Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia, two of my favorite actors, made a movie last year titled “Hero.” It was terrific. I loved it. And it was a flop. Given the spirit of the times, if they had called it “Bum,” I’m sure it would have been a smash.
These days, heroes sink beneath the waves and bob up again, bigger than ever, only as anti-heroes. Look at Charles and Di, or Burt and Loni: They’ve been dragged through the mud and arrived at a second, much sleazier, level of fame.
We’ve done a complete 180 since it all started in the 1960s. The student upheavals and the Vietnam War set the stage for no-holds-barred journalism. Watergate set us free. Before then, the media would not report an utterance by a public figure more ferocious than “hell.” Now, we not only are told the emperor has no clothes, but hey, wait until you hear why he isn’t wearing them and whom he’s not wearing them with.
I think the pendulum has swung too far. We’re too tough on our leaders. It’s hard to name a single national figure-in sports, politics, entertainment or religion-who has escaped the pitiless gaze of public scrutiny and come out of it looking good. OK, so no role model is perfect. But we still need them.
As long as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Schmidt and Mikhail Gorbachev were given larger-than-life treatment, they succeeded in getting their programs passed. The more we saw of them, warts and all, the more their influence waned and the weaker they became. The longer they were in office and the more experience they gained, the better equipped they were to deal with the problems they faced. But by that time, the relentless pounding they were subjected to every day eroded their ability to lead.
Being president of the United States is the toughest job there is. Try this scenario: You travel to Japan-a 20-hour flight-in order to bang antlers with half a dozen other heads of state to try to negotiate a policy to deal with a continuing negative balance of trade. Then you fly back immediately to the U.S., interrupting a break in Hawaii because it would look bad politically to be splashing in the surf while your fellow citizens’ homes were being washed away by floods in the Midwest. Then the Bosnian crisis flares, challenging your role as the leader of the world’s remaining superpower. While you’re trying to contain that firestorm, another Middle East conflict breaks out in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, threatening to escalate into a full-scale war. While Bosnians, Serbs, Lebanese, Syrians and Israelis press their claims on you as the acknowledged leader of the free world, the legislation that will determine the fate of your economic program teeters on the brink of failure in Congress. Meanwhile, back in the private quarters of the White House, your wife awaits you after a hard day at the office. She has a $90 billion package for health-care reform she would like to discuss with you . . . and when she’s through, the secretary of the treasury and the budget director want to stop by and brief you on the budget wars. They’ll be by around midnight.
And that is just an average week.
Now, if in the course of that average week, you should happen to get irritated at a reporter, make a stupid joke, have a sweaty lip, glance at your watch at the wrong time or look kind of pudgy, then all the week’s carefully managed decisions matter for naught, and you can expect to hunker down for a few days or weeks of damage control while the shells burst around you.
Don’t worry. If a president can handle this and thrive, so can you. If you run a company, manage a plant, supervise an office or train a platoon of 17-year-old Army recruits, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. That’s the price of leadership. It’s too high a price, but thankfully, there are people willing to pay it.
———-
Mackay’s Moral: No one ever kicks a dead dog.
