WRITTEN BY JOSEPH LOCONTE
Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy, where he writes widely about the role of religion in promoting democracy, human rights, and social justice. He is the editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm."
The American presidency has been described as the most powerful political office in the world. Perhaps in no other Western democracy does the position of president occupy the singularly important role that it does in the United States. The head of the Executive Branch of government, defender of the Constitution, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces—the American president assumes all of these roles and more. He serves as the living symbol of the nation’s democratic values. Though easily overlooked, some of America’s most beloved presidents have been men of deep religious conviction. They have shaped not only the national character, but also America’s image and influence before a watching world.
George Washington and the Character
of the Republic
More than any other national leader,
George Washington embodied the American ideal of republican government: a government of
free people that could only be sustained by moral virtue and the willing consent of the
governed. When a group of disaffected soldiers threatened civil disobedience, for
example, Washington won them over with these words: “In the name of your common
Country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and
as you regard the Military and National character of America,” do not “open
the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in blood.”[1] After
assuming office, members of the Newport Hebrew Congregation wrote to congratulate
Washington. His response articulated the American principle of religious liberty with
exceptional power. He reminded the Jewish assembly that the government of the
United States “gives bigotry no sanction” and offered them this wish:
“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to
merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants…while everyone shall sit in
safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him
afraid.”[2] After
a brilliant military career that helped secure Independence, Washington could have been
named King of America—and some hoped to make him so. But he would have none of it.
He resigned his military commission, ran for president, and refused to serve more than
two elected terms. “We now have a national character to establish,” he said,
“and it is of the utmost importance to stamp favorable impressions upon it.”
Though not without his faults, Washington raised a standard of presidential character
that remains the American democratic ideal.
Abraham Lincoln: Ending the Scourge
of Slavery
A visit to the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C. suggests something of the resolve, the solemnity, the grandeur, and the
moral seriousness of Abraham Lincoln, the president who freed America’s slaves. No
leader believed more deeply in the universal appeal of American democracy, what he called
“the last best hope of earth.” At the same time, no president faced the moral
failings of the United States with greater sobriety (he issued numerous calls for
“public humiliation, prayer, and fasting” and inaugurated the first day of
national thanksgiving). Lincoln came to despise America’s besetting
sin—slavery—both for its innate cruelty and its destructive influence on the
national character. “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its
just influence in the world—and enables the enemies of free institutions, with
plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—cause the real friends of freedom to doubt
our sincerity.”[3] Yet
the abolition of slavery came at a terrible cost: a civil war that took the lives of
600,000 Americans. Lincoln led the nation through four of the bloodiest years in its
history. Mindful of the hand of Providence and “the judgments of the
Almighty,” he nevertheless opted for mercy and clemency for the defeated Southern
Army. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as
God gives us to see the right,” he implored, Americans must join together to
“bind up the nations wounds” to achieve a “just and lasting peace,
among ourselves, and with all nations.” Sometimes called “the redeemer
president,” Lincoln simultaneously sustained a profound sense of divine justice and
spiritual humility—and employed it to preserve America’s experiment in
democratic freedom.
Theodore Roosevelt and the Fight for
Social Justice
Perhaps best known for his foreign
policy aphorism—“speak softly and carry a big stick”—Theodore
Roosevelt believed firmly in the principle of peace through strength. “We
infinitely desire peace,” he said, “and the surest way of obtaining it is to
show we are not afraid of war.” Despite his tough rhetoric, though, Roosevelt
proved to be a skillful negotiator. He helped resolve the Russo-Japanese War (for which
he received the first Nobel Prize awarded to an American), a conflict over Morocco, and
several clashes in Central America. During his administration, Roosevelt improved
relations with Great Britain, began construction of the Panama Canal and “pursued
as enlightened a policy in the Philippines as America’s imperialist assumptions
allowed.” Other assumptions, however, would be scrapped—including, for
example, the idea of an industrialized society that treated citizens as fodder for
corporate greed. “Nine-tenths of my fighting,” he wrote, “has been
against men of enormous wealth, and their henchmen.” And fight them he did: He
passed a food and drug law, curbed child labor, improved wages and working conditions,
and championed workers’ compensation laws. Behind his Progressive agenda was a
religious ideal: the application of “uncorrupted Christianity” and the Golden
Rule to domestic life. Roosevelt brought the same moral zeal to counter the rapacious
exploitation of natural resources by private industry. An avid hunter and
conservationist, he emerged as America’s first environmentalist president. His
Reclamation Act of 1902 funded dozens of projects to prevent the destruction of soil,
forests and wildlife. He established five national parks and set aside millions of acres
of public land. After leaving office, Roosevelt called conservation a “great moral
issue” that helped ensure “the health and continuance of the
nation.”[4]
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
‘Arsenal of Democracy’
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became
president in 1933, the nation was in the throes of the worst economic crisis of its
history, the Great Depression. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed, banks were in
freefall, and millions of people were cast into poverty and homelessness. Amid this chaos
FDR created the New Deal—a vast expansion of government involvement in the economy
to address social needs. With a Democratic Congress behind him, Roosevelt established a
myriad of federal programs and agencies, from the Works Progress Administration to the
Social Security Act. His policies not only transformed the Democratic Party, but
permanently redefined the role of government vs. the private sector in the provision of
social welfare. 1933 also was the year that Adolf Hitler rose to power in Nazi Germany.
