When Leaders Change History

In the early spring of 1995, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was riding high, and President Bill Clinton was in deep political trouble. Gingrich’s Republican troops on Capitol Hill were busy enacting their “Contract With America,” and Clinton looked pathetic, begging even to be heard. “The Constitution gives me relevance,” he informed a press conference on April 18.

The next day, Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the arc of Clinton’s presidency changed utterly. The fevers of right-wing politics suddenly broke; Clinton seized the opportunity to become the emblem of national reconciliation; a president on the ropes took command of his presidency and set off for reelection.

The killing of Osama bin Laden is certainly a dramatic moment. And repeatedly in the past, sudden events of equal or greater importance have helped transform presidencies that looked either beleaguered or distracted, much as the raid in Abbottabad may reinvigorate President Obama’s flagging administration.

Abraham Lincoln had been planning in mid-1862 to issue an order emancipating Southern slaves but lacked the public support in the North that only a Union victory could bring. Then, on Sept. 17, Union and Confederate forces met at Antietam Creek. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland had been thwarted, and it was victory enough for Lincoln to release his preliminary emancipation proclamation five days later, thereby transforming his presidency and the Union’s stated war aims.

As fascism swamped Europe at the end of the 1930s, and Japanese militarism arose in Asia, Franklin D. Roosevelt tenaciously battled conservatives in Congress to obtain measures such as Lend-Lease to aid the British, in preparation for what he thought would be America’s inevitable entry into World War II. In an instant, on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything.

John F. Kennedy had an extremely rocky first year in office, punctuated by the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April, a poor performance at the Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in June, and the building of the Berlin Wall two months later. Yet Kennedy’s flexible but tough-minded handling of the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962 completely changed the tenor of his presidency.

Dramatic turning points have not always been propitious, as Jimmy Carter learned when the effort to free the hostages in Iran in 1980 turned into a disaster. Sometimes the margin between success and failure is tiny. Imagine what might have happened had all the helicopters at Abbottabad malfunctioned.

Instead, Obama is, deservedly, enjoying what may prove a transformative moment in his presidency. But he should not on that account take too much for granted. Great moments can lift a presidency, and can even, for a time, unite the nation, but they do not bring the end of politics, or banish the kind of political retaliation the president can expect down the road.