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Leadership is always somewhat mysterious. Ronald Reagan's leadership was fascinating. The author Garry Wills wrote, "Reagan runs continuously in everyone's home movies of the mind. He wrests from us something warmer than mere popularity. A kind of complicity. He is, in the strictest sense, what Hollywood promoters used to call 'fabulous.' We fable him to ourselves, and he to us. We are jointly responsible for him."
Americans loved Reagan because he was genial and optimistic, not a molecule of the neurotic in his body. He liked to tell a slightly peculiar story about a boy who on Christmas morning finds a pile of manure in his room and says brightly, "I just know there's a pony in here somewhere." He was coated with Teflon: blame never attached itself to him.
The historian Carl Friedrich once wrote, "To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact." A Frenchman knows what it means to be a Frenchman. Americans constantly wonder about themselves, about what they represent, about their purpose and their virtue and where they stand in the world. Americans are constantly reinventing themselves.
Reagan gave them one version and, doing that, restored much of the nation's battered morale. "Actually, he was the Great Interpreter," says Ralph Whitehead, a public service professor at the University of Massachusetts. "People used his public persona, his resolve, his upbeat spirit, his patriotic vitality as a tool to help them make better sense of their own experience. Now Reagan's framework seems simplistic and out of date."
Americans, it may be, now need a leader to give them a sense of their coherence and their role in the world. "In those rare moments when the American people feel that the direction of their country is going to affect their private lives," says the historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin, "they are engaged at a far deeper level." They need to reinvent themselves once again on a planet that has enormously changed in just a few years.
Many Americans sense that the nation has been out of control, indulging in an escapist fantasy, consuming too much, saving too little, not paying the bills, not paying attention to global realities. They have lived on credit cards, while the Japanese and other foreign investors have been buying up their assets. We are not us anymore, they tell themselves, not the nation as it was in the triumphant postwar years, the American Century. They know that they live now in a global economic village in which they must learn to compete and re-earn their grace. As Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt tells his campaign audiences, "Reagan made us feel good. Now we've really got to be good."
Mussolini once remarked, "It is not impossible to govern the Italians, it is merely useless." It is not impossible to lead Americans as a nation. It is just that the Founding Fathers did not think it was a particularly good idea. Says Historian James MacGregor Burns: "Leadership itself is one of the most mentioned and least understood processes in the American system. What we have in this country is an antileadership system bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers because they feared overly strong Government. It is quite ironic that we end this bicentennial year with a dramatic example of how our constitutional system inhibits long-range planning and collective action."