Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman . . . ((A salesman)) don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back -- that's an earthquake.
-- Death of a Salesman
It was a mild October. But then the temperatures dropped, and the cold at dusk had the first wolf of winter in it.
One afternoon in Minnesota, near the headwaters of the Mississippi, the season arrived abruptly in a complex sky. Bright sun fired through slabs of blackish clouds -- tremendous lights and darks at work -- and then a dense snow pelted horizontally through the sunlit air. The American weather was transitional, bewildering. In Washington, leaves drifted from the trees in Lafayette Square. Across the street, there was a vacancy in the White House.
It was a strange vacuum, a palpable absence. Ronald Reagan, for so long a vivid presence in the American consciousness, seemed, for a time at least, to be lost, almost vanishing. One thought of a line from A Passion for Excellence by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin: "The number-one managerial productivity problem in America is, quite simply, managers who are out of touch with their people and out of touch with their customers." The President and his customers were living on different planets.
Americans, dazed by the seizures on the world's stock markets, looked to the White House for . . . what? At the least, for an acknowledgment of the reality and the fear. Suddenly a door to the future had been blown open, and what the world saw (or was it mere hallucination?) seemed frightening. A glimpse of monsters out there in the dark. People looked for a stirring of presidential energy, for both substance and symbol to announce that the most powerful office in the world was alive to the danger. What the world needed was focus, intelligence, communication. It needed to hear the voice of an adult. Editorial writers, columnists, businessmen and politicians cried in chorus, "Leadership! Leadership!"
Perhaps they were being illogical in the expectation. Ronald Reagan's agenda when he came to Washington was to undo as much as possible the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, after 59 months of consecutive economic growth in Reagan's Roaring Eighties, trouble arrived, and everyone (even businessmen who hate Government interference) expected Reagan to start sounding like F.D.R. They may even have wanted him to get on television after the crash and say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Suddenly they wanted activism from a President who has always believed Government should essentially be passive. Reagan's political philosophy does not have a tool with which to repair this kind of breakdown.
The crisis in the world's markets was driven by psychology as well as by objective economics. Rational business and irrational panic are separated by the thin membrane that confidence in the nation's leadership sustains.