it was his role to flesh this out. And George Washington sought to do that with equanimity. He sought to do that with a great deal of dignity. He knew that people were going to be watching him. Washington said this quote, “I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which might not hereafter be drawn precedent.” I mean there were those who wanted to refer to him as “majesty, the President of the United States”. He didn’t want to be “majesty”. He understood the simple Republican little R, the simple Republican dignity of ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States that actually turned out to be regal, but without the trappings of monarchy, the eventual consensus was for this strong executive role precisely because Washington would be the first. He would set the precedence. But it also nearly ended with George Washington. In a very real sense, we don’t think about how traumatic it was to the nation when George Washington declined to run for a third term. By the way, it was one of the precedents he set, violated only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then corrected by the 22nd Amendment to make sure it couldn’t happen again.

Why did it almost end? It is because Washington is singular in American presidential history, not just because he’s George Washington, not just because he was the first, but because he was a president without a party. Okay, most Christians even thinking about this in the United States, in our system don’t recognize that we have a party system as well as a constitutional system. And most of the people I know, they think partisanship is a problem rather than an asset. And the parties are an obstacle rather than a means of action. In the American constitutional system, the only way the presidency could continue after George Washington, who was not partisan, and in his farewell address, he said that the two great dangers to the United States were external treaties, he called them entangling alliances, and the rise of political parties. Well, by that time, Washington had long lost the argument because you have the development of political parties. Now why is that crucial? Why is it crucial? It is because the British Parliament and the House of Commons, the prime minister has a majority, otherwise he or she would not be prime Minister. So he can’t or she can’t fail to pass legislation. So just think about that for a moment.

When there is a new parliament elected in Britain, the majority always gets what the majority wants. So that’s why it swings so much. You can have a Tory government, conservative party, then you have a Labour government, and so it can be radically different. The problem after Washington is that you could have a completely immobilized presidency because there’s no natural constituency in Congress to do what he wants. In that sense, partisanship, the development of parties in the United States and the development of the President as basically the head of the party, that turns out to be absolutely crucial for presidents to be able to do anything. And so the strongest presidents are the presidents who have majorities of their own party in both houses, both chambers of the legislature. Because then he’s almost like a monarch or at least a head of government as you would have in Great Britain, where theoretically he can’t lose. Okay? Now more than we’d like to think, there has been such an alignment, and even in the 20th century there has been such an alignment. When there’s not such an alignment, then presidents are then not immobilized, but they’re forced into a more necessary process of negotiation with Congress defined in partisan terms. So I’m not saying that there is not a downside to the partisanship, I’m just telling you the only reason we have a presidency that survived is because of the development of our system of partisanship after George Washington, because George Washington got things done because he’s George Washington. No president after George Washington is in any position to win a congressional majority that way. 

Alright? Very quickly, the government changes a great deal. The presidency changes, it’s a modern invention, but the modern age moves quickly. And so you’d have to fast forward to someone like Andrew Jackson. And so Andrew Jackson, as early as Jackson, you start having a president who basically says, I’m going to test the boundaries of this executive power. And so he is so bold, to have the Supreme Court rule some of his actions unconstitutional, and he says how many troops they got? Alright? Now, I can’t tell you right now in detail whether that was a good or a bad thing, but I can tell you I don’t think any president since then has been quite so bold to say that. And in general terms, I think it was a very bad thing. But nonetheless, it does point out the fact that you have to have a president who buys into the constitutional system and actually embodies that constitutional system because only with that kind of confidence can he, when necessary, exceed that system and maintain the credibility of his own personal leadership and of the presidency. 

