The Importance of an Executive’s Character with Lara Brown & Major Garrett

0:00 [Music] [Music] i really think of leadership as being not just about you sort of being yourself but leadership is about you recognizing what

0:21 those people who are trusting in you need at any one moment and so i really believe that good leaders to a certain extent are also good actors ronald reagan himself said you know i don’t know how you could do this job if you weren’t an actor laura major we’re delighted to have you with us as we attempt today to spend time exploring

0:41 the office of the presidency and inviting students and teachers into a conversation about that office how it relates to the other branches of government and how we relate to that because if those three are the if the executive the judicial and the legislative or the branches the people are the trunk and so we want to talk about how we understand and process that and and what we learned from there

1:03 invite each of you to just start by sharing how you became interested in the presidency and how that has been a part of your career as it has for both of you laura sure i mean i will say that i began really interested in two ideas character and leadership um and what is so interesting

1:24 to me about the office of the presidency is that is really the place within our federal government that those attributes reside and have the most expression i think one of the things that’s so interesting when you think about our government is so many of the roles are to a certain

1:45 extent constrained right they’re constrained by rules and procedures and even though the presidency has sort of large bounds it is also true that a president has more latitude than anyone else in our system for me it’s kind of personal i was born in 1962 i had two cousins who served in

2:06 combat in the vietnam war so when i was about seven or eight that would be 69 1970. i remember packing care packages with my mother to my two cousins fighting in a war in a very distant place and that was kind of about my first understanding that there was a president and a congress that were making decisions about this huge thing

2:28 and i felt involved somehow in that enterprise then let’s just advance six years later it’s 1976 we’re celebrating our bicentennial i’m 14 years old and there’s a long running conversation about what does america mean at age 200. so in the formative years of my life thinking about a career in journalism

2:49 these things were very vivid very personal and on my doorstep every day and that thing that was on the doorstep was a newspaper and my greatest ambition as a child was to maybe someday figure out if i could be in a newspaper as a writer maybe maybe someday get to washington and observe and report for the country these

3:09 very things that arrived on my doorstep as a child laura as a scholar you’ve studied the the office from a standpoint of a political scientist can you give us a portrait of the boundaries and the capabilities of that office as they may be designed and as they might be conceived of on paper and then major i’d love to hear you describe how does that

3:31 really work out when when it goes hot so i think what is so interesting is that when we think about the presidency is that it’s changed so much it really was an office that was designed by the framers to essentially restrain uh an individual they were

3:53 sought they were there to lead but really to execute what it was that congress did in other words their job was in some ways more administrative it was more symbolic it was also um kind of bounded around the idea of the negative so when we think about a veto really what that is

4:15 about is a president saying i don’t want congress to do something congress loves to say presidents propose but congress disposes congress has the ultimate power and there are a couple of enormous powers in congress’s hands that the president can never take away or encroach upon power to tax power to spend and if the president negotiates a treaty

4:36 a power to say yes or no to that treaty these are deeply imbued and invested powers in congress and i’ve watched that clash play out and laura writes beautifully about the character aspects that presidents have brought to that office we’re going to switch roles here ever so slightly i’m going to talk about some larger contextual issues i believe we should think about historically as the

4:57 presidency has evolved so one of the times when presidential powers were really scrutinized with the civil war what did lincoln do with these presidential powers that was because of a structural challenge by the original sin of slavery and a war fought to resolve that issue once and for all the next great great challenge that’s a structural challenge to the powers of the presidency the next great challenge to the powers the

5:18 presidency where they were redefined was economic great depression and we had an activist president with an activist congress that redefined constitutional interpretation of what the powers of the federal government were because of an economic crisis then we had a scientific change to the presidency that’s the nuclear age and the cold war and all

5:39 of the presidential powers that grew as a result of the cold war were about this great threat and the president was invested with the idea that you have to watch this threat and maybe act in ways that a previous president wouldn’t because the threat was so large the last one that changed the attitude about powers of presidency from my perspective

