A Word In Edgewise: I’ve Ego, Pride, Ability Aplenty: The People Need … ME!

Really? Well, yes, sometimes we do. We’ve always needed men and women with these leadership qualities, if — and only if — they’re yoked to a desire to help their fellow citizens.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Leadership in Turbulent Times” (2018) shows how qualities of leadership were developed and lived by four American presidents (who are also treated in in-depth biographies): Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. They made no bones about seeking the power inherent in the Oval Office. While each succeeded, their paths and temperaments differed widely.

This is not a handbook for anyone seeking a leadership role in the office hierarchy or to climb the managerial ladder, but rather a study of four personalities whose possessors guided our country through critical times in history, whose names will be remembered. Different personalities, who in their unique fashions shared certain crucial traits.

They each wanted the job. Bad. All wanted to be remembered by future generations. But by the time opportunity knocked, each had incorporated, in his deepest being, the knowledge that their physical and mental energies alone were not enough; they must be linked to serving the less privileged.

Log cabin or Harvard, trauma added to their education beyond the book learning through some specific psychic baptism. All four had survived some upheaval: depression, loss of loved ones or debilitating illness, from which each emerged imbued in his own manner with the clarity and stamina necessary to control the reins of power, to command, and to see the seemingly impossible through to the end.

Abraham Lincoln, struggling to birth the Emancipation Proclamation, agreed to hold until the tide of battle was more favorable. But, at the suggestion to negotiate the war’s ending without the inclusion of slaves’ freedom, he declared he’d rather face defeat; that with such a reversal he “should be damned in time & in eternity,” and as to the soldiers’ vote, “would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind [him] than to be elected without it.”

While Lincoln’s father took away his precious study books, young Teddy Roosevelt was given entire libraries and whatever scientific equipment he desired. Part of his later explorations and military derring-do were to prove his own agency. His darkness fell when both his beloved wife and mother died within 24 hours. Grief drove him west to toughen and mature for two years on a Montana ranch. Politics beckoned, offering new life-skills — including governor of New York (1899) and on to VP with President William McKinley, by whose assassination Roosevelt became the youngest-ever U.S. president on September 14, 1901. His accumulated skills aided him in resolving the torturous political ballet of the 1902 Coal Strike, skillfully negotiating between J.P. Morgan, coal company owners and miners, saving the country from a lethal fuel loss and leading to social reforms.

Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was hale, hearty, successful — until polio struck, thrusting him on his lifelong course of trauma, where he clawed his way back, not to health but to a highly functioning, widely-smiling simulacrum. Always cheerful, ever optimistic, to the point that he remains the only president to serve three terms and be elected to a fourth. He served 82 days, passing suddenly in Warm Springs, Ga., on April 12, 1945. He pulled the country out of the Great Depression and was leading us to the end of World War II.

Lyndon B. Johnson also assumed the presidency after an assassination, and as thirsty for power as any of his predecessors, he knew instinctively that he must complete and pass the civil rights bills left pending by John F. Kennedy. The most volatile and tempestuous-natured of the four presidents, the time 19-year-old Johnson spent teaching fifth to seventh grades at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas, affected him deeply. He personally bought sports equipment, organized a debating team and was truly committed during his term in office to passing civil rights bills and providing education. He was the engine behind his “Great Society” initiatives and in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was the right person and temperament for these issues, but not for the handling of the Vietnam War. Goodwin, who later assisted with Johnson’s memoirs, recalls that he felt his failure there intensely and feared he would be remembered solely for his actions there. His withdrawal, while in office, from the upcoming election was televised on March 31, 1968.

While each embodied flaws of their times and temperaments, each fought for those who had less, and each deserves honor and memory for what they gave. Goodwin’s book shows what was needed then, and what is crucial to restore to leadership today.