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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. THEY MADE A DIFFERENCE
Leaders Who Changed the World
2. WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Largest Human Being of Our Time
3. CHARLES de GAULLE
The Leadership Mystique
4. DOUGLAS MacARTHUR AND SHIGERU YOSHIDA
East Meets West
5. KONRAD ADENAUER
The West’s Iron Curtain
6. NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
The Brutal Will To Power
7. ZHOU ENLAI
The Mandarin Revolutionary
8. A NEW WORLD
New Leaders in a Time of Change
9. IN THE ARENA
Reflections on Leadership
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PHOTOGRAPHS
INDEX
To the leaders of the future
INTRODUCTION
My third book, The Real War, dwelled on tangible factors in geopolitics such as military power and economic power. But it was also about the less-tangible but far greater power of the human spirit. As Sir Robert Thompson once remarked, national power equals applied resources plus manpower times will—and a nation draws its will principally from the example of its leaders. During the late 1970s, the United States lacked effective leadership and therefore lacked national will and purpose. So it was logical that my study of the quagmire of indecision and self-doubt into which America’s vacuum of leadership had plunged it in the late 1970s should lead to a study of leadership itself—hence my next book, Leaders.
Of all the books I have written, Leaders is probably my favorite. Its model was Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, which I read for the first time in 1979. Churchill’s work was assembled from a series of profiles he had written while languishing in the political wilderness before World War II. He had written some of the pieces because he needed the money. As a result of the success of my memoir RN, published in 1978, my financial situation was no longer as bad as his had been, but my political situation was, if anything, worse. Unlike him, I had no thought of returning to public life. I had found that writing was the best way to keep my mind active and sharp, since it is the only kind of work that requires the same degree of concentration as decision-making.
To help plan the project I again called upon Ray Price, who had headed the speech writing office in the Nixon White House and also provided invaluable editorial assistance on The Real War. He enlisted a cadre of bright undergraduates to prepare monographs, reading lists, and other research tools for me while I was still working on the final draft of The Real War. Once Mrs. Nixon and I had moved back to New York and I was able to turn my full attention to the project, the most difficult problem was deciding which leaders to include from among those I had met while traveling to over eighty countries over a period thirty-three years.
To qualify, the leaders had to meet two tests. I had to have known them—which did not eliminate many, since I had known every major postwar leader except Stalin. They also had to have made a difference—by building their nation, by saving it, or by moving the world in some other singular way. I had been fascinated by Toynbee’s concept of withdrawal and return, and there was no question that the book would include profiles of leaders who had spent time in the wilderness—not only Churchill but also de Gaulle, Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi of Italy. Each had returned from the wilderness to lead his nation out of a moment of supreme crisis.
My first list also contained a select group of great Americans such as Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Taft, and Richard Russell. In the end the only American who made it was Douglas MacArthur, and only then because his greatest contribution was as the architect, along with Shigeru Yoshida, of modern Japan. Mark Hatfield, who was one of my closest friends in the Senate when I served as President, and who remains one of my most loyal readers, once asked me why I ultimately chose not to write about other Americans. One reason was simply a shortage of space. But as the book took shape, it became clear I was writing not only about the makings of leadership but about the makers of the post-World War II world—from the great power centers of the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and Western Europe to the post-colonial Third World and the red-hot cauldron of the Middle East. When I write I always hope to reach younger Americans, and while most students have at least an instinctual understanding of the forces that shaped their own country, polls showed that they were increasingly ill informed about the forces and personalities that had shaped the rest of the world. So I decided to leave American leaders to a future volume.
What else set these leaders apart? Just this: While I never researched the point, I would be willing to bet that none of the twenty-two leaders who receive detailed attention in the book ever commissioned a public opinion poll. Today, leaders are often judged by their ability to “gauge the national mood” or by their instincts for “avoiding no-win issues.” Most of the individuals profiled in Leaders stood out because of their ability to change the national mood or to take an unpopular issue and make it popular. As believers in democracy we are used to thinking that leaders are supposed to follow the national will. But even in a democracy, a great leader is one who forges a national purpose in the face of great crises or challenges.
Who among today’s leaders would qualify for Leaders if I were writing it in 1990? Certainly Margaret Thatcher would deserve consideration for dragging Great Britain away from the abyss of irrelevancy and stagnation to which it had been brought by a generation of socialism. Mikhail Gorbachev would also be a finalist for recognizing that the dead hand of communism was turning the Soviet Union into a second-rate power. But with the exception of Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, one of the greatest nation-builders of the century, I chose not to include living leaders in the book, and I would not want to diminish Lee’s special place in it by making more exceptions.
