The Temperament Factor: Who's Best Suited to the Job?

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What Qualities Matter?

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill said, was like opening your first bottle of champagne. "Knowing him was like drinking it." Temperament is a special subcommittee of character: it is less intellect than instinct, more about music than lyrics — the quality voters sense when they watch a candidate improvise or when he thinks no one is looking. It's why newspapers run profiles quoting kindergarten teachers; temperament is formed early. "You can call it balance. You can call it a sense of proportion. You can call it maturity, good judgment," says historian David McCullough. "One of the clearest lessons of history is that there's no such thing as the foreseeable future, and particularly in traumatic times such as we have now, temperament is of the utmost importance."

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TIME's Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs sit down with prominent historians to discuss the most elusive of requirements for a president: Temperament.

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But what type of temperament matters, especially in a time like this? The idea that anyone can grow up to be President is an American gospel, but that's about honoring equality not excellence. It's good to be smart, but that's no guarantee of success; Woodrow Wilson, the only President with a Ph.D., never won over a majority of voters. More important is the confidence that lets you welcome smart people around you — and hope they disagree. Hence Lincoln's famous "team of rivals," says biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin. "How can you do this?" people asked him when he stocked his Cabinet with former adversaries. "He said, 'Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country's in peril. I need them by my side.' He had the internal self-confidence to know that if he could get them working together as a team, it would be exactly what he needed for his leadership."

Perhaps even more important than intelligence is vitality: Tigger beats Eeyore any day. F.D.R.'s success, argues Goodwin, reflected as much his infectious optimism as his eloquence: "To have gone through his own adversity with polio and still remain optimistic and upbeat — all of that was what he projected to the country during the Depression," she says. "They had faith in themselves because he had faith in them." McCain had his fortitude forged by fire in a prison camp; he throbs with an energy of someone who has never stopped making up for lost time. He burns more calories sitting in a chair than most people do shoveling snow. Obama is upbeat but never giddy, sunny without being blinding.

Resilience helps too; every President will get thrown back against a wall and need to come back stronger. Just ask Bill Clinton. So do steadfastness, persistence, conviction. But as soon as you make the list, it mocks you, for history is a dance of luck and intent, and sometimes they trip each other. Wilson was strong enough to win a war but too stubborn to save the peace. Herbert Hoover was "the Great Humanitarian" who saved Belgium from starvation; under the right circumstances, he could have been a great President. But his temperament undermined his talent; he never understood that politics was more art than engineering. He later recalled that after growing up in Iowa as a Quaker orphan, he was 10 years old before he realized he could do something for the sheer joy of it without offending God. "Now that's a lesson from his early days that I think crippled him temperamentally," says Smith, "particularly as the kind of empathetic leader that we desperately called for after 1929."