The next big turning point I’m going to say is Woodrow Wilson President 1913 to 1921. And this is I think a very negative thing, but it is also tied to the modern age. It’s kind of like the industrial revolution, good things and bad, but we don’t have time to make that debate. But we’re living with the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, and I do not intend to ride a horse home. And so I’m basically thankful for it. But much like that in the modern age, you had in the United States, following the model of Otto von Bismarck in Germany, the rise of an administrative state in a bureaucracy. And Woodrow Wilson wanted that. Most Americans don’t know Woodrow Wilson considered the American Constitution out of date, and he wanted to just ignore the Constitution. He had argued for this as a professor of political science at Princeton. He wanted to exceed the presidency’s executive function as defined in the constitution by means of this administrative state. And like Bismarck and like others, he knew that that state would become increasingly impervious to politics. So that’s what Otto Von Bismarck wants in Germany. And Prussia specifically, he wants a government that’s impervious to politics. Well, that’s what we have brothers and sisters by and large in Washington, we have hundreds of thousands of employees who we’re paying for and who operate a regulatory state, who are impervious to politics. And that means things are moving in one direction all the time. And that means more than anything else in the direction, not only what they think, but what they think is in their own best interest. Alright, let’s stop preaching on that. But the presidency is different after Woodrow Wilson. It’s fundamentally different, and then it’s transformed again under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And again, it’s a crisis. It is the Great Depression. And then of course it’s the crucible of the second World War, but FDR obviously tests the limits of the president’s constitutional power. And we know he did this by, for instance, subverting the will of Congress, and thanks be to God he subverted the will of Congress, in helping to arm Britain during the time when Britain was basically facing the Nazis alone. And FDR on the other hand also when the Supreme Court became an obstacle to him in the constitutional system, he sought to pack the court. And by the way, he failed and then succeeded. He failed in actually expanding the seats on the court, but he succeeded in intimidating the court so much that the court became rather docile and increasingly gave him what he wanted.

The American presidency since then has had crises, but what we’re looking at now is arguably a situation in which the American president has more power in 2024 than ever before, but simultaneously less influence, more power, but less influence. And a symbol of this is the fact that we have a sclerosis in Congress, which by the way, is not exactly something that wasn’t planned in the constitutional convention. In other words, we don’t want an overly active Congress. Well, we’ve got a very unproductive Congress and there’s a part of me that says, we should pray for Congress to be unproductive, when you consider what they might call productive. But still, we do recognize that the power has shifted increasingly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The power has been transferred increasingly to the Oval Office, and it’s hard to imagine how that’s reversed. But the President has less influence than he’s ever had before. When FDR spoke, for instance, in the crucible of the Depression in the Second World War, he spoke for the nation and just about all Americans, those who liked him and those who didn’t, said, well, that’s America talking. There are very few American presidents who’ve been able to speak with any kind of credibility along those lines, because again, our political system has changed. You could blame all kinds of things for it. For one thing, familiarity is a huge problem. The American president used to have at least some of the assets of the British monarchy in a certain distance. But let’s just say in 24/7 cable news that’s gone, and in social media that’s completely gone. There used to be a mystique about the presidency in which only years later would conversations get reported to an historian long after most people are dead. Now it’s on the internet by 11 o’clock at night, or a Russian bot is saying that it was. In any event, the influence and the dignity of the office has been reduced even as its power has increased. And by the way, the power increased at certain points. But one of the things we do need to note is that the power of the American presidency was acknowledged by all three branches of government, significantly amplified after September 11th, 2001. There is just no doubt that the American presidency in many ways is far more powerful because of actions undertaken by George W. Bush in 2001 that Congress did not seek to obstruct and the courts upheld. And so that, again, it’s one of those things that you say, we didn’t see that coming. Well, on the other side of that, the presidency is a different thing, right down to even how some decisions are made. I mean, presidents now are in the habit of handing down executive orders that even Franklin Delano Roosevelt would never have considered. It wouldn’t have been considered constitutional. Different times, different challenge.

Alright, 10 leadership lessons. I know. Don’t panic, they’re fast. I’m not going to be able to illustrate them like I would like. Number one, the necessity of unitary leadership. Here’s a unitarian in a different sense. What if we divided our government and said, okay, here we have a head of government who’s going to be a head of state, but over here we’re going to have a commander in chief. That won’t work. We have a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That’s a fairly recent development. Basically the shape started to take place during World War II, concretized after World War II, but you look at it and you recognize, no, no, no, the president has to be able to say to the army, shoot, to the Air Force, go, and otherwise we’re doomed. And so that’s unitary. And where you have a situation where it’s not unitary, you do not have the United States of America, you do not have the stability of our constitutional order. 

Secondly, the urgency of energy in the executive. That’s what Hamilton was talking about. We need energy in the White House and that’s why we really look to presidents to initiate major historic legislation. The most important historic history changing legislation needs to come from the White House sent to Congress. And that’s much like what would happen in the British system where the government makes proposals to parliament. It’s just different in the American sense. But the idea of the Virginians, the presidency would be reactive, was rejected, and instead the President as active was adopted.

