• • •
In Great Contemporaries Churchill wrote that “one mark of a great man is the power of making lasting impressions upon people he meets.” Some do this through their physical presence, some through the strength of their intelligence. I also think it is no coincidence that virtually all of the major leaders I have known were exceptionally skilled in the vanishing art of face-to-face conversation. Leadership is persuasion, and the leader who fails as an interesting, impressive conversationalist is likely to fail as a persuader and therefore as a leader.
MacArthur’s masterful monologues, de Gaulle’s eloquent pronouncements, Yoshida’s self-deprecating humor, Zhou Enlai’s flashes of poetry, all were to today’s run-of-the-talk-show chitchat as Rembrandt is to fingerpainting. Their conversation had both style and substance; it was at once lively and profound; it evoked in the listener an immense respect for the intelligence that inspired it, and this sort of impression is one of the ways in which a successful leader both establishes his power and exercises persuasion.
Whenever I was going to meet with one of these men, I looked forward to the occasion as I would to a performance by a great artist—which in fact it was. Yet if I were to rate one postwar leader even above the others in this category, it would not be one of the legendary European or American figures. It would be Robert Menzies.
His sense of humor was sharp but seldom cruel. He was an eloquent phrasemaker, and he loved the give and take of spirited dialogue. He was also a good listener. He was unusual in another respect: He was an excellent writer as well as a good talker. Often those who write well cannot speak well, and vice versa. A few—Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and de Gaulle—could do both. But for one who wants to rise in the political world, being able to speak well, both in public and in private conversation, is more important than the ability to write well. It is virtually indispensable.
As a result of Menzies’s skill with words, few were willing to tangle with him in public. Early in his career he learned, as Churchill did, that it was much more effective to turn aside a hostile question or comment with a snappy quip than a long-winded defense or explanation. At his first press conference as Prime Minister a leftist reporter jeered, “I suppose you will consult the powerful interests who control you before you choose your Cabinet.” Menzies replied, “Naturally, but please, young man, keep my wife’s name out of this.”
The technique worked just as well in Parliament, which retained a dash of frontier vulgarity that Menzies sometimes found distasteful. Once he responded to a complaint from an MP that he had a superiority complex by saying, “Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising.” About another MP he said, “The conducted tour of the Honorable Member’s mind would have been more instructive if it had not taken place in gathering darkness.” The Labor party, stung once too often by such remarks, once actually advised its members not to cross Menzies unnecessarily.
Menzies’s rejection by his party in 1941 had scarred him deeply. “It was the stroke of doom,” he said later. “Everything was at an end.” In fighting back from political obscurity during the 1940s, Menzies developed a crust of healthy cynicism toward his critics, especially those in the press. He was not afraid to cross swords boldly with them. After having to endure two hours of unmerciful roasting at one prestigious press gathering—the Australian counterpart of Washington’s Gridiron Club dinner—he toasted the press as “the most overpaid unskilled labor in the Commonwealth.” He once boasted to me that he treated the press with “marked contempt and remarkable success.” Menzies also had contempt for his critics in the business world, particularly those who had deserted him during his long years in the wilderness. He told me, “These business types sit in armchairs and cut a politician down who loses.” He said he knew how that felt when he had been struggling back after losing power to the Labor party. “They said I couldn’t win,” he said with a smile. In 1949 he proved them wrong.
Menzies often told me that politicians had to be thick-skinned, and he made some remarkably perceptive comments about one of our most thin-skinned Presidents, Lyndon Johnson. While he had great respect for Johnson’s abilities—“a brilliant politician,” he told me—even in the mid-1960s Menzies had detected in the Texan the obsession with public and press opinion that would cause him so much torment later in his presidency and after it. “Now, you and I know the press doesn’t matter,” Menzies said to me. “I often used to say to Lyndon, ‘Don’t be so sensitive about what these fellows write about you. They weren’t elected to do anything—you were. They speak only for themselves—you speak for the people.’ ”
Appreciating and practicing as he did the art of conversation, Menzies pinpointed Johnson’s other great weakness: his inability to sit still for even a few moments. “You never feel he is paying attention,” Menzies said. “He’s always grabbing for the telephone in the middle of a conversation.”
Johnson had three television sets in the Oval Office so he could watch all three networks at once. In contrast Menzies’s housekeeper told me that the Prime Minister never read about himself in the newspapers during controversies—“Though he once told me,” she said, “ ‘When they quit abusing me, I’ll know I’m finished.’ ”
• • •
Menzies was an astute observer of American politics. When I sent him a copy of my first book, Six Crises, which included a discussion of my televised debates with John F. Kennedy in 1960, he wrote back and said that he had always thought it was a mistake for me to agree to the debates. “I do not say this because I thought you lost . . . I saw two of them on television and I thought you won them. But I do think that when the campaign began you were well and favorably known to three times as many people as knew Kennedy, who, in any event, was best known on the East Coast. I thought at the time, and still think, that one of the great effects of going onto television with him with so vast a viewing public was to make him as well known as you were. I hope that you will not think me impertinent if I say that I think this was giving away a trump card.”
