Aaron David Miller, The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 288 pp., $28.00.

IN 1973, the prominent New York Times foreign-affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger produced a book entitled An Age of Mediocrity, which covered the period of history from 1963 to 1972. It posited that all the great men of the previous era had passed from the scene or shortly would do so, and that no figures of greatness were emerging to replace them. “Our age of mediocrity,” he wrote, “is marked not only by an absence of outstanding men, but also by an absence of vigorous new ideas.” He added that, in an era without credos or ideology, “men must look even more to inspirational leadership, a characteristic that now seems lacking.”

Sulzberger quoted former secretary of state Dean Acheson, arguably a man of greatness himself, as saying, “We are now in a period where there are mediocre men everywhere. People have opinions but no knowledge, and leaders are made in the image of the masses.” At lunch one day in Paris, the great French intellectual and warrior André Malraux told Sulzberger, “This is a sadly barren era: there are no great men in any field. . . . None in America, in Europe.” Around the same time, the prominent columnist Joseph Alsop returned from his last European reporting trip just before retiring and detonated a polemical blast at the entire era. “In the former capital of the Western world,” wrote Alsop, “the pygmies now seem to reign supreme. Pygmy views on every subject are almost the only ones that are publicly heard.”

The lament of fading greatness is nothing new. Every generation, looking at its public men when their warts are all too visible, wonders whether the heroic figures are all gone now. But it is instructive that this lament was particularly pronounced in America and Europe during the 1960s and into the 1970s. It is explained perhaps by the fact that this particular time succeeded a truly heroic age, when the old order crumbled to dust, amid much destruction and carnage, and a new one had to be designed and built. Thus, the men who constructed that new order—Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Truman, Stalin, Mao and many others who clustered around them to play major roles in the struggle—possess the look of greatness because they emerged at a time of great events and ended up successfully shaping those events. Greatness is as greatness does.

Now comes Aaron David Miller, a writer, scholar and former State Department adviser, to argue not only that greatness is gone in America’s presidential politics but also that we should all rejoice in its passing. His provocative thesis is reflected in his new book’s title: The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President. There’s a certain in-your-face quality in Miller’s iconoclasm, so at odds with the conventional view that magisterial leadership is “the solution, if not the panacea, to just about everything that ails us,” as Miller sardonically puts it. He concludes, “That we cannot have another giant seems self-evident. That we seldom need one, now that the country has moved beyond the kind of profoundly nation-threatening and encumbering crises that confronted it in the past, seems clear too.”

In the end, he is probably wrong. But his intellectual trek wends its way into lush forests of insight and charm, through underbrush and past tall pines of history, biography, political science and human understanding. While the destination may not yield the panoramic view that is promised along the way, the journey is its own reward.

IN PUTTING forth his thesis, Miller explores the literature of presidential ratings that emanated from the polls of historians on White House performance over the past half century or more and offers his own evaluations of particular presidents whose achievement levels he places into various categories of success or lack of it. Through this process he traces the development of presidential leadership in America and presents a window into how the office works. (He also offers, I note here by way of disclosure, a few welcome words of regard for my book on the subject, Where They Stand.)

Throughout American history, writes Miller, the country has seen only three truly great presidents—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. They were the three “indispensables,” whose achievements were “real, measurable, and defined by crises overcome and legacies that endure.” This corresponds with conventional wisdom. Through the numerous polls of historians on presidential performance since this practice began in 1948, these men consistently rank as the top three, usually with Lincoln as the greatest, then Washington and then FDR.

Miller argues that these giants of American history emerged through the convergence of three elements, which he calls the “Three Cs of Greatness”—crisis, character and capacity. First, there had to be a prolonged crisis of severe magnitude that threatened the nation’s future. Only such a crisis or challenge, he says, can pave the way for major transformational change. Second, these men all possessed the character traits—ambition, courage, discipline, psychological balance and self-confidence—that translated into strong leadership and endowed them with the ability to see the big picture of their era. Third, they had capacity—a strength of temperament mixed with the skills and wiles needed to operate the levers of power successfully in a system designed to keep those levers from being easily manipulated (or abused).

