2nd Term a Rare and Risky Task

Having arrived at a pinnacle that only George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and nine other men have attained in the past 200 years, William Jefferson Clinton now stands at what may be the most precarious position in American politics: Next month he will take the oath of office for his second term as president of the United States.

Presidents who win and serve out two full terms are something of a rarity. And while several have had notable achievements in their second four years, few have escaped unbloodied and many have come to grief, from Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace over Watergate, to James Madison, who managed the War of 1812 so ineptly that British soldiers pillaged Washington and ate the supper the fleeing president had left behind in the White House.

Even the seemingly invincible Franklin D. Roosevelt stumbled badly in his second term. His attempts to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices and purge conservative Democrats from Congress in 1937 and 1938 met with stinging defeat. A misguided effort to balance the budget helped trigger a recession that brought new misery to millions of people and erased much of the progress made against the Depression during his first term.

“Presidential popularity and power do not often last through eight full years in office,” Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone remarked in considering the difficulties encountered by the nation’s third president during his final years in the White House.

The American presidency, history seems to say, is a dangerous job--and eight years is a long time for even the most skilled and fortune-blessed leader to stay at the table and keep winning. Foreign crises, domestic economic problems, political enemies, even zealots and madmen all can bring a president to grief, and the odds on encountering them do not diminish with the passage of time.

Clinton, in his first press conference after the election, said he was “very mindful of history’s difficulties,” although he vowed “to try to beat them.”

So far as Clinton is concerned, what are “history’s difficulties”? And how might they apply to his second term?

First, while external events have frequently played earthquake-like havoc with the plans of reelected presidents, the resulting disasters most often have sprung from the chief executives’ own mistakes and miscalculations.

In particular, history suggests that Clinton’s second term may depend on how successfully he deals with four challenges:

* How he reads the strengths and weaknesses dealt to him and his Republican opponents by the November election.

* How he handles the economy. Clinton has recommitted himself to balancing the federal budget, a goal he described as “easily achievable.” For the moment, such pronouncements may be politically useful, but the experience of Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, after a far larger reelection victory than Clinton’s, shows how quickly public opinion can turn sour.

* How he deals with scandals carried forward from his first term. Nixon is the most obvious example of a president who did not meet this test. But the president whose experience might give Clinton more pause is Ulysses S. Grant, whose reputation perished even though he was never himself found guilty of any impropriety.

* How well he copes with deep-running currents of contemporary history and with the conflicting visions and desires of the public. Presidents not only make history, they struggle against it; in the process, they often encounter forces they can neither yield to nor ignore.

Tough Battles in Round Two

While it has been widely assumed in modern times that serving eight years was the norm for presidents in the simpler world of yesteryear, in fact one-term presidents were at least as common from 1850 to 1950 as they are now.

Five of the first seven presidents were elected to second terms; of the 33 men (before Clinton) who have been president since then, only another five were reelected and served for four more years. Two others, Lincoln and William McKinley, were assassinated, and Nixon resigned. (In addition, Grover Cleveland served one term, was defeated for reelection and then won a second term four years later.)

Few of the problems of modern-day two-term chief executives seem related to the fact that, since Franklin Roosevelt, the Constitution has limited presidents to two terms, which automatically turns second-term leaders into lame ducks. The tradition of only two terms was so strong that Roosevelt’s predecessors were effectively lame ducks too.

Clinton can take comfort from the fact that several presidents, including Washington, Jefferson and Dwight D. Eisenhower, endured bruising second terms that did not diminish their larger achievements. Others suffered serious damage but still recorded significant accomplishments in their second terms.

Franklin Roosevelt not only went on to win unprecedented third and fourth terms but scored two substantial accomplishments in his beleaguered second term. Though the bloom was clearly off the New Deal rose, he persuaded Congress to pass a wage-and-hour law that materially improved the lot of working men and women. And he began the difficult process of turning a divided and resistant country away from isolationism.

