Tragedy Measures a Leader

Remember how we savored the idea of an outsider to rein in and reign over government? How, last November, we wished for change, for change’s sake? In other words, we wanted a president who played to us.

Then, as happens from time to time, and as happened this week, we get jolted out of our easy chairs. We don’t want the president to heed us any longer. Now we want him to lead us.

If he can do it well.

We watch intently as this man strides across the lawn of the White House. We study him through the glass eye of our televisions as he speaks. We hope to find in him the mettle that no man can prove except in the forge of events.

In a turn swift and terrible, the government is no longer something separate. It is our defender. It is our instrument of justice. Our shield and our sword. It is us now. All the way to the untested top of the chain of command and onward from the president to an enemy lurking somewhere.

Leadership can be pondered, as one might study art or literature, for the truth it holds about human nature. But unlike art or literature, leadership is not meditative. It is visceral. Along with love, it is among those most mysterious human interactions.

Leadership, as the judge said about pornography, is not readily reduced to words, but we know it when we see it.

Leadership is this: When the air hisses with bullets overhead, a commander leaps out of the foxhole and yells, “Charge!,” do we follow?

In a democracy, leadership is alchemy and little else. There are few tools in a self-governing society to enforce the will of a pretender. We rise out of the foxhole and follow, or we don’t.

Leadership is a contagion. We look at the person on our left and on our right, and a signal passes down the line and a collective judgment is rendered. Only later do we speak of it. Only in the end do we know whether we did right.

One thing we are sure: George W. Bush is up against a superb leader. Whomever he was--and let’s make it easy and presume it was a he--he yelled, “Charge!” and other men rose from the safety of the foxhole to lay down their lives for a cause.

“More than acts of terrorism, these were acts of war,” Bush responded.

We elected a president after a debate on the narrowest of grounds. Tax rates, drug prices, school exams. We voted for someone to manage government. We received an ideologue on a mission to cut it. Now he must command it. Great events create great ironies. Ours is this: Bush was the man of the moment for those whose faith in government had ebbed. He stood apart from Washington. The moment changed. All eyes turn to Washington where the federal government once again is central to our shaken lives. We no longer want a president apart, but on top.

Scrape away the boilerplate of our political dialogue, and it’s been a long time since Americans felt the need for much more than ministerial caretakers in Washington. Divided rule was not accidental but sought. Ironically, one of Bush’s most appealing campaign promises was to turn down the volume. We didn’t want to hear about it all the time.

Now, we hang on his utterances, we weigh his body language. We anguish when he goes missing from sight and runs for most of a day as debris clouds blossom over the Eastern Seaboard.

A nation accustomed to having its every esteemed opinion registered in polls, on talk shows and in the halls of Congress lapses into doubt, struck on home soil by an unknown, or at least little-known foe--perhaps a bearded phantasm of a man who answers not to a state but to a religous state of mind, an enemy who seeks destruction rather than conquest. Terrorism: the power of the powerless.

So we rally. Around this president or around our hopes for him. Unseasoned in diplomacy. Uninspiring as an orator. Unimposing to the camera. An un-president for millions of Americans. Destiny handed him the summons.

Why he was elected hardly matters. How he was installed matters less, at least for now.

We hold our breath. Congress, acquiescent, convenes in a choir to sing a patriotic ditty. Bush gathers himself.

He counsels patience, which very few will deny him. He speaks of a new kind of war but promises an old-fashioned victory.

We look and we listen and we wait to learn what he is made of. And in the unfolding, it won’t be him alone. It will be, as it should in a democracy, as it always is in a foxhole, him and us. Leaders are often worse but seldom better than the people they lead.