The politician, no less than the actor or the filmmaker, knows that to bore his audience is to lose his audience. Thus, few great political leaders are dull. They cannot afford to be. Political leadership has to appeal to the head, but it must also appeal to the heart. The wisest course is likely to fail unless the leader who advocates it is able to reach the people on an emotional level.
We cannot find the stuff of leadership in the dry pages of a history text. To find it, we have to look into the spirit of the man, to see what it is that sustains and drives him and enables him to drive or to persuade others. We see this in a MacArthur and a Churchill—proud, vain, paradoxical, posing always, yet brilliant, insightful, with their eyes on the long view of history; driven men, driving others, whose views of their own destinies coincided more often than not with their views of their countries’ destinies. We also must look at the legends. Legends are often an artful intertwining of fact and myth, designed to beguile, to impress, to inspire, or sometimes simply to attract attention. But legend is an essential ingredient of leadership.
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Some aspects of leadership are common to all fields—business, sports, the arts, the academic community. But some are peculiar to the political process or at least loom larger in the political process.
Prominence by itself is not leadership; nor is excellence. Excellence can be achieved in a solitary field without the need to exercise leadership. Writers or painters or musicians can practice their art without leading. Inventors or chemists or mathematicians can exercise their genius in solitude. But political leaders have to inspire followers. Great ideas can change history, but only if great leadership comes along that can give those ideas force.
By the same token the “great” leader is not necessarily good. Adolf Hitler electrified a nation. Joseph Stalin was brutally effective at wielding power. Ho Chi Minh became a folk hero to millions beyond the borders of Vietnam. The good and the bad alike can be equally driven, equally determined, equally skilled, equally persuasive. Leadership itself is morally neutral; it can be used for good or for ill.
Thus, virtue is not what lifts great leaders above others. Others are more virtuous but less successful. The maxim “Nice guys finish last” is far more applicable to politics than to sports. What lifts great leaders above the second-raters is that they are more forceful, more resourceful, and have a shrewdness of judgment that spares them the fatal error and enables them to identify the fleeting opportunity.
Neither is brilliance, in an intellectual sense, their defining characteristic. All the major leaders discussed here were highly intelligent. All had keen analytical capacities. All were deep thinkers. But they tended to think concretely rather than abstractly, to measure consequences rather than construct theories. The average professor sees the world through the prism of his own values and therefore exalts theory. To the leader theories can be a useful springboard for analysis. But they must never be a substitute for analysis.
One of the most obvious questions about leadership is also one of the most elusive: What is the most important characteristic a successful leader must have? There is of course no single answer. Different qualities are required in different circumstances. But certainly high intelligence, courage, hard work, tenacity, judgment, dedication to a great cause, and a certain measure of charm are all key ingredients. In political campaigns I used to say that what we had to do was “outwork, out-think, and outfight” the opposition. The great leader needs insight, foresight, and the willingness to take the bold but calculated risk. He also needs luck. Above all, he must be decisive. He must analyze his choices shrewdly and dispassionately, but then he must act. He must not become a Hamlet. He must not succumb to “paralysis by analysis.” He also must want the job, and he must be willing to pay the price. There is a persistent myth that if only a person is well enough qualified, the office will—or should—somehow seek him. It will not, and it should not. This myth of the “reluctant candidate” was, for much of the intellectual world, a part of Adlai Stevenson’s attraction. But show me a reluctant candidate and I will show you a losing candidate. A reluctant candidate will not give a campaign the intensity of effort it requires, nor will he accept the sacrifices leadership itself requires: the ruthless invasion of privacy, the grueling schedule, the sting of unfair and often vicious criticism, the cruel caricatures. Unless a person is prepared to accept this and still be ready to pursue the job with passion, he is not going to have the steel to stand it once he gets it.
One need, often overlooked, has tripped up many a brilliant prospective leader on the way to the top. Winston Churchill wrote of one of Britain’s potentially great leaders of the nineteenth century that “he would not stoop; he did not conquer.” In this country Thomas E. Dewey and Robert A. Taft lacked this quality, and the lack may well have cost them the presidency. At a political dinner in New York in 1952, I was sitting next to Dewey when a somewhat drunken guest slapped him on the back and greeted him with what Dewey considered a too-easy familiarity. Dewey brushed him aside and asked me, “Who was that fatuous ass?” It had been the owner of a chain of small but important Upstate New York newspapers. In the New Hampshire primary in 1952 a little girl asked Taft for an autograph. Taft refused, explaining stiffly that he would be glad to shake hands but that if he took time to grant all autograph requests he would never get his campaigning done. Unfortunately for Taft, the incident was captured on television and shown over and over again in the living rooms of America. However impeccable his logic, the effect was politically devastating.
Because the leader is busy, because he has a large ego, because he resents intrusions and distractions, because he considers himself superior, he may have little patience with those he perceives as his inferiors. The trouble with this inability to “tolerate fools” is threefold. First, the leader needs followers—and a lot of those he needs have ideas he would consider foolish. Second, the man he is tempted to dismiss as a fool may not be. Third, even if he is, the leader might learn from him. Leadership requires a sort of mystical bond between the leader and the people; if the leader appears to show disdain for the people, that bond is likely to snap. However, one must always remember that leaders are uncommon men. They should not try to appear to be common. If they do try, they will come across as unnatural—not only phony, but condescending.
People may like the boy next door, but that does not mean that they want him as their President, or even as their congressman. The successful leader does not talk down to people. He lifts them up. He must never be arrogant. He must be willing and able to “tolerate fools.” He must show that he respects the people whose support he seeks. But he must also retain that quality of difference that allows them to look up to him. If he asks for their confidence, he must inspire their faith. This approach is not only honest—if he were common, he would not be a leader—but it also is necessary to creation of the leadership mystique in a democratic society.
The leader must learn not only how to talk, but also when—and equally important, when to stop talking. Carlyle once commented that “silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.” De Gaulle pointed out trenchantly that silence can be a powerful instrument for a leader. It also is when we are listening, not when we are talking, that we learn.
Time and again I have seen newcomers to Washington dazzle the media and even their colleagues with their seeming ability to speak articulately and at length on any subject. But soon the novelty wears off, and they find themselves judged not by how they speak but by what they say—and are dismissed as not being what the French call hommes serieux. Frequently the glibbest talker turns out to be the shallowest thinker. A good rule for the would-be leader, when he has a choice, is to exercise his tongue less and his brain more.
• • •
In his essay on Lord Rosebery, Churchill wrote: “Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the edu
cation of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.”
Churchill knew what it was both to win and to lose, and to be roughed up in the political thicket. He was right about the educational value of waging a campaign. Elections are “rough and slatternly,” but they are essential both to the democratic system and to the interaction between leader and led. Democratic government is an extremely complex process of give and take among a multitude of groups, forces, and interests. The cliché that a leader should be a statesman and not a politician is grossly condescending toward the democratic system and shows contempt for the voting public. The pundits who sit in their lofty towers dispensing disdain for the political process are really dictators at heart.
The leader should of course be out ahead of the people. He should have a clearer perception than they of where the country should be going, and why, and of what it takes to get there. But he has to carry the people with him. It makes no sense to blow the trumpet for the charge, then look back and find no one following. He has to persuade. He has to win the people’s consent to the vision he holds out. In the process—in the wooing that precedes the winning—he can learn a great deal about their concerns, their reservations, their hopes and fears, all of which are things that, as a leader, he must deal with. In that same process he can also get a better idea of the kinds of compromises he is going to have to make.
The pundit who exalts “standing firm for principle” and condemns compromise demands, in effect, that the leader throw himself on the sword. Very few leaders are willing to do that. Nor should they. What the pundit fails to see is that the leader frequently has to compromise in order to live to fight another day. Knowing when to compromise is part of the process of choosing priorities. It is easy for the armchair strategist to conclude breathlessly that the leader must fight and win on this battle or that one without taking into account the other battles he must fight. There are times when the one who has responsibility will conclude that the cost of winning a particular battle is too great if he is going to succeed in winning the war. He must choose which battles he will fight and which he will not fight, so that he can husband his resources for more important battles to come.
If the successful leader has to know when to compromise, he also has to know when to go his own way. Too many politicians today ride toward destiny “at full Gallup.” The candidate who slavishly follows the polls may get elected, but he will not be a great leader or even a good one. Polls can be useful in identifying those areas where particular persuasion is needed. But if he sets his course by them, he abdicates his role as a leader. The task of the leader is not to follow the polls but to make the polls follow him.
The successful leader must know when to fight and when to retreat, when to be rigid and when to compromise, when to speak out and when to be silent.
He must take the long view—he must have a clear strategy as well as a goal and a vision.
He must take the complete view—he must see the relation of one decision to others.
He must stay in front, but not so far in front that he loses his followers.
In the “rough and slatternly” process of electioneering, he has a chance to move his followers forward and also to measure how far ahead he can afford to get. If the Shah of Iran had had to campaign, he might not have lost his country.
• • •
A general needs troops but also a command structure. A political leader needs followers but also an organization.
One of the hardest things for many leaders to accept is the need for delegation. Eisenhower once put this in capsule form when he commented to me that the most difficult thing he had to overcome as an executive was learning to sign a bad letter: that is, to put his signature on one that had been written for him, even though he knew that he himself could have done it better.