The first of these, the crisis factor, gets to the heart of Miller’s thesis. He notes that, particularly in a presidential system such as ours, epic decision making isn’t possible without “enormous stress, crisis, and emergency: the door openers to great performances in the presidency.” Miller adds, “Unless the times offer up the opportunity, the margin for heroic action diminishes, particularly in a political system that constrains the accretion of power and the desire for significant change [among voters] in ordinary times.”

He is correct here, and others have made the same point, not only in terms of the American system but also as a universal reality. In his 1973 lament for the passing of great leaders, Sulzberger noted that mediocrity might actually carry certain political benefits. “Political giants are produced by crises—or produce them,” he wrote. President Barack Obama’s early chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, expressed this same sentiment from a slightly different angle when his boss entered the Oval Office in the midst of economic upheaval. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel, denoting Obama’s studied expectation of presidential greatness (an expectation, as Miller suggests, that has proved elusive, despite the crisis that greeted his ascension).

WHERE MILLER perhaps goes awry is in turning this truism around and suggesting that, since great leaders only emerge in crises and nobody wants a crisis, we shouldn’t want great leaders either. We tend to forget, writes Miller, “that great leaders almost always emerge in times of national crisis, trauma, and exigency, a risk we run if we hunger for the return of such leaders.” Elsewhere in the book, he asks, “If threat, danger, and calamity are required for greatness in the presidency, why would we ever want another great president?”

The flaw in this thinking is obvious. If we only need life insurance when we die, why would anybody want life insurance, since nobody wants to die? But of course we all die at some point, and at that stage life insurance comes in handy for our loved ones. Similarly, with presidential leadership, crises seem to be an intermittent part of history, and when they occur—whatever their magnitude—we want presidential leadership equal to the challenge. True, as Miller suggests, the crisis may not be of such intensity as to clear the way for the kinds of presidents who alter the national landscape and set the country upon a new direction. That’s fine. If the consensus isn’t there for such a forceful leader (and such moments are extremely rare, as Miller correctly notes), then perhaps it can be assumed that the country is getting the level of leadership that it needs at that particular time.

As Miller writes, “Make no mistake: without crisis and a president who recognizes the inherent opportunity of the moment, the seeds of transformative change in American society do not get planted and cannot grow.”

He is right to emphasize that not every president can be a transformative leader, because the country can’t allow itself to be in a constant state of transformation. Sometimes the country simply needs sound management that addresses the problems of the day in a deft and appropriate manner and focuses on keeping the country out of crises. The Founders, writes Miller, wanted the president to be “a strong executive, accountable and constrained”—in other words, a leader wielding the level of power needed to meet the challenges of the day, but not empowered to act capriciously or to take the country where it doesn’t want to go. This is an important point, and Miller expresses it well.

More curious is Miller’s argument that major crises demanding truly strong leadership are probably now a thing of the past. He talks about the “changing nature of America’s crises and challenges” and suggests that “the older a nation becomes, the fewer the foundational trials.” He elaborates:

Contemporary leaders aspiring for unparalleled, unprecedented achievement also face a “been there, done that” problem. Nations, like individuals, pass through foundational trials and existential threats and crises early in their histories. The nations and polities that survive likely never pass that way again, largely because they had the right leaders at the right time to guide them through these challenges. As nations mature, the need and opportunity for heroic action to preempt or deal with these existential challenges diminishes, along with tropes and narratives that define both the myth and reality required for great achievement.

Miller is saying here that the country has passed through the phases of its history when it faced the kinds of existential threats and challenges that called for a Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt. Washington faced the need to set the fledgling nation upon a course that could prove durable and lasting at a time when all kinds of pressures and forces were militating against such an outcome. Lincoln faced the threat of the nation being torn asunder and the ultimate incompatibility of slavery with the country’s fundamental credo. Roosevelt confronted the economic havoc of the Great Depression, the societal instability it was generating and the crisis of the European order falling apart. But, writes Miller, such crises are largely intrinsic to a nation’s early experience and aren’t likely to emerge now that we are a mature country.

