The Soul of a Leader

Waller R. Newell

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061984822
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

What are we looking for in a leader? Has the meaning of leadership changed? Can history provide guidance for the leaders of a rising generation? What defines the soul of a leader? In The Soul of a Leader, political scientist and cultural commentator Waller R. Newell offers a fascinating perspective on the role of leadership in American life today. From the birth of democracy in Periclean Athens to the Founding Fathers' view of statesmanship, from the experiences of Abraham Lincoln to those of modern presidents, this far-reaching and provocative new book explores the many and diverse elements of good statesmanhip, including the timeless qualities all good leaders share. As Newell plumbs the depths of history, he illuminates the moral, psychological, and intellectual resources we inherit from the traditions of the West— traditions steeped in the experience and reflection on statecraft from ancient times onward— and offers a compass for the challenges America's next generation of leaders will face. In this engaging blend of character portraiture, historical perspective, and contemporary political insight, Newell proposes a bold new perspective on the evolution of the modern American presidency, from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush. He steps back in time to evaluate the clashing models of Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, as they captured the struggle for the soul of the American Republic. And, in an essay of masterful historical reach, he contemplates the roots of modern leadership in the story of what he calls "the West's first superpower conflict"— the epic battle between Athens and Sparta, with its echoes of both Vietnam and Iraq. Finally, he draws from these stories ten lessons in political greatness— lessons the next American president will be wise to heed.

PART I

A Generation Bids Farewell

The Saga of the Modern American Presidency

On January 2, 2007, official Washington ground to a halt for the state funeral of Gerald R. Ford, the thirty-eighth president of the United States. The capital had been through a particularly tumultuous period. The voters had recently delivered a resoundingly negative judgment on the presidency of George W. Bush, stripping the Republican Party of control of both houses of Congress in midterm elections that amounted to a referendum on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq. Bush himself, initially the hero of 9/11 who had vowed to bring justice to the terrorists—and made good on this promise by toppling two hostile regimes in the space of two years—had enjoyed unprecedented favorable ratings. Yet now he seemed the lamest of lame ducks, with approval ratings sinking to Trumanesque levels. As the White House scrambled to reexamine its strategy in Iraq, the triumphant Democrats paused on the brink, temporarily stunned by their own unexpected success, and wondering just how much latitude the public had actually given them to reverse the president’s war-making strategy.

Yet the death of an American president, whatever the surrounding circumstances, compels attention and respect. For a prolonged moment, partisan differences were set aside. All the country’s living presidents gathered for the service, joined by much of the capital’s political and cultural elite. Old faces, historical legends—such as Henry Kissinger—from what now seemed like another age, reappeared briefly on the stage of their former triumphs and reverses. As contenders began to emerge for what was to be the first presidential race in fifty-six years in which no incumbent would be running, a feeling was already in the air that the next presidential race would not just be a change but a generational change. A new generation would take over from the current one, which was coming to an end with the second President Bush. The administration’s principal foreign policy architects, including the vice president and secretary of defense, were veterans of five Republican presidencies stretching all the way back to Richard Nixon. The state funeral for Nixon’s successor seemed to symbolize the historic transition that many were feeling was already upon us.

At the core of that generation’s perspective on the world was the trauma of the war in Vietnam. A war that had begun with the shining intentions of John F. Kennedy to defend freedom wherever required around the world, it had ended in a debacle costing more than fifty thousand American lives, American cities burning in riots, and the downfall of two presidents. Nixon’s presidency had been driven by the need to bring the war to as honorable an end as possible through a two-state solution, such as had prevailed in Korea. He pursued a negotiated withdrawal by steady stages and the preservation of South Vietnam. In the aftermath, with the final defeat of South Vietnam by the communist North during the Ford presidency, aided by a vengeful Congress determined not to continue propping up America’s former ally, a bitter reaction set in among policy intellectuals who believed that American power in the world must be reasserted in the service of spreading the American ideal of democracy. These “neoconservatives,” as they came to be known, reacted against both what they saw as the hopeless pacifism of the Democratic Party, shattered by Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the war, and the cynicism of the Kissinger approach to international relations as an amoral balance of powers regardless of whether the regimes included were democratic or not. This new generation of “neocons,” including Paul Wolfowitz and Jeane Kirkpatrick (many of them former Democrats), found in Ronald Reagan the vehicle for translating those policies into reality. In time, some of the older Nixon hands themselves, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, outgrew their roots in Kissingerian realpolitik to embrace the neoconservatives’ professed revival of Wilsonian internationalism. Eventually, the Democrats themselves came around, at least in part, and through figures like Joshua Muravchik and Madeleine Albright found in Bill Clinton a Democratic president who was willing to use military force abroad, as in Kosovo, where it both served a moral purpose defending human rights and consolidated American influence in the region.