Ronald Reagan, though stained by the Iran-Contra affair and a series of uncharacteristically clumsy missteps after his reelection, won approval of a major tax simplification law in 1986. More important, his abandonment of “Evil Empire” rhetoric in favor of an increasingly warm series of summit meetings with Mikhail S. Gorbachev helped set the pattern for a remarkably rapid switch from enmity to virtual alliance.

“Some of it is just plain luck,” says John Alexander, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Cincinnati, in assessing the fortunes of second-term presidents.

Reading the Message From Reelection

Reelected chief executives sometimes substitute an inflated sense of mission and public support for the political savvy and restraint that marked, for example, Clinton’s successes in the second half of his first term.

At his post-election press conference, Clinton put misreading the message from voters near the top of his list of pitfalls to avoid: “What we have done to try to avoid that is, number one, make it clear that we understand the American people want us to work together with the Republicans.”

Translating a shibboleth about harmony into concrete action is another matter, as the records of his predecessors and his own first term demonstrate.

Woodrow Wilson’s failure to win approval for U.S. membership in the League of Nations after World War I may be the most disastrous example of a president who misjudged the temper of the times and compounded the error with what presidential scholar James David Barber called “his stubborn, self-defeating behavior.”

Under any circumstances, it might have been difficult to win a commitment to internationalism from a nation with a history of fearing foreign entanglements. And Americans in 1919 were both weary of war and dismayed at the haggling that followed the armistice. But Wilson’s headlong insistence that the League treaty be approved exactly as he presented it, and his self-righteous refusal to consider even the slightest compromise, played into the hands of his enemies.

When Wilson brushed aside warnings from his doctors and embarked upon a punishing trip to rally public support, the strain brought on a massive stroke. He not only lost the League battle but served out the remainder of his term a nearly helpless invalid.

The form book on Clinton now is that, having overreached on health care reform in his first term, he is committed to thinking small instead of large in his second term. Even if he remains content with a constrained agenda, events are not likely to leave him undisturbed or his political footwork untested.

Managing the Economy

Given the nature of the business cycle, a president who wins a second term because the country is prosperous on election day can almost count on the economy turning downward before the second four years has passed.

In 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt cut back the federal payroll and slashed the roles of federal relief recipients, he was following a course of orthodox social and economic policy not unlike the conventional wisdom of today. But the recession that followed hurt millions of people and shook public confidence in Roosevelt’s leadership.

More than 100 years earlier, when James Monroe took office in 1817, the country was enjoying such good times and relative harmony that the period became known as “the era of good feelings.” To bring order to a chaotic financial system, Monroe’s administration took the prudent step of reestablishing the Bank of the United States, a kind of central bank for the nation.

When the bank began to rein in the loose credit that had helped finance a surge in westward expansion, however, six years of depression followed, turning Monroe’s second term into a time of anything but good feelings.

Similarly, Clinton’s rhetoric about budget balancing may be smart politics and even good fiscal policy today, but economic conditions and public opinion can change rapidly. And history has seldom awarded high marks to presidents entrapped by hard times.

Coping With Scandal

Prior to November 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George S. McGovern struggled in vain to focus public attention on the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and on links between the burglars and Nixon’s campaign organization. No sooner had Nixon been reelected, however, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, than the public’s seeming indifference evaporated. On Aug. 8, 1974, less than two years after reelection, he was gone.

For any president, the lesson of Watergate is child-simple: Reelection offers no protection against guilt.

The lessons of Grant and Reagan also echo ominously. Both faced hostile congresses in their second terms. Both--correctly but irrelevantly--saw their critics as partisan enemies. Both relied on defensive tactics instead of acknowledging misconduct.

Before Grant’s second term ended, his vice president had been implicated in the notorious Credit Mobilier scandal, and his secretary of war had been impeached for taking bribes. A “whiskey ring” had been uncovered that reached directly into the White House: Government officials, including the president’s private secretary, were conspiring to help distillers avoid taxes. Lesser scandals proliferated as well.

