Word: rileys
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...presidential temperament, our assistant managing editor Michael Duffy, along with Lisa Todorovich from the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, organized a roundtable of presidential historians: Richard Norton Smith, who has run five presidential libraries, Beverly Gage of Yale, and David Coleman and Russell Riley of the Miller Center. Excerpts from their conversation follow Nancy Gibbs' wise and penetrating cover story. You can listen to the whole thing on TIME.com...
TIME recently gathered four presidential historians--George Mason University's Richard Norton Smith, Yale University's Beverly Gage, and Russell Riley and David Coleman of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia--to discuss presidential temperament: what it is, who had it and how much it matters in the White House. An excerpt of their conversation...
...Riley: It's a little bit easier if you're talking about an 8-week-old child to figure out what temperament is. There are two basic questions: Does she fuss a lot? And how does she sleep at night? ... You could do worse than starting with that if you're talking about a President or a presidential candidate. Does this person fuss a lot? ... Do the demands of the office wear on this person in a way that makes it difficult for him to think straight? Obviously, you don't want a Calvin Coolidge, who reportedly slept 11 hours...
...Riley: [I would add] Reagan's survival of [an] assassination attempt, which had a profound effect on budget policy at that time, because Reagan was foundering a little bit during the early phase of his presidency ... He'd come out of an election--he had won an election that was closer than the score indicated ... but his grace literally under fire in that event, joking to the doctors as he was going under, and his recovery, I think, is a very good illustration of how, in an extreme set of circumstances, one's temperament can have an influence on politics...
...Riley: Two other examples: with Richard Nixon, I mean, it's impossible to think about Watergate without thinking about Nixon's temperament, his sort of dark sense of enemies everywhere. And Bill Clinton--[his] failure was a deeply personal failure with Monica Lewinsky, and it's a failure of discipline. I mean, this is a man who knew that ... for years there were people out to get him, and he, even in that environment, didn't have the personal discipline necessary to avoid creating a problem that ... for all of history will...