I WOULD like to offer an alternative view, not as a rebuttal but in the spirit of discourse established by Miller’s exploratory tone. History teaches us that crisis, like the poor, will always be with us. And, while Miller is correct in saying the country hasn’t experienced challenges of the magnitude that called forth Washington, Lincoln and FDR, that doesn’t mean that such challenges are now gone forever. One can argue that the country—indeed, the world—is heading toward a crisis of profound proportions.

Miller somewhat jocularly quotes from a scene in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm in which a conservative posits what he calls “the theory of the 77”—meaning a great president emerges every seventy-seven years. First Washington, then Lincoln, then Roosevelt and then . . . George W. Bush. “We’re turning the whole damn world around,” the conservative declares. No doubt the liberal producers of Curb Your Enthusiasm intended to induce chuckles of wry amusement at the thought that anyone would equate the presidency of George W. Bush with the presidencies of those three giants of the American past. (Miller himself takes a dim view of the Bush presidency, a view I share.) He points out that these were not seventy-seven-year cycles, but rather cycles of sixty-four years, sixty-eight years and (from FDR’s death to our own time) sixty-nine years. Beyond that, he dismisses “the theory of the 77” as merely a kind of presidential trivia that is “alternately fun, silly, and driven as much by coincidence, luck, and serendipity as by anything serious.”

He is probably right. On the other hand, serious historians have explored American history through delineated cyclical patterns. Arthur Schlesinger Sr., the noted Harvard scholar, pioneered a way of looking at his country’s history based on political cycles “between public purpose and private interest,” as his son, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it in a 1986 book, The Cycles of American History—a process of determinism in which each new phase flows out of the conditions and contradictions of the phase before it. And usually the transitional period is characterized by a significant degree of societal and political disruption, or crisis.

Without succumbing to any rigid determinism in the matter, it is worth noting that historians such as Schlesinger Sr. didn’t believe that a nation’s maturation process could unfold in such a way as to interrupt normal historical cycles and thus preclude serious crises. History is a product of human nature, and human nature doesn’t change.

Perhaps it might be more pertinent to compare the global situation today to the circumstances that were present when America last faced a crisis of such magnitude as to call forth the leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt. In those years, the world faced what Schlesinger Jr. called “The Crisis of the Old Order,” an order based on Europe’s global preeminence, British naval superiority and financial dominance, and a balance of military force on the European continent. This set of arrangements was destroyed with World War I, and for a generation no new structure of stability emerged to replace it. The result was a period of flux that led directly to the Great Depression and World War II. Those events, and the leadership they yielded (particularly Roosevelt), produced a new order based on America’s global military reach, the strength of the dollar, and a balance of power between the U.S.-led West and an expansionist Soviet Union positioned in the ashes of war to threaten Western Europe.

Miller is correct in identifying Franklin Roosevelt as one of the greatest leaders ever produced by America. He essentially remade the American political structure, and then he remade the world. The result was a new order of relative stability, Western prosperity and global development. It has been called the Pax Americana, and it has lasted for roughly seventy years.

That structure now is under severe strain, as the editors of The National Interest wrote in the magazine’s special issue of May/June 2012, entitled “Crisis of the Old Order: The Crumbling Status Quo at Home and Abroad.” The issue laid out the ominous signs of impending crisis:

Roosevelt’s concentration of power in Washington has yielded over time a collection of elites that has restrained the body politic in tethers of favoritism and self-serving maneuver. Wall Street has captured the government’s levers of financial decision making. Public-employee unions utilize their power to capture greater and greater shares of the public fisc. Corporations foster tax-code provisions that allow them to game the system. “Crony capitalism” is endemic. Members of Congress tilt the political system to favor incumbency. A national-debt burden threatens the country’s financial health. And American citizens have become increasingly frustrated and angry.