With al-Qaeda’s unexpected assault on American shores on 9/11, George W. Bush, initially perceived in many quarters as a neo-isolationist, found that foreign policy would almost totally define his presidency. The neoconservatives of the preceding decades found their ideal cause at last: the defense of America from an ideological foreign foe whose defeat would proceed hand in hand with the extension of American ideals of liberty and self-government to oppressed peoples around the world, beginning in the Middle East. This time, the neocons resolved, there would be no detente with the enemy, the International Jihad. For Nixon’s pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, and especially the more toothless version carried on by Ford, they believed, had only encouraged the Soviets to think America lacked resolve. Moreover, there would be no stopping short of the final goal of deposing Saddam Hussein, correcting the error of the president’s father, who had listened more to Kissingerian pragmatists like James Baker than to the neoconservative firebrands who had flourished under Reagan, but whom his successor distrusted.

The death of Gerald Ford, who had presided over the collapse of South Vietnam and the souring of detente, and who had pardoned Richard Nixon, summed up this whole remarkable saga. In truth, the solemn state obsequies drew together into a single narrative what had been a continuous process involving several generations and several layers of history in the twentieth century, reaching all the way back to John F. Kennedy. One trait they shared was the experience of war: A number of these men, and their electoral opponents, had been genuine war heroes—Kennedy, George McGovern, George H. W. Bush, Robert Dole, and Ford himself. Others, like Nixon and Reagan, had at least seen some form of service. Even the presidents who had not seen combat themselves employed top advisors (including Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld) who had done so. The experience of war formed a powerful moral spine in the outlook of these men, one that had already started to go into abeyance with the current President Bush (a number of the chief architects of his war strategy, including Vice President Cheney and his onetime deputy Paul Wolfowitz, had never served in the military) and which was, with the exception of John McCain, almost completely absent from the new generation of contenders.

Even more important than military service, however, were the historical lessons all these presidents had drawn from the cold war. For it was the cold war conflict between America and the Soviet Union that had fundamentally determined American involvement in Vietnam and shaped the moral horizon within which presidents of both parties acted, all the way down to the second invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, there was a powerful historical precedent for superpower conflict at the very dawn of the West, a precedent of which many of the twentieth-century leaders were aware. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, in his masterful account of the Peloponnesian War (which we’ll explore in Part Three of this book), told the story of the first superpower conflict, a decades-long struggle between Athens, the first democracy in Western history, and the grim collectivist oligarchy of Sparta. That conflict in turn stemmed from the earlier alliance between these two Greek states against Persian invaders from the East. After the common enemy had been vanquished, the two allies viewed each other with a distrust that at length broke into open conflict, sometimes through proxy wars between their allies, subsiding into long periods of cold war punctuated by violent armed clashes.

As we will see, Thucydides’ history of that first democracy has never been forgotten in the West, and particularly in Athens’s modern successor, the United States. It fed the atmosphere, and may even have provided a model, for Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Theodore Roosevelt read Thucydides on at least two occasions (one of them during his presidency), contributing discerning comments of his own to the modern perspective on this ancient epic. Throughout the twentieth century, the ancient historian’s lessons about the relationship between freedom and empire, and on the impact that combating tyranny abroad will have on democratic politics at home, seemed ever more relevant.

When John Kennedy, in tones reminiscent of Winston Churchill, spoke about the “long twilight struggle” against communist tyranny, the example of that earlier conflict between ancient Greek democracy and the despotism of Persia loomed large. JFK, along with Churchill and many other political leaders of the era, were intense devotees of history, including the history of the ancient Greek and Roman republics from which the modern West received so much of its heritage and inspiration—early in his presidential term, Kennedy cited Thucydides in urging the NATO alliance to speak with a common voice against continuing threats to freedom in the world.

