American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was the intellectual quality of the men and women of all three cadres that made the crucial difference. Jurists like Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black, politicians like Corcoran and Robert La Follette, Jr., legislators like Representatives Thomas Eliot, Mike Monroney, and Albert Gore, or personages of the stature of Perkins or Eleanor Roosevelt herself were more interested in ideas than in political promotion or maneuver. No wonder, then, the comment of John Maynard Keynes in the mid-1930s that of “all the experiments to evolve a new order, it is the experiment of young America which most attracts my own deepest sympathy,” or Adlai Stevenson’s observation in the mid-1950s that the “next frontier is the quality, the moral, intellectual and aesthetic standards of the free way of life.”

  Interviewing leaders like these, examining their lives, following the ebb and flow of their careers arouses a profound curiosity about the nature of intellectual and political leadership. Watching John Kennedy climb the greasy pole and reach the top while so young was a fascinating case study in human ambition, political skill, and audacity. As I came to know Kennedy during the 1950s, I found I was observing a politician who as a student of history and of major American politicians had had ample opportunity on Capitol Hill coolly to measure leaders at home and abroad. He had limned his own political heroes in Profiles in Courage, a portrayal of senators who had fought for their convictions at risk—often at fatal risk— to their political careers. Kennedy’s own career, however, suggested that he would not risk election defeat in pursuit of some Utopian principle.

  Early in 1960 I published a study of Kennedy in which I expressed some doubt that he would show more than a profile in caution as candidate for President. The issue was intellectual and moral commitment as well as political. Though the book was generally positive toward the candidate, it did not meet the exacting standards of the Kennedy family and entourage. Jacqueline Kennedy in particular was disturbed by my portrait, which she felt made too much of the influence of his parents, his older brother Joe, and indeed his whole social background.

  “You are like him in many ways,” she wrote beguilingly. “You know the hard parts and the pitfalls. Can’t you see that he is exceptional?

  “Or is he to be just another sociological case history? Irish-Catholic, newly rich, Harvard-educated etc. — Does every man conform totally to his background? Surely there are some who contribute something of their own.…” She was most upset by my failure to emphasize more her husband’s learning experiences. What other candidate, she asked, had in his twenties talked to Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, Laski, had in his thirties known de Lattre, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, had been to Russia in Stalin’s day, had had friends in the French and English parliaments? “Jack was part of all that and it influenced him enormously.” She went on: “I think you underestimate him. Anyone sees he has the intelligence—magnetism and drive it takes to succeed in politics. I see, every succeeding week I am married to him, that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self confidence and sureness of his powers.”

  Jacqueline Kennedy’s letter was more than a wife’s brief for a husband— it was a reminder to biographers that their subjects can rise far above, or, by implication, fall far below, the psychological and sociological forces that have shaped them. And if John Kennedy turned to sundry Western leaders as role models, he in turn became a model for thousands of young would-be leaders. So had Eleanor Roosevelt for countless women, and so would Robert Kennedy later for young rebels, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for blacks.

  The leadership gap that afflicts us today could be rather simply explained: our leaders were shot down. Yet a nation with strong second and third cadres can survive the loss of top leaders. While some of JFK’s best men left Lyndon Johnson’s administration during its first year, enough remained—and enough new talent came in with LBJ—to devise and launch the sweeping domestic programs of the Great Society. So there must be a more fundamental explanation for the decline of leadership, especially among liberal Democrats.

  Does our foreign policy experience give us a clue? The leadership group that had waged the battle against isolationism in the late 1930s fell victim to the cold war mentality following World War II—with considerable assistance from Stalin—and two decades later younger men and women were even more victimized by the cold war. For they were stigmatized whatever side they took on Vietnam. As the Democratic party establishment collapsed in 1968, those who stuck with the Vietnam War went down with it, while those who broke with the war became isolated in the McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and McGovern secessions. Men and women on both sides later became university presidents or deans, foundation heads, distinguished attorneys, writers, and teachers. But what many of them in the 1970s were not doing was what they should have been doing when their turn came in the rise and fall of leadership generations—running the government. It is their exile, along with the withering away of the Stimson-Eisenhower-Rockefeller presidential Republican party, which helped produce the critical leadership gap of the last two decades.

