The Presidency by Hugh Sidey: A Visionary or a Dogmatist?

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The Presidency

In the musty corners of the Capitol, Republican leaders now say among themselves that Ronald Reagan has about three months to demonstrate the worthiness of his economic program before a political firestorm engulfs his presidency.

Along the power corridor of the White House, a few steps away from the Oval Office, they put the grace period at six to eight months. But in candid moments, Reagan's men admit that they face a lonely vigil through weeks of high unemployment and business decline.

All Washington, it seems, is pondering the President's mind these days and wondering about this classic drama of leadership. Is he a visionary or a dogmatist? Is he courageous enough to change? Or stubborn enough not to?

There is little question now that Reagan stands at the head of a diminishing band of believers in the battered supply-side theory, which has produced a mix of budget cutting, reduced taxes, increased defense spending and—the sum of it all—huge, debilitating deficits. Rising Republican sentiment on the Hill is to increase tax revenues while continuing budget restraint and somehow reducing defense spending. Kansas' Robert Dole, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, toured boardrooms, banks and the markets and came back to Washington bearing the same message from Reagan boosters in the world of finance: Hundreds of billions in new debt could cause panic. Democrats, confused and flummoxed for a year, are making similar sounds. The old swamp fox of the Senate, Russell Long of Louisiana, tumbled into a limousine the other day with a Republican Senator and drawled, "I want to help the President." Translation: there is a majority forming in Congress, and perhaps the nation, that believes that Ronald Reagan must begin to cut his losses and start to make some deals. And there is the rub.

"One of the tragic impulses of any President," insists Clark Clifford, a Washington insider for 40 years, "is the desire for vindication." There are in history a few examples of Presidents standing in splendor on their ideology and being vindicated finally by events. Lyndon Johnson's fight for a civil rights bill in 1964 was a sometimes lonely road to glory. But our system is not an ideological one. It is based on flexibility, compromise. Clifford recalls Johnson as he sealed his fate in the sweltering officers' club of Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam, urging his field commanders to "come home with that coonskin on the wall." L.B.J.'s lust for victory was ultimately to defeat him.

All during January the nation listened to the litany of Franklin Roosevelt's greatness. One theme in the lesson was FD.R.'s desire for results even at the expense of philosophical purity. He quoted an old Bulgarian proverb that says, "You are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."