Leadership
It was not simply for himself; it was for the people he hoped to lead. He wanted to distinguish himself in their eyes. The sense of community was central to the master dream of his life—the desire to accomplish deeds that would gain the lasting respect of his fellow men.
“I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.”
“He carried away from his brief schooling,” his biographer David Herbert Donald observes, “the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.” A dream that he might someday be in a situation to make the most of his talents began to take hold.
“If elected,” Lincoln pledged, any law providing dependable roads and navigable streams for “the poorest and most thinly populated” communities “shall receive my support.”
Lincoln began, drolly admitting, “I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”
He was after something more significant than the gratification of an artfully delivered humiliation.
The founding fathers’ noble experiment—their ambition to show the world that ordinary people could govern themselves—had succeeded, and now, Lincoln concluded, it was up to his generation to preserve this “proud fabric of freedom.”
the following Thanksgiving, Franklin delivered the shocking news: he had asked Eleanor to marry him; she had accepted. “I know what pain I must have caused you, and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it,” he wrote Sara after returning to Harvard. “I know my mind, have known it for a long time and know that I could never think otherwise. Result: I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest—and for you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have always been & always will be to each other—only now you have two children to love & to love you.”
With Eleanor by his side, Franklin believed “he would amount to something someday.”
election to the State Assembly would come first, leading to an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, before becoming governor of New York and then, with good fortune, president of the United States.
Lyndon Johnson remained forever plagued by a sense of academic inferiority. “My daddy always told me that if I brushed up against the grindstone of life, I’d come away with more polish than I could ever get at Harvard or Yale,” he said years later, a wistful tone in his voice. “I wanted to believe him, but somehow I never could.”
“Ambition is an uncomfortable companion,” Lyndon conceded in a college editorial. “He creates a discontent with present surroundings and achievements: he is never satisfied but always pressing forward.”
Lyndon appeared to his students “a human dynamo,” “a steam engine in pants,” driven by a work ethic and an unlimited enthusiasm that proved contagious.
Indeed, an amalgam of his father’s coarse politicking and his mother’s prim scrutiny of appearance and demeanor when she taught elocution at Johnson City High can be clearly traced in their son’s pedagogy.
“If he caught you reading a letter from your mother,” Jones said, “or if you were taking a crap, he’d say, Son, can’t you please try a little harder to do that on your own time?”
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, nine out of ten American farms had no electricity. “The lack of electric power divided the United States into two nations,” one historian notes, “the city dwellers and the country folk.” Farm wives enjoyed none of the conveniences of twentieth-century life—refrigerators, washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners. Farmers had to rely on hand labor to draw water from a well or milk the cows. For decades, private utility companies had refused to install power lines in rural areas, maintaining that the rate of return in thinly populated areas precluded a profit.
“If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.” The letter ended abruptly with the simple statement “I can write no more.”
The greatest passion he harbored, he confessed to Speed, was “to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.”
Indeed, “the leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow that can be done to-day.” The key to success, he insisted, is “work, work, work.”
in the marginMom taught the same
Fragmented notes penned during this period reveal Lincoln’s attempt to boil down the slavery argument into its elemental components. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B,” Lincoln began, “why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”
Stressing the fact that the word “slavery” was deliberately omitted from the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”
When he arrived in the West, he acknowledged, “there were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters, but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
So, “constantly forcing himself to do the difficult or even dangerous thing,” he gradually was able to cultivate courage as “a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power.”
Roosevelt’s leadership style was, in actuality, governed by just such a series of simple dictums and aphorisms: Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.
Power “in most positions,” he believed, should be concentrated “in the hands of one man.” This might signify the fairly bold credo of a dictator except for the major caveat Roosevelt added: “so long as that man could be held fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people.”
Sighting one large banner inscribed with the words “Roosevelt’s Razzle Dazzle Reform Racket,” he asked the men carrying it if he could keep it as a souvenir.
Where had Roosevelt’s leadership gone astray? “I do not deal with public sentiment. I deal with the law,” Roosevelt had repeatedly insisted. But every leader must deal with public sentiment, as Abraham Lincoln had learned from the negative reaction to his intemperate maiden speech before the Congress, when he had failed to take into account the widespread popularity of the Mexican-American War.
For Roosevelt, being a subordinate was never confused with being subservient.
“When things got easier I put up my tent and lived a little apart,” Roosevelt recalled, for “it is the greatest possible mistake to seek popularity either by showing weakness or mollycoddling the men.
Kaleidoscopes and pendulums—Roosevelt’s images connoted an abiding belief in the hard lesson of his crucible philosophy: All one can do is to prepare oneself, to wait in readiness for what might come.
If he would not meet with someone she thought it imperative for him to meet, she would take it upon herself to invite that person to dinner. “I sometimes acted as a spur even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcomed,” she later wrote. Her constant pressure and lack of humor made it difficult for him to relax. “We’re not going to do that now,” he would often cut her short. “I don’t want to hear about that anymore.” And yet, invariably, he would return to her unwanted suggestion, realizing before long that her persistence might well have been warranted.