While Germany was rearming, the United States was slashing its military budget. FDR
signed the 1935-36 Neutrality Acts, which cut off American aid to either side in a
European war. In a 1936 re-election speech, Roosevelt reflected the isolationist mood
when he vowed to keep the United States out of another European war: “We shun
political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connection with
the political activities of the League of Nations…We are not isolationist except
in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.” It would take the
Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to prompt Roosevelt to declare war on
the Axis Powers and implement a radical war-time economy. Once fully engaged, the
American president became a tenacious and morally charged Commander-in-Chief. “We
are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills,” he said.
“There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between
good and evil.” By the time Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term as president,
he had forged a close friendship with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The
“special relationship” between the United States and Great
Britain—based on their shared military sacrifice and democratic values—proved
to be decisive in defeating the Axis states and rescuing Europe from the tyranny of
fascism.
John F. Kennedy and the Burden of
Freedom
Though John F.
Kennedy is considered an icon of political liberalism, the hawkishness of his foreign
policy—with its robust democracy agenda—would draw the ire of most
contemporary U.S. Democratic leaders and British Labour Party MPs. In his inaugural
address of January 1961, he affirmed the Jeffersonian belief that the “the rights
of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God." He vowed,
not only to Americans, but to the world community, that “we shall pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to
assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Kennedy meant business. His
first interventionist scheme on behalf of democracy—the plan to help Cuban exiles
overthrow communist dictator Fidel Castro—ended in failure and disgrace.
Evidently emboldened by American weakness, the Soviet Union secretly began construction
of a ballistic missile site in Cuba. Its discovery, and Kennedy’s decision to order
a naval blockade of the island, brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the
brink of nuclear war. Proclaiming his opposition to the spread of Communism, Kennedy
stepped up political, economic, and military support for South Vietnam against the North
Vietnamese regime of Ho Chi Minh. Under Kennedy’s watch, the number of U.S.
military serving in the conflict jumped from 1,800 to over 16,000, setting the stage for
the most divisive foreign war in American history. In June of 1963 JFK visited West
Berlin and used the construction of the Berlin Wall—separating the communist East
from the Democratic West—to excoriate Soviet Communism. “Freedom has many difficulties and
democracy is not perfect,” he
said, “but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in." Kennedy also
believed strongly in the use of American “soft power,” and created the
Peace Corps, an international
volunteer program that sends Americans into underdeveloped nations to promote education,
agriculture, health care, and other initiatives. Worried about the influence of
communism in South America, he also launched the Alliance for Progress to promote
economic development, trade, and human rights. “Let us once again awaken our American revolution,” he said, “until it guides the struggles of people everywhere—not with an imperialism of force or fear but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man.” Though JFK was felled by an assassin’s bullet in November of 1963, much of his democratic idealism continues to inspire the Party faithful.
Ronald
Reagan and the End of the Cold War
Barely three
months after Ronald Reagan took office as president in January of 1980, he was shot by a
would-be assassin outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The bullet
pierced his lung, missing his heart by less than an inch. While in the operating room,
Reagan quipped to his surgeons: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”
One of them replied: “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”
This was Reagan in character—a leader who not only possessed a core set of
political beliefs, but also a sense of decency and humor that disarmed his critics. It is
easy to forget, though, how deeply unpopular Reagan was among the liberal establishment
of his day, at home and abroad. His tax cuts and “supply side” economics
incensed defenders of big-government and an ever-expanding welfare state. His support for
democracy movements worldwide unleashed the scorn of the political left. His description
of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” was denounced as “crude”
and “moralistic.” His massive military build-up stoked fears of a nuclear
conflagration. In each case, the force of elite opinion—and the drift of recent
history—was against him. “What I am describing now,” he told
Britain’s House of Commons, “is a plan and a hope for the long term—the
march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of
history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the
self-expression of the people.” The speech got decidedly mixed reviews. Yet Ronald
Reagan, the tenacious one-time lifeguard from Tampico, Illinois refused to back down. His
tax cuts helped jump-start the American economy and create 20 million jobs. His moral
assessment of the Soviet Union gave hope to thousands of dissidents. The deployment of
Pershing II and Tomahawk missiles in Europe—amid fiery protests involving millions
of people in capitals across the continent—checked the expansion of Soviet power.
