Word: smith
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...find the keys to 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...
...Smith: Post-Reagan, there's a whole school of thought that says the Coolidge model of the presidency at least can be taken seriously ... I have problems with this word because I find it terribly elusive. As a biographer, I'm tempted to say [temperament] is a distillation of life's experiences that leaves a residue, if you will ... There are Presidents for whom it is very easy to say what their temperament is. Harry Truman is a classic example. Probably Lyndon Johnson would be another example. Ronald Reagan [is another], but there are others for whom...
...Smith: In a more benign way, I would point to Eisenhower ... It was famous around the White House that if [he] was wearing a brown suit that day, stay away, because you didn't want to be around him. George Washington spent a lifetime trying to control his temper, not always successfully. Eisenhower probably did a more successful job, but that's not public ... On a brown-suit day, he was irritable. He could be curt, but ... most of the time, [he was] much more politically sophisticated than he wanted the public or the press to believe...
...Smith: But that's also a great example of a President in effect not simply exercising crisis management but coming out of that crisis having established a kind of emotional bond with people and banking political credit that he can call upon down the road when things inevitably become more difficult. Maybe think of F.D.R. in March of 1933--I would argue that there really was never a majority of Americans who bought into the right-wing notion of Stalin Delano Roosevelt, because at a critical moment, F.D.R. established a kind of credibility ... God knows he was controversial. God knows...