Epilogue.

BURNS, JAMES MACGREGOR

As the twentieth century closed, historians recorded that the president of the United States had dallied with a lover in the White House itself. A longtime philanderer, the president had assignations outside as well as inside the executive mansion. His wife, busy with official responsibilities, speech making, and a pet reform or two, knew of her husband's infidelities, but she loyally protected him. Mrs. Warren G. Harding stuck by her man, people said admiringly. Years later, John F. Kennedy had trysts in the White House while his wife was out of town, and decades later, Bill Clinton confessed to sexual encounters in the Oval Office with a much younger woman than he. And his wife stuck by him too.

These affairs differed markedly in one vital respect--the media coverage. Both Hardings's and JFK's dalliances leaked out into public awareness decades later. Neither set of revelations aroused much public interest. But Clinton's recklessness, combined with some bad luck, produced a media frenzy that lasted for months and was continuing as these articles were written. And he was still in office, fully exposed to the wave of disgust and disappointment that swept the country following his confession.

One result of the media frenzy was to shift analysis of the Clinton presidency from emphasis on the political to obsession with the personal, from a concern with public values to emphasis on private virtues. The articles in this volume are centrally concerned with moral principles without neglecting personal ethics.

Bill Clinton came to Washington in January 1993 with a determination to be a great president. And what was a "great president?" Among other things, it was a chief executive rated as a great by scholars--mainly historians and political scientists--voting in the presidential sweepstakes of the Arthur Schlesingers, father and son. The tests of greatness for most of these scholars were moral conviction, policy innovation, political skill, and executive competence.

For Clinton, being a great president meant, above all, the determination to make fundamental changes, and he was intent on that too. Aware of the difference between transformational and transactional leadership, he wanted to be more than a political broker among economic and political factions. And he knew that a transformational leader had to be a courageous initiator and a tireless "follow-up-er," willing to take risks, to fail, but to try, try again.

His first--and some would say only--act of courageous innovation was the health bill of 1993-94. Ambitious and complex, it fell to a massive onslaught by paid media and the health industry. This kind of opposition was nothing new in the history of American political and social reform. Policy innovators and social reformers were used to defeat--they simply pressed on. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt's minimum wage measure of 1937 failed in the face of business and southern opposition-- he tried again the next year and got his bill. Sometimes, great leadership is mere humdrum persistence.

But sometimes, too, nothing fails like failure. The health bill was not only strangled on Capitol Hill--it was interred for good. For months after its defeat, administration officials talked about it in hushed tones, as though even proposing the bill was a kind of cardinal sin. Instead of try, try again, after ridding the bill of its deficiencies, it was never-never again. The Clinton White House had lost its nerve.

The health bill defeat strengthened the hand of those in the administration who wanted the president to follow a political strategy of centrism, moderation, and bipartisanship, operating in the middle of the political and ideological spectrum. Urging transactional rather than transformational leadership, they would have the White House negotiate with friends and foes, left and right, on an ad hoc, step-by-step basis.

This was the incrementalism of "policy bites," such as favoring school uniforms or advising mothers how to put their children in seat belts. It might be that, given the fragmentation of the American system of government, it is the only strategy that works in the long run. But how long will the long run be? While transactional leaders plod ahead foot by foot, transforming leaders in business, finance, communication, the environment and--yes--the health industry make mighty changes of their own. They take the risks, they try the innovations, that presidents dare not. And, as Richard Rose reminds us, global policy making and institution building may be changing outside the United States faster than inside the beltway.

And now, Bill Clinton is in his second term, historically a time of postponed problems, as Michael Nelson notes, and of no honeymoon. Even worse, he is in (if not sacked) the second half of his second term, when political leadership is further fragmented as presidential hopefuls launch their candidacies. Could the famous "comeback kid" come back in 1999? If he were constitutionally able to run for office again, he probably would win; his political forte has always been, in the final showdown, to win votes. But to come back as a transformational leader seems out of the question.

Who would fill the political void? It is the supreme irony of the Clinton presidency that the most conspicuous leader who tried a transformational strategy was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Derided for trying to be "copresident" in the first term, she was later admired for her dignity and forbearance, as well as her loyalty, in the Monica Lewinsky debacle. Even more, she might be admired for sticking to Bill Clinton's original vision of greatness. Certainly, she brought to her vision the commitment, self-discipline, and purposefulness that the White House so often lacked. While Bill Clinton will be relegated to the political sidelines on January 20, 2001, she need not be. Hillary Rodham Clinton might become the finest legacy of the Clinton presidency.

JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS

Senior Scholar
James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership
University of Maryland

James MacGregor Burns, Ph.D., Harvard University, is a senior scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Leadership and of a number of biographies, including Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom.