Hearts Touched with Fire

How Great Leaders are Made

David Gergen

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781982170585
• eBook ISBN: 9781982170592
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This instant New York Times bestseller is an “inspiring and useful” (The Washington Post) guide to the art of leadership from David Gergen—former White House adviser to four US presidents, CNN analyst, and founder of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership.

As nations careen from one crisis to the next, there is a growing cry for fresh leadership. Those in charge have relatedly fallen short, and trust in institutions have plummeted. So, what does great leadership look like? And how are great leaders made?

David Gergen, a leader in the public arena for more than half a century, draws from his experiences as a White House adviser to four presidents, his decades as a trusted voice on national issues, and years of teaching and mentoring young people to offer a stirring playbook for the next generation of change-makers.

To uncover the fundamental elements of effective leadership, Gergen traves the journeys of iconic leaders past and present, from pathbreakers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, John McCain, and Harvey Milk to historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, to contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Leadership is a journey that starts from within, Gergen writes. A leader must become self-aware and then achieve self-mastery. You cannot lead others until you can lead yourself. As you start to leap into the world, you begin your outer journey, overcoming setbacks, persuading others, empowering them, and navigating crises—armed with a sense of history, humor, passion, and purpose.

By linking lessons of the past with the ever-changing practice of leadership today, Gergen reveals the time-tested secrets of dynamic leadership. A “clarion call for lives dedicated to service and leadership” (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize­–winning author of Leadership), Hearts Touched with Fire distills experience and wisdom of the past into an invaluable guide for leaders of our future.

PART ONE YOUR INNER JOURNEY

ONE HEARTS TOUCHED WITH FIRE

He could have ducked.

His father was a prominent physician and intellectual, his mother a major abolitionist, his family well connected. So when President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could have easily ignored it.

Instead, he dropped out of Harvard College and signed up as a first lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts, putting his life on the line for the sake of his country. He answered the call. In battles that followed, Confederate bullets struck him down repeatedly—at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. In one battle, he was shot in the chest and barely survived; in another, he was shot in the neck and left for dead.

But as his biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe has written, those grievous wounds did not diminish his life. They instead shaped and strengthened his public leadership for the next seventy years. Even as he witnessed so much death and destruction, his inner steel hardened, and his aspirations for America grew. He rose to become one of the nation’s most influential and eloquent jurists, named to the Supreme Court by Teddy Roosevelt and serving until FDR reached the White House.

Some years after the Civil War, in a speech on Memorial Day in 1884, Holmes described how military service had inspired his generation. “As life is action and passion,” he said, “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.… Through our great good fortune, in our youth, our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”

“In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire.”

What a glorious way to capture what so many young men and women have experienced in one era after another in committing themselves to civic life, seeking to create a fairer, more just, and more peaceful world. Life will hold perils, but in devoting yourself to the service of others, you find a satisfaction that transcends your troubles. As many have discovered, service and leadership are inextricably bound together. Indeed, leadership at its best is service to others.

BUT DO LEADERS REALLY MATTER?

In one generation after another, down to our day, we have seen the joy and inner peace that comes to leaders who work tirelessly to serve others. Think of Jane Addams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating Hull House to serve as many as two thousand women a week; she was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. Or the many creations of Albert Schweitzer in the first half of the twentieth century, including the hospital he built in Africa, at Lambaréné. Schweitzer believed that “the purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.”

Think too of the work of Frances Perkins in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, a creative force behind the New Deal. Or Eleanor Roosevelt, who opened doors for scores of women in midcentury and served as the chairperson of the drafting committee of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa, down to John Lewis and New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern of our own time. All commanded universal respect. As we will see in the pages ahead, the way men and women exercise leadership continues to change—we have, for example, largely discarded the Great Man theory of centuries past in favor of more collaborative and diverse leadership—but the need for leaders of courage, compassion, and character has not only remained essential but has grown exponentially.

For centuries, historians and social scientists have debated whether leaders matter to the unfolding of the human story. Origins of the study of leadership can be found in ancient Greece, Rome, and China. In more modern times, the Western school of thought has been driven by historians, moral and political philosophers, practitioners, and most recently, social scientists. Different scholars bring with them their own approaches: Historians tend to focus on lessons from high-profile leaders from the past, while practitioners apply their own experiences and insights to leadership analysis. In the past several decades, as thinkers like Warren Bennis worked to solidify “leadership” as an academic discipline in its own right, social scientists have increasingly dominated the field of leadership research, applying an objective, “value-free” lens in understanding what constitutes effective—or ineffective—leadership.