A leader’s most precious resource is his time. If he squanders it on the nonessentials, he will fail. Among his most important choices are those in which he selects what he will do himself and what he will leave to others—and also those in which he selects the people to whom he will delegate. The leader has to be able to get good people, and also to get rid of those who for whatever reason do not work out. Gladstone once commented that the first requisite for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher. Firing people can be one of the most difficult tasks a leader faces but also one of the most essential. The easy cases are those where the subordinate is venal or disloyal. The tougher ones are those in which he is loyal, dedicated, but incompetent—or where there simply is someone else available who would be better. That is when the leader has to steel himself to put public responsibility ahead of personal feelings. But even this requires qualification. Loyalty is a two-way street, and he cannot retain a loyal staff if he operates a revolving door. So he has to strike a balance. But in striking it, he must resist the inertia that makes it easier not to make changes. He must be a butcher both to ensure that what he delegates is done well and to ensure that he feels free to delegate. He has only a limited time in which to exercise power. He has to make the most of the time that he has. If he cannot be a good butcher himself, he needs someone who can be. General Walter Bedell Smith once broke into tears as he told me, “I was just Ike’s pratboy. Ike always had to have a pratboy.” In my own administration Bob Haldeman got a reputation for ruthlessness. One reason was that he performed for me a lot of the butcher’s tasks that I could not bring myself to perform directly.
Especially where a huge bureaucracy is involved, the butcher’s function is vital for another reason. I have found that, generally, a few people in the bureaucracy are motivated by devotion to the leader, and some by devotion to the cause he represents. But most are motivated primarily by self-interest. Some want advancement—to move up the ladder competitively. Some want security—to keep the jobs that they have. The worst thing that an organization can do is to provide too much security. The people grow lax, and the organization grows ineffective. Positive incentives are needed to maintain morale. But an occasional firing, for evident good reason, will shake up the troops and provide a tonic that every organization needs.
In the final analysis, delegation can never be a substitute for the leader’s thinking a problem through and making the key decisions on the major issues. He can and must delegate to others the responsibility for doing things. He cannot and should not delegate to others the responsibility for deciding what should be done. This is what he was selected to do. If he lets his staff do his thinking for him, he becomes a follower rather than a leader.
In assembling a staff, the conservative leader faces a greater problem than does the liberal. In general, liberals want more government and hunger to be the ones running it. Conservatives want less government and want no part of it. Liberals want to run other people’s lives. Conservatives want to be left alone to run their own lives. Academics tend to be liberals; engineers tend to be conservatives. Liberals flock to government; conservatives have to be enticed and persuaded. With a smaller field to select from, the conservative leader often has to choose between those who are loyal but not bright and those who are bright but not loyal—in the sense not of personal integrity but of deep-rooted commitment to the leader’s conservative principles.
Some things are relatively easy for a leader to delegate: those that others can clearly do better than he can. De Gaulle, Adenauer, and Yoshida were not first-rate economists themselves. Each had the good sense to put economic matters in the hands of people who were: Pompidou, Erhard, and Ikeda.
Eisenhower’s bad-letter example points up the more difficult kind of choice: where the leader must delegate things he could do better, because he cannot or should not spare the time. This requires the ability to separate the essential from the important, as well as the self-restraint to let others handle the important. The tendency of many leaders is to get bogged down in small matters because they cannot bring themselves to “sign a bad letter.” Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on personally picking the bombing target
s in Vietnam is a case in point.
In a sense it can be argued that everything that crosses a President’s desk is important; otherwise it would never get that far. But he cannot attend to everything. The big man is hired for the big decisions, not to fritter away his time and attention on small ones. There will be times when urgent questions of social and economic policy require his attention; there will be times when he must concentrate on crucial questions of foreign policy; there will be times when he has to escape the urgencies and focus instead on transcendent questions of the longterm future. What he delegates today might not be what he would delegate tomorrow. He needs the flexibility to shift priorities with shifting needs. But he must have the ability to push away from his desk those decisions, however important individually, that would impair his ability to deal as he should with those that are his preeminent responsibility.
The situation has an analogy in baseball. Many good hitters hit for the averages, trying for singles in order to push their averages toward .300. But these are not the great hitters who make the headlines and draw thousands into the park. The great hitters, the Reggie Jacksons, are the ones who hit in the clutch, who go not for the averages but for the game-winning home runs. The leader must organize his life and concentrate his energies with one overriding goal in mind: to make the big plays. These are the ones by which he makes his mark on history. He can go for the averages and be average. If he tries too hard to do everything well, he will not do the really important things extraordinarily well. He will not rise above the pack. If he wants to be a great leader, he has to concentrate on the great decisions.
• • •
Before he became President, Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech in which he differentiated between men of thought and men of action. In politics it has been my observation that too often the man of thought cannot act and the man of action does not think. The ideal is one like Wilson himself, who was a great creative thinker and also, when he was still at his best, a decisive man of action. Generally the most effective leaders I have known have been among those few who were both men of thought and men of action. The French philosopher Henri Bergson once advised, “Act as men of thought. Think as men of action.”
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