Those periods in which the right balance is maintained between thought and action are those in which leadership reaches its highest achievement. Certainly Churchill, de Gaulle, MacArthur, Yoshida, de Gasperi, Nehru, and Zhou Enlai were profoundly men of thought as well as decisive men of action. Superficial appraisals of Adenauer would conclude that he was an impressive man of action, but not in the others’ league as a man of thought. In fact those who knew Adenauer would recognize the fallacy of such an appraisal. He did not wear his intellectual superiority on his sleeve. But those who failed to see it simply did not know the private man beneath the public facade.
Even the impulsive Khrushchev usually thought before he acted, though, like Brezhnev, he did not demonstrate great philosophical or intellectual depth. However, those who led the Communist Revolution in Russia—Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—were men of thought as well as men of action. Stalin does not have the reputation, but those who have studied his background have found that he was at least a voracious reader. Though the world would be better off without their achievements, those three rank high among the men who have left their mark on history.
Robert Menzies once told me that he regulated his day so that he could devote half an hour each weekday, and an hour each Saturday and Sunday, to reading for pleasure. This was not escapist reading: It was history, literature, philosophy. It lifted him out of the morass of reports, analyses, and other current reading that so consumes a leader’s time and assails his mind. Though I regulated it less precisely, I also made a point of making time for such reading, even during periods of crisis. If the leader is to keep his long perspective, he must step back from the present. Sometimes the need for this is greatest when the crisis is most urgent, because that is when the long perspective is most needed. When young people whose goal is political leadership ask me how they should prepare themselves, I never advise them to study political science. Rather, I advise them to immerse themselves in history, philosophy, literature—to seek to stretch their minds and expand their horizons. The nuts and bolts, whether of politics or of government, are best learned by experience. But the habits of reading, the disciplines of thinking, the techniques of rigorous analysis, the framework of values, the philosophical foundation—these are things the would-be leader must absorb from the beginning of his educational process and must continue to absorb for the rest of his life.
Even at the age of ninety, my friend and mentor, the late Elmer Bobst, was still razor-sharp and had a phenomenal memory. I once asked him how he remembered so well. “I punish my memory,” he replied. Rather than take notes, he forced himself to remember conversations, in all their detail, a day later. He also reminded me that the brain is like a great muscle. The more exercise it gets, the stronger it grows; unused, it withers away.
One common characteristic of virtually all the great leaders I have known is that they have been great readers. Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today’s youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow’s leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.
Another common characteristic is that all were hard workers, many of the sixteen-hour-a-day variety. One of the most dangerous traps for a leader to fall into is the trap of overly long hours. Some thrive on this. But most need to get away, to get a change of scene or a change of pace, so that they will be at their best when they need to be. Truman went to Key West, Eisenhower to Colorado and Georgia, Kennedy to Hyannis Port, Johnson to his Texas ranch; all were criticized for this, but none should have been. The important thing in a leader is not how many hours he spends at his desk, or where that desk is, but how well he makes the great decisions. If a game of golf is what it takes to put him in the right frame of mind, then he should push aside the paperwork and head for the golf course.
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Of all the elements of luck that enter into a leader’s success, perhaps the luck of timing is the most crucial.
Different cultures bring forth different kinds of leaders, and so do different ages. It would be difficult to imagine a Disraeli winning an election in the United States in the 1980s, or, for that matter, a Konrad Adenauer or a George Washington.
Sometimes a person comes along who would have been a superb leader, one of world stature, if only he had been born a few years earlier or a few years later. I am convinced that Senator Richard Russell of Georgia could have been one of the best Presidents America ever had if he had come along at a time when his southern origins did not disqualify him. As it was, he was an immensely influential power behind the scenes in the Senate, and a protégé whom he tutored and counseled, Lyndon Johnson, did make it to the White House. During my service as senator, Vice President, and President, I valued his judgment more highly than that of any other senator. Except on civil rights, we seldom disagreed. He was a moderate conservative on domestic issues and a tough-minded, farsighted pragmatist on defense and foreign policy issues.
Russell exemplified another phenomenon. He provided his guidance in the cloakrooms, in committee rooms, in private sessions. He seldom spoke even on the Senate floor, though when he did the entire Senate listened. What he wielded most spectacularly was not the power of actual decision, but influence; he had such influence that his influence became power. In his case the influence was rooted in the genuine respect that other senators, and Presidents, had for him. It was also rooted in his meticulous homework, his attention to detail, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Senate and its members.
One of the defining characteristics of the new world is the increasingly rapid pace at which things change. A country that needs one kind of ruler for one phase of its development may need another kind for the next phase, and these phases may come in rapid succession. In terms of its impact on a leader’s place in history, getting offstage at the right time can sometimes be as important as getting onstage at the right time.