5:59 is the ideological one of a global jihad meaning terrorism around the world all the time and after 9 11 we heard this phrase pop up every now and again the constitution is not a suicide pact we are not going to adhere to all these niceties of the constitution if there is something that is so threatening to this country and its sense of peace and

6:19 tranquility that we’re going to abide by these rules and not fight this terroristic enemy i think those are the four big places in which presidencies and the country observing it have watched power shift and more often than not than not in the president’s direction but let me also switching these roles note that with every one of those

6:41 changes came major changes within the media i mean i think one of the things that’s so interesting is that how presidents are covered really significantly changes that proximity to the public and the amount at which presidents feel they need to be in front of the issues and before the

7:03 congress so what if we go back to the beginning of all this when technology at least as we understand it was the printing press and that was sort of it we’re talking today in the society of the cincinnati which is which was born out of washington’s officer corps as we got to the end of the revolution and washington had a couple of precedent setting

7:24 things that he chose to do one of them was to reinforce the separation of the military from the civilian authority and that’s in part what this institution i think is is kind of a memorial to in so many important ways but he was precedent setting in a lot of others laura how did he understand his boundaries and what role did he play in

7:46 setting them well certainly president washington knew that almost everything he did would be seen as a precedent so he was very aware of etiquette from kind of whether he would be balancing his riding in an ornate coach versus walking in the streets with big boots to

8:07 represent his sense of commonality with the people he also really eschewed his relationship to the military when he was president because he wanted to reinforce the idea that civilians are in charge of the military so there was

8:27 even some controversy around the society of the cincinnati and his desire to kind of be a part but also be somewhat distant from it in the early days washington chose to serve only two terms that wasn’t that was a self-imposed limitation and i think he’s he’s interesting because

8:48 more than anybody else he he had a say in all of the limits that were set upon the presidency nobody else has had quite that say since but where do where does that stand now major as you look at the last couple of decades you’ve been witness to so many contests and conversations about this how how does all that trace back and and how do you see it moving

9:09 so presidents that i’ve covered have struggled with this question of what are my powers how can i best exercise them what if congress simply is immovable not resistant but immovable and i’ve covered presidents who’ve basically come to the presidency and say well look

9:32 because i’m here now congress won’t be immovable they might be resistant but we’ll work it out and to some degree they’ve succeeded but in other times they’ve been completely frustrated among my most vivid memories of that is president obama dealing with question of immigration he really believed that congress could be movable on the question of large structural reform to america’s

9:52 immigration system a big update and the negotiations went on and on and he kept investing and spending money on border enforcement border enforcement some in his party began to call him the deporter in chief some progressives who were deeply aggrieved by how much he was leaning into sort of the enforcement side of the question on immigration and i know from

10:15 talking to those very close to president obama that was a concerted policy maneuver to deal with a political issue demonstrate his seriousness so resistant republicans would come around former president clinton did that in a much smaller way i remember paul vagala one of his top advisors talking about

10:35 executive orders stroke of the pen law of the land how great is that george w bush again in the era after 9 11 expanded sometimes secretively sometimes publicly presidential powers either in pursuit of the public good or because they regarded the procedure of going through congress

10:57 a dead end and this reinterpretation of presidential powers is with us right now very recently president biden has decided that there’s a way to interpret existing legislation that allows him to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of college debt in a way that no previous president has seen

11:17 law was there only he sees it this is an application and expression and an expansion of presidential powers and this is very dangerous i’ll just say that this is where we see presidents deciding that their will should be the country’s will and that is different uh sort of in every way from

11:39 what our framers really understood they really believed that congress was article one for a reason it was the branch that was there to represent all of us in our local and state interests when we get to elections and and especially to the results of

11:59 elections many times there’s conversation that students will hear about there having been a mandate secured through this election major could you respond to what what what is a mandate in the in the terms that that you see it and laura i’d like you to expand if you would on how that’s looked historically because i think that’s changed pretty significantly too

12:19 what’s a mandate in public terms as well as constitutional terms i think it’s pretty vague in constitutional terms i think it’s all interpretive i think it’s one grand interpretive dance the president’s put on for the country i’m elected and i’m going to fill in this thing that i call the mandate with all the things i want to put in it