At the time of his letter I had recently lost the 1962 California gubernatorial election. He wrote, “I cannot believe that we have, in the political world, heard the last of you.” Characteristically he was unable to end without a quip: “Please give my affectionate greetings to your wife, who, like my wife, deserves a gold medal for putting up with a political husband.”
• • •
Many who criticized the U.S. role in the Vietnam War did so from a neoisolationist perspective. They contended that, whether it was right or wrong to assist a free nation that was being attacked by Communists, South Vietnam was too far away to be of any real concern to the United States. No part of the new world is so far away that events there will not affect every other part of the world. Nonetheless, a quarter-century after he first coined the phrase, the “North Atlantic isolationism” that Douglas MacArthur fought against all his life was once again in vogue.
Lee and Menzies viewed the world differently. Each supported the American effort in Vietnam; Menzies, in fact, sent Australian troops to fight there beside Americans. Both leaders believed that North Vietnamese aggression presented a threat to the stability of the entire region. As Menzies put it, “To you Americans, it’s the Far East. To us, it’s the Near North.”
Lee and Menzies were both staunch anti-Communists. As early as 1940 Menzies realized that after the end of World War II a Western European coalition including Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy might have to be founded to contain the Soviet Union’s westward thrust. Along with Lee he realized that his own country was on the front lines of the fight against communism in the Far East.
Lee’s Singapore lay at the crossroads of free Asia, dependent on the continuation of trade between its neighbors. Lee believed that the spread of communism would have a deadening effect on productivity and commerce, like a heavy blanket of snow that freezes everything it covers in place. He told me as early as 1967 that a Communist Asia would experien
ce economic and social Dark Ages. A decade later, true to his prediction, a dark age enveloped Indochina.
Lee was able to view the war in Vietnam from a global as well as a regional vantage point. “Above all,” he told me, “a great nation like the United States must stand by the smaller nations who look to it for their security. If it fails to do so, the tide of Soviet expansionism and repression will sweep over the world.
“A national leader’s first responsibility is survival for himself and his country,” he continued. “If he loses trust in the U.S., he will have no other choice than to make the best accommodation he can with the Soviet Union.”
Lee believed that only a strong America could guarantee the survival of the nations of free Asia. When he came to Washington in 1973, I told him during our private talks that the goal of my administration was to create a stable world order, including China and the Soviet Union, from which all nations would benefit, in terms both of enhanced security and of increased prosperity. That evening at the state dinner we held in his honor, he referred approvingly to my remarks and, in lighthearted but effective terms, described the discomfort a small nation could feel living among the unrestrainted, predatory Communist powers. “We are a very small country placed strategically at the southernmost tip of Asia,” he said, “and when the elephants are on the rampage, if you are a mouse there and you don’t know the habits of the elephants, it can be a very painful business.”
Menzies also believed that it would be dangerous if the U.S. shirked its global responsibilities. He told me once that “if the Communists succeed in Vietnam, they will try elsewhere.” When we talked about the war in 1965, he was visibly delighted that the U.S. had chosen to make a stand in the Far East. “Vietnam is a great new commitment in a new area,” he said. When the subject of the antiwar movement came up, he just waved his hand in the air and barked, “Intellectuals!” In a way Menzies was paying back a debt with his active support of the United States in Vietnam. In World War II his country was saved from being attacked when the Americans stopped the Japanese a few hundred miles off the Australian coast in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Menzies pursued an active foreign policy. He allied Australia with New Zealand and the United States in the ANZUS pact, an accomplishment he considered his finest; he joined SEATO; he began a politically unpopular but strategically sound rapprochement with the Japanese in the late 1950s that was capped by a state visit to Australia by Japanese Prime Minister Kishi. Under Menzies, Australia played such an active role in Asian affairs that positions in New Delhi and Djakarta were more coveted by foreign service officers than positions in Rome and Paris. “We can offer intelligent resistance to communism,” he said. “There is certainly the possibility of Asian leadership before us. But we are not going to become leaders merely by proclaiming ourselves leaders.”
Lee’s maneuverability as a head of government was more limited than Menzies’s because of Singapore’s size. He was nonetheless an equally perceptive foreign policy analyst. As an ethnic Chinese whose family had lived in Singapore for several generations, Lee had a particularly intimate understanding of Asia’s largest and oldest power. “Mao is painting on a mosaic,” he told me in 1967. “When he dies the rains will come and wash what he has painted away, and China will remain. China always absorbs and eventually destroys foreign influences.” Lee was speaking nine years before Mao’s death, at a time when the Cultural Revolution was raging in China. Yet he proved to be right in predicting the decline of Mao’s influence.