Although leadership studies were initially focused on the qualities of leaders, the discipline has taken on explaining increasingly dynamic forces at play between leaders and their followers. How do leaders effectively navigate a world in which their values and culture may not align with those of their followers? What role do followers play in the efficacy of a leader? If a man exercises power in an immoral or evil way, should he still be called a leader? How can one voice seek to empower and advocate for a diverse cross section of interests? As we continue to understand the nuances of human behavior and expand our understanding of who can become “a leader,” questions related to what constitutes good leadership have multiplied.

At the crux of it all, however, is one central question: How great an impact can one person have on the arc of history? As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. pointed out, many eminent thinkers have believed that individuals are only the pawns of larger forces, such as God’s will, fate, and historical inevitability. In War and Peace, Tolstoy argued that if there had been no Napoleon, a different French general would have invaded Russia, slaughtering all in sight. Individuals, Tolstoy wrote, are but “the slaves of history.” He belonged to what has been called the determinist school of thought—a set of beliefs stretching back to gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus and stretching forward to Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and, indeed, Nazism.

In one of my favorite essays, “Democracy and Leadership,” Schlesinger made the counterargument that determinism at its core denies human agency as well as human responsibility. When an individual murders another, we hold him accountable for his act unless he is judged incapable of distinguishing right from wrong; we don’t give him a free pass. We believe each of us is responsible for our own behavior. Each of us has our own agency—for good as well as bad. And so it goes with leadership: Each of us can choose to make a positive difference.

In 1931, Schlesinger wrote, a British politician visiting America crossed Park Avenue in New York City after dinner, looked the wrong way, and was struck down by a passing car. “I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell,” he later said. Fourteen months later, an American politician was sitting in an open car in Miami when a gunman fired at point-blank range. Had the gunman’s arm not been jarred by a nearby woman, the politician would have died; as it was, the man next to him perished.

Schlesinger posed this hypothetical: If history had played out differently, that British politician could have died that night in New York. So too could that American politician have succumbed to his bullet wound in Miami. If those two men, Winston Churchill and FDR, had died on those days, would history have been any different? You bet! Every serious person believes that neither Neville Chamberlain nor Lord Halifax—the alternatives to Churchill—could have given voice to the British lion as Churchill did during the war. Similarly, no one believes that Vice President John Nance Garner, the Texan who said his office was “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” could have led us through the Depression and the war as FDR did.

Our greatest leaders have emerged from both good times and, more often, challenging ones. They are those among us who, in our darkest hours, stir us with hope and provide us with a clear vision for the days ahead. Often they remain calm at the helm when facing a crisis; they can right a sinking ship. In a pinch, the very finest among them make the difficult calls, calls that can ultimately alter the course of history. Through courage and character, they motivate others to follow their lead; one single person can inspire the masses to act, to change the world for the better. Individuals still matter, especially in leadership.

ARE LEADERS BORN OR MADE?

Experts disagree whether the qualities and talents of effective leaders are in their DNA. When Dwight Eisenhower was a kid, others automatically looked to him in organizing their touch-football games; he wrote later that teenage teams were his training grounds for leadership. Abraham Lincoln had less than a full year of formal education, but his words still ring true with us a century and a half later. It certainly appears that some people are born gifted—or, as Warren Buffett likes to say about his investment savvy, he was lucky to have won life’s lottery.

You may have been born with some natural advantages, but if you want to excel as a leader—to go “from good to great,” as Jim Collins puts it—you have to work steadily over a long period of time. Frequently, personal development depends heavily upon your own patience and persistence. It is only through first mastering your own intentions, coming to understand your values, and then leading increasingly large groups of followers that one can truly become an effective leader. The journey is not straightforward and is sure to be full of failures large and small, but leading can prove to be one of life’s most meaningful endeavors.

HOW SHOULD WE DEFINE LEADERSHIP?

Students of leadership also argue over how it should be defined. That’s because the practice of leadership draws primarily upon subjective, hard-to-measure qualities like character, compassion, empathy, and the like. It is more art than science. Or as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a 1960s case, obscenity is hard to define but “I know it when I see it.” Or perhaps you might compare leadership to jazz: The art, as Miles Davis suggested, is how to play the silence between the notes.

Altogether, students of leadership have found over two hundred definitions of leadership. Many of them are similar. A number touch upon the ability to inspire others. Ronald Reagan, for example, thought a great leader is “one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” A slightly different school of thought emphasizes the selfless nature of leaders. Lao-tzu famously said, “A leader is best when people barely know he exists; when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.” Likewise, Nelson Mandela thought it better to empower others, leading from behind and allowing them to celebrate the fruits of their labor. Others home in upon personal traits, common among them courage, vision, and integrity. Today there is a school of thought emerging around the idea of leaderlessness—a concept that emphasizes collective action and shared roles rather than a single individual guiding the masses. We will return to this subject in pages to come.

