THE CURSE OF GOOD TIMES

Ivy-league lawyer in the oval office, brilliant political practitioner, champion of better education for poor black children, husband of a woman who broke precedent and bravely crusaded nationally on one of the great social issues of the day, voracious book reader, shrewd observer who identified a massive shift in the U.S. economy and the job skills required to meet it, partisan of women's rights, winner of a knock-down, drag-out battle with a Congress that attempted to shut down the government and humiliate the President.

Bill Clinton? Not on your life. I'm talking about Rutherford B. Hayes, a President brushed aside by history and used as the prop of a thousand Washington toastmasters searching for a cheap laugh over the past 120 years. Humorist Bob Orben says the name is melodic ("Chester Arthur doesn't make it"), and Hayes' dim place in the national chronicle makes him fodder for almost any joke. Washington visitor at the Hayes Inauguration in 1877: "Who was that man in front of you on the stand with his hand raised?" Senator: "I didn't catch his name."

Clinton should take a lesson from Hayes if he wants to avoid being trapped by history into a forgettable presidency. His 19th century predecessor has been given a raw reading by historians who are just as enamored of wars and depressions and human calamity as Hollywood. They have tended to write bad scripts, at least at first, for those Presidents who presided in moments of prosperity and tranquillity and kept them that way. Cases in point: George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, William Howard Taft and Martin Van Buren.

High political priest of all historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. assembled a jury a while back to judge presidential greatness. This flocking of fellow liberals quite naturally elevated John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and diminished Jerry Ford and Ronald Reagan. But the shocker was that Bill Clinton was also put down there with Hayes, Arthur and Benjamin Harrison and devastatingly close to Calvin Coolidge. The White House has not stopped quivering in indignation. Clinton's greatest second-term battle may be against historical irrelevance, and there is ample evidence that he understands the difficulty of being a heroic leader in a democracy in a period of well-being and peace. No civil war, no winning of the West, no world wars (hot or cold), no depression, no Dust Bowl. Even Schlesinger admits democracies often are at their worst in good times.

Clinton will attempt to take the crisis in America's personal and cultural values, along with the great economic changes caused by an industrial society giving way to the information age, and weave everything into a coherent national challenge with a language of hope and inspiration. Only one President so far has managed to do that. He was the muscular Theodore Roosevelt--rancher, explorer, author, hunter, warrior--who defined by his intelligence and personal exuberance America's arrival as the world's greatest mover and shaker. But even T.R. confessed that his success was based on the fact that the U.S. was in a "heroic mood" that came 20 years after Hayes was President. Is the nation now closer to Hayes or Roosevelt? And can it be nudged ahead?

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