The New York Times

Monday, November 13, 2000

A Sure Hand Can Save the New President

By RICHARD NORTON SMITH

RAND RAPIDS, Mich. - For the moment, with Florida under siege as armies of partisans descend to watch the recounts, it seems hard to imagine George W. Bush or Al Gore truly winning the White House - that is, able to claim the mandate necessary to govern effectively. Yet someone will have to be declared the nation's 43rd president, by the courts if not by the electorate.

Whoever is left standing will need to establish his political legitimacy. For guidance, he can choose from two very different historical models.

On the one hand, there is John Quincy Adams, that other son of a president, who in 1824 failed to win a majority of either the popular or the electoral vote. Only with Henry Clay's belated support did Adams nail down a victory in the House of Representatives over his Tennessee rival, Andrew Jackson. Adams's subsequent appointment of Clay as secretary of state all but guaranteed his status as a one-term president. The new executive's sweeping call for federally financed road and canal projects, plus a national university, was a profound, if visionary, misreading of his questionable mandate. A bitter rematch with Jackson became inevitable; their 1828 contest remains notable for a level of personal abuse unequaled in American history.

By contrast, there is Rutherford B. Hayes, beneficiary of a seemingly interminable deadlock, after the 1876 election, during which there was muttered talk of a new civil war and a bullet was fired near the candidate's window as he and his family dined a few feet away.

Unlike Adams, Hayes embarked upon a presidency in which principled reform complemented the pursuit of national unity, the latter desperately sought by a nation reeling from the assassination of one president, the impeachment of another and the discrediting of a third.

One can hardly envision less favorable circumstances for a new president than the sullen, bitterly divided nation that inaugurated Hayes on March 4, 1877. Many Democrats boycotted the ceremony to protest Hayes's 185-to-184 Electoral College victory over Samuel Tilden, who had won the popular vote by a quarter of a million votes.

Openly mocked as His Fraudulency, the new president appeared to the waspish Henry Adams "a third- rate nonentity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one."

Appearances are deceiving. The amiable three-term governor from Ohio had accepted his party's nomination by calling for a "thorough, radical and complete" overhaul of the nation's civil service. Just as a century later it would take the veteran anticommunist Richard Nixon to open China, so it fell to Hayes, the political careerist from the Republican heartland, to plead the cause of political reform in an era of rampant corruption and bipartisan thievery.

Hayes began by naming a cabinet in which ability counted more than cronyism. He next issued an executive order forbidding all federal officeholders from managing party politics. "Party leaders should have no more influence in appointments than other equally respectable citizens," declared the president.

This brought him into conflict with his own party - specifically Senator Roscoe Conkling, New York's Republican boss. It was said of the arrogant Conkling, whose love for the Union had proved insufficient to make him wear its uniform in the late conflict, that he was "invincible in peace and invisible in war." But Conkling was a one-man army when defending his political machine. To comply with Hayes's orders would mean an end to his personal control, exercised through the elegant grafter Chester Arthur of the New York Custom House, lucrative linchpin of the spoils system.

Conkling's colleagues on Capitol Hill, equally fearful over the loss of senatorial prerogative, staged a stormy confrontation with the president at the White House. From his desk drawer, Hayes took a copy of the Republican platform of 1876. Calmly he invited his callers to read its pledges regarding civil service reform.

"We must not forget that I am president of the whole country, not any party," said Hayes. To his diary the president confided, "I am clear that I am right, I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me."

In this he was undoubtedly correct, even if the best people did not necessarily include a majority of the Senate. In January 1878, a White House secretary appeared at the doors of the Senate with "a wheelbarrow load of documents" proving Hayes's charges of corruption.

Hayes, in rising above the party system that had produced him, dispelled the fog of cynicism that periodically settles over the American electorate. By voluntarily renouncing a second term, Hayes the Reconciler relegated His Fraudulency to fading memory. Thus did he create his own legitimacy.

Today's conventional wisdom holds that whoever takes office next Jan. 20 will have to content himself with the purely ceremonial aspects of office, as the circumstances of his election will rule out substantive achievement. But it doesn't have to be.

Indeed, the very closeness of this year's campaign invites a moderation that could go a long way toward dispelling post-election bitterness. Whatever else divides them, both candidates will have been liberated from their most extreme supporters and their most divisive policy proposals. Each could cobble together a bipartisan cabinet, foreshadowing an appealing legislative agenda marked by pragmatic approaches to Social Security, health care and tax cuts.

Until then, both sides should remember the August 1974 appeal of Gerald Ford, who took office amidst far graver doubts as to his legitimacy. "I am acutely aware that you have not elected me by your ballots," said Mr. Ford, "and so I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers."

A quarter century later, it is not the Constitution that is being tested, but the people who live under it.

(Richard Norton Smith, a historian, is writing a biography of Nelson Rockefeller.)