Fragments of Leaders
“I despise your festivals, take no delight in your solemn assemblies… But let justice roll down like waters, righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
From age 26 to 43, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill had White House assignments. He went with, was a part of preparation and protection for, wherever on the planet the President decided to go. Hill chronicles these personalities and events in FIVE PRESIDENTS: MY EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY WITH EISENHOWER, KENNEDY, JOHNSON, NIXON, AND FORD. Overall, it is written in an anecdotal, interesting, matter of fact way, only occasionally with personal opinion and emotion expressed…making such expressions even more significant.
Hill affirms the basic likability of the presidents. Eisenhower and golf. Kennedy and his kids. Johnson loving to show people the little house in which he was born. Nixon, though suspicious and calculating, so wanting approval. The down to earth good guy-ness of Gerald Ford. He notes each had, perhaps requisite for anyone with that job, “an enormous ego.”
“Each faced challenges they could not have predicted…had to dig deeply in their character to make decisions that affected the whole world. Eisenhower a visionary…ran the administration with military precision. Kennedy rhetorically gifted, with the capacity to inspire. Johnson had an oversized personality…the skill to muster support for major domestic policies…Viet Nam his unfortunate legacy. Nixon had first term successes, openings to China and the Soviet Union…but his emotional flaws led to his downfall. Ford was an ordinary man intent on doing right….
“I saw their strengths and weaknesses as each wrestled with life and death decisions. No one person has all the qualities necessary to be a perfect leader in every situation. America’s voters carry the responsibility of choosing the best person to lead our nation….”(pp. 431-432)
Agent Hill, within seconds of the first shot at President Kennedy, jumped on the back of the limousine, trying to shield the leader. The third shot literally exploded the president’s head. For years, with great emotional, physical, and family cost, Hill held in how he felt responsible for not being there a fragment of a second sooner to take the bullet to save the president. In a fateful interview years later, he also clarifies that Mrs. Kennedy had not climbed on the back of the car trying to escape, but trying to retrieve fragments of her husband’s head. (p. 426)
We are fragmentary, imperfect people. That’s no excuse to do less than our best, not to hold ourselves and our leaders accountable. Yet it borders on a sinful waste of lifetime to take near diabolical delight in finding that our leaders are fallible...as we all are.
The God of love and justice we know in Jesus is a vertical presence cutting across all the horizontals of human life – from politics to personal endeavors. That vertical affirms what is good, challenges what it is not. Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering mid-20th century theologian, argued that God’s full agape love can never be perfectly embodied in a human or earthly system.
What we seek with God’s help is to do justice. Justice is rough approximations of God’s vertical perfect love applied in the imperfect horizontal situations of our life together. Though we may not always feel ‘lovey-dovey’ with each other, that does not absolve us from treating people rightly, or affording them the same rights we enjoy.
So, in these presidential campaign days, we can expect all sorts of efforts to discredit the candidates, both of whom, like us all, are fragmentary and imperfect. The question is: which candidate, with his or her foibles galore, touches and inspires the best, not the worst, in us?
As we know, there was and is only one perfect candidate. And we recall what people like us did to him. Yet the resurrecting God of Jesus will not give up on us. Let us not give up on each other.