No personal corruption was ever proved against Grant. But he was so unwilling to police his associates and so intent on defending himself and some who were clearly guilty that “Grantism” entered the political lexicon as a synonym for corrupt and feckless leadership.

In more modern times, the second-term Iran-Contra scandal eroded the public’s faith in Reagan, a previously untarnishable leader. So great was Reagan’s obsession with freeing hostages in the Middle East and overturning the leftist government in Nicaragua that he secretly trampled his own stated policies and a series of congressional restrictions by allowing the sale of arms to Iran and giving some of the proceeds to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels.

In Clinton’s case, despite the general talk of harmony, Republicans have already vowed to use their control of Congress to demand high-profile accounting on the Arkansas banking and real estate dealings known collectively as Whitewater, the still-inadequately explained transfer of sensitive FBI files to White House underlings, and the Democrats’ apparently systematic solicitation of campaign contributions from foreign interests. Clinton also stands accused of sexual harassment while governor of Arkansas in 1991.

Clinton’s response thus far has been to deny impropriety, stiff-arm his critics and put his trust in trench-warfare resistance. The experiences of Grant and Reagan imply that his approach might not be enough.

Handling Riptides of History

If Clinton is to succeed in his second term, he must also read and respond to the larger currents at work below the surface. Neither caution nor boldness guarantees a favorable verdict from history. Jefferson’s second term makes the point; in some ways, Jefferson as president was almost Clintonesque.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had been a call to revolution and, with the Louisiana Purchase, he stretched the bounds of both the country and the Constitution. Yet Jefferson’s opposition to “big government” was far more profound than Clinton’s. And in the White House, Jefferson was determined for both philosophical and practical reasons to think small and stay out of trouble.

Accordingly, he pared the government to the bone, all but abolished taxes, cut the national debt in half, pruned what modest military forces the country possessed and steadfastly refused to be drawn into military confrontations.

Yet Jefferson faced historical forces that would not be contained and contradictions within his own country that could not be papered over.

The most serious of these sprang from the war between France and Britain. As Washington himself had discovered in his second term, a president could declare neutrality from foreign quarrels, but even at this early date the United States was so enmeshed in the global economy and so sensitive to foreign slights that it could not truly stand aside--did not, in fact, entirely want to stand aside.

The U.S. merchant fleet, already among the largest in the world, dominated trade between Europe and the Americas. Hauling cargoes to Britain and France brought fat profits, especially for New England. But each of the then-superpowers sought to prevent U.S. trade with its enemy. Jefferson avoided military conflict and responded instead with diplomacy and economic pressure--an embargo on trade with both sides.

The result was near-rebellion in New England, ceaseless effort to get around the ban and provocative clashes with the British navy.

Jefferson, ranked by some historians with Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt when it came to practical politics, managed to keep the country intact and out of war. But many Americans scorned Jefferson’s notion that economic sacrifice was a patriotic duty preferable to war. He took a fearful pounding and endured substantial setbacks. Moreover, his chosen successors, Madison and Monroe, suffered even more at the hands of the forces that buffeted Jefferson.

Clinton, as leader of the world’s only superpower, is not likely to face the kinds of foreign threats Jefferson did, though even brush-fire conflicts can bring out the gap between the nation’s pride and its appetite for casualties.

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More important for Clinton, the kinds of historical undercurrents that Jefferson faced in foreign affairs have counterparts every bit as powerful in American domestic life today. Racial tensions, the march of technology and profound social and economic changes all beat upon the country.

For Clinton, they take such challenging forms as reducing the deficit in a slow-growth economy, sustaining Social Security in an aging population, mediating social tensions in a period of heavy immigration.

Weighing Jefferson’s performance as he struggled against the currents of history, biographer Malone concluded that Jefferson’s second term “was certainly not the most glorious of his public life, and his second quadrennium as chief executive must be compared unfavorably with his first.

“That seems to have been the rule rather than the exception in presidential history.”