Leadership and Kamala Harris

The “secrets” of good leadership are pretty open and simple. You maintain a system of good principles and values that don’t change. You apply them to resolve disputes and problems and improve the lives of your people. When the facts change—or when you learn facts that you didn’t previously know—you change your approach, but not your principles. And when you make a mistake, as all humans do, you ’fess up, correct the mistakes as much as you can, and move on.

In theory, that’s not hard, is it? But human nature makes it hard. In a democracy, “winning” requires convincing the people, even at times when the right course of action is difficult or unclear. Sometimes it’s easier just to delude and deceive the people, or to incite and follow their raw emotions, rather than lead them.

In my 79 years, American presidents of both parties have given us examples of good, bad, superb and abysmal leadership. Let’s take a few salient ones.

Republican Dwight David Eisenhower (“Ike”) was both a great general and a great president. As Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, he led the greatest seaborne invasion in human history, on “D-Day” at Normandy, France. He made the invasion easier by ordering a fake force of rubber tanks and planes on fields in Southern England, directed at Calais, not Normandy.

That may have been the most successful military feint since the Trojan Horse. And it was the beginning of the end of the Nazis’ evil empire and the Holocaust.

When Nasser’s Egypt seized the Suez Canal in 1956, England, France and Israel began to take it back by force, and the Soviet Union started rattling its saber. As President, Ike solved the problem by putting the Suez Canal—still today one of the world’s most important commercial arteries—under UN Control. In the process, he began advancing an “international order” of rules, principles and institutions that has lasted 68 years. It’s just breaking down today.

Ike sent federal troops to the South to enforce the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate schools. He also built the Interstate Highway System and chewed out the anti-Communist demagogue Joe (NOT Gene) McCarthy, but unfortunately only in private. And, on his way out, he warned us all about the military industrial complex, which today is busy churning out, for private profit, hideously expensive big planes and ships that are sitting ducks for today’s AI-enhanced drones.

Ike’s Democratic successor John Fitzgerald Kennedy (“JFK”) was an inspiring and resourceful leader. In his inaugural address, his told us all to pull together for the common good. “Ask not,” he told us, “what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” He created the Peace Corps to spread American values abroad. And when the Soviet Union threatened us by staging medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, potentially putting our entire Eastern Seaboard within fifteen minutes of nuclear annihilation, JFK got the missiles out.

Rather than order a bloody invasion of the island nation, as some of his generals had advised, JFK blockaded the island nation and secretly made a deal with Soviet leader Khrushchev to remove the missiles—all of them. In return, he agreed to remove our similarly threatening missiles from Turkey and never again to try to invade Cuba, as we had done by supporting a failed invasion by mostly Cuban volunteers at the Bay of pigs. The thirteen days of uncertainty before that deal took hold were the closest our species has yet come to self-extinction. But JFK managed the crisis adroitly; when he got assassinated, Khrushchev reportedly wept.

JFK’s Democratic survivor, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), was a mixed bag of leadership. On the one hand, his legislative skill and legendary persuasive power leveraged the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspiring moral leadership to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two crucial laws have become the legal foundations of our still agonizingly slow approach to racial justice. LBJ accomplished this feat just two years after racist Alabama Governor George Wallace had stood in the statehouse door and declared “Segregation today . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever.”

LBJ did this with a combination of moral suasion and legendary legislative arm-twisting. A vulgar man, he once bragged that he had his rivals’ “peckers in mah pocket.” (Nearly all members of Congress were men in those days.) As part of his so-called “Great Society,” LBJ also pushed through Congress Medicare and a number of anti-poverty programs. Had all that been his legacy, today he would be hailed as the greatest president since FDR.

But after Communist North Vietnam had kicked the French colonizers out and had attacked a corrupt and brutal but non-Communist “democracy” in the South, LBJ made perhaps the most disastrous mistake of any postwar president. He set our nation on a course of escalation toward our first—and still today, our most bloody and disastrous—major military defeat, massively escalating our role in the War in Vietnam. In the process, he abandoned our long national quest for an “international order” in favor of half-hearted, unilateral military force, caused the death of some 50,000 Americans, and cemented our reputation in many parts of the world as an imperialist loser.

Perhaps the most pathetic part of this debacle was its alleged “reason.” Although every expert on Vietnam had advised that Vietnam had resisted Chinese domination for most of a millennium, LBJ heeded the advice of Robert S. MacNamara, JFK’s (and LBJ’s own carryover) Secretary of Defense. MacNamara had made his reputation as a car-maker at Ford. He had had virtually no experience in foreign policy before becoming SecDef. He touted a superficially plausible theory that, if Vietnam “fell” to Communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow, falling like “dominoes.”

Of course, nothing of the sort happened after our defeat. Before he died MacNamara apologized for his “domino theory,” but not for the untimely deaths of 50,000 Americans and an estimated 3.5 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.

