The wimp factor

Hillary Clinton and John McCain recently tried to provoke Barack Obama into bombing Iraq and Syria by questioning the president’s manhood. Dick Cheney, as vice president, did goad George W. Bush into invading Iraq by pressing the manhood button. The junior Bush made no secret of his obsession with his father's "wimp" image and consequently bent over backward to prove his own macho credentials. (Never mind that Bush Sr. was a genuine war hero, and Bush Jr. was a genuine war avoider.) Al Gore, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney all lost close presidential elections after being tarred as wimps. And now a grateful world can thank Thomas Friedman and Trudy Rubin for waving red flags at Vladimir Putin just as Russia’s bare-chested putative tsar is searching for a graceful way to withdraw from Ukraine.

What to do about our 21st-century epidemic of wimp allegations? In the Internet age, when perception trumps reality, public figures like Kerry and Bush Sr., who actually put themselves in harm’s way in wartime, find themselves tarred as wimps by armchair warriors like Dick Cheney, who never heard a shot fired in anger.

Bush unarmed

Bush Jr., in his memoirs, describes Cheney’s anger when Bush declined to pardon Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby: “I can’t believe you’re going to leave a soldier on the battlefield,” Cheney told Bush — a bizarre analogy, coming from a man who had obtained five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. But Bush was unarmed for such a rhetorical duel. And in this brave new world, our old reliable giants of classical literature, drama and cinema — like, say, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, Austen, or Melville — offered him precious little guidance.

We know that Shakespeare’s Henry V evolved from callow wastrel to confident ruler by leading the outnumbered English troops to victory at the Battle of Agincourt. Whether that battle was really worth fighting — since the English were driven out of France less than 40 years later — was a question Shakespeare chose to ignore. But in any case, today’s alleged wimps haven’t been asked to put their lives, only the lives of others, on the line. When George W. Bush told Condoleezza Rice that he was going to whip Saddam Hussein’s ass, he was speaking figuratively, of course — much like the cattle rancher Rufus Ryker in Shane, who declares, “I’ll kill him if I have to,” to which his hired gun Jack Wilson corrects him: “You mean I’ll kill him if you have to.”

Iago vs. Othello

To be sure, some military heroes really did turn out to be wimpy politicians (Ulysses S. Grant and, to a lesser degree, Dwight D. Eisenhower displayed much more backbone in battle than in the White House). The fact remains: This wimp business is a phenomenon that Shakespeare et al. seem to have overlooked.

Lady Macbeth egged her hesitant husband into murder by urging him to screw his courage to the sticking place. Iago manipulated Othello into a jealous rage that spun way out of either man’s control. Oscar Wilde’s Salome reduced King Herod to slavish hallucination by dancing seductively. But in each of these cases, the victim seems helpless to escape his adversary’s rhetorical or artistic trap. None addresses the urgent question posed by modern current events: What’s a testosterone-obsessed national leader to do when someone calls him a wimp? And how can the rest of us encourage our leaders to respond to political crises with their heads rather than their guts?

Othello, a bona fide military hero with no need to assert his machismo, might have told Iago, “Don’t you have anything better to do than gossip?” Macbeth might have told his missus, “The issue here isn’t courage or failure — it’s how can you justify murder?”

Dilworth’s contrived rage

In his recent biography of Philadelphia’s reform mayor Richardson Dilworth, Peter Binzen notes that Dilworth’s famous public rages (he once denounced a hostile South Philadelphia audience as “greasers”) were often contrived in the knowledge that “public displays of temper, properly directed, could be an asset.” The 20th-century Philadelphia tycoon Albert M. Greenfield (subject of my recent biography) projected an image of supreme self-assurance at all times, but that was largely a screen behind which he sifted all viewpoints that confronted him. Had he used standard analytical processes to arrive at his decisions, he might have appeared so weak and indecisive as to undermine his greatest asset: his ability to inspire confidence.

Obama seems unwilling or unable to engage in such games. To his credit, he has refused to take the “wimp” bait by calling out the military at every sign of trouble. He also seems immune to the intoxications of power that seem to have infected Vladimir Putin. But Obama has failed to use his bully pulpit to reclaim the rhetorical initiative from his adversaries. When he’s attacked as a wimp, would it kill him to say, “I’m not the only fellow who turns the other cheek. Anybody here heard of Jesus?”

There’s nothing quite as wimpy as a leader who worries about being called a wimp. But our high-tech age does offer remedial tools that never occurred to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Voltaire or Rabelais, maybe. This is no job for Dostoevsky. Jon Stewart, Monty Python, or the young Woody Allen should suffice.