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1/23/01
8:00 a.m. By Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute and NRO contributing editor. His latest book is Tocqueville on American Character. |
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Two of the greatest leaders of the last century entered office with similar reputations: Ronald Reagan and King Juan Carlos of Spain. At the beginning of the 1980 campaign, Reagan was branded as the one Republican candidate that Carter might actually defeat, because he was so stupid. A failed actor, a real dimwit, a guy who couldn’t say anything coherent unless he had his little index cards. And so it went. Even now, lots of smart people refuse to believe that Reagan actually outwitted Gorbachev and destroyed the Soviet Empire. Why? Because nobody that stupid could possibly do anything that brilliant. They were so certain that anything he did was doomed to fail, that Reagan was able to carefully organize his policies--from saving the national economy to winning the Cold War--before they knew what hit them. So powerful was this conviction that even his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer couldn’t recognize that the stereotype of Reagan was completely wrong. Contrary to what Edmund Morris believes, Reagan was not at all hard to understand; he was a wise man with strong convictions and great inner tranquility. Similarly, Juan Carlos was universally described as an idiot playboy. He couldn’t possibly be smart enough for the daunting job of guiding Spain from dictatorship to democracy, because he had only gone to military schools, hadn’t mastered the latest political and philosophical fads, and didn’t spend time in the intellectual salons. When he became king, nobody looked too closely at him, which enabled Juan Carlos to quietly organize a transition to democracy that was so smooth and apparently effortless that it became the model for the entire world. Prior to Juan Carlos it was taken for granted that you couldn’t get from dictatorship to democracy without violent convulsions, even a civil war. After Juan Carlos we take it for granted that a peaceful transition to democracy is perfectly normal, and we wonder why it doesn’t happen more often. These enormous misjudgments were based on the intellectual conceit that the best leaders are highly educated and culturally refined. Let’s call it the JFK model: Harvard comes to the Potomac. But JFK failed rather more than he succeeded, whereas the simpler souls often did much better, because their minds were uncluttered and their spirits were strong. They knew what they wanted to accomplish, and they set about it with a single-minded determination, confident in the rightness of their cause and at peace with themselves. This last is the most important quality of great modern leaders, for without it they will end up seeking popularity for its own sake, and thereby lose their direction. So far, the great thing about W. is that he seems to have the inner peace that characterizes successful men and women. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast between his elegantly simple proclamation of the fundamental principles of Americanism on Inauguration Day, and the frenetic, detail-ridden wonkishness of his predecessor. He’s lucky to be dismissed as a dimwit. Let’s hope the savants don’t catch on too soon. |
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resident W. comes to
office with an enormous advantage, courtesy of his critics and the self-important
scribblers and chatterers who shape so much of our political commentary:
He is widely considered an ignorant buffoon. With such low expectations,
any good thing he does will be welcomed with delighted surprise by those
citizens who put stock in the media, including the many foreign leaders
who worry (or cheer) that America has fallen into the hands of an airhead.
But this is only the first of three great blessings that derive from that
stereotype. Since he is not expected to have any serious strategy in mind,
he is not under pressure to move quickly (he’s not going to be criticized
for failure to meet some imagined deadline. And finally, there will be
less snooping into his policy plans, since he is believed to have none.