  And yet, the sources of our leadership failures lie deeper than electoral prudence or political assassinations, cold war attitudes, or foreign policy disasters. They lie in habits of thought long shaped in a land that has allowed ample leeway for social and political as well as economic and industrial innovation, on the part of people who like tinkering and patching up and proceeding “by guess and by God.” Looking back over two hundred years, the chronicler sees the American Experiment as a series of planned or unplanned experiments—ventures in a written Constitution, a Bill of Rights, checks and balances, federalism, Jacksonian democracy; in isolationism, expansion, empire building, Wilsonian internationalism, cold war interventionism, bountiful foreign aid; in slavery, civil war butchery, emancipation, serfdom, southern white rule; in massive migration and immigration, industrial innovation and giantism, Social Darwinism, New Deal regulation, Keynesian spending, war economics, laissez-faire; in nuclear attack; in race hatred and segregation, exploitation of women and children, Prohibition, repeal, depression, joblessness, drugs, poverty; in public education, social movements, populism, desegregation, literary and artistic creativity, youth rebellion, scientific discovery, space exploration.

  But the grand experiment that transcended all the others was the effort to expand both individual liberty and real equality of opportunity for all—the supreme promise of the Declaration of Independence, the campaign pledge of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians and their successors, the subject of Tocqueville’s most penetrating observations, the core of the epic struggle of the 1860s, the essence of the twentieth-century philosophical battles over the dynamic tension and interplay between liberty and equality. This experiment was called Freedom, combining as it did liberty and equality. And this doctrine of freedom was forged and promoted by liberals of all creeds, liberals in both parties and third parties, Republican liberals like Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Clifford Case, Democratic liberals like Wilson and Al Smith and FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Jordan, Truman and LBJ, Senators Lehman and Wagner, Fulbright and Kefauver, and three leaders by the name of Kennedy.

  The political and intellectual vehicle for the ideology of freedom was called liberalism. So pervasive was this doctrine in American history, so comprehensive its reach in American politics, that liberalism and liberals seemed unassailable. During the 1980s, however, Reaganites converted this mild and venerable word into a hate object. Where in the old days conservatives had attacked communism and socialism, now they were moving toward the heart of their target. At the same time, liberalism was ripe for a fall. Like some old mansion top-heavy with junk-filled attics and sagging excrescences but weak in its foundations, liberalism collapsed of overextension—its overemphasis on individualism and pluralism, its flabby appeal across the wide center of the political and intellectual spectrum that resulted in a lack of core values.

  All these tendencies reflected ha
bits of thought that foster experimentation but at the same time lead to an excessive reliance on expediency, short-run planning, opportunism, and ultimately to the erosion of the supreme values—liberty and equality—by which the experiments themselves must be tested.

  I completed the writing of this volume during the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Doubtless my dismay over the quality of late-twentieth-century leadership in both parties, and especially in the Democracy, has been deepened by the inevitable contrast with the thinkers and politicians of the late eighteenth century. Historians have long studied the personal qualities of the Framers that led to that explosion of talent in Philadelphia in 1787. Some of their findings are summarized in a capsule explanation of mine I like to quote: they were well bred, well fed, well read, well led, and well wed. But the thousand or so delegates to the state ratifying conventions often lacked some or all of these advantages: many came from poor, low-status families, they had little or no formal schooling, they were cut off from the main leadership networks, and their brides rarely brought them the several thousand acres of land that could provide leisure for deep thought. How then explain the intellectual capacity of the second-cadre leadership that came to the fore in the ratification debates?

  The answer, I think, lies in the transcending, even overwhelming moral and intellectual commitment that these early Americans made first to independence from Britain, then to a new constitutional order, and finally to the Bill of Rights, all within the twenty years between the early 1770s and the early 1790s. All these commitments were crucial, and each vivified the others. The leaders, national and local, had staked their hopes and their lives on a carefully thought-out balance of liberty and order. In a time of tumultuous conflict they had fought their colonial governors in America, their imperial masters in London, and then one another, for what they considered the highest purpose. And because every major step they took was informed by a powerful but incalculable moral passion as well as a calculation of grand political strategy, they spoke from the heart as well as the head.

  It is this combination of moral and intellectual commitment that I find so lacking in our current politics. All political leaders in democracies are brokers, finaglers, manipulators; the question is whether they rise above this when fundamental issues reach crucial turning points. FDR transcended his foxlike maneuvering when he moved to the left in 1935 and 1936, when he tried to deal with a deadlocked political system during his second term, as he came to confront the menace of Nazism, when he sought to leave a legacy of world peace and security in postwar plans for the United Nations and in settlements with the Russians. John Kennedy made the kind of commitment of the heart as well as head that the presidency called for in his third and last year in office, setting a standard for his successors. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, struck one as merely opportunistic to the last, operational, pragmatic in the worst sense—he earned the appellation “Tricky Dick.” Conservative Republicans had to wait for Reagan to make a firm, strategic commitment to rightist doctrine— a commitment hopelessly snarled in Reagan’s White House.