 Third, the merging of the man. Thus far, they have been all men and the times. And you recognize that the presidents we don’t talk about were kind of mismatched with their times. The presidents we do talk about absolutely matched with their times. Now, I would describe this with that apology in so many ways, seen and unseen to the providence of God. I’ll mention just four, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Very different politics. But we cannot imagine those crucial periods of world history, whether it be the founding era, the period of the Civil War. The question is whether we’d be two nations or one, the challenge of the Great Depression and World War II, America’s emerging global leadership, and then Ronald Reagan, the fact that he saw a way to end the Cold War that none of his advisors saw and that he pursued it and the Soviet Union is no more. You’d see that was a man absolutely timed for maximum effectiveness, not only in the United States, but on the world stage at that time. 

The fourth is the fulcrum of crisis. And this is Bill Clinton’s pathetic statement that his presidency wouldn’t be considered as great as it should be because there was no great world crisis. To which he responded. That’s kind of pathetic. I mean, how’s that for narcissism writ large? But it’s true, it’s true. He’s followed by George W. Bush. Had nine 11 happened when Bill Clinton was president, we’d be talking about a very different set of circumstances, and undoubtedly given Clinton’s complexities, this would just become a further part of the complexity. But things happen when things happen, and who is sitting in the White House turns out to be determinative when things happen. 

The fulcrum of crisis is four. Five is the power of persuasion. And this is something very important to our constitutional system. Presidents have a power to persuade and a bully pulpit, so to speak, to persuade that others don’t have. The speaker of the house can call a press conference and CSPAN shows up. The President of the United States calls a press conference difference, and radio Saudi Arabia shows up. I mean, everybody has to show up. And so it’s a completely different thing. And so you can have a very powerful senator, and he may be someone that everyone on the inside knows you got to talk about, and people on the outside know has influence, but the moment the president walks in the room, all the cameras [pivot motion]. It’s like this, head of state, head of government, commander in chief, singular voice for the American government at this time, he can at least seek to persuade. Most effective presidents have learned the leadership lesson that power is a part of the equation. Persuasion is a crucial part. 

Six, the president is leader of a party. Again, you can argue that’s good or bad. I would argue that we would not have a presidency if it had not become effectively a way to lead a party, because otherwise presidents would have no natural constituency in the legislature and that would be a disaster. And so there is no working constitutional system in which you have a head of government, let’s just say head of government. Let’s forget the head of state for a moment. There is no working system in which the head of government has no constituency in the legislature. It just doesn’t work. It worked for George Washington only because he was George Washington, no one else.

Seventh, the duality of presidential power. That’s that unitary part. Head of state and head of government. So here’s the thing. Remember Bagehot I mentioned, the dignified and the efficient. One of the things I’ve just at least tried to live by is that, as a leader, kind of like the American presidency, but I don’t mean that in any pretentious way. I mean everyone, even if you’re squad leader in the sixth grade, leadership comes down to some combination of the dignified and the efficient. And I think this is where a lot of younger leaders get the efficient part. They don’t get the dignified part. And I think you look at politics right now, a part of the mess of American politics is we have a lot of younger legislators who quite frankly, lack all the dignified part. And quite honestly, we’ve had some presidents who’ve not been at all good in the stewardship of the dignified part. And let me tell you what a pastor told me one time, it was one of my pastors, our pastor, the name was Robert Leonard Smith, first Baptist Church Pompano Beach, and he taught me a lot. One of the things he told me was, you must always act in front of the congregation in such a way that when their son dies in an auto accident, you show up as the same person they know in every other setting. That’s a part of the dignity of an American president. It’s a part of the dignity of leadership. It doesn’t mean pretentiousness. It does mean the self-consciousness. 

The president and the bully pulpit. I’ve mentioned communication. The best presidents have been master communicators. That goes all the way back to Washington. And here’s the thing, sometimes the best communicators are the less personally revealing. So George Washington is still an enigma. I mean even those closest to him, he’s still an enigma. This is something else people don’t recognize. Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, was a personal enigma. There were people who worked for him for 30 years who say, I don’t think I really know him. It is because he reserved that internal life to himself and obviously to Nancy. And so in other words, this is just an interesting duality that goes on here. 

