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Politicians, of course, are not America's only leadership class and not the only ones to have failed in their responsibility. Leaders of business, finance, academe and the news media knew intellectually that the Reagan Administration had replaced the Democrats' tax-and-spend with the hugely popular but unsound practice of spend-and-borrow, and that the nation's prosperity in the '80s was being stolen from its children and grandchildren.
It was naturally to the White House, however, that Americans turned. At a time when the global economy was vibrating violently, a sense of panic from + down deep in the infantile reaches of the psyche rose to the surface. People wanted a sign from Daddy that someone was in charge and working to set things right. They expected words from the Great Communicator. They expected a presidential Rising to the Occasion. They waited beseechingly.
Reagan's tepid and grudging reactions -- reluctant and uncomprehending -- confirmed a suspicion in many minds that Reagan, a lame duck with 15 months to go in his second term, was presiding over an Administration bereft of ideas and energy. It was a custom a generation ago for people to remark, "Well, we must trust the President in that decision -- he has more information about it than we do." No one says that in the second term of Ronald Reagan. In fact, one unstated anxiety during the stock-market crash was that Reagan would inadvertently say something to make the panic worse.
The President seemed bizarrely disengaged or possibly merely conflicted and resentful. The world was telling him that he must change. Reagan had gone very, very far in the world on a smile and a shoeshine and on his almost majestic stubbornness. "I've believed this too long to change my mind now," he would tell aides who were trying to turn his views on some program that conflicted with his tenets. His persistence was always one of his virtues, part of his political genius: Americans thought he believed deeply in a few simple principles, including low taxes and high defense budgets, a configuration that helped turn the U.S. into the world's biggest debtor. But now that stubbornness, almost a denial of reality, worked toward his undoing.
When he was inaugurated in 1981 -- at that triumphal January moment when the American hostages were at last flown out of Iran -- Ronald Reagan became the sixth President to enter the White House in 20 years. That was an alarming turnover and a sort of enigmatic commentary on the problems of leadership in America in the late 20th century. John Kennedy: assassinated. Lyndon Johnson: driven from office. Richard Nixon: forced to resign. Gerald Ford: an unelected President, rejected at the polls. Jimmy Carter: buried in a landslide. Commentators began to wonder whether Americans had a streak of the regicide in them. Going into Reagan's fifth year, however, Americans began to think he would be the first President since Eisenhower to leave Washington after two terms with a smile on his face.