In the end, the only leader I would add today would be the late President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan, with whom I met on several occasions both in New York and during a visit to Islamabad and Peshawar in 1985. During the critical stages of the war in Afghanistan, in spite of Soviet intimidation and growing domestic unrest, he provided a haven for the Afghan resistance and for three million refugees who had been driven from their homes by the war. If it had not been for his courageous policies, the Soviets might never have withdrawn their forces. As much as any other leader of recent times, Zia truly made a difference.
—RN
March 1, 1990
Saddle River, New Jersey
THEY MADE
A DIFFERENCE
Leaders Who Changed the World
IN THE FOOTSTEPS of great leaders, we hear the rolling thunder of history. Throughout the centuries—from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare, to the present day—few subjects have proved more perennially fascinating to dramatists and historians alike than the character of great leaders. What sets them apart? What accounts for that particular, indefinable electricity that exists between the leader and the led?
What makes the role of these leaders so compellingly interesting is not just its drama, but its importance—its impact. When the final curtain goes down on a play, the members of the audience file out of the theater and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.
For the last thirty-five years I have had an exceptional opportunity,
during an extraordinary period of history, to study the world’s leaders firsthand. Of the major leaders of the post-World War II period, I knew all except Stalin. I have visited more than eighty countries and have not only dealt with their leaders but also seen the conditions in which they operated. I have watched some leaders succeed and others fail, and have had a chance to analyze the reasons from the perspective of my own experience. Having known both the peaks and the valleys of public life, I have learned that you cannot really appreciate the heights unless you have also experienced the depths. Nor can you fully understand what drives a leader if you have only sat on the sidelines, watching.
• • •
One of the questions I have most often been asked during my years in public life has been “Who is the greatest leader you have known?” There is no single answer. Each leader belongs to a particular combination of time, place, and circumstances; leaders and countries are not interchangeable. Great as Winston Churchill was, it would be difficult to imagine him playing so successfully the role that Konrad Adenauer did in postwar Germany. But neither could Adenauer have rallied Britain in its hour of greatest peril as Churchill did.
The surefire formula for placing a leader among the greats has three elements: a great man, a great country, and a great issue. Churchill once commented of Britain’s nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord Rosebery that he had the misfortune of living at a time of “great men and small events.” We commonly rank wartime leaders more highly than peacetime leaders. This is partly because of the inherent drama of war and partly because histories dwell so largely on wars. But it is also because we can fully measure a leader’s greatness only when he is challenged to the limits of his ability. When awarding the Medal of Honor, I often used to reflect on how many of those who won it must have appeared to be quite ordinary people until they had risen with supreme valor to an extraordinary challenge. Without the challenge they would not have shown their courage. In leaders the challenge of war brings forth qualities we can readily measure. The challenges of peace may be as great, but the leader’s triumph over them is neither as dramatic nor as clearly visible.
The small man leading a great nation in a great crisis clearly fails the test of greatness. The large man in a small country may demonstrate all the qualities of greatness but never win the recognition. Others, though big men in big countries, live in the shadow of giants: Zhou Enlai, for example, who discreetly let the limelight shine on Mao.
One distinction must be kept clear: Those commonly acclaimed as “great” leaders are not necessarily good men. Russia’s Peter the Great was a cruel despot. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon are remembered not for their statesmanship but for their conquests. When we speak of the great leaders of history, only occasionally do we refer to those who raised statecraft to a higher moral plane. Rather, we are talking about those who so effectively wielded power on such a grand scale that they significantly changed the course of history for their nations and for the world. Churchill and Stalin were both, in their different ways, great leaders. But without Churchill, Western Europe might have been enslaved; without Stalin, Eastern Europe might have been free.
• • •
In writing about leadership, it was tempting to include some of the outstanding leaders I have known from fields outside of government. I have watched leaders of giant corporations and labor unions fight their way to the top as doggedly as any politician and then wield power with a diplomatic skill to rival that of a foreign minister. The intrigues of the academic world are fully as Byzantine as those of a party convention. I have known leaders in the news media—Henry R. Luce, for example—who have had a larger impact on the world than the leaders of many nations.
But this book is very specifically about the kind of leadership I know best and which to me matters most: It is about those who lead nations, with not only the power such a position carries, but also the responsibility.
Each person treated here had a goal, a vision, a cause, that to him was supremely important. Some have names that are certain to echo through the centuries. Others may be little remembered outside their own countries. Each has something important to tell us about the nature of leadership and about the conflicts that have swept the world during these decades.
