“I Could (and Should) Be President”
The end of Donald Trump’s term as president is, finally, at hand. And with it, the incessant assessments, revelations, speechifying, expressions of horror and mockery are, if nothing else, entering a new phase. One question in the aftermath: What is it that makes anyone believe they have presidential potential?
As it happens, I have observed and/or worked with seven men who thought they could or should be president of the United States. And four of them actually got the job — Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The other three were Walter Mondale, Richard Gephardt and Wesley Clark, all of whom were considered serious contenders for the presidency until, for one reason or another, they were not.
I knew them from various distances, in the case of Mondale as the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post. Dick Gephardt, a leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives from Missouri who served from 1977 to 2005 published his campaign book An Even Better Place with me when he contended for the nomination in 2004. And I published two books by General Wesley Clark which made him a brief frontrunner in 2004.
I eventually published five books with Carter, two with Clinton, one with Obama and two with Trump, long before he was elected.
I am certainly not qualified to render judgment on these men’s motivation to becomes the most powerful person in the world. But I can report what I saw and thought watching them.
My experience with Mondale was in the mid-1970s before he was Carter’s vice president and a candidate against Ronald Reagan in 1984. I have described the experience elsewhere when Senator Mondale visited the Soviet Union in 1974 and I attached myself to him in Moscow and Leningrad. In short, I wrote a piece saying that he had embarrassed himself on that trip by hedging his instincts to meet with dissidents, hoping for a session with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. I have been told and believe that when Mondale read the piece which was more critical on the page than I had intended, he withdrew from the race, telling himself: “Fritz, you’re not ready…”
I first encountered Gephardt in Richard Ben-Cramer’s masterful account of the 1988 presidential contest called What It Takes. It can be safely said that Gephardt was one of the less colorful figures in his era in politics. He was known as the man who was so white you couldn’t see his eyebrows. The power of Cramer’s portrait came through to me one night when my wife, Susan, reading the book turned to me and said, “Oh it’s so sad, Gephardt just dropped out…”
Then in 2003, Gephardt decided to make another effort at the nomination, and I was approached about publishing his campaign bio and manifesto. I visited his tidy rowhouse in a Virginia development. He was much in keeping with his reputation, thoughtful, earnest, intelligent and, well, bland. I travelled with him and saw how in an airport lounge in Detroit, he took off his jacket, loosened his tie and called a list of people asking for money.
Gephardt gave up early, leaving PublicAffairs with thousands of unsold copies of the book. Our publicity director at the time, Gene Taft, regaled our colleagues with the story of me on the phone with a Gephardt aide telling him that unless he bought the copies it would end up on remainder tables, complete with family photos and a mushy dedication, for around a dollar. We did unload some books.
Wesley Clark was the U.S. Supreme Commander of NATO and led the air offensive in 1999 that was a bloodless (for Americans) victory in Kosovo. He was a celebrity general. His agent, the estimable Mort Janklow, said he wanted to write a book about leadership. Instead, we devised a book called Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat.
Clark’s handsome presence and fresh persona, effective use of the media and the search for a viable candidate against President George W. Bush in 2004 launched Clark as a possible nominee. He authored a second book Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire, made it to news magazine covers, hired an expert team (led by my college roommate and beloved friend, Eli Segal). No need here to explain why the effort sputtered. The simple reason was that for all his intelligence and charm, he was not supple as a politician.
Clearly an exemplary military man, but more ambitious to be president, than qualified.
I came to know Carter in his post-presidency. He had returned to Plains, Georgia, a diminished figure. But Jimmy Carter had amazing inner strength. And over time, he restored his reputation and became known as the best ex-president in history. I can vouch for Carter’s genuine personal style. I sat at his kitchen table at meals preceded by grace and served by a housekeeper in a sweatshirt. I watched the evening news with Jimmy and Rosalynn (they’ve been married for 74 years) on a television in their bedroom.
In Atlanta, at their small apartment in the early years of the Carter Center, they used a murphy bed tucked into the wall.
My experience with Clinton, publishing his 1992 campaign manifesto Putting People First which was a national bestseller and a 1996 campaign book called Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century which enabled me first-hand to see his charisma. At a White House meeting in the spring of that year, he arrived in his tracksuit: young, vigorous, engaged. (He took a call in the middle about a development in the Justice Department’s Whitewater probe and immediately turned back to us.) The book was shallow, and its sales were disappointing. To me the benefit was access to this quintessential figure of my generation.
I only had one hour-long meeting with Barack Obama in 1994. He was starting out in Chicago and had missed his deadline for a memoir with Simon & Schuster. I was offered the chance to do the book when finished so he could pay back the $40,000 he owed to S&S.
We published that book Dreams from My Father in 1995 and a decade later, it was reissued and became one of the most acclaimed pieces of writing by a future president ever. I take some satisfaction in recognizing at that single session that Barack Obama had extraordinary calm dignity yet was clearly ready to be bold. I was not altogether surprised by his great success in politics and by his ability, in my opinion to be one of our best presidents.
(No need to deal with Trump here. I’ve done that in Editing Donald Trump and Once More with Feeling: DJT.)
So, what does it take to want to be president? An impossible question but certainly this is one requirement: an abiding self-confidence to the point of a messianic belief in oneself. Is that a positive human trait?
Sometimes.