Perhaps these developments haven’t congealed into the magnitude of crisis that Miller sees as leading to FDR-like figures—that is, “foundational emergencies” and “calamities that are hot, combustible, and inescapable.” But they are driving events in a direction that isn’t sustainable. The Occupy Wall Street movement of a few years ago and the political significance of the Tea Party testify to the reality that the political status quo in America is showing cracks and fissures. A new order will have to replace the crumbling old order, just as Roosevelt crafted a new order in his day, and history tells us that such transitional epochs breed substantial disruption—in other words, crisis.

BUT IT isn’t simply the old order of U.S. domestic politics that is under powerful stress. The postwar global system also is in progressive erosion. America remains the world’s preeminent power and will maintain that status for a considerable time. But the era when the world generally accepted American dominance is coming to an end. Challenges to U.S. preeminence are emerging from a host of quarters, and they will gather force in the coming years and decades. The rise of China, the regional ambitions of Russia in Europe, the chaos of the Middle East, the intermittent structural crises of the European Union, America’s persistent global meddling—all these undermine the stability of a fading postwar era. And that doesn’t include the possibility that the global economic order could implode at any time as well. China is sitting on a real-estate bubble that could burst tomorrow. Europe faces the prospect of a descent into the ravages of deflation. The U.S. Federal Reserve has fostered a frothy market surge that many consider artificial, and its expansive monetary policies also have placed serious strains upon the dollar as the global reserve currency. Meanwhile, the global debt burden is huge, growing and probably unsustainable.

Perhaps America and the world will slide smoothly out of the old political and economic order just in time to avoid a major crisis and make their way to a sturdy new system without disruption, chaos or bloodshed. But history doesn’t offer much hope on that score. More likely, the crisis of the old order will fester until it breeds a period of serious instability. Only then, perhaps, can a new order of stability be designed and crafted.

But no new one will emerge without major figures of the kind who appeared on the world stage in the first half of the twentieth century. For, just as great leaders can’t emerge absent great crises, great crises can’t give way to a new dawn of stability without great leadership. So long as it takes for such leadership to materialize, so long a crisis will linger—and probably deepen. Two cases in point, as noted by Miller, were the presidencies of James Buchanan in the nineteenth century and Herbert Hoover in the twentieth. The crisis each faced certainly fostered opportunities for great leadership and new directions, but neither proved capable of leveraging the crisis sufficiently to lead the country out of it. It took Lincoln (following Buchanan) and Roosevelt (following Hoover) to do that.

One lingering question is whether America can summon the presidential leadership needed to address these many intertwined and spreading problems in such a way as to prevent them from exploding into a global cataclysm. As Miller writes, although we want to elect presidents who can handle crises when they arise, “even more important, we should want to select those whom we sense have the judgment and prudence to avoid getting the nation into the unnecessary crisis to begin with.” The problem, as Miller emphasizes, is that presidents may lack the flexibility of action to avert crises before they reach an intensity that concentrates public sentiment on behalf of bold measures. “The notion that the president’s job is to create a story or a compelling narrative in order to teach and inspire is absolutely on target,” writes Miller. “But to be compelling, meaningful, and productive, the story must have authenticity, and that means grounded in an urgent reality of the day.”

That may explain America’s current political dilemma. The system clearly isn’t working, and the American people aren’t happy about it. But neither the people nor their leaders seem willing to accept the kinds of solutions that could break the deadlock of democracy and avert the intertwined crises that nearly everyone sees on the horizon. Perhaps the crisis just isn’t yet sufficiently intense and palpable.

STILL, HISTORY has issued plaudits to presidents who avoided potential crises through deft and measured action. Dwight Eisenhower gets credit for avoiding the kind of American involvement in Vietnam that eventually ensnared the country under Lyndon Johnson (though few credited Ike for any particular wisdom on the issue during his presidency; only hindsight revealed the soundness of his judgment). Johnson himself, as Miller makes clear, leveraged the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his own mastery of Congress to rally the nation behind landmark civil-rights legislation, thus placing race relations on a new plane and possibly averting a major crisis of racial tensions in the country. One could argue that Ronald Reagan’s economic program, though flawed in some respects, steered the country away from a set of policies that were taking it toward a runaway inflation that economist Walter Heller likened to the Great Depression in its threat to the Republic. Reagan also stepped up on the highly incendiary Social Security issue, fostering a set of changes—at great political risk—that averted a looming financial crisis in the system for several decades.