12:40 because i want i’ve earned the right to fill this vessel which i will call the mandate and hold in front of you and call the mandate with all the things i want it to mean and as long as i’m close enough to your acceptance of what i’ve said to you i’m putting in the mandate we’re good if i exceed your expectations or your will to follow then i may lose your

13:03 favor and fall out of favor but mandates are for presidents to decide and they shift you know as major suggested mandates are invented they are claimed by presidents as a justification to help them move forward on issues or ideas that they

13:25 feel are central to their presidency and usually those are expressed in their campaign platforms so they come into office with sort of all of this head of steam about what they are and what that means certainly abraham lincoln had in you know 1863

13:47 issued the emancipation proclamation and knew that he was now redefining if you will his campaign mandate as not just being about the union but being about abolishing slavery um in its forms all across the union and i think

14:08 this is where he you know anticipated that he would actually not win re-election and when he did then i think there was a mandate which moved forward into the constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and provided for african americans to or i should say

14:30 african-american men to be able to vote we’ve talked a lot about constitutional and structural limits that are there how many what kind of limits does the person bring with them themselves laura you’ve written about this a lot let’s let’s talk about what you see there and how you how do you analyze that yeah so

14:51 this is where i think it’s so interesting right because as i just sort of went into presidents do push and pull the system in the ways that they want but it is also the case that all of our presidents up until former president donald trump had had a

15:11 tremendous amount of experience in politics or the military or they had a deep grounding whether it was a law degree or an education within the parties about how democratic politics work and how our institutions of american government are supposed

15:31 to um proceed and i think one of the things that you see that was so incredibly important as you look at this is that past presidents kind of knew where the opportunities existed for them to push into the system without breaking the system

15:51 what has been the reaction around president trump by many of my colleagues has been he didn’t understand those guard rails those norms those kind of unwritten rules of separation of powers and democracy and he only cared about

16:13 his policy ideas or his political wishes and so in many ways i think most of my colleagues would say he attempted to break the system not just transform it or push it in a way that other presidents of other times have

16:33 with the mandate that he thought he had right yes major how do you assess what might be coming in year three for president biden and now we’re talking structurally what’s he going to have to maneuver what’s likely to affect and shape it and then laura if you could draw that line further back into the past i think would be a really interesting

16:54 study in contrast and comparison so the first thing to say is laura has brought a very original thought to considering a presidency much of what i’ve read about presidencies focuses on the first year for all sorts of understandable reasons we have this sort of once in a lifetime benchmark of the

17:15 great depression and the striking policy and political contrast between franklin delano roosevelt and herbert hoover and the first hundred days which as i mentioned a moment ago a lot of that legislation had already been written and drafted so it was very easy to move as quickly as was moved and that hundred days has given us a false sense of expectation about what’s ever that first time boy the hundred

17:36 days are everything no actually they’re not and laura has suggested and i think wisely so that the third year of a presidency is as instructive if not more instructive about what political realities are what’s been learned in the presidency what has been the reaction to their declaration of their mandate how it’s

17:57 been received in congress how it’s been received in the public at large what was the midterm reaction and do you have to recalibrate a presidency after a midterm so let’s go from the hypothetical to what’s actually happened and where we can start to measure the the consequences and effects lord help us understand what why did you why did you even go to year three what caused you to look there so i went

18:19 to year three mostly because when you look back on presidential history the third year seems to be incredibly important in terms of whether or not that president ends up winning reelection or not in other words it is that third year where presidents are coming off the

18:41 midterm they’ve essentially learned how to do the presidency and now their big question is what issues do i want to lay before the country what successes do i want to tout what unfinished business do i want to focus on and how do i want to lay the foundation

19:02 for what will be a fourth year sprint through an election so i think what is so interesting when you really dig into it is that there’s a recalibrating there’s a moment where presidents are saying has what i’ve done thus far been right and good and should i stay