The definition that I find most compelling, however, and use in classrooms comes from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian Garry Wills. In a book written a quarter century ago, Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership, he presented biographical sketches of individual leaders, weighing how followers shape their leaders. Sorting out distinctions, Wills offered this definition of a leader: “one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leader and followers.”

Traditionally, scholars have agreed that there are three main elements to leadership: the leader, followers, and context. Each matters. We spend most of our time focusing on leaders and overlooking followers. But as Garry Wills recognizes, the qualities of followers heavily influence the success of leaders. For example, the French Revolution and the American Revolution both sought to strengthen the liberty of their peoples and both occurred at relatively the same time in history. Why, then, did the American Revolution succeed and the French fail? Thomas Jefferson believed that Americans had long experience in self-governance beforehand while the French people had lived under the thumb of the monarchy and the church. Americans were culturally ready for independence; the French were not. A former colleague of mine, Barbara Kellerman, has written a valuable book on followers that I recommend.

Similarly, the context in which a leader finds her- or himself will also shape what that person can get done. In his recent studies of leadership, political scientist Joseph Nye has pointed out that in 1939, Winston Churchill was a washed-up leader. The British public was then clinging to hopes of a negotiated settlement with Germany and saw Churchill as impulsive and militaristic. But within a year, as the Nazis marched across France and threatened to invade Britain, Churchill was seen as a savior. The context had changed, summoning him into action.

I would offer one amendment to the traditional view that leader, followers, and context are the three key pillars of leadership. In my experience in various White Houses, there is always a fourth element: the goals. A leader will be much more successful if she chooses goals that are doable and are aligned with the values and interests of her followers. In the early Reagan years, for example, Reagan’s chief of staff, Jim Baker, distinguished among three types of goals for a president: easy, difficult, and tough but doable. Easy ones, he said, should be left to the departments to secure; difficult ones should be allowed to ripen; tough but doable are the stretch goals we should embrace. That perspective was a key to Reagan’s success. Stretch goals like the massive reform of Social Security and the overhaul of the tax system—both requiring significant bipartisan participation—came to define his presidency. On occasion, other presidents have overstretched and failed. It’s essential to find the right balance if you want to leave a positive legacy.

ENDURING VS. EVOLVING STANDARDS

It is fascinating to look back upon earlier times and to recognize how leadership has evolved over the centuries. A major theme of this book is that the capacity to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape is one of the most important skills a leader needs today. Even Ben Franklin, the most innovative of the founders, might be lost in today’s culture of globalization and digitalization.

Yet as one looks more closely, it seems equally important—perhaps more important—that a leader also embrace standards that have endured for over two thousand years. We know that personal character has been essential to leadership since classical Greece and Rome. The ancients believed, as we do now, that a person’s inner values and strengths were key determinants of their ability to practice principled leadership. Equally essential have been courage and honor. One can read Marcus Aurelius and Plutarch and learn as much about leadership as you can from any text of modern times.

I would be remiss if I failed to address an unshakable notion of leadership in America: that of a man on a white horse, strong and fearless, rescuing his followers from looming disaster. Richard Nixon reportedly watched the movie Patton no less than nine times. He loved the portrayal of a bold leader swearing at his troops on the eve of battle. General MacArthur played to that tradition too, as did Donald Trump in his presidential campaigns.

In truth, when darkness falls across the political landscape, democratic nations often call upon and sometimes need a visibly strong person. Witness the call to Churchill in May 1940. But over the years, scholars have moved away from individual strongmen and toward leaders who are collaborative and welcome partners. Instead of a lonely singular figure brooding over a decision, a favorite depiction of Barack Obama the night bin Laden was captured shows him in the Situation Room surrounded by half a dozen advisors. We will find repeated examples of collaborative leadership in the pages ahead.

Indeed, throughout this book you will find sketches of leaders whose lives shed light on the arts and adventures of leadership. In that spirit, let’s look at three contemporary leaders whose lives underscore the idea that even though standards have evolved, the values we cherish have endured over centuries. What we see is that each leader had to adapt to the context of their times, resorting to different strategies for success. But equally so, we see striking commonalities in the way they thought and acted. Importantly, as leaders, they shared many of the same basic values.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One: Your Inner Journey
• Part Two: Your Outer Journey
• Part Three: Leadership in Action
• Executive Summary: 20 Key Takeaways
• Epilogue: Answering the Call
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright