None of the leaders I have dealt with here was one-dimensional. None was pure. None was without mixed motives. But none wanted power solely for personal aggrandizement. Some, like Sukarno, were far too self-indulgent with regard to the demands of the flesh. Some, like Khrushchev or Mao, were far too callous about the suffering their policies inflicted. But all had a purpose beyond themselves. Each, rightly or wrongly, believed that he was serving a great cause. Each believed that he was leaving his mark on history for the better.
• • •
In speaking of leaders, we commonly use metaphors of height. We speak of them as climbing to the top, rising to the occasion, holding out a lofty vision. We routinely refer to meetings among heads of government as summits. Churchill, during his crisis over Gallipoli in World War I, once wrote an unsent letter in which he urged the foreign secretary not to fall “below the level of events.”
Some leaders do, as individuals, tower over their contemporaries. But for all, the metaphors of height are peculiarly apt. They have to be able to see above the mundane and beyond the immediate. They need that view from the mountaintop.
Some people live in the present, oblivious of the past and blind to the future. Some dwell in the past. A very few have the knack of applying the past to the present in ways that show them the future. Great leaders have this knack. As Bruce Catton wrote of Lincoln, “once in a while, for this man, the sky failed to touch the horizon and he saw moving shapes, off beyond.”
As military strategists, de Gaulle and MacArthur both stood above the clouds and saw into the distance. De Gaulle, protesting reliance on the Maginot Line, asked what would happen if the enemy refused to be drawn into the compartiment de terraine. MacArthur ignored the islands Japan had fortified and leapfrogged to those it had not.
In each case it was an example of thinking in terms of this war, this year’s technology, while others thought in terms of the last war. Mobility was the key to the weakness of the Maginot Line and also to MacArthur’s Pacific strategy. What seems obvious in retrospect is often not obvious at the time.
Great leaders are the ones who first see what in retrospect, but only in retrospect, is obvious, and who have both the force of will and the authority to move their countries with them. De Gaulle in the 1930s did not yet have that authority, but he demonstrated the qualities that would be crucial when he later got it. MacArthur in the 1940s had this authority. If de Gaulle had had the authority sooner, and if Churchill had had it in Britain, the history of Europe might have been different, and there might have been no World War II. De Gaulle and Churchill were, in the 1930s, ahead of their time—or, tragically, Europe had not yet learned the hard way that they were right.
• • •
Theorists like to treat power as if it were an abstraction. Leaders know better. Power anchors them to reality. Professors can go off on flights into the stratosphere of the absurd. Those with power have to keep an eye firmly on the results, the impact, the effects. Leaders deal with the concrete.
Hollywood dramatists, who have such influence through both screen and television on America’s impressions of itself, are entranced by power but tend to sneer at executives, whether military, business, or political. The executive cannot tag along on giddy emotional roller-coaster rides through lands of illusion; and so he is seen as square, dull, brutish. He cannot operate as if he lived in a make-believe or ideal world. He has to cope with the imperfect world of the real. Therefore he is seen as callously indifferent to the suffering around him. In fact he is not indifferent to the ill; but he does have to concern himself with things that will actually work to help alleviate it, even if incrementally and therefore undramatically. Hollywood can posture. The executive has to perform.
In politics and statecraft, power means life or death, prosperity or poverty, happiness or tragedy, for thousands or even millions of people. No one who holds power can ever forget that, even though he must sometimes put it deliberately out of his mind while making a decision. Power is the opportunity to build, to create, to nudge history in a different direction. There are few satisfactions to match it for those who care about such things. But it is not happiness. Those who seek happiness will not acquire power and would not use it well if they did acquire it.
• • •
A whimsical observer once commented that those who love laws and sausages should not watch either being made.
By the same token, we honor leaders for what they achieve, but we often prefer to close our eyes to the way they achieve it. Schoolchildren are taught about George Washington and the cherry tree. Moralists praise the Wilsonian ideal of “open covenants, openly arrived at.” Armchair pundits urge leaders to “stand up for principle,” to refuse compromise, to be “a statesman rather than a politician.”
In the real world, politics is compromise and democracy is politics. Anyone who would be a statesman has to be a successful politician first. Also, a leader has to deal with people and nations as they are, not as they should be. As a result, the qualities required for leadership are not necessarily those that we would want our children to emulate—unless we wanted them to be leaders.
In evaluating a leader, the key question about his behavioral traits is not whether they are attractive or unattractive, but whether they are useful. Guile, vanity, dissembling—in other circumstances these might be unattractive habits, but to the leader they can be essential. He needs guile in order to hold together the shifting coalitions of often bitterly opposed interest groups that governing requires. He needs a certain measure of vanity in order to create the right kind of public impression. He sometimes has to dissemble in order to prevail on crucial issues. Long before he acknowledged it publicly, de Gaulle confided privately that he believed independence was the only answer for Algeria. Roosevelt talked of keeping America out of war while maneuvering to bring it into war.
