As Americans watch the Republican candidates debate and President Obama govern, how can they judge leadership? This historian suggests voters look to Lincoln, Churchill, and Admiral Nelson for five standards by which to measure presidential leadership.
If what you are expecting to emerge from the welter of presidential wannabes now swimming across America's national screen is leadership, then you may be in for a winter of political discontent.
Skip to next paragraphThis is not because the country lacks candidates of talent, charm, or intelligence. Whatever we may think about the politics of a Newt Gingrich or a Mitt Romney or even a Barack Obama, these contenders would not be where they are without a tremendous fund of smarts and skill.
What America lacks, instead, is a workable standard of judging what singles out one individual from a pack of indisputably gifted pre-presidents and moves us to settle on the most qualified one.
We could, I suppose, turn to the ever-expanding bookshelf with titles on "leadership" to discover the qualities we should look for in a president. But the sheer number of such books is a sure sign that even the leadership gurus cannot make up their minds about where the best lessons are to be had.
I suspect it is not the consultants but the historians who have the most meaningful recommendations to make about spotting leadership in aspiring presidents. This is because so many of them spend significant portions of their lives in the mental company of people who really did turn out to possess the Midas touch of leadership. (Not too many historians enjoy writing about failures in history, except to point out how to avoid replicating those failures.)
And if there is anything that the history people can say about political leadership, it is this:
Look for those who understand the issues of government. No one ever led by ignorance. Ably pointing the way arises out of a passion for learning, a single-minded determination to understand what makes people and things tick.
In his compelling study of Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, Adam Nicolson noticed that in Admiral Nelson's Royal Navy, every senior officer had to begin as a lowly midshipman, learning every knot the same as any ordinary seaman. Nelson's French and Spanish adversaries, however, were aristocrats who acquired their rank through social standing and who couldn't have sailed a toy boat around a bathtub.
No wonder they were nearly annihilated.
Look for those who love the daily toil and mechanics of governing. Leadership means not only knowing, but loving the knowing. American essayist Logan Pearsall Smith once said, "The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."
It's become fashionable to sniff at this as workaholism or wonkishness. But it's really describing someone who has found joy in the innumerable nuts and bolts of work. And that is precisely what the greatest leaders of free societies have possessed. Winston Churchill even arranged his sleeping hours into two parts so as to "press a day and a half's work into one." Oddly, it's been the hallmark of dictators to be careless and spendthrift of governing, preferring to franchise the real work to underlings who must then compete for the dictator's attention.
Look, also, for those who have mastered the organization. Governing is not for the faint-hearted or those who are condemned to spend the first six months of their presidency figuring out where the washroom is. A leader understands the pulse and flow of responsibility among segments of a government as instinctively as a hunter estimates the range and speed of his target.
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