The Presidency: Job Specs for the Oval Office

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up ten.

Well, we have proposed no fewer than 31 attributes of presidential leadership. There could be longer or shorter lists, but they would all have this in common: no one of the cited qualities is by itself rare, and indeed we all know people who possess a number of them. The problem is to find somebody with all these qualities, or all but a very few, who is willing and able to seek a major-party nomination. Better yet, to find a dozen such people, so each party can choose from among first-class candidates before presenting the electorate the final decision.

The Resume Just to read the resumes of the modern Presidents, you would have had a hard time predicting their effectiveness in office. The only fairly safe guess would be that one term as Governor of Georgia is not ideal preparation.

(This is a retroactive guess; in 1976, some 40 million voters, including the writer, didn't think the point mattered that much.)

Two of the modern Presidents were two-term Governors of our two most populous states: F.D.R. and Reagan. Many students of politics think the Governor's job in a big complicated state is the closest thing there is, though nothing is very close, to the presidency.

Truman has become a kind of democratic legend of the "common man" rising to lofty challenge. He came to the White House from out of the seamy politics of Kansas City and two terms as a "machine" Senator.

When Ike was elected some of his critics were genuinely concerned about a "military mind" in the White House. Admirers who understood Ike's extraordinary kind of command success, at least as much political and diplomatic as military, may have expected a presidential greatness he did not quite achieve.

One might have expected less, or more, than we got from Kennedy and Ford. J.F.K. had spent 14 years on Capitol Hill, though he was not particularly diligent or influential there. Ford called himself "a child of the House," where he had spent 25 years, always in the minority; he served eight months as our first appointed Vice President.

Probably the best resumes of all were Lyndon Johnson's (federal bureaucrat, Navy, Congressman, Senator, majority leader, three years as V.P.) and Nixon's (federal bureaucrat, Navy, Congressman, Senator, eight years as V.P).

Eight of the nine were college graduates, and the list of their institutions evokes the American dream. Harvard, Yale Law and Michigan are there, and the senior service academies. But a fellow from Southwest Texas State Teachers can grow up to be President (and boast of the Ivy Leaguers working for him). So can a young man from Whittier, or from, perfect name, Eureka. Truman held no degree but had studied law at night school in Kansas City.

The academic performances are not very revealing. F.D.R. tended to the "gentleman's C." Nixon was No. 3 out of 25 in his class at Duke University Law School, Carter was 60 out of 820 at Annapolis, Ike an unostentatious 61 out of 164 at West Point.

Only three of the nine earned law degrees (F.D.R. and Ford as well as Nixon), a lower proportion than in the membership of Congress (still about half lawyers). Apart from the lawyers, none of the nine held an advanced degree.

Lateral Entry It will be interesting to see whether a Ph.D. can be elected again (Woodrow Wilson is the