Character Will Never Never be Irrelevant | Opinion

Nearly all the glowing tributes for the late Colin Powell included wistful references to the promising presidential campaign he passed up in 1996. Columnist Maureen Dowd flatly declared: "General Powell was the best America had to offer.... He could have been president."

At a jammed press conference in November of 1995, with his inspiring memoir My American Journey riding high on national bestseller lists, the charismatic four-star general made a long-awaited announcement: that he had registered as a Republican and planned to back the GOP, but declined to become a candidate himself. "I believe I can help the party of Lincoln move once again close to the spirit of Lincoln," Powell pledged.

Anyone who believes he succeeded in advancing that goal must have enjoyed a Rip Van Winkle interlude and missed the brawling, bitter, pugnacious GOP that's emerged in recent years. Lincoln may have been an earthy frontier lawyer with little formal schooling, but he impressed his contemporaries, and even political opponents, with his kindness and character. Early Republicans placed a priority on uprightness and dignity even before "Honest Abe" appeared on the scene. Their first-ever presidential nominee, John C. Fremont in 1856, had earned national adulation before politics as a fearless explorer of the western wilderness ("The Great Pathfinder") and a dashing military officer.

After Lincoln, the most popular Republican presidents—U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan—each earned larger-than life reputations as national heroes that preceded and transcended their political success.

It would have been easy to envision General Powell fitting comfortably into this legacy, along with recent GOP nominees—such as Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney—who, even in defeat, made a point of coming across as "class acts." They upheld the values of honor and self-control as more significant than combativeness or cunning. That's why Richard Nixon always seemed out of place in the Republican pantheon; from the ethical questions behind his "Checkers Speech" near the beginning of Nixon's career to the criminal charges that marked its sordid conclusion, traditional Republicans never fully embraced him, despite the 49-state landslide he engineered in 1972.

More recently, in the era of Clinton and Trump, Americans seem less willing to consider the content of a president's character and more inclined to doubt that character counts at all. The defenders of both the most recently impeached presidents never insisted on the virtue of "Slick Willy" or "The Donald" but claimed that a president's political skills more than made up for any moral failings. The many admirers of former president Donald Trump used this logic to brush aside his obvious shortcomings. Peggy Noonan, speechwriter to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, wrote a marvelous memoir of her White House years called When Character Was King. I recently suggested to her that if she ever wanted to update her book to the present, she would need a revised title: "When Character Was Irrelevant."

But it's never really irrelevant, because character, more than ideology or intellectual ability, shapes the way that any leader copes with the unforeseen challenges that fate or history inevitably throw in his path. As Duke professor James David Barber declared in his indispensable 1972 analysis, The Presidential Character, "character is the way the President orients himself toward life, not for the moment but enduringly. Character is the person's stance as he confronts experience. And at the core of character a man confronts himself."

The American people sensed, instinctively, that we had missed a great opportunity when Colin Powell declined to seek the presidency a quarter century ago. Looking back, Peggy Noonan worried that we may never get another such chance: "Here is the question you ask as you look at his life, the question always in the back of your mind now as you consider the great ones who've passed: Are we still making their kind? Or have we got so many things wrong we aren't quite producing them anymore?"

In this vast and vibrant republic, the answer is almost certainly that we still produce "great ones," but we may fail to recognize and support them when they appear.

More than 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed an eternal truth: "A man's character is his fate."

And a nation's fate is its ability to value and elevate its leaders of character.

Michael Medved hosts a daily radio talk show and is author, most recently, of God's Hand On America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era. Follow him on Twitter: @MedvedSHOW.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.