The country certainly didn’t get that kind of leadership from Obama, who neglected to address the underlying problems of the nation and the forces contributing to increased global instability. Miller is hard on Obama for inserting into the American consciousness a set of expectations for himself that were “dangerously high.” By summoning up presidential ghosts of the past, writes Miller, “Obama likely was creating his own high bar and aspiring to much more than his own capacities, his opposition, and the times would ever allow him to accomplish.”

Perhaps. But here’s where we get to the crux of the Miller thesis. It is with Obama particularly in mind that Miller posits what he calls the “fable of the transformative president.” He explains the myth thus:

A strong president claiming a mandate sets an ambitious policy agenda, acts through the force of personality and high moral purpose by using the vast powers of the presidency as a bully pulpit. The people and Congress follow. And almost always when that conception of leadership fails, the lesson is that the president was unable or unwilling to lead boldly, create a compelling story, and lobby Congress in a way that sways political elites and the nation too.

The crux of the fable is that these expectations are almost never realistic, certainly not in the case of the Obama presidency. The pressures of Internet journalism, the habitual overexposure of presidents in today’s media environment, the country’s political polarization, the lack of a compelling crisis—all of these factors, in Miller’s view, ensured that Obama would not be able to govern as he had promised. “Barack Obama is only the latest in a series of presidents who confronted the aspiration-to-disappointment cycle,” writes Miller. “The fall was particularly hard in his case because expectations were running so high.”

The answer, then, is to reduce expectations, jettison the fable of the transformative president, settle for competence and measured aspiration in the Oval Office, and place our leaders in a historical context that recognizes the rarity of presidential greatness. Miller writes:

The disappearance of our greatest presidents is no cause for despair and cynicism about our politics; nor is it reason to give in to the declinist tropes that America’s best days are behind it, or that we cannot have successful leaders. But it does mean that we need to come to terms with the limits of a president’s capacity to fix things; our own impatience that there are comprehensive solutions to all our problems; and to abandon any notion that the One is coming to rescue us.

In general, that is sound advice, much in keeping with what the Founders had in mind when they created the American presidency. The president enjoys vast powers, but they can only be exercised by surmounting extensive constrictions. He (or she) may be the only politician who can claim to speak for all Americans—but must nevertheless deal with 535 others who speak persistently for smaller constituencies. As Harry Truman once put it, staring glumly into his bourbon glass, “They talk about the power of the presidency, how I can just push a button and get things done. Why, I spend most of my time kissing somebody’s ass.”

This constriction on presidential prerogative is all to the good. At the same time, presidents must rise to whatever level of leadership is required to dispose of the problems, challenges and, yes, crises of their time in office. If they don’t bring to their tenure large doses of guile, persistence, deviousness and will—in addition to all the other elements of effective leadership—they almost surely will fail. And that will bring upon them the opprobrium of the American people—and eventually history. That’s good, too. In this sense, it can be argued, notwithstanding Miller’s fable of the transformative president, that Obama not only failed to fulfill unreasonable expectations but also failed to lead as the country needed him to lead.

In our time, the country is headed in a dangerous direction almost certain to generate serious crises in both the domestic and foreign arenas. The American people know it. Their leaders know it. And I’m sure Aaron David Miller knows it too. It may not take a Lincoln, Washington or FDR to avert these crises, but it will take strong and effective presidential leadership. Ours is a presidential system, after all, and these kinds of crises are dealt with through Oval Office performance or not at all. While a little calibration on presidential expectations may be in order, the American people are not going to abandon—nor should they—their crucial job of ensuring presidential accountability.

Robert W. Merry is political editor of The National Interest and an author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Image: Flickr/g cobb/CC by-nc-sa 2.0