Unruffled Responses Overcome Crises : Emotional Appeal Gives Reagan a Potent Weapon

“A second-class intellect--but a first-class temperament.”

That trenchant verdict was delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the nation’s 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Holmes’ epigram serves to illuminate a key element in the stewardship of one of Roosevelt’s most ardent admirers--and most successful successors--President Reagan.

Even Reagan partisans concede that the 40th chief executive lags behind some predecessors when it comes to the technical details of government policies. Mastering this fine print is only one element of effective leadership, however--perhaps not even the most important part, some scholars believe.

And as he outlined the agenda for the sixth year of his presidency Tuesday night, Reagan demonstrated again that he ranks with the best in those qualities of temperament that contribute to political power--the ability to discipline his own feelings and focus them on achieving his goals.

Says Jeff Bell, deputy chairman of the pro-Reagan lobbying group, Citizens for America, in comparing Reagan to such recent predecessors as Jimmy Carter, Richard M. Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson: “They were more knowledgeable, they knew more about a lot of things. But no one cares about a lot of those things, and Reagan is smart enough to know that.”

And Roosevelt scholar William Leuchtenburg of the University of North Carolina considers Justice Holmes’ “first-class” rating as apt for Reagan’s temperament as it was for F.D.R.’s. Just as Roosevelt, whom Leuchtenburg described as having his emotions under such control that “it was said he must have been psychoanalyzed by God,” so Reagan uses emotions not as an outlet for self-indulgence but instead as a potent weapon.

Thus, in Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech, Reagan set out the objectives of his presidency in terms that echoed many citizens’ own hopes and concerns. And, though compelled to grapple with daunting economic and foreign policy problems, Reagan evoked symbolic themes laden with emotional appeal.

Pointing with pride to the economy’s recovery from the worst decline since the Great Depression, Reagan spoke of “the Great American comeback.” And, pointedly, he gave full credit to the American people rather than to government, declaring that “private values must always be at the heart of public policies.” The institutions closest to the average citizen, family and community, he said, would remain “the moral core of our society.”

A Democrat himself until the 1950s, Reagan had been greatly impressed with Roosevelt’s leadership and has often quoted him with approval. And Tuesday night Reagan viewed the future in language reminiscent of one of Roosevelt’s most celebrated phrases--”a rendezvous with destiny”--an expression Reagan used in accepting his party’s 1980 presidential nomination and in other speeches.

“What we accomplish this year, in each challenge we face, will set our course for the balance of the decade, indeed, for the remainder of the century,” Reagan said in his State of the Union address. “After all we’ve done so far, let no one say this nation cannot reach the destiny of our dreams.”

Seeming to shrug off the lame-duck syndrome that has humbled almost every second-term President, Reagan enters his sixth year still commanding unprecedented popular support and still dominating debate on the national agenda.

Changed Expectations

In a larger sense, what Reagan appears to have done during his first five years in office is to reshape the presidential job description--and make most of the public like it. “There has been an emormous lowering of expectations for presidential involvement and presidential performance,” says Harry McPherson, who played a key role in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. “We have changed our expectations to accommodate our affection for Ronald Reagan.”

As his critics see it, something has been lost from the presidency in the process. “One has the sense,” says Leuchtenburg, “that this President’s manner of well-being and pleasantness has been bought at the price of reality denied.”

But presidential behavior that some critics might regard as self-delusion seems to be viewed by much of the citizenry as evidence of confidence and hope and can be an aid in governing. Thus, some analysts believe that Reagan’s unruffled response to the ravages of the 1982 recession and to the attacks on U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983 helped him get through both crises with minimal political damage.

“He does have the ability to downplay crises, to insist there isn’t a crisis,” says Stephen Ambrose, a biographer of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In this respect Ambrose likens Reagan’s manner of dealing with untoward situations to the way that Eisenhower sought to cool public reaction to such threatening episodes as the Soviet launching of Sputnik and the bitter opposition to school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.

Widespread Popularity

To be sure, conditions over which he had little control have contributed to Reagan’s widespread popularity. At home, oil prices have gone down in his presidency instead of soaring as they did under Carter and Nixon--making the economy easier to control instead of fueling inflation. Abroad, the Soviets have been preoccupied with power shifts inside the Kremlin and have seemed less bellicose than in some previous years.

Such circumstances have given rise to the contention among some detractors that Reagan has been more lucky than most other recent presidents. But luck, as baseball’s Branch Rickey used to say, is “the residue of design.” Reagan, like all presidents, has had luck both good and bad. He has helped himself, and his country, by making the most of the good breaks and limiting the damage from the bad ones.

Just as he avoids complaining about his own fate, he generally refrains from grumbling about his countrymen. “You’ve never heard him say a bad word about America,” says Ambrose, who recalls how Carter “ran down the United States” in his malaise speech as the country was reeling from the shock waves caused by the Mideast oil price increase.

Avoids Confrontations

Also, as the upbeat tone of his State of the Union address showed, Reagan avoids unprofitable confrontations and vendettas with his political opponents. “Nixon and Johnson spent a lot of time trying to punish people who opposed them,” recalls Bell, who served as a campaign aide to both Reagan and Nixon.

“But Reagan doesn’t take things like that personally. If someone thwarts him, he doesn’t seek him out for revenge,” he said.

Brookings Institution senior fellow Stephen Hess, a former White House aide to Eisenhower and Nixon, views Reagan’s relatively civil dealings with his fellow politicians as marking a break “from the whole paranoid style in political life that seemed to be part of recent presidencies.

“It is unusual for a politician to have risen as high as Reagan has without the ground around him being strewn with dead and dying rivals,” says Hess.

Political Benefits

Reagan’s relaxed and congenial style in personal relationships has pragmatic political benefits. He seems to believe that he can afford to share some of the glory in return for the chance to advance toward his goals--and to deflect some of the blame if things go awry.