The presidency and its expanding powers, again, more power, less influence the president and the judgment of history. Who are great presidents? It’s really interesting that that list changes all the time. Presidents go up and presidents go down. Reagan’s been coming up and Harry Truman’s been going down. So this is just the way things sometimes work. Just very quickly in these ranking controversies, there’s basically an agreement on three great presidents, and this is pretty much bipartisan by great, this doesn’t mean you agree with them. It says you recognize they were transformative. That’d be George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Just about all historians. And I say again on the right and on the left will say, well, for good or for ill, all three of those were absolutely necessary. Without all three of those, you just can’t tell the story of America at crucial points. And by the way, in three different centuries. So, you look at that, you say, well, that’s interesting. So I would add Ronald Reagan to that list, but I’d have to put a footnote. In other words, Ronald Reagan didn’t have the same kind of function as a George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he oddly saw himself as in continuity even with FDR in terms of presidential leadership. And that’s one of the reasons why FDR, in the middle of the depression and all the rest, was able to smile before the American people, and Ronald Reagan understood the necessity of doing the very same thing. The last presidential debate, as it was called, shows the limitations of not smiling. The American people are horrified by the complete lack of a smile. 

Okay, who are the worst presidents? Nathan Miller wrote a book years ago entitled Star Spangled Men in which he offered the worst presidents in the American history. I think he’s generally right. Jimmy Carter, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Harrison, Calvin Coolidge, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and then he puts Richard Millhouse Nixon. You have to put an asterisk in Nixon. Nixon was one the most effective presidents of the 20th century, but of course, in moral terms with Watergate and all the rest, he destroyed himself again, becoming a Greek tragedy. He starts with Jimmy Carter, and I did a Thinking in Public with President Carter, I was editor of the Christian Index in Georgia where President Carter had vast influence, he was on the other side in the SBC controversy, he criticizes me pretty savagely in three books, never by name, by the way. It’s always the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I don’t even deserve a name. It’s just he who must be condemned. President Carter spoke at a Southern Seminary Commencement just before I was elected president. It was held down at the Center for the Performing Arts. It’s all on video. You can Google it and you can watch it. President Carter, I’m just going to say, we’re very different people. I will also say that he did agree to do the Thinking in Public with me—and again, you can find that on the website—and he’s been very gracious in so many ways, which I appreciate. I think at the end of the day, he’s a Southern Baptist in terms of his heart, even if he’s not Southern Baptist in terms of his church membership. And I actually received, I should say, a message from him with greeting one day out of the blue and just very, very kind. In terms of being a president, Jimmy Carter was a different kind of model of leadership, and frankly, not one that many other presidents are going to say they’re going to follow.

But there’s some great leadership lessons. And so I just want you to know I’m saying this in a way that’s critical, but not without affection and respect, I hope that’s heard. But when President Carter was Governor Carter, he had a family meal in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, and he announced that he was going to run for president, and his mother asked, “President of What?” And it’s just, thanks mom. But give the man credit. He won the Democratic nomination and he won the White House. My favorite thing about Jimmy Carter and leadership, and again, I’m saying this just because there are assets and liabilities, but between the time that Jimmy Carter was elected in November of 1976 and took office, remember he had been in the nuclear service, a graduate of Annapolis, and he’d been a naval officer. He had served under Hyman Rickover in the nuclear Navy. And so people were just trying to figure out who is this, who’s just been elected president? So they went and tried to find some people. They found someone who had taught him and commanded him. And they said, we want to talk about Jimmy Carter and leadership. Now, this is worth hearing. I want you to trust me on this. And I don’t mean this just at President Carter’s expense. You’re going to remember this. It’s good for all of us. And the reporter said, what do you think about when you think about Jimmy Carter and leadership? What kind of leader is he? And he said, well, when I teach leadership at Annapolis, I say, there are two kinds of leaders. There are forest men and there are tree men. There are leaders who see the forest, and there are leaders who see the trees. And the guy said, well, the reporter said, well, then you’re telling me that Jimmy Carter is a tree man? He said, good Lord, Jimmy Carter’s a leaf man. What a way to describe this.