A leader can be out in front, ahead of public opinion, but not too far ahead. While trying to bring the public around, he often has to conceal a part of his hand, because to reveal it too soon could cost him the game. De Gaulle wrote that the statesman “must know when to dissemble, when to be frank . . . and only after a thousand intrigues and solemn undertakings will he find himself entrusted with full power.” He also noted that “every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be forgiven him—indeed, they will be regarded as high qualities—if he can make of them the means to achieve great ends.”
The less attractive aspects of leadership are not confined to politics. I have known leaders in business who were as ruthless as any politician, and church and academic leaders who schemed as deceptively and as manipulatively as any Washington bureaucrat. In fact, people who move from the academic world to government and back again often comment on how much more vicious and petty the competitive infighting is in the universities than it is in government. Academics are more sanctimonious, but hardly any more sanctified.
But whatever the field, the crucial moral questions are, in effect, those of the bottom line. Those who are wholly self-serving can be dismissed out of hand. And this applies whether their particular form of self-service involves riding roughshod over rivals or pious posturing. Those who wrap themselves in the robes of higher virtue and cause others to suffer so their own hands can remain clean—the moral robber barons—are fully as contemptible as business robber barons. Neither white collar, blue collar, nor clerical collar is any indicator of morality.
In politics the competitive aspects get more attention than they do in business, education, or the news media. But this is not because politics is more competitive. It simply is because the two fields in which competition is most public are sports and politics. In the other fields the competition is just as keen but better concealed. In my own admittedly biased view, the competition is nobler when the stakes are large questions of public policy or even the nation’s survival, rather than when they are the market share for a particular brand of cereal or a coup
le of points in the network ratings war. Yet I find that time and again the same commentators who play the ratings game so ruthlessly turn pious when they pass judgment on the rest of us.
• • •
One of the most familiar arguments in the whole field of public philosophy is the one about whether the end justifies the means. This is sometimes addressed profoundly, but most of the discussion is superficial and fatuous.
It would be absurd to claim that a good end justifies any means; it is equally absurd to claim that when otherwise unacceptable means are necessary to a great goal, they are never justified. The human cost of defeating Axis aggression in World War II was staggering—tens of millions killed, maimed, or starved to death—but the goal justified it. Failing to fight Hitler or losing the war would have been worse.
The leader must always weigh consequences; this becomes second nature to him. He cannot be bound by rigid rules laid down arbitrarily, and in wholly different circumstances, by ones who bear no responsibility.
Neither means nor end, in isolation, can be used as the measure of a leader. Unless he has a great cause, he can never be in the front rank. Leadership must serve a purpose, and the higher that purpose the greater the potential stature of the leader. But purpose is not enough. He also has to perform. He has to produce results, and he has to do so in a way that serves that higher purpose. He must not use means that disgrace or undo the purpose. But if he does not produce results, he fails his cause and fails history.
We think of Abraham Lincoln as a supreme idealist, and he was. But he was also a cold pragmatist and a total politician. His pragmatism and his political skills were what enabled him to make his ideals prevail. As a politician, in terms of such nitty-gritty things as patronage, he played the game to the hilt. As a pragmatist, when he freed the slaves he did so only in the states of the Confederacy, not in those border states that remained within the Union. As an idealist, his one consuming passion during that time of supreme crisis was to preserve the Union. Toward that end he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties. His justification was necessity. Explaining his sweeping violation of constitutional limits, he wrote in a letter in 1864:
My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of preserving by every indispensable means that government, that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground and now avow it.
More than forty years ago, Max Lerner wrote a brilliant introduction to an edition of Machiavelli’s works. In it Lerner suggested that one reason we “still shudder slightly at Machiavelli’s name” is
our recognition that the realities he described are realities; that men, whether in politics, in business or in private life, do not act according to their professions of virtue . . . Machiavelli today confronts us with the major dilemma of how to adapt our democratic techniques and concepts to the demands of a world in which as never before naked power politics dominates the foreign field and determined oligarchies struggle for power internally.
It is difficult to quarrel with Lerner’s conclusion:
Let us be clear about one thing: ideals and ethics are important in politics as norms, but they are scarcely effective as techniques. The successful statesman is an artist, concerned with nuances of public mood, approximations of operative modes, guesswork as to the tactics of his opponents, back-breaking work in unifying his own side by compromise and concession. Religious reformers have often succeeded in bringing public morale closer to some ethical norm; they have never succeeded as statesmen.
It is often said that the key to success in any field, including politics, is to “be yourself.” However, most of the great leaders I have known were accomplished actors, though only de Gaulle candidly admitted it. Like great stage performers, they played their public role so well that they virtually became the parts that they created.