If Nkrumah had turned over the reins to someone else after Ghana gained its independence, he would have exited a hero and remained a hero. Nasser’s reputation is probably greater today than it would have been if death had not cut short his rule when it did. It may well be that one of de Gaulle’s shrewdest moves was to exit when he did in 1946, so that he remained politically intact for the moment when the call came in 1958. George Washington knew when to quit. His refusal to run for a third term set a tradition that lasted until 1940, and that, once broken, was written into the Constitution. Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation when he announced in 1968 that he would not run for reelection. As the one who confronted the storms that swept the country during those next four years, I think that, however much he hated being in retirement, luck was with him in getting him off the stage at that time. He would have been savaged mercilessly if he had remained in office.
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Different systems need different kinds of leaders, and different countries—with different cultural backgrounds and at different stages of development—need different systems.
One of the most persistent faults in America’s dealings with the rest of the world has been our tendency to measure all governments by the standards of western democracy and all cultures by the standards of Western Europe. Western democracy took centuries to develop and take root, and its path was not straight or sure. Freedom advanced in Europe by fits and starts, moving ahead in one age only to be pushed back in another—as happened in parts of Western Europe in the 1930s and in Eastern Europe in more recent years.
Democracy is still the exception rather than the rule among the world’s nations. As U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Jeane J. Kirkpatrick has pointed out, “The truth is that most of the governments in the world are, by our standards, bad governments. [They] are not democratic [and] never have been. Democracy has been rare in the world. Most governments are, by our standards, corrupt.” Among the majority of countries that are ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian methods, we must learn to be more discriminating. Every authorita
rian ruler puts at least some of his opponents in jail, whether his aim is to exploit his people or to develop his country. But there are vital distinctions between those who arm for aggression and those who try to preserve the peace; between the murderous fanaticism of a Pol Pot and the progressive paternalism of a Shah. Some are good neighbors and some are bad neighbors. Some are benign and some are malign. These differences are real, and they are important.
We may not like authoritarian rule, but for many countries there simply is no practical alternative at their present stages. If democracy came tomorrow morning to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, the result would probably be disaster. They simply are not prepared to deal with it. We do less developed countries no service when we insist on imposing the same structures that have worked for us. And to insist on the forms of democracy, knowing that the substance is unlikely, is the worst form of self-righteous hypocrisy. We should learn to be less meddlesome.
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Of all the changes taking place in the new world, one that will have a particularly dramatic impact on future leadership is the crumbling of those barriers that in the past have held women back. Few have made it to the top so far. Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher have been the exception rather than the rule. But more and more women are moving into the ranks from which leaders are drawn. The woman candidate for a top executive office still has to overcome a residue of the old presumption that such positions are a male preserve. But as more move up, that presumption will fade.
If, in 1952, acceptance of the idea of women in high office had advanced as far as it has today, Clare Boothe Luce could well have been a strong candidate for Vice President. She had the brains, the drive, the political acumen, the judgment, and she was the first really interesting woman to make a major mark in American politics. She also had a well-honed ability to engage in the cut-and-thrust of political conflict and she was identified as a strongly committed anti-Communist—two of the specific qualities for which Eisenhower chose me. If he had chosen her instead, this book might never have been written. But she would have turned in a stellar performance.
In 1952 Clare Boothe Luce was ahead of her time. But I believe that before the end of the century we will probably elect a woman to the vice presidency and possibly to the presidency.
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At first glance it may seem surprising that so many of the great leaders during this period were so old. And yet on reflection it is not surprising. Many had a “wilderness” period. The insights and wisdom they gained during that period, and the strength they developed in fighting back from it, were key elements in the greatness they demonstrated later. Churchill, de Gaulle, and Adenauer all made their greatest contributions when they were past what we think of as the normal retirement age. Churchill was already sixty-six when he began his wartime leadership of Britain, de Gaulle sixty-seven when he created the Fifth Republic, and Adenauer was seventy-three when he took the reins as Chancellor. De Gaulle was still President at seventy-eight, Churchill was still Prime Minister at eighty, and Adenauer was still Chancellor at eighty-seven.
The twentieth century has seen a medical revolution. We live longer and we stay healthier. But beyond this, the same drive and the same stamina that propel the great leader up often keep him going long after others have settled into placid retirement. Often we age because we allow ourselves to age. We grow old by giving up, or by sitting back, or by letting ourselves become inactive. Those who remember the long, drawn-out deathwatches over Churchill, Eisenhower, and MacArthur remember how stubbornly their bodies refused to give up, even long after they had sunk into unconsciousness. Great leaders make their own rules, and they are not the kind to surrender meekly to the calendar merely because that is the customary thing to do.