Jimmy Carter, you may remember, got so bogged down in details that the leadership often didn’t happen. And you may remember that one of the oddities of administration was there was a debate and a conflict on his staff on access to the White House tennis court. And at one point he had the sign out list for the White House tennis court in the Oval Office. Okay, that’s micromanagement. That’s a leaf, brothers and sisters, and just a reminder to us that these things matter. Calvin Coolidge reminds us that you can go down in history as famous for not doing anything. Okay, not only that, Calvin Coolidge would be the proudest man on planet Earth to be known that we’re talking about him not doing anything. I would say that there are ways in which Calvin Coolidge reminds us of a kind of traditional conservatism that’s very hard to find these days. But it’s also true the American government is very different, the American challenge now is very different. I love reading about all these men. I love reading about the presidency. I feel like over time you get to know these people. My favorite lines about Calvin Coolidge are these, at one point, a major British diplomat left the Oval, well, left the president’s office in the White House at that point, and walked past one of the president’s aides and said he didn’t say anything. And the aide said, president Coolidge can be silent in five languages. Yeah, evidently even more. And one of them is English. And then of course, Herbert Hoover, he remembered a conversation he had when he took the presidency from Calvin Coolidge and Calvin Coolidge told him quite seriously this advice. He said, if you keep dead still, they will run down in three or four minutes. Meaning people come in the office, just don’t say anything. Three or four minutes later, they just kind of, eh nevermind, and walk out, which is what Calvin Coolidge wanted. 

Okay, I just want you to know your friend right now is named Mary Mohler because I looked at her face and she looked at the clock, and that’s a gift. That’s a gift. I saw it. Okay. It’s a gift. She’s looking out for you. Yeah. There’s so many other things I’d love to talk about here. The verdict of history just reminds us that you can be great when you leave office and be put on the bad list 20 years later, and nothing’s changed in what you did. But the way leadership is interpreted is, well, it’s open to reinterpretation all the time. And sometimes it’s on the basis of new information. I mean, we know a lot more. For one thing, presidential papers become unsealed. Historians have the opportunity to deal with them. I think the most fascinating illustration of all this is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the activist president, needless to say, Robert Caro’s magisterial biography—I am just praying he lives long enough to write that last volume—is so encyclopedic. But what he has done in that massive biography of Lyndon Bains Johnson, he’s changed the way we understand the sixties, in particular, just because of the primary documentation he’s been working through for all these years. So this is a good reminder to us. The verdict of history can be very different. 

The realities of power. It comes down to this, the American presidency is so powerful that it has made some leaders great and it has broken others. The presidency has broken several men, and it’s just a reality that we elect them or they go into office with the great hope they can handle this, not always the case. The presidency, on the other hand, has made some leaders great. I guess one of the greatest examples of that, to be honest—I mean great. I don’t mean great in terms of the fact you’re talking about them all the time, but just think about, for example, what happened when you had the death of a president in Garfield assassinated. Four presidents have been assassinated, four have died in office. When you had President Garfield assassinated and Chester Arthur, his vice president, who was probably engaged with organized crime. I mean that, I mean Tammany Hall, just the whole New York system. I mean, people were afraid of what would happen when Chester Arthur got anywhere close to the White House. President Garfield’s been assassinated, Chester Arthur becomes president. What’s Chester? Arthur remembered for now? Helping to break the back of organized crime, and by the passage of laws. So in other words, sometimes the presidency makes somebody. This guy’s considered crooked, becomes president, it’s a very different story. Now, we’re not talking about Chester Arthur all the time, but it’s an interesting observation about the presidency. On the other hand, it has broken several as well.

But as we think about America’s constitutional history and we think about the 2024 presidential election, perhaps the most sobering reality, the most sobering leadership lesson is that we have the President we deserve. No President’s imposed upon us by a foreign power. One way or another, the president we have is a president who has gained that office by constitutional means representing the will of the people somehow. That’s a sobering reality. It certainly underlines our responsibility looking at November of 2024. And quite frankly, we’re also reminded of the fact that we’re electing a government and that government’s going to establish policies, and so the presidency is now much bigger than the President. We’re not only voting for the individual who’s going to sit in the Oval Office chair, we’re also voting for thousands of people who are going to make the policies and establish the direction of the regulatory state, or who are going to sit on the seats of judgeships and be justices on the Supreme Court. Quite frankly, I take that as a very powerful indication of how I must vote. So you put all that together and you recognize George Washington, well, I don’t know what he would think if he saw the picture today, and given his reputation for stoicism and a completely expressionless face, if we were to tell him, we probably wouldn’t know what he’s thinking. But I do want to tell you, I go back, and I’m glad Alexander Hamilton won that argument. I’m glad we have the constitutional system we have, and when Americans say hail to the chief, it still means something that doesn’t mean anything anywhere else in the world. That is the same. Thank you so much for your attention. Let’s pray for our nation at this time. And I have one final word for you, but again, thank you for coming.