Simplify the concept that “we are trying to construct a more inclusive society” into “we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”
“I always believed,” he said, “that as long as I could take someone in the room with me, I would make him my friend.” The greater the distance from his audience, however, the more diluted, stifled, and ineffective he became. His ability to fathom people’s desires and motivations depended upon repeated, informal exchanges that were not the norm in a body of 435 representatives, separated into different office buildings, protected by ever-enlarging staffs.
Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.
Gather firsthand information, ask questions.
Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.
Guided by the “principle of forgiveness,” Lincoln insisted he did not care if someone has done wrong in the past; “it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.”
Set a standard of mutual respect and dignity; control anger.
This contest “is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come,” Lincoln had reiterated in numerous ways. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained.”
“I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.”
If “defeat is an orphan,” the old saying goes, “victory has a thousand fathers,” and in this case, Roosevelt was delighted to let the world know of the unique contribution of each of the fathers. Privately, however, he let off steam against the coal operators. “May heaven preserve me for ever again dealing with so wooden-headed a set,” he vented in a letter to his sister Bamie.
On this day of defining separation from the past, he asked the chief justice if, instead of simply saying “I do” after the oath was read—as thirty-one presidents had done before him—he could repeat every phrase of the presidential oath (I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear and . . .). He sought to invest a more personal affirmation in every syllable of the vow he was taking. In ways large and small Roosevelt loved to surprise, to break precedent, to transmit an inspiriting readiness to assume responsibility before a single word of the inaugural address was delivered.
Tell people what they can expect and what is expected of them.
He told the country he was prepared to recommend to Congress a series of measures that “a stricken Nation” required. If the members should fail to respond “to the unprecedented need for undelayed action,” however, he would ask Congress “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive authority to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Here he harked back to the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation as an executive order based on his powers as commander in chief, and to Theodore Roosevelt who saw himself as “steward of the people,” an office giving him the warrant to do whatever the people needed unless expressly forbidden by the Constitution or the laws.
If the new president had long since learned to make himself appear confident in order to become confident, might not the characteristic uplifted tilt of his head, the sparkle of his eye, his dazzling smile, and his assured, calm voice soothe and embolden the fragile nerves of the country at large?
To compound the innovative nature of the new administration, Eleanor Roosevelt held her own first press conference at the same time that day. She made a rule that only female reporters could attend, which meant that all over the country conservative publishers had to hire their first female reporters. Indeed, because of Eleanor Roosevelt’s weekly press conferences, an entire generation of female journalists got their start.
Open channels of unfiltered information to supplement and challenge official sources.
Master the power of narrative. Lyndon Johnson, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, knew that people were “more easily influenced” by stories “than any other way,” that stories were remembered far longer than facts and figures.
Johnson noted in his memoirs, the word consensus meant “a search for the lowest common denominator,” that definition belied the “prime and indispensable obligation of the Presidency”—to decide first what needs “to be done regardless of the political implications” and then to “convince the Congress and the people to do it.”
For Johnson, a successful consensus was the consequence of effective persuasion.
That civil rights supporters never afterward missed a quorum call was theatrically apparent during the Washington Senators’ opening day baseball game. President Johnson had invited dozens of senators to join him. A small group of southerners who had stayed behind to continue the filibuster took advantage of the absence and called for a quorum. “Attention please! Attention please!” the public address system blared, carrying the message through D.C. Stadium. “All senators must report back to the Senate for a quorum call!” A fleet of limousines pulled up to the park and carried the senators back to the Senate floor to meet the quorum call in twenty-three minutes.
“I was just elected by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country, fifteen million votes,” Johnson noted to the gathered crowd. “Just by the natural way people think and because Barry Goldwater scared hell out of them, I have already lost about two of these fifteen and am probably getting down to thirteen. If I get in any fight with Congress I will lose another couple of million and if I have to send any more of our boys into Vietnam I may be down to eight million by the end of the summer.” Such shrinkage, he explained, was “in the nature of what a president does. He uses up his capital.” All this subtraction added up to one gigantic goad: “So I want you guys to get off your asses and do everything possible to get everything in my program passed as soon as possible before the aura and the halo that surround me disappear.”
“What convinces is conviction,” Johnson liked to say. “You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing.” In this instance, Johnson spoke directly from the heart.
The fame they craved, the recognition they sought, bears little resemblance to today’s cult of celebrity. For these leaders, the final measure of their achievements would be realized by their admittance to an enduring place in communal memory.
If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore “the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.”
Concealment of personal matters had been a major motif throughout Roosevelt’s life. He had been trained from boyhood to present a consistently confident and encouraging demeanor before his invalid father. During the six agonizing weeks he spent in the hospital after contracting polio, he had projected a uniformly optimistic image. By buoying up others, he had learned to uplift himself. In his mother’s family, Franklin’s cousin Laura Delano recalled, “You just never said you were sick.” Similarly, in the weeks and months that followed during the spring of 1944, Roosevelt chose to ignore his illness, always keeping the potential gravity of his condition at arm’s length.
He considered history, an understanding of how we came to be, the best vehicle for understanding who we are and where we are going.