Lee employed similarly colorful terms as he divided the world into those nations that would make it and those that would not. “There are great trees, there are saplings, and there are creepers,” he said. “The great trees are Russia, China, Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan. Of the other nations, some are saplings that have the potential of becoming great trees, but the great majority are creepers, which because of lack of resources or lack of leadership will never be great trees.”
About one of Asia’s “great trees,” Lee said, “The Japanese inevitably will again play a major role in the world, and not just economically. They are a great people. They cannot and should not be satisfied with a world role that limits them to making better transistor radios and sewing machines, and teaching other Asians to grow rice.” This had been my own belief since the early 1950s, when I first urged Japan to rearm and take its rightful place as a bastion of freedom in Asia. In Lee—who, both as a Singaporean and as an ethnic Chinese, had ample reason to resent Japan for its imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s—this attitude was the mark of a realistic and courageous leader.
Domestically Lee was one of the few postcolonial leaders in the Third World to overcome his wounded pride and channel his own and his people’s energies into nation building rather than angry, destructive revolutionism. In his international thinking Lee showed a similar ability to rise above the resentments of the moment and of the past and think about the nature of the new world to come. This is a sign of true greatness, and the fact that a leader of Lee’s breadth of vision was not able to act on a broader stage represents an incalculable loss to the world.
IN
THE
ARENA
Reflections on Leadership
“NOTHING GREAT IS done without great men,” de Gaulle wrote, “and these are great because they willed it.”
The successful leader has a strong will of his own, and he knows how to mobilize the will of others. The leaders in this book are ones who succeeded—some more than others—in imposing their will on history. They are men who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they willed it. That distinction is vital in understanding power and those who exercise power. To wish is passive; to will is active. Followers wish. Leaders will.
Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out that the very rich are different, I have found that those who hold great power are different. It takes a particular kind of person to win the struggle for power. Having won, the power itself creates a further difference. Power is not for the nice guy down the street or for the man next door.
Of all the questions I used to be asked as President, some of the most perceptive related to the differences power makes. Some of the most irritating, on the other hand, were variations on the gushing query: “Isn’t it fun to be President?”
John J. McCloy once told me of having talked with Henry L. Stimson, who had known nearly all the Presidents of the first half of this century, and asking Stimson who was the best President in terms of organizing and conducting the office. Stimson thought a moment and replied, surprisingly, that William Howard Taft was by far the most efficient and had the best-run office. But, he said, the problem with Taft was that he did not enjoy power. Who did enjoy power? McCloy asked. The two Roosevelts, Stimson replied.
Adenauer, Churchill, de Gaulle—they, too, immensely enjoyed power. But to speak of this as “fun” trivializes and demeans it. One who believes that his own judgment is best, even though fallible, and who chafes at seeing lesser men mishandle the reins of power yearns, even aches, to hold those reins himself. Watching another bungle and blunder can be almost physically painful. Once he has the reins, he relishes their use.
To enjoy power, he has to recognize that mistakes are inevitable and be able to live with them, hoping that he will make his mistakes on smaller things rather than on bigger things. Only if both elements are present—only if he enjoys power and is not afraid to risk mistakes—will he make the bold moves that great leadership requires.
Unless a leader cares so strongly about the issues he must deal with that things like “fun” become simply irrelevant, he ought not to be a leader and will probably be an unsuccessful, maybe even a dangerous, one. He should carve out time for recreation, and this can include “fun,” however he defines it, but he must keep the separation between this and his work. He has to bring to his work a cold, impersonal calculation, and this applies to the ceremonial aspects as well as the substantive.
When people
imagine that being President—or Prime Minister or King where a King has real power—is somehow fun, they may be thinking of the picture of a smiling leader in front of a cheering crowd, forgetting how much care went into assembling the crowd and ensuring that he smiled for the camera. Or they may be thinking of the superficial, ceremonial aspects—the panoply, the uniformed guards, the herald trumpets, the airplanes, the yachts, the motorcades, the flags. But these are not laid on for the President’s pleasure. Like a judge’s robes, they define the office and contribute to its functioning. A certain magisterial quality is needed, at times even a certain majesty. Foreign heads of state, especially those from smaller countries, need pictures showing themselves being welcomed with these visible totems of respect and esteem, not so much by the President personally as by the President on behalf of the nation. Anyone who thinks that standing at attention under a hot sun, having to remember names, trying to ensure that each detail of the ceremony comes off precisely as planned, is “fun” has never done it. It is part of the job.
I do not mean to suggest that I regarded the presidency as a “splendid agony” or in any of those other self-pitying terms sometimes applied to it. I wanted the presidency. I struggled to get it and I fought to keep it. I enjoyed it, most of the time—but, as with most leaders, not in the sense of fun.
History has had its share of despots who craved power for its own sake. But most leaders who rise to the top—certainly most of those whom we would call great leaders—want power for what they can do with it, believing that they can put it to better use than others can.
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