A President and A KingI never liked Richard Nixon. It always struck me that anyone who could choose Spiro T. Agnew as his vice-president was up to no good and needed to be watched very closely. I shed no tears when Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, fleeing to avoid impeachment.
Richard Nixon never struck me as being enamoured of the democratic process but I began to think just a bit more kindly of him when I watched him in lengthy interviews he gave David Frost.
I guess the interviews weren't that great because I only retained one anecdote from the lot but it was good, very good. Nixon was being questioned on how he got the U.S. to accept communist China.
He replied saying that the true test of any democratic leader was his ability to persuade his people to support, perhaps reluctantly, unpopular positions. It was the duty of leaders, he noted, not only to lead by doing what needed to be done but also to lead the people to accept and support that decision.
Would that more of our leaders today accepted that obligation. Unfortunately we have too many who view democracy either as mob rule or else as the unwashed deciding, every four or five years, who will be their dictator for the next four or five years. The mob rule type eventually lead to an unjust, dysfunctional government. The other type do pretty much what they want and then open the doors to profligate spending at the end of their term to buy their way through another election.
It takes a great deal of patience, committment and perseverance to govern by the model Nixon described. These are qualities often absent in our too-often petulant, top-down prime minister. We need better. Stephen Harper doesn't like to explain. He doesn't like to have to justify or convince. If he can't lead us on an issue, such as Afghanistan, he simply goes ahead with it anyway and moves on to something else. Now, there's a Decider for you.
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