It would be difficult not to be struck by the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the cold war involving the United States and the U.S.S.R. After beginning with a survey of the reasons for the superpower conflict between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides warns that we cannot understand that conflict without going back further in time, to their original alliance against Persian despotism. Modern statesmen could make a similar deduction. Just as Athens had allied with Sparta to defeat the Great King of Persia, the United States had also allied itself with a grim collectivist oligarchy, the Soviet Union, to defeat the tyranny of Hitler. The eventual, inevitable falling-out between the two superpowers led to a prolonged conflict—one that ran sometimes hot, mostly cold, and was often fought through proxy wars, such as Korea and Vietnam. Most remarkably, just as Athens’s potent blend of democracy and empire met its nadir in the invasion of Sicily—and the crushing defeat of the Athenian army and fleet that followed—so did the imperial idealism of the cold war meet its debacle in the jungles of Vietnam. In both cases, a great democratic empire had underestimated the size and difficulties of subduing “a piss-ant little country” (as LBJ called Vietnam).

JFK and his successors also believed it was important to look back to the origins of the cold war to see what was required of America today. It was crucial to recall the mistakes of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler if we wanted to avoid repeating them with the Soviet Union. It was equally important to recall the towering giants of the struggle against Hitler—Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, our contemporary equivalents of the great Athenian wartime leader Pericles—if we were to live up to their example in the struggle with the new enemies of democratic civilization. In withdrawing from Vietnam, Richard Nixon believed he was imitating de Gaulle’s statesmanship in leaving Algeria to save the French Fifth Republic from internal collapse. JFK and his advisors thought the torch had been passed to America from Churchill’s Britain. The younger generation of neoconservatives believed that the Democratic Party—the party of Truman and JFK, of the wars of anticommunist containment in Korea and Vietnam—had been traumatized by Vietnam and sunk into a dewy-eyed one-worldism that dated back to Henry Wallace and Adlai Stevenson and their heirs George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. They saw themselves as JFK’s true heirs, though by and large they left his Democratic Party to join Ronald Reagan’s Republican surge in 1980.

This whole dizzying kaleidoscope of associations came to mind as President Ford’s cortege rolled slowly through the streets of Washington. Truly a generation had passed. What would follow it?

The Titans: Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Two titanic figures dominated the American experience of World War II and the cold war that emerged from it—Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Time and again, from JFK to the present, their examples and their precepts have been invoked, and their legacies claimed. Let us examine some of their more striking features as leaders.

The complexity of Churchill’s character was largely hidden from the public by the persona he had to assume as a wartime leader—John Bull, the British bulldog, the embodiment of the nation’s stubborn pluck and grit. Like all great leaders, he was eventually reduced in the broader public’s mind to a silhouette: Honest Abe, TR’s flashing teeth and shouts of “Bully,” FDR’s head tossed back with a cigarette holder.

In truth, however, Winston Churchill was a man of many layers, both dark and light. As one of his close wartime aides, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, summed up this larger-than-life personage, lovable even in his faults:

I wonder whether any historian of the future will ever be able to paint Winston in his true colors. It is a wonderful character, the most marvelous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which, if not guided, must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again. He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I would not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth.

In his moral certainty about the code of the gentleman, Churchill was every inch a Victorian. But he had more than a touch of Edwardian whimsy. His colleague during the war (and later his successor as prime minister) Harold Macmillan, a more straitlaced figure, marveled at Churchill’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and ability to combine work with pleasure at a wartime conference in Casablanca:

His curious routine of spending the great part of the day in bed and all night up made it a little trying for his staff. I have never seen him in better form. He ate and drank enormously all the time, settled huge problems, played bagatelle and bezique by the hour, and generally enjoyed himself.

The eminent British psychiatrist Anthony Storr believes that great leaders, artists, and thinkers often strive for achievement in order to fill an inner emptiness stemming from some early tragedy or rejection. In the overall emotional economy of life, the rest of us benefit from their unhappiness while neither enjoying their spectacular achievements nor suffering their inner hollowness. This is not to reduce great achievement by equating it with this sense of emptiness; depression is no guarantee of greatness. But greatness may require a degree of depression, melancholy, a sense of one’s own frailty, and the vicissitudes of fate. It is precisely in overcoming one’s inner demons to achieve something for the benefit of one’s country or mankind that many men have risen to nobility and grandeur.

Storr entitled his book Churchill’s Black Dog, after Churchill’s private name for the crushing depression that would incapacitate him for days or weeks at a time, especially as a young man. It led to a periodic reliance on the opiate laudanum in his twenties to escape insomnia and, throughout the Second World War, to continuous self-medication by heavy drinking to deal with the extraordinary stress of his duties. We know from his biographers that as a boy Churchill felt ignored, virtually abandoned, by his mother, the beautiful American-born socialite Jennie Jerome, and his father, the brilliant but unstable Sir Randolph Churchill; he idolized both from afar, perhaps more fervently because he spent so little actual time with them. It is reasonable to surmise that he struggled all his life to deserve their love, to find in public fame the acceptance they had withheld.

