The Presidency: Job Specs for the Oval Office

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could say, "Power? The only power I've got is nuclear—and I can't use that." This was silly, and Johnson's record didn't suggest he believed it.

Rossiter was closer to the truth, but the danger in the heroic view of the presidency is that it can lead to vastly inflated public expectations. Two generations of historians and their readers were prepared to be disappointed with anything less than a Roosevelt—Franklin or Theodore. The leading historian of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., saw F.D.R. in an exalted light and later found enough activist electricity around J.F.K. to want to work for him. Only during the Nixon Administration did he begin to worry about the excesses of an "imperial presidency." James S. Young of the University of Virginia argues that there must be a "retrenching" of presidential power "to save the presidency for the things only it can do." The President can and should restrain public expectations of his office and distinguish between "threats to the Republic and mere problems for the Administration." Young and other advocates of a smaller presidency might have relished a comment in the White House the morning after a bad Carter primary hi 1980: "I understand," confided one of the young Georgians, "that the leader of the Free World took quite a chewing out from his wife last night."

Even without war or depression, the times are sufficiently difficult to test Presidents as severely as ever in our history. To be a "good" President hi the 1980s may be even harder than to be a "great" President hi the days of Antietam or Pearl Harbor.

Ideally . . . So what are we looking for? Always, of course, enough of a good quality but not too much. With almost every presidential virtue, a little too much becomes a defect, even a danger. The President must be "a good politician" but not "too political." The President should be decent but not "too nice." Etc. To start at the easy end of the check list:

> The Body. We prefer Presidents to look like Presidents. F.D.R. did (supremely so), also Ike, J.F.K., Reagan. Other recent incumbents, through no fault of their own, didn't.

A President needs tremendous physical stamina (though George Reedy, one of L.B.J.'s press secretaries, has noted that "no President ever died of overwork"). The 36-primary campaign, whatever else may be said of it, is a rigorous physical exam. We, at least, know that anybody who can get nominated and elected is in good shape.

The President ought to be an athlete (Ford, J.F.K., Ike) or at least an outdoorsman (Reagan), not just because it appeals to voters but because it helps make a rounded man, capable of relaxing. Carter, after that ruinous jogging photo, took up trout fishing in a big way. L.B.J. poured all his volcanic energies into politics; his was the youngest natural death (at 64) of any postwar President. Nixon is an essentially sedentary man. Truman's sports were walking, poker and bourbon.

> Character and Temperament. The presidential bedrock must be integrity, perceived and real. (Integrity includes an honorable private life.) There is an unavoidable tension between this necessity and the political necessities of maneuver, indirection and calculated ambiguity. Of the two