While listening to NPR I heard a segment with author Aaron David Miller who suggests that we have had only 3 great Presidents in the history of our country; Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. He reasons that in order to be a truly great President that you must meet 3 criteria; a crisis, the capacity to handle the crisis, and character. It can't be any old crisis however, it must be a big one. He argues that without a truly nation paralyzing crisis that one cannot be truly great and because he does not want to go through any earth shattering crisis he never wants to have a truly great president again. I find this reasoning fallacious, both the fact that one cannot be great without a great crisis and also that we should never have great president again because that means we would be in crisis.
I believe that any president has the potential to be a great president regardless if they have to whether a great national crisis. How a president handles crisis helps define that presidency but there is more to greatness than triumphing over national crisis. A lot goes into successfully running a country and I think that like any CEO who guides his company to record profits and sustained growth can be considered a great CEO, a President who runs the nation great but never experiences a great crisis can still be a great President. Maybe because he/she has handled many small crisis exceptionally well, they never have to trudge up the mountain of great crisis.
I agree. Why would weathering a major crisis be a determining factor of your greatness? It seems like that type of criteria would encourage presidents to get involved in unnecessary crisis in an attempt at greatness, definitely not the type of behavior I would want to encourage in my elected officials.
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