Shedding Tears For An Entire Nation

The president’s eyes fill with tears. His words express both grief and anger, tenderness toward the victims and their families and a determination to see their deaths avenged.

In times of national tragedy, the American people look to the president for that combination of strength and compassion. In a sense, he becomes both commander in chief and mourner in chief.

“It is something that is really probably pretty easy to pull off,” said historian Sam Kernell, an authority on the presidency who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. “One is hard put to find presidents failing to do it adequately. But there are some recent presidents who seem more effective in representing the nation in mourning.”

President Clinton is one that Kernell said “gets high marks for this.”

And Ronald Reagan, of course, was a master at showing both the emotion and the strength the nation looked for in times of crisis.

It may be no accident that Clinton and Reagan are also the two presidents who have never hesitated to shed tears.

Clinton’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing met a national need. It caused many people to take second look at him, after a rocky two years in office. In that sense it proved a turning point in his presidency.

Not all historians agree that national mourner is an appropriate role for presidents.

“Television makes this possible,” said Henry Graff, professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It makes the president take on a new function of the presidency. Pastoral skill will now be viewed as yet another qualification for the Oval Office.”

When Clinton flew to Oklahoma City for a prayer service the Sunday after a bomb destroyed a federal building and killed 168 people, including children at a day care center, he was filling that presidential role.

With tears in his eyes, he hugged family members and said softly, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

He also vowed to “do everything in my power” to strengthen the nation’s defense against terrorism. As for those responsible for the bombing, he said, “If this is not a crime for which capital punishment is called, I don’t know what is.”

Last week, another terrorist bomb killed 19 American servicemen in Saudi Arabia. The president went to the White House press briefing room and vowed that “we will not rest in our efforts to find whoever is responsible for this outrage.”

And over the weekend, Clinton cut short a trip to France to attend memorial services at two Air Force bases in Florida for the bombing victims. “America stands with you in your sorrow and outrage,” he assured mourners.

Kernell pointed out that in most other countries leadership roles are divided; the political and legislative leader does not take on the symbolic role of leading the nation in mourning.

“We are among the few in the industrial democracies that have the political leader, the president, perform both in politics and in national symbolic gestures,” he said.

Not all presidents have been as good as Clinton and Reagan in taking on that role.

Prof. Richard Kirkendall of the University of Washington, a biographer of President Truman, said Truman was “pretty awkward at anything that called for a formal speech. He was really quite poor at the ceremonial sides of the presidency.”

President Bush tried hard, but without much success, to convince people that he was, in Clinton’s words, “feeling your pain.”

Columbia’s Graff criticized what he called the era of “the president as pastor,” in an article he wrote in 1987 shortly after Reagan eulogized the 37 sailors killed in an Iraqi missile attack on the frigate USS Stark.

Graff argued that such a role by the president “requires a reassertion, a defense of military policy to prove the servicemen have not died in vain.”

But even in his criticism, Graff conceded that “few scenes presented to the nation can compare with the effectiveness of our chief executive tearfully embracing the beloved of the slain men he ordered to stand guard on foreign ramparts.”

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