Meanwhile, Reagan’s commitment to a missile defense shield, dubbed “Star
Wars,” helped drive the Soviet Union to economic ruin. Though alternately chided as
a “warmonger,” a “washed-up actor,” or a “happy
dunce,” Reagan advanced a foreign policy doctrine of confronting Soviet aggression
that proved immensely prescient and effective. His approach to negotiations with Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev—“trust but verify”—reduced the risk of
nuclear war by reducing the means of waging war. Reagan rejected the conventional wisdom
that a nation’s behavior, and not its political ideology, mattered most. “Our
military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this
strength in the hope it will never be used,” he said, “for the ultimate
determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and
rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold,
the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.” Three years after
Ronald Reagan left office, the collapse of the Soviet empire was complete.
George W.
Bush and the War on Terror
During the
2000 presidential campaign, Republican nominee George W. Bush criticized the foreign
policy failures of the Clinton White House by declaring that his administration was not
interested in “nation-building.” For the first eight months of his first term
in office, Bush kept his promise. He launched an ambitious domestic agenda, including
education reform and a massive tax cut. He created a “faith-based initiative”
to forge partnerships between government and church-based charities helping the poor.
With the end of the Cold War and shrinking U.S. military expenditures, president Bush
advanced no bold, new vision for American leadership in the world. Then came the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed 3,000 Americans, most of them
civilians. Within weeks Bush ordered a U.S-led assault on Afghanistan, the safe harbor
for the masterminds of 9/11. “In a second world war, we learned there is no
isolation from evil,” Bush told the U.N. General Assembly. “We affirmed that
some crimes are so terrible they offend humanity itself. And we resolved that the
aggressions and ambitions of the wicked must be opposed early, decisively, and
collectively, before they threaten us all. That evil has returned, and that cause is
renewed.”[5] In
January of 2002, in his State of the Union address, Bush described an “axis
of evil”—a nexus of rogue regimes, Islamic terrorists, and weapons of mass
destruction—that threatened the foundations of civilization itself. “I will
not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and
closer,” he said. “The United States of America will not permit the
world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most
destructive weapons.” Thus the emergence of the Bush doctrine: The United States
was engaged in a “war on terror” and must act “pre-emptively” to
thwart a catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. The new doctrine provided
the major rationale for the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. The failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, however, sparked the most acrimonious debate over
U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam war. The Bush doctrine also involves the promotion
of democracy abroad, a staple of U.S. foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War.
Yet here as well the Bush doctrine has proved controversial. It is the Middle East, he
insists, that most desperately needs democratizing. “Sixty years of Western nations
excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us
safe,” he told a Washington audience in November of 2003. “As long as the
Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of
stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”[6] The
Bush administration arguably has taken on the task of nation-building with a vengeance.
This is true not only of America’s ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but
also—perhaps most surprisingly—in Africa. Bush’s unprecedented $15
billion HIV/AIDS initiative targets mostly African states ravaged by the disease. In
addition to his humanitarian argument for ramping up the U.S. commitment to fight the
pandemic, Bush cites the problem of “failed states” as breeding grounds for
terrorism. The impact of the Bush doctrine on international peace and security remains
hotly debated. Nevertheless, the president’s AIDS initiative already is considered
the most principled, generous, and strategic commitment to the African continent of any
Western leader—and must surely figure into any estimation of his legacy.
Further
Reading
W.B. Allen, George Washington: A
Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988)
Fred Barnes, Rebel in Chief: Inside
the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (Crown Forum,
2006).
Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life
of Purpose and Power.
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life:
John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003).
Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader (New York: The Free Press,
1997).
Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
Robert G. Kaufman, In Defense of the
Bush Doctrine (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky,
2007)
Doris Goodwin Kearns, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Forrest McDonald, The American
Presidency: An Intellectual History (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
1997)
Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An
Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2004)
Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore
Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2001)
John O’Sullivan, The President,
the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Washington, D.C: Regnery Publishing Incorporated,
2008)
Thomas G. West, Vindicating the
Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997)
Useful Links
http://www.presidentsusa.net/bio.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/
http://www.fdrlibrary.com/
http://www.jfklibrary.org/
http://www.reaganlibrary.com/
http://www.reagansheritage.org/
[1] Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Discovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 44)
[2] William J. Bennett, Our Sacred Honor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 330-331.
[3] Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), p. 189.
[4] Gary Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 146-147, 154-155.
[5] Remarks by the President to the United Nations General Assembly, U.N. Headquarters, New York, November 10, 2001.
[6] Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2003.
