What Kind of Temperament Is Best?

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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.