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?