Khrushchev was calculating in his use of bombast, de Gaulle equally calculating in his use of symbols of French grandeur. Each in a different way was compensating for his country’s deficiencies. Khrushchev acted the bully, de Gaulle acted the haughty seigneur; each was playing at a sort of psychological gamesmanship. But although both were calculated, neither was phony. Khrushchev was a bully; de Gaulle was haughty; Khrushchev was crude; de Gaulle was a passionately patriotic Frenchman who believed in his country’s grandeur. And this is important: To play the role successfully, the leader has to fit the role.
Adolf Hitler was the supreme demagogue of the twentieth century. With his voice, he could mesmerize the multitudes, and he whipped millions into frenzies of hate and fear as well as patriotism. Could de Gaulle have done the same if his goals had been those of Hitler? No. For de Gaulle’s great strength, his appeal, lay to a crucial extent in his moral authority: One can no more imagine de Gaulle inciting a mob to murder than taking off his clothes in public. He succeeded because his character fit the role, and his role was one of marshaling the best of France.
Some great leaders take pains to conceal their humanity; some flaunt it, even exaggerate it. There is a vast difference of style between the lofty grandeur of a de Gaulle and the earthy exuberance of a flesh-pressing Lyndon Johnson. Yet each was effective in his own way, in part because each man was, in a very real sense, larger than life. The Johnson “treatment” was legendary, and it was physical as well as rhetorical. De Gaulle, like George Washington, remained always wrapped in a cocoon of almost regal reserve. The person Johnson was trying to persuade found himself wrapped in Lyndon Johnson.
• • •
No one becomes a major leader without a strong will, or without a strong ego. Lately it has become fashionable to try to conceal ego, to pretend that it does not exist, to present instead an outward modesty. But I have never known a major leader who was not an egotist. Some of these leaders affected a modest air, but none was a modest person. Modesty was a pose, a device, just as MacArthur’s corncob pipe was a device and Churchill’s strut was a pose. A person has to believe in himself if he is to win mastery over the forces leaders deal with. He has to believe in his cause if he is going to punish himself the way leaders must. Unless he believes in himself, he is not going to persuade others to believe in him.
In 1947 I was told by one French critic of de Gaulle that “in political matters he thinks that he has a direct telephone line with God and that in making decisions all he has to do is to get on the wire and get the word straight from God.” Those leaders who succeed in imposing their own will on history are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but seldom unsure. They listen to their own instincts. They assemble the advice of others, but follow their own judgment. The leaders I have dealt with in this book would sometimes make mistakes, but they were supremely confident that they would be more nearly right more of the time if they pursued their own vision and went by their own instincts. They had no doubt that they were at the top for a reason: because they were the best for the job. And, being the best, they were not going to defer to the second best.
That inner voice is something a leader’s ear grows attuned to. The exercise of power trains it. As he grows accustomed to seeing large consequences flowing from his own decisions, the leader grows more comfortable making those decisions and more ready to risk the results of his own error rather than accept the consequences of someone else’s error.
A leader may go through agony in deciding what to do. But few successful leaders spend much time fretting about decisions once they are past, wondering whether they were right. The hard decisions I had to make in trying to bring American involvement in Vietnam to an end were often close decisions. Whe
n advisers who participated in those decisions would privately express doubts afterward about whether they were right, I would often say, “Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.” If the leader dwells too much on whether his decisions were right, he becomes paralyzed. The only way he can give adequate attention to the decisions he has to make tomorrow is to put those of yesterday firmly behind him.
This does not mean he does not learn from his mistakes. It does mean that his reflection on them should be analytical, not compulsive or guilt-ridden, and that it should basically be confined to those periods when he has time for reflection. De Gaulle in his “wilderness” years, Adenauer in prison and in the monastery, Churchill out of power, de Gasperi in the Vatican library—all had time to reflect, and all used it well. I found that some of my own most valuable years were those between the vice presidency and the presidency, when I was able to step back from the center of events and look in a more measured way at the past and the future.
• • •
All the great leaders I have known were, deep down, very emotional, which may be another way of saying they were very human. Some, like Churchill, displayed their emotions openly. Others, such as Khrushchev, used them shamelessly. De Gaulle, Adenauer, MacArthur, Zhou Enlai, and Yoshida were examples of the controlled, self-disciplined leader who presents to the public a front that conceals personal feelings. But anyone who knew them well would have found the deeply emotional core within the walls of an intense feeling of privacy.
• • •
One reason why it is frequently so difficult to sort out myth from reality in reading about political leaders is that part of political leadership is the creation of myths. Churchill was a master of this. He was constantly onstage. For de Gaulle mystery, honor, detachment, the applause of the multitude, were all instruments of statecraft, to be used to further the cause of France. The extraordinary emotional hold that hereditary monarchs have so often had on their subjects is less a matter of individual personality than it is of romantic myth. We wrap movie stars, rock stars, and now television celebrities, in the trappings of myth, and this is what makes the crowd swoon—and flock to buy tickets.
Leaders Page 44