  Aside from Reagan and Jesse Jackson, presidential candidates in the 1980s seemed all of a piece—cool, calculating, prudent, carefully choosing and exploiting issues on the basis of public opinion polls and media attention. They were leading with their heads, not their hearts. A year or so after JFK became President I saw in him four Kennedys—the rhetorical radical, the policy liberal, the fiscal moderate, the institutional conservative—and I expected that the four tendencies could not live together indefinitely. Presidential candidates today seem equally fragmented—able rhetoricians, fine policy analysts, fiscally cautious, sublimely indifferent to the fact that their larger hopes and programs cannot be achieved through our splintered and often deadlocked governmental machinery. The candidates forswear ideology, not recognizing that they themselves possess ideologies of flabby liberalism or cloudy conservatism.

  Moral passion informing intellectual power harnessed securely to explicit, overriding ends or values—this must be the essence of twenty-first-century leadership.

  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. …”These words of Yeats have been quoted by every generation since he wrote them in 1920, but never more than today. In the late twentieth century many Americans sense an intellectual, cultural, and political fragmentation and trivialization that pervades our public and private lives. And there has been the usual overreaction, the breast-beating about the ignorance and distorted values of the American people followed by a feverish search for scapegoats. The two leading culprits are the mass media and education. Since there is a reluctance to challenge the independence of the media, given its protected position under the Bill of Rights, the easy, all-purpose target has been the educator, whether the kindergarten teacher, the college dean, or the graduate school professor.

  Once again, in the most recent “crisis of education,” all the old moth-eaten solutions have been trotted out. The most popular one is that we must read the Great Books. As a former teacher of some of the “Greats,” as one who believes that they should be at the heart of every liberal arts or humanistic curriculum, as one who knows that the great philosophers offer profound explorations of human nature, moral values, and political power, I balk at this cheap overselling of the classics. They are introductions to thought, not substitutes for it. They raise the enduring questions that confound humankind—they do not offer solutions necessarily relevant to our current plight.

  Like Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln, like the many lesser “greats” who flowered in this country from around the second to the sixth decade of this century, we must think our way through our problems. This means drawing our values from the teachings of the past, arraying them in priorities based on human needs, and above all—and by far the most daunting intellectual and analytical enterprise—working out the instrumental ends and the intermediate means that enable us to apply our supreme values effectively and explicitly to everyday decisions and actions. This intellectual strategy calls for a structure of government—in essence for a team of leaders with the power to govern, an opposition party leadership with the power to oppose, full protection of procedural and substantive liberties by all branches and especially the judiciary—in short, majority rule, minority rights, and a constitutional system that fosters both.

  “… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats continued. It is above all the lack of moral conviction and of intellectual creativity that lies behind our present predicament, and this in turn stems largely from the decline of cutting conflict and controversy in our politics. As long as press and politicians prate about consensus and bipartisanship and centrism, both our ideas and our politics will be sterile and stalemated.

  “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.…” So Yeats began his famous poem. The Berkshire hills and dales broaden out to the Taconic Range and the Green Mountains and the Alleghenies, and finally to the Appalachians and the Rockies and the great valleys in between. The mountainsides turn during the fall from dark green to brilliant red to brown and then to a blackness against the first snows. I reflect on a phenomenon that I will never fully understand—how the lushness and softness of the summer is incomprehensible as one stands in an icy field, how the rocklike soil and all-enveloping cold of winter are incomprehensible as one sits amid the gentle grass and last wildflowers of autumn.

  But, I reflect, at least there is the certainty of it even as we cannot quite grasp it. And I find some consolation in the thought that coping with both the killing frosts of winter and the droughts, floods, and bugs of summer provided Americans—whether Yankee tinkerers or eminent philosophers—with the kind of stimulus, the kind of contrasting challenges that spurred their inventiveness and creativity.

  I think finally of the explorers—those who made their way across the Atlantic, who penetrated the Appalachian slopes and then, under men
like Lewis and Clark, pushed their way across prairie and desert and mountain chain. And I think finally of the space explorers of today, human and robotic, and of a planned space platform that will be named Freedom, and of probes called Pioneer flying past Saturn and Pluto even as these words were written and are now being read.

  My hills, like the stars, endure. And in college convocations to come, I will join in singing some words that express my most fundamental commitment—singing them with a fervor that still surprises me:

  My country, ’tis of thee,

  Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee I sing;

  Land where my fathers died,

  Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,

  From ev’ry mountain side

  Let freedom ring.

  Notes

  1. The Crisis of Leadership

  p. 3 [Flight to Chicago]: Ed Plaut Papers (RG 31-HH), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; New York Times, July 3, 1932, pp. 1, 9; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, pp. 1-5; Time, vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10; Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), pp. 67-77; Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History (Doubleday, 1983), pp. 277-81; Gilbert Grosvenor, “Flying,” National Geographic, vol. 53, no. 5 (May 1933), p.586.