There are many leaders I have known whom I would like to have included but did not: outstanding Latin American leaders, for example, such as Mexico’s Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Arturo Frondizi of Argentina, Colombia’s Alberto Lleras Camargo, and the visionary Brazilian President who opened his country’s interior, Juscelino Kubitschek. Or Canada’s Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker, very different from one another in personality and political orientation, but each with a sense of Canada’s destiny and a clear view of the world. Gulam Mohammed, the Governor-general of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s President Mohammed Ayub Khan. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito. Francisco Franco of Spain, a man so different in private from his public impression. Popes Pius XII and Paul VI, each of whom, in his own way, played a profoundly significant role not only spiritually but on the world political stage. Pioneering leaders of the postwar international community, such as Belgium’s Paul-Henri Spaak, Italy’s Manlio Brosio, and Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet of France. To consider even these few of the many others who might have been included is to remember how broad and varied the world’s array of leadership talent has been in recent decades.
Of those whom I do treat in the chapters that follow, I have chosen some because of their transcendent stature or sweeping impact on the course of history, some because of their inherent interest as people, some as examples of forces that were sweeping the world during this tumultuous period of history. I have not included American leaders, except for Douglas MacArthur, whose most lasting contribution was his role in the shaping of modern Japan.
• • •
Most histories are about events and only incidentally about the men who played a role. This book is about the leaders and how they shaped the events. It is about how they made a difference and how they differed, about the characteristics that enabled them to have an impact and how they did it.
Great leadership is a unique form of art, requiring both force and vision to an extraordinary degree. There has long been a widespread belief in the United States that what the country really needs is a top-flight businessman to run the government, someone who has proven that he can manage a large-scale enterprise efficiently and effectively. This misses the mark. Management is one thing. Leadership is another. As Warren G. Bennis of the University of Southern California’s business school puts it, “Managers have as their goal to do things right. Leaders have as their goal to do the right thing.”
Leadership is more than technique, though techniques are necessary. In a sense, management is prose; leadership is poetry. The leader necessarily deals to a large extent in symbols, in images, and in the sort of galvanizing idea that becomes a force of history. People are persuaded by reason, but moved by emotion; he must both persuade them and move them. The manager thinks of today and tomorrow. The leader must think of the day after tomorrow. A manager represents a process. The leader represents a direction of history. Thus a manager with nothing to manage becomes nothing, but even out of power a leader still commands followers.
Great leadership requires a great vision, one that inspires the leader and enables him to inspire the nation. People both love the great leader and hate him; they are seldom indifferent toward him.
It is not enough for a leader to know the right thing. He must also be able to do the right thing. The would-be leader without the judgment or perception to make the right decisions fails for lack of vision. The one who knows the right thing but cannot achieve it fails because he is ineffectual. The great leader needs both the vision and the capacity to achieve what is right. He hires managers to help him do so, but only he can set the direction and provide the motive force.
The great cause that grips a leader may be one of creating something new or of preserving somethin
g old—and often strong leaders on opposite sides of a conflict have causes that collide. A strong leader with a weak cause may prevail over a weak leader with a strong cause, or a bad cause may prevail over a good one. There is no simple set of immutable rules by which to predict history, or for that matter by which to judge it. Often causes, like leaders themselves, look different in retrospect. Sometimes the judgment depends on who wins. Historians tend to be kinder to winners than to losers, among causes no less than among leaders.
All of the really strong leaders I have known have been highly intelligent, highly disciplined, hard workers, supremely self-confident, driven by a dream, driving others. All have looked beyond the horizon. Some have seen more clearly than others.
The years since World War II have been a time of greater and more rapid change than any comparable period of world history. We have seen a clash of titans as the superpowers have risen to confront one another, a series of cataclysmic upheavals as old empires have given way to scores of new nations, a time of mounting peril as weapons developments have stretched even the science fiction-altered imagination. Great events bring forth great leaders. Tumultuous times bring out both the best and the worst. Khrushchev was a powerful leader but a dangerous force. Mao moved mountains; he also crushed out millions of lives.
The years ahead will require leadership of the highest order. It has been said that those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it and, conversely, that if the leaders of one age see further into the future than did their predecessors, it is because they stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. This book is written about leaders of the past, but for leaders of the future. Each of the leaders in this book studied the past and learned from it. To the extent that we in turn can learn from them, the world may have a better chance of moving forward in the years to come.
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