Noted historian of American Presidents James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have written a book entitled The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America. They also wrote an article for the LA Times which I found in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. While they say nothing about our current President that Frog Ponders don’t already know, they do an interesting comparison between Bush and FDR.
They contrast the openess of FDR in bringing people with a wide diversity of opinions and perspectives and political party affiliations to serve on his Cabinet, and Bush’s secrecy and a Cabinet of clones.
They contrast the vibrancy of FDR’s Cabinet meetings with the brevity and ideological tone of Bush’s.
On the one hand,
Roosevelt believed in strong, collective leadership. His Cabinet was broad and inclusive. Relishing experimentation and the lively competition of ideas, he took talent where he could find it. His secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, and his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, were progressive Republicans, and Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor, was an Independent. His secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and his secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, were Republicans — he even chose Republican Harlan Fiske Stone as chief justice in 1941.
On the other,
Recent presidencies have seen the Cabinet decline as a vehicle for collective leadership, but under Bush it has reached its nadir because the president prizes above all ideological uniformity. Cabinet meetings are reported to be brief and perfunctory, with no deep discussions or exploration of alternative policies.
They describe a more disturbing quality of the Bush Presidency is the reduction of even his truncated and passive Cabinet to an even smaller “Kitchen Cabinet” made up only of Dick Cheney.
But Bush’s Kitchen Cabinet is rather odd. It has only one member, Vice President Dick Cheney, backed up by hard-core conservative White House staffers, working in secrecy. With little question, Cheney is the most powerful vice president in our history. He controls a staff of true believers, issues his own ideological pronunciamentos and maintains his own alliances with key conservatives in Congress. White House watchers speculate that, behind the scenes, Cheney directs policy.
And they conclude,
The Bush-Cheney presidency — shaped and led by ideologues who have rejected the creative, collective leadership that might be supplied by a vibrant, diverse Cabinet — has immobilized itself in its own narrowness and extremism. The test of leadership is not simply calling oneself “the decider.” The test is whether leaders can mobilize followers who will sustain them in the tough decisions that lie ahead.
All of this is a nice academic way to say what I would rather put a little more crassly. We are being led by a petulant little rich boy who, if we won’t let him be “the decider” and we don’t play his way, he’ll just go home and tell Daddy. The only saving grace of this little fascist may be that he is just so fucking incompent.
Here’s a link to the article.
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1306202.html
