The cult of decisiveness in U.S. politics

"Once a decision was made," a former U.S. president wrote in his memoirs, "I did not worry about it afterward."

Stoic talk. Yet the guy who said it, Harry Truman, made perhaps the single most momentous decision in American history: to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 people.

That, friends, is decisiveness as America defines it. We are a society of decision-makers — or, at least, hungry to believe that we are. To conclude anything else would suggest the unimaginable: that we are a nation of bystanders.

We roll up our sleeves to get the job done and, in the process, often ignore process. We favor "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," and reject "Let me mull it over and I'll get back to you after I weigh the options." We are Lucy — square-jawed, decisive, prickly when challenged — and not good ol' wishy-washy Charlie Brown.

Yet from the very beginning, the United States was constructed to be, well, kinda, sorta indecisive.

A face for decisions
The founding fathers built into our national fabric a separation of powers — the president, Congress, the Supreme Court — to prevent the tyranny that other nations in the 18th century faced. That meant that no one expression of American decisiveness could squash others.

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As we know now, it didn't turn out that way. A culture built around the individual requires a face for its decisions. The president, the most visible person in government, became that face.

George Washington refused to be crowned king because of the founders' fears that consolidating decision-making in one man could reproduce the very tyranny they had just shed. But as the decades of the 1800s passed, the presidency evolved into a command center for decisiveness.

One by one, big decisions started coming from the White House. From Thomas Jefferson (the Louisiana Purchase), James Monroe (the Monroe Doctrine) and Andrew Jackson (who used the oft-overlooked veto as an executive sledgehammer). Then, after a string of weak forgettables like John Tyler, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, came the man remembered as one of American history's most decisive leaders.

Quiet loner at civilization's edge
Abraham Lincoln's key decisions to save the Union — leading the North into the Civil War and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation — claimed so much power that opponents cried tyranny. But, Donald T. Phillips writes in "Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times," "What would have been the consequences had Lincoln not been decisive? We can only shudder at the thought."

In the decades that followed, the glorification of the frontier experience elevated decisiveness even further. The image of the quiet loner at civilization's edge, making decisions on behalf of progress, became a potent one. "Our cultural mythology teaches us to look for decisiveness and people who have been engaged in certain kinds of adventure and conflict, and expects them to produce decisive results," says Richard Slotkin, a frontier historian and author of "Gunfighter Nation."

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Not long afterward, Theodore Roosevelt unleashed his progressive policies in his decidedly non-shrinking violet way and created the 20th century image of a decisive president that echoes today. A generation later, his cousin Franklin steered the nation through the Depression and war and claimed policymaking initiatives with a sure-footedness that further cemented the decisive presidency.

Then came JFK. The vigorous vision of space-age leadership his aides sculpted included a smooth, modern, almost glib brand of decisiveness that was tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace and enrobed with youthful optimism.

As John A. Barnes notes in "John F. Kennedy on Leadership," Kennedy extended his direct decision-making power into diplomacy and public relations. Whereas Dwight D. Eisenhower fashioned his presidency on the military bureaucracy he oversaw during World War II, his successor — a junior officer in that war — thought such bureaucracy impeded decisiveness. So Kennedy "moved the White House unquestionably to center stage in American life," Barnes wrote, "making it the center of national executive decision-making."

Hesitancy and the presidency
Then there's George W. Bush.

In the post-9/11 landscape, Bush's shoot-from-the-hip style — call it the imperial presidency, as his opponents have, or the CEO presidency — emphasizes decisiveness itself as a paramount trait, regardless of what the decisions might be. So even while the merits of an Iraq invasion are debated, Bush's stay-the-course message is presented as a position of strength. Any hint of indecisiveness — even the notion of considering multiple opinions before acting — is cast as weakness.

The very appearance of hesitation can sink a presidency, as evidenced by Jimmy Carter, who was perceived as too nice a guy for the White House. And it also can sink a presidential campaign.

Political strategist James Carville, writing in Time magazine in 2005, acknowledged Karl Rove's skill in helping Bush defeat John Kerry in 2004. Rove, Carville asserted, "made the last election one not about policies or positions or even about values or national security — he made it about decisiveness."

"Who else ever won the presidency on a message that basically says, `You may not like what I stand for, but I stand for something,'" Carville wrote.

That doesn't sit well with Kerry.

"In a president, people are looking for strength — strength of character, strength of purpose, strength of belief — and I value that," the Massachusetts senator says. "But unfortunately, it's been trivialized by the system, by the process in regrettable ways that don't do justice to the complexity of some of the choices we face or ... the complexity of the world we live in."

When it comes to decisiveness, Kerry says, "You can be strong and nuanced."

Fair point. Trouble is, as a society we value strength. But nuance? Not so much.

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