19:23 the course or do i need to make some additional tax or include something that i didn’t and those strategic decisions in the third year i really do believe are not just what then kind of determines whether or not a president is re-elected but they become

19:43 the foundational ideas of their legacy because should they win re-election they then spend their next four years putting into place all of those ideas that were developed in the in the third so laura your work has gone further by saying not only is that third year important

20:04 but there are elements of a president’s character that predict how they’re going to handle a lot of this and you’ve identified three can you describe those elements and how they relate to the president’s role in the constitutional structure why those are important in your assessment yeah so i really think of leadership as being

20:25 not just about you sort of being yourself but leadership is about you recognizing what those people who are trusting in you need at any one moment and so i really believe that good leaders to a certain extent are also good actors um ronald reagan himself

20:47 said you know i don’t know how you could do this job if you weren’t an actor and certainly george washington they didn’t meet residents no he didn’t and certainly george washington saw his job in some way as about acting the part and and this is where you know i make a distinction in my book about

21:08 actors versus celebrities celebrities are about you know promoting themselves all of who they are not bowing to anybody and really just riding off the fame that they enjoy whereas actors are about trying to understand a role they want to inhabit inhabit a character

21:30 that has um a sense of kind of emotional center and is imbued with expectations from the audience and i think one of the things about our best presidents is they understand that so they lead in i would argue three different uh ways one way is what i i call courage

21:51 another way is compassion and another way is curiosity i tend to think of these as the wizard of oz traits if you have all three you will eventually get to the great and all-powerful oz um but really what you need is you need at times to take strong action and that is

22:14 seen as being courageous there are times where you just need to offer sympathy or empathy to those who are suffering and that is an expression of compassion and then there are times when you need to sort of pause you need to take a step back and slow down kind of the public and that is really

22:35 about leading from curiosity where you as a president say things like i think we need to form a commission i think we need to have some experts look into this so there are these different tempos if you will that a good leader picks up from their

22:55 uh the people and really looks to reflect um that back to the people i’ve often said and majors heard me say this that i tend to believe that presidential rhetoric is like the background music for the country it is not something that the public necessarily hears

23:17 but it is something that somehow kind of subconsciously moves them and so it’s very important to set the right tone at the right time in a moment of near maximum peril for the country the cuban missile crisis john f kennedy can’t go to congress really

23:37 and remedy this situation he can maybe have a couple of conversations with some very trusted members of congress but he can’t in 13 days get a solution from 535 as the saying go secretaries of state he also doesn’t know exactly

23:59 what the motives are at the pentagon or the cia because he has lived through a calamitous political and strategic failure early in his presidency the bay of pigs so he is singularly in the office of the presidency facing the greatest nuclear challenge of any president he can’t go to congress and he’s unsure

24:20 of the executive element of his own government not distrustful but unsure and in that precious 13 days and the books and the movie 13 days is a wonderful rendering of this he has to combine lots of instincts character traits curiosity

24:40 courage conviction and he’s got to find a way out of this to pull things back to interpret the motives of the soviets and all of those decisions are in one place in one place only and i dare say sitting in this room

25:00 if the framers could have imagined a proposition like that it would have terrified them at every level and they would have said the system we’re constructing does ask a lot of this occupant and in that crucial moment

25:22 the country had the right occupant the president’s in a presidency is an enormous office as we just described bigger than any one person can ever really wrap their arms around you can’t understand everything you end up having to think about stuff you never thought you’d have to think about in your life but at the end it’s still one person inhabiting that what’s that like for

25:43 them so i don’t know what it’s like because i’ve never been president i’ve never aspired to that office but i’ve been somewhat close enough to it to get a sense in particularly difficult moments the most difficult moment of my life covering the american president was 9 11. i was in sarasota florida with

26:04 george w bush i wasn’t in the classroom that people see in that memorable video i was in the adjacent classroom very select group of pool reporters were in the classroom i was in the classroom next door but as i’ve often told people everyone who was close to the president that day was available to me in that

26:25 adjacent room and of course i was not the only reporter hounding them for any information they had about what this was what we were going to do how bad was it going to be those were like the three biggies all of them in that moment unanswerable so i’d like to explain it this way

