Believe it or not, those who chose and for long supported Charles Haughey's leadership of Fianna Fail were looking for a strong man.
This may seem incredible as, with every week that passes, Mr Haughey and his legacy appear more likely to be the party's ruination.
Bertie Ahern is the latest, arguably the closest and certainly the most important, of Haughey's erstwhile colleagues being challenged to account for themselves.
And, once more, Mr Ahern is being asked to explain why he told the Dail less than the whole story - in this case about a Fianna Fail cheque, countersigned by him, which ended up in an account held by Mr Haughey's financial adviser, Des Traynor.
But the party's problems are no longer capable of being reduced to single issues or sorted out by plausible accounts and acts of contrition by the Taoiseach.
Even if Mr Ahern is unwilling, or unable, to explain himself to the Dail, the Moriarty Tribunal continues to show how it all began and the Flood Tribunal fills in the detail of the latest complications.
In the beginning there was the case for a strong leader: a strong man leading a singleparty government was what Fianna Fail and the country needed. Or so the argument ran when Mr Haughey was chosen in 1979.
It was a view which had persisted, not only when Fine Gael and Labour held office from 1973 to 1977, but after Fianna Fail's return to power with 84 TDs in a 148-seat Dail.
Jack Lynch, who had led Fianna Fail for 11 years, had given the party its historic majority but not the style of leadership provided by its founders, Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass.
Mr Lynch's ordinariness - his complete lack of fanaticism - won support across party lines, something Mr de Valera and Mr Lemass had never done. It was not what the party wanted.
The party had some bitter memories to erase: the exposure of its rhetoric on the national question, and deep division on Northern policy in 1970; in 1973, electoral defeat for the first time in 16 years.
Even with a historic majority there was a nagging sense of insecurity. What was needed was a man of destiny, someone with the style to lead as of old. Mr Haughey had always known that he was the man.
Others who admired his style compared him to the Romans or the emperor Napoleon. Some still do. Some saw in him a latter day Charles de Gaulle, sent to revive the spirit of the nation.
Few were worried by the whiff of cordite; indeed, it was one of Mr Haughey's attractions. What was it Mr Lemass had said about its being a slightly constitutional party?
Nor was there a contradiction with that other reputation as the speculators' friend, the high-flyer about whose source of funds no one was sure. If he could do it for himself, maybe he could do it for the country.
George Colley, Des O'Malley and Mary Harney were in a minority, jostled at party meetings, cold-shouldered at ardfheiseanna, dismissed as begrudgers who couldn't bear to see their opponent succeed.
The middle ground in the party fell silent and gradually came to accept a form of wartime politics: unquestioning unity of purpose bred in isolation and constantly under threat at home and abroad.
Some who stayed after the formation of the Progressive Democrats were uneasy with the style and the disregard for democracy. They consoled themselves that one day their man would deliver. They were wrong.
Style was everything. The substance, as we heard at the McCracken Tribunal and are now discovering in greater detail, was more rotten than Mr Haughey's enemies imagined.
Ten years ago, Tom Garvin wrote in the Irish Press that Margaret Thatcher would at least have an ism to her name. Mr Haughey would leave nothing.
It was an understatement. The first calls made by the newly elected strongman were on rich friends and acquaintances, asking for - demanding - the funds he needed to pay off the banks. The man who was credited with all manner of entrepreneurial skills was regularly on the touch, seeking investments for his son's company, Celtic Helicopters.
Some of the investments ended up in his or his adviser's accounts. But several of the investors reaped their own rewards as a result of (coincidental) decisions made by Mr Haughey as Taoiseach.
The leader who was suspected by his critics of buying political favours is now seen to have been accepting huge sums, not to finance grand schemes in the State's interest, but to meet the cost of his own aggrandisement.
Yet to maintain the style to which he had become accustomed, there had to be a steady flow of funds. And to ensure that the flow continued he had to be in government.
SOME commentators were convinced that, in opposition between 1983 and 1987, the party had retreated into traditional positions for purely political reasons. How else could we explain the extraordinary stance it adopted on the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and in the referendums of 1983 and 1986?
Mr Haughey raised problems about the forum report at the last minute, sent Brian Lenihan to the US to campaign against the agreement and issued a craw-thumping statement on divorce which commentators and colleagues alike knew to be brazen hypocrisy.
These decisions were all but inexplicable until it became clear that he needed money more than he believed the party needed consistency, credibility or a political rationale.
Those who nowadays look on him as an old man hounded by unforgiving critics either never knew or choose to forget that he once enjoyed the support of the most influential people in the media.
John Healy contributed two or three columns a week to this newspaper about those much derided figures Garret the Good (FitzGerald) and Honest Jack (Lynch), by comparison with whom Charles J. Haughey was a man of the world with a macho personality and a knowing air.
In Burgh Quay and Middle Abbey street, he was fiercely defended by Tim Pat Coogan and Michael Hand, editors of the Irish Press and the Sunday Independent.
Attempts to raise questions about Mr Haughey's cynical attitude to social change - the ridiculous Irish solution to an Irish problem as well as opposition to divorce on family grounds - were simply dismissed.
The argument was that Irish newspapers did not stoop to the levels of the British press, invariably dismissed as tabloid. Besides, where was the evidence to support the claims of hypocrisy? Catch 22: we didn't have the evidence; and if we followed custom we wouldn't look.
There were rumours of offshore bank accounts and debt. AIB flatly denied Des Crowley's report in the Evening Press about how much Mr Haughey owed. The Press apologised, as RTE was to apologise to Larry Goodman for another report which was substantially true.
Strong men may be damn all use to the rest of us; they're more likely to use their muscle for their own interests.