Brief Meditation on the Perils of Leadership

While we're all basking in the effulgence of the new foreign policy team and the general atmosphere of a "ministry of all the talents," it might be useful to remember that there are many possible precedents, and they point in many directions: many models of (non)cooperation in an administration, particularly in foreign policy where there are so many loci of power.

Here's a famous example: Kissinger and Nixon. For all of Kissinger's shameless bottom-kissing, I'd say they operated pretty much as a team (Nixon may have responded well to fawning and flattery, but he and Kissinger each did have a mind of his own). The one to feel sorry for in tht relationship was poor William Rogers at State, who must have felt from time to time like a glorified travel agent In terms of influence, Rogers probably ranks somewhere below FDR's Cordell Hull: FDR did give Hull trade to play with, but the great events he pretty much kept ot himself.

Eisenhower, for his part, never sounded quite at home with the pompous, boorish, hyperactive John Foster Dulles-but Dulles was one of those people too powerful to fire: Eisenhower seemed more to endure his secretary than to work with him in any real spirit of cooperation. The case of Truman and Acheson is particularly interesting. At first blush, it looks like a true partnership (on the model of Nixon and Kissinger?). But on closer scrutiny, it appears that Truman, for all his virtues, was pretty much out of his depth in foreign affairs and seems to have accepted and appreciated the guidance of his far more experienced aide.

And so forth. For Obama, one important cautionary example would be Jimmy Carter. As Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance took a somewhat conciliatory line towards the Soviets. Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took a much harder line. The result was not a creative frisson: the result was a good deal of uncertainty about where America really stood on the issue of the Soviet Union, adding another component to the general perception that our government was tentative or ambivalent of just generally lost in the woods.

In Hillary Clinton, Obama has a secretary with the independence of a Dulles, and who surely aspires to the range of a Kissinger (or, as she might prefer to see it, an Acheson). In Carter/Vance/Brzezinski, Obama has the example of personalities not nearly so formidable, under the aegis of a President who would not or somehow did not succeed in controlling or containing them. Not an example that he would want to follow, or that any of us would want him to.