26:46 every day the american president sits atop a pyramid of information a vast pyramid of information that only the president has access to accumulated by the pentagon cia and state department nsa and lots of other appendages of our

27:07 government funneling information this vast pyramid upon which the president sits and that information is dissected and prepared for the president and thought about distilled and decisions are made in that moment of 9 11 that pyramid went like this and our president

27:29 and i believe any president meaning if it had been al gore george w george w bush or ralph nader would have been on that same flattened pyramid and with the pyramids like this the distance between what i know and what every american citizen knows and what the president knows is very large

27:49 but that morning we all knew just about the same which wasn’t much and you can see that on the president’s face and you can see it in his demeanor as the day progresses he’s trying to get up to speed he is trying to summon the government and this vast array of

28:11 capabilities to give him something more to work with but in those early moments he looks just like us now some people criticize him for that oh he doesn’t know what to do honestly would you have known what to do he was very close to us probably closer than any president has

28:31 emotionally in my lifetime and that is a reminder constantly to me that there are moments in which a presidency can be very close to us and when a president of any of any party uh plays what we have now come to regard as

28:51 the really important consoling part of this job it’s not historically been a part of the job but it is now you have to hold people you have to embrace them you have to do so repeatedly and you have to do so on camera whether you’re comfortable or they’re comfortable you have to wrap the presidency’s arms

29:14 around suffering americans that’s another part of the job that does bring that sense of touch ability and approachability closer to home and presidents have to figure out a way to do that and kind of create some emotional space that the public can hold on to

29:36 so they don’t they’re out of touch they’re indifferent they’re high and mighty all bad bad places for a president to be so in those two respects i think i have witnessed and seen how this humanity part of the presidency has become a bit more visible

29:56 you have a anecdote or a story that really captures that for you lauren you know i i actually think about it more in the ways in which they try to elevate themselves as opposed to kind of bring themselves into the same level with the american public

30:16 i mean you can see this almost every year right whether it’s the state of the union or an inaugural address presidents are working very hard to wrap themselves in the code that is the presidency and say follow me you can trust me i am here to

30:37 you know help you realize your interests and desires so i’m also very interested in not just how they maybe are just like the rest of us but in fact work exceedingly hard to also be more than the best of us

30:57 what do you hope a student can learn the and understand so that they can really participate in our country system they can understand the presidency and make wise choices when it’s their turn to go into the ballot box so i think the most difficult thing about the presidency

31:18 is actually understanding how attached to the political parties it has become so in the beginning the framers actually imagined the electoral college would be something of a nominating process in and of itself the electors who were meeting in the various states would propose individuals

31:39 who would be worthy of the presidency that then would lead to a decision rendered by the house of representatives among the top three or four people as our country has evolved and the political parties have sort of secured the methods of election

32:02 the biggest problem we have now is that at the end of the day anyone can be president but they can only be president if they win the nomination of one of the two major political parties and those are uh duke professor john aldrich’s words not mine but they are incredibly important

32:23 because what it means is that for our presidency to really i think animate the country and be the leader that we need we actually need them to rise above political party but the political parties have so taken over the nomination process

32:44 that there is now sort of almost no way for just your average citizen to participate unless they get in early and support candidates who are not just pandering but actually have larger visions uh beyond their party interests

33:04 we set out to do something that at the time was revolutionary not revolutionary enough lots of people were excluded from our definition of freedom at our inception no question but that definition still was broader and more radical than any place else in the world again not close

33:26 and that expression created tension about that definition and we have lived with that tension and enlarged that definition step by step not always peacefully sometimes very painfully but we’ve enlarged it

33:46 that’s part of the experiment and i would say to any student as you think about politics in our country just ask yourself one question what is my level of satisfaction and what is my level of participation and i just invite you to lean into participation as you weigh your satisfaction

34:07 major laura thank you for spending the time with us explaining what you’ve shared and helping us understand things that you’ve spent lifetimes as you can tell we kind of like it seems like it so thank you very much