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A leader must sometimes rally his people to follow a painful and difficult course, as Churchill so memorably did when he offered the people of Britain “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” More often, he has to win support for an unpopular idea, or prevail against strong tides of intellectual fashion. Philosopher-theologian Michael Novak has noted that today, “in a world of instantaneous, universal mass communications, the balance of power has now shifted. Ideas, always a part of reality, have today acquired power greater than that of reality. . . . The class of persons who earn their livelihood from the making of ideas and symbols seems both unusually bewitched by falsehoods and absurdities and uniquely empowered to impose them upon hapless individuals.” Frequently the leader’s toughest battles are not against the leaders of other political movements as such, but against those glib, superficial, and destructive ideas that so pervade the airwaves, entrance the “glitterati,” and debase public discourse.
Television today has transformed the ways in which national leadership is exercised and has substantially changed the kind of person who can hope to be elected to a position of leadership. Abraham Lincoln, with his homely features and high-pitched voice, would never have made it on television. Nor would his speaking style, with its long, rambling anecdotes, have worked on the tube. The premium today is on snappy one-liners, not lengthy parables.
Television has drastically shortened the public’s attention span. It also changes the way people see things and events. Like a mind-altering drug, which in a very real sense it is, it distorts their perception of reality. The neat little capsule dramas that we see on the screen—whether presented as entertainment, as “news,” or as part of a magazine format designed as entertainment in the guise of investigation—are not mirrors of life. They are distorting mirrors. Real-life events seldom have so neat a beginning, middle, and end, nor are good guys and bad guys so clearly distinguished. Decisions that leaders sweat over for weeks are routinely dismissed in twenty seconds with the curl of a commentator’s lip.
In the television age, celebrity has acquired a whole new dimension. A television actor is invited to advise a Senate committee on medical questions because he plays the part of a doctor on a popular weekly program. Another actor who portrays an editor is asked to lecture at journalism schools. The line between fact and fantasy is blurred into invisibility, and increasingly the public accepts this blurring.
Television is a home version of Hollywood. It is a fantasy land, and the more people get in the habit of viewing the world through the television screen, the more they will carry in their minds the image of a fantasy world.
Some argue that the worst thing about television is its pervasive left-wing bias. Others argue that the worst thing is its trivializing of events, its obsession with scandal or the appearance of scandal, its unwillingness or inability to present the dull or complex, or its milking of the emotional angle of every public issue. All of these, unfortunately, contribute to its distortion of public debate.
Whether democratic nations can survive against a determined totalitarian foe in a television age is perhaps still an open question. Television forces events into a soap-opera mold, and it does so with such emotional force and such an enormous audience that it all but eclipses rational debate. It especially does so in situations that lend themselves to dramatic, emotionally loaded footage of such scenes as a bleeding soldier or a hungry child. Hard choices often have to be made among different sets of painful consequences. By concentrating so powerfully on the pain from one of those sets of consequences, television badly skews the debate and, in effect, stuffs the ballot-box. Television cast the Iranian hostage crisis so exclusively in soap-opera terms that people eventually accepted a national display of yellow ribbons as a substitute for national policy. The kind of one-sided coverage television gave the war in Vietnam was probably the single most significant factor in so limiting our options there that the war was lengthened and ultimately lost.
Unless television steps up to its duty to reflect reality more accurately, whoever tries to lead responsibly in the years ahead is going to have a very difficult time.
Television does, however, provide the leader with one advantage that can be crucial, part
icularly in a crisis situation. It enables him to go directly to the people, to reach them in their own living rooms, and to make his case to them without the intervention of reporters and commentators. He can do it only occasionally. But when he does, for a few minutes, before the commentators again take over, he can explain the situation as he sees it, in his own terms, and try to persuade them of the course of action necessary. In the hands of a person skilled in its use, this can be an enormously powerful instrument. There is an inherent drama in a presidential appearance during a crisis, and this drama builds the audience and rivets its attention. He then has to get his message across to his viewers, and he has only a short time in which to do so: After twenty minutes or so, the audience for a speech usually stops paying attention. But he does have that one shot, once in a while.
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As between the determinist and the “great man” approaches to the study of history, the truth probably is that each is partially right and neither is wholly right.
History does have its own momentum. When the “leaders” in power merely stick a moistened index finger into the air to see which way the popular wind is blowing, then history will go its own way despite them. But when leaders who do have a clear vision of the future and the power to sway nations are in command, they will change the course of history. That is when history becomes a series of tracks in the wilderness that show where one man went first and then persuaded others to follow.
Leaders Page 46