I could go on in similar detail, but the trail of American leadership narrows considerably after LBJ. Reliance on clear and good principles and values faded. Instead, our presidents increasingly resorted to demagoguery, fear-mongering and pandering to win elections.

Republican Richard M. Nixon was the first great fear-monger of our postwar era. Picking up where Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery left off, he constantly emphasized the threat of Communism, not just from the Soviet Union and then-“Red” China, but from inside our nation itself.

We had helped win the greatest war in history, and our moral and political leadership had established the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the global postwar order. But Nixon’s incessant fear-mongering made us fearful and suspicious. And the fear and suspicion that Nixon had fostered to gain power remained in force through JFK’s narrow win over Nixon in 1960, JFK’s and LBJ’s presidencies, and Nixon’s presidential victories in 1968 and 1972.

Nixon did do some good things. He signed into law the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”). With his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he “went to China”—despite his earlier, relentless fear mongering about it—and eventually opened diplomatic relations with it. During the inflation caused by the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970’s, Nixon dropped some Republican orthodoxy when trying to fight it: he even tried price controls, until they didn’t work.

But Nixon’s fatal flaw was his lack of principle. He craved power more than he respected any principle. Fear mongering had brought him to power, and he apparently had few moral restraints. When he presided over the Watergate break-in and the “Plumbers’” attempts to fix the 1972 election using illegal means to dig up dirt on Democrats, a then-principled Congress appeared poised to impeach him, and he resigned in 1974.

Long before Nixon resigned, he had prolonged our dismal War in Vietnam by: (1) claiming to have a “secret plan to end the war” that never materialized and (2) concealing and thwarting sincere efforts by the North Vietnamese, at the Paris Peace Talks, to end the war early by making major concessions. Thus, contrary to his famous protestation that he was not, Nixon had actually been “a crook,” both in approving or condoning the Watergate break-in and torpedoing the Paris Peace Talks for his personal political benefit.

In retrospect, Nixon’s principle-free approach to politics seems a watershed. Despite his resignation in disgrace, his political tactics encouraged others to take a “game-playing” approach to presidential politics, albeit with delayed effect.

Nixon’s Vice-President, Gerald Ford, succeeded Nixon after his resignation. He was a stodgy and uninspiring but honest man. To avoid the spectacle of criminal trials for a disgraced former president, he pardoned Nixon. No doubt his doing so sealed his fate: a nationally unknown Democrat, Jimmy Carter, won the presidency at the next election, easily defeating Ford.

Today we all know how principled Jimmy Carter is, after his half-century of post-presidential service, both here and abroad. A real Christian, among so many who use Christianity as a political prop, Carter just celebrated his 100th birthday. He remains determined to stave off his metastatic brain cancer just long enough to vote for Kamala Harris.

A nuclear engineer while in the Navy, Carter was undoubtedly one of our most intelligent presidents, and the one with the best understanding of physical science. Realizing the vast potential of solar energy, and knowing about the limited supply of fossil fuels [see Point 2 of linked source], he had solar panels installed on White House. Ronald Reagan, his successor, took them down.

Reagan was also Richard Nixon’s successor in demagoguery. He had reached the presidency by exaggerating and exploiting public fear of disorder arising from protests against the War in Vietnam, and unrest among American college students, including the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

But Reagan’s immense popularity as president also derived from another successful, unprincipled innovation to American politics: pandering. I’ve written a whole essay on how Reagan relentlessly exploited the human vice of selfishness, elevated it to a matter of political “principle,” and incorporated it into the general notion that government is bumbling, restrictive and evil and that private business does everything best. I won’t repeat that essay here.

Suffice it so say that Reagan’s political battle cry—“It’s your money!”—was a direct assault on the patriotic selflessness that JFK had promoted in his inaugural address. It was the foundation of a generational drift away from patriotism and self-sacrifice, from higher tax rates on the wealthy, and from government regulation of such things as pollution of our air, water and soil, and unsafe food, water, drugs, cars, trucks and planes. It was the primary cause of the biggest non-wartime deficits in our national history. And all this is still going on today.

Pandering to natural human selfishness was just the beginning. Pandering to tribalism also became a dominant theme of Republican politics. It morphed from racism to xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia, and today, to trans-phobia. Even the most principled (and most competent!) Republican president of the last half-century—George Herbert Walker Bush (“Bush the Elder”)—pandered to racism by using the image of a released Black re-offender, Willie Horton, as alleged evidence of Democrats’ softness on crime.

To put it mildly, pandering is not leadership. It’s following. Indeed, it’s following and exploiting the worst instincts of the worst people.

Pandering is also not a principle. It’s a tactic. Inevitably, it gets in the way of serious, effective solutions to political problems. For just one example, how can you lead people of different races and backgrounds to get along if you pander to the tribalists, haters and dividers among them?