This Freudian interpretation of the unconscious motive for achievement offers a way to grasp the traditional Aristotelian conception of “the great-souled man”—the exceptional leader who finds only the gravest challenges of statecraft arduous enough to demand his fullest talents. Such men are often bored by the ordinary domestic politics of budgets and taxes, and perform poorly when politics is confined to such issues. Yet the threat of war or civil war, stimulated by struggles worthy of their inner sense of greatness, allows them finally to show their full capacities. This is a hallmark of all the great leaders we discuss in this book, and it is preeminently true, for example, of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Lincoln—who also suffered from a childhood sense of abandonment and lifelong depression—likewise appeared to find in the demands of his mission as a statesman the closet thing to a cure, converting the dark brooding into a source of energy to do good. Public service in the Aristotelian tradition, in other words, may be the most effective therapy for a leader in waiting who might otherwise drown in the vortex of his inner sense of alienation and loss.

Only Churchill’s enormous hunger for honorable fame through statesmanship can explain his ceaseless drive to embody the spirit of Britain as a whole during the Nazi threat. The Welsh Labor Party politician Aneurin Bevan marveled at Churchill’s performance:

He cast himself in the role of the great advocate who put the case of Britain to the world and the destiny of Britain to the British. His name will stand…as a symbol of what inspired words can do when there is a strong, brave and devoted nation free and willing to back them up with deeds.

Charles de Gaulle, never excessive in praising others, nevertheless saw in Churchill a man whose greatness was summoned forth by the gravest national perils, and who played his role not only successfully but with a flair, gusto, and grandeur that were themselves sources of moral strength for the people he led:

Churchill seemed to me equal to dealing with the most arduous tasks, so long as it was also grandiose. His character fitted him for action, for running risks, for playing his part wholeheartedly and without scruple. I judge him perfectly at ease in his post of guide and leader. From the beginning to the end of the drama, Winston Churchill appeared to me as the great champion of a great undertaking and the great actor in a great History.

As early as 1912, the Welsh prime minister David Lloyd George—no stranger to the value of a dramatic public presence and a love of the rhetorical flourish—saw Churchill’s ability to play the part of a leader like a great stage role: “The applause of the house is the breath in his nostrils,” he observed. “He is just like an actor. He likes the limelight and the approbation of the pit.”

Sir William Milbourne James, a high-ranking naval intelligence officer during the Second World War, sensed a thirst for power in Churchill, but also the pure enjoyment he took from being the top dog, surely fed by his historical studies of great warriors and leaders like his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough and the justified pleasure a man ambitious for public honor can feel in his leading role in the great affairs of state:

He is virtually a dictator, as there is absolutely no one else to take his place and lead us to victory. He has a real sense of humor and I am sure has a silent chuckle when he reminds the house [of Commons] that he is entirely their servant.

As a student of the great historians Edward Gibbon and Thomas Macaulay, and an accomplished historian himself, Churchill knew all too well that historians would have the final say on his role in the twentieth century—and therefore determined to write that history himself. As one of Eisenhower’s staffers, Captain H. C. Butcher, observed:

The prime minister said it was foolish to keep a day to day diary, because it would simply reflect the change of opinion or decision of the writer, which, when and if published, makes one appear indecisive and foolish…. [H]e would much prefer to wait until the war is over and then write impressions, so that, if necessary, he could correct or bury his mistakes.

These morally ambiguous qualities—in addition to his overwhelming ambition, which amounted almost to a lust for public honor—might have made Churchill more repellent if not for his matchless charm. The British war correspondent G. W. Stevens remarked of Churchill as a young man of twenty-five:

He is ambitious and he is calculating, yet he is not cold—and that saves him. His ambition is sanguine, runs in a torrent, and the calculation is hardly more than the rocks or the stump which the torrent strikes for a second, yet which suffices to direct its course.

Even his detractors were disarmed by this openness, an almost boyish ingenuousness and inability to conceal his ambition. Although Churchill could play the role of populist, his aristocratic background bred in him a contempt for artifice or concealment that is consistent with the code of the gentleman stretching back to Aristotle and Cicero. This code—which holds that a gentle...