Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Do Americans expect too much from their Presidents? And what makes a great commander in chief?
Margaret Warner explores those questions with the author of a new book.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Aaron David Miller is known for his decades of work on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East in four administrations. But now he’s returned to his training in American history with a new book, “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.”
He argues there have only been three truly great Presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, and that Americans should stop searching for another one.
We spoke about this at Mount Vernon, home of George Washington.
Aaron Miller, thanks for joining us.
AARON DAVID MILLER, Author, “The End of Greatness”: Pleasure, Margaret.
MARGARET WARNER: You write in this book that Americans, we Americans need to get over our obsession — you actually call it an addiction — in seeking out, also searching for a great President. Why not? Why not the best?
AARON DAVID MILLER: Well, you could search, but what if you search — and it be ennobling — what if you search for something you cannot have? That’s the predicament that we’re in.
We have created a sense of expectation in a job that’s already, some would argue, impossible. Let’s just say it’s implausible, given the nature, the complexity of the presidency, the terrifying contingency about politics, so many factors beyond our control, and yet we want to turn the president into a kind of a combination between Harrison Ford in “Air Force One” and Superman. And the realty is, we can’t have presidents like that anymore.
That’s the real issue. We have to stop pining for the presidents, the great transformative ones, because those are not going to come back, it seems to me, and allow the presidents who we do elect to be good. Stop expecting them to be great, and allow them to be good, in the meaningful sense of the word.
MARGARET WARNER: What did the three greats, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, have that the others didn’t or achieve that the others didn’t?
AARON DAVID MILLER: Transforming a nation encumbering crisis. That defines greatness.
Without crisis — and I’m not talking about marginal crisis or a serious crisis — I’m talking about a crisis that encumbers the nation for a sustained period of time. That is what separates the capacity of the greats, the undeniable greats — I call them the indispensables — Washington, Lincoln and FDR, the three greatest challenges the nation faced produced, fortunately for us, our three greatest presidents.
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