So we can summarize the last thirty-odd years of American presidential history easily. Bill Clinton discovered that pandering—in the slightly more subtle form of “triangulation” (aka following the crowd and co-opting the opposition)—could win elections. I’ve written a whole essay on that subject, too. By pandering to Wall Street, the billionaires, the rising oligarchs, and the “bigger is better” trend among financial institutions, Bill Clinton—a Democrat—won elections by virtually abandoning every economic principle that Democrats had stood for since FDR. The result, unsurprisingly, was the Crash of 2008.

The final ignominy was the presidency and now is the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. He self-evidently has no principles but his own personal advantage, and he has raised fear-mongering and pandering to high arts. He incites and reinforces paranoid fears of hapless migrants with lies about them taking jobs, bringing crime, and eating pets. And he claims, contrary to fact and common sense, that they do not come here hoping for a better future but are being foisted on our innocent nation by unnamed foreign leaders releasing them from prisons and insane asylums.

When you abandon all principles for fear-mongering and pandering, it’s easy to abandon truth and honesty, too. And that, dear readers, is precisely where we stand in this election: a choice between embattled and neglected principle, on the one hand, and, on the other, demagoguery, fear-mongering, pandering and political campaigns unhindered by the most basic truths, such as who won the last presidential election.

Where does Kamala Harris stand on this sad spectrum of societal degeneration? An incident early in her political career is indicative.

Mere months after assuming her first elective office, District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris faced a difficult dilemma. A thug was charged with killing a San Francisco police officer, in cold blood, with an AK-47. The evidence against him was pretty strong, as a second officer involved in the incident had been an eye-witness. The question for Harris was whether, in the maiden voyage of her political career, to seek the death penalty for the accused killer.

Harris had promised not to seek the death penalty in her campaign for the office. She had done so out of principle: she believed that it is applied unfairly, randomly and discriminatorily. Did she back down for this politically charged and extreme case? No. She stood her ground on principle and never backed down.

Police turned their backs on her in the Hall of Justice. At the funeral for the slain officer, hundreds of uniformed police were present. Senator Diane Feinstein, then the doyenne of California Democratic politics, publicly advocated for the death penalty, in an obvious attack on Harris. These public displays of displeasure would have chilled the heart of anyone who, like Harris, had sworn to uphold the law and required the police’s cooperation to do so. But still she didn’t back down.

According to the Frontline program that covers this aspect of her career [Set the times at 48:00], Harris later did other things, and made other compromises, to restore her reputation among police—and the public—as an effective and even stern participant in law enforcement. But, to my knowledge, she has never wavered in her opposition to the death penalty, while putting away many criminals—from murderers to violent members of cartels and other criminal gangs.

You can argue the death penalty on both sides. But one thing is obvious to any law professor: in this country the death penalty is routinely applied unfairly and unequally. The number of cases in which entirely innocent Black people and other People of Color have sat on Death Row for decades before more careful reviews of their cases exonerated them continues to mount. Every professor of law has colleagues who participate in “innocence projects” that strive to keep the penalty from being applied to innocent people, often after they’ve waited on Death Row for years or decades.

Finally, there’s the dismal recent example of Marcellus Williams. He was a Black man just executed in Missouri despite requests by current prosecutors (due to weaknesses and racial bias in his trial), and pleas by the murder victim’s surviving family, that he not be. It’s impossible to review his case and many others like it without concluding that the death penalty is less an instrument of justice than a juggernaut of random State oppression.

My own view on the matter is that the death penalty should be reserved for the most extreme cases of well-proven (or admitted) mass murder, in which a vanishingly small probability of judicial error does not justify the cost to the State of keeping the mass murderer alive and incarcerated. But neither my views in the abstract nor yours matter in this instance. What matters is that Kamala Harris is a woman of principle, who doesn’t change her mind or her heart on important principles for expediency, public pressure, career enhancement, or electoral advantage.

As you survey presidents and presidential candidates since Carter, it’s hard to find ones who didn’t abandon important principles just to win. Although I thought he was right to do so, George Herbert Walker Bush reneged on his public pledge not to raise taxes. Bill Clinton jumped on the bandwagon of financial deregulation, helping cause the Crash of 2008. George W. Bush started two unnecessary wars to avenge 9/11, one that ended in debacle and one that is even now collapsing in stalemate, while Barack Obama got bin Laden with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. And if Donald Trump has any principles besides his own personal advantage (as he sees it at the moment), it’s hard to discern them.

In my view, the only presidents in the last half-century to stand on principle consistently when the chips were down, and to show leadership in so doing, were Jimmy Carter, Barck Obama and Joe Biden—a man too old to reach the young.  Isn’t it time we had another, younger, more vigorous one?

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