Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 05

O ver the past five decades, Harvard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has devoted herself to chronicling the ups and downs of four exceptional American presidents: Abraham Lin- coln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roo- sevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. “I have awakened with them in the morning and thought about them when I went to bed at night,” she writes in the opening to her latest book, Leadership in Tur- bulent Times. But when she decided five years ago to look at them through the exclusive lens of leadership, she felt as if she was meeting them anew. The result is individual portraits playing off the group’s collec- tive canvas, revealing that each suffered through a devastating quarter-life or mid-life crisis before gaining their footing again and reaching the pres- idency. In that role, each faced obstacles that have a lot to teach us about leadership in government. Lincoln exemplified transformational leader- ship with the Emancipation Proclamation. Theo- dore Roosevelt’s handling of the coal strike in 1902 was a masterful display of crisis manage- ment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days, with its turnaround leadership, gave impor- tance to that time frame even today for new gov- ernments. Lyndon Johnson–whose failure with the Vietnam War tarnished his legacy and makes him seem an outlier in this group–was a towering, visionary leader after the assassination of John Kennedy, pushing through the civil rights legisla- tion his predecessor had been stalled on. Lincoln had walked a fine line on the issue of emancipation. But in the summer of 1862, with the Civil War raging, Goodwin notes that he convened a special session of his cabinet “to re- veal–not to debate–his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.” He had been led to that moment by some standard, but important, leadership approaches. He acknowledged that the failed policies pursued so far had failed–the Union forces were stymied, Northern morale was at its nadir–and a change of direction was needed. He had gathered first-hand information to under- stand the situation. He was known for going to see people directly at their own homes or offices or, in this case, the troops in hospitals or trenches. He found time to reflect, spending time before the declaration at the Soldiers Home, a three-hun- dred-acre complex in the hills three miles north of Washington which served as his refuge. He had exhausted all possibilities of compro- mise before turning to imposing unilateral execu- tive power. He anticipated contending viewpoints in his cabinet. Indeed, although he signalled his intention when he read the proclamation, he wel- comed reactions from those listening–people he knew well and whose comments he expected and planned for. But he maintained full responsibility for the pivotal decision and later did his best to shield his colleagues from blame. He had assembled an unlikely cabinet– the “team of rivals”, as Goodwin neatly summed it up in a previous best-selling book. “They could trumpet self-serving ambitions, they could criticize Lincoln, mock him, irritate him, infuriate him, exacerbate the pressure upon him; everything would be tolerated so long as they pursued their jobs with passion and skill, so long as they were headed in the direction he had de- fined for them and presented a united front when it counted, as it surely did on September 22, 1862, when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation,” she writes. And amidst the pressure he tried to maintain balance, in particular–it’s sad to recall– by his visits to the theatre, surrendering his mind to what he said were “other channels of thought.” When President William McKinley was assas- sinated in September 1901, Theodore Roosevelt promised a steady and cautious hand when he took over, signalling apparent support for more conservative policies than his own progressive hallmark. But the next day he also declared a new political era was dawning. In the fall of the next year, as cold weather ap- proached, there was widespread panic with no settlement in the six-month coal strike at the piv- otal Pennsylvania mines. Roosevelt had to first cal- culate the risks of getting involved. “Passivity ran counter to Roosevelt’s disposition as well as his conception of leadership,” Kearns notes, and so he Leadership in Turbulent Times By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $29.95 24 / Canadian Government Executive // October/November 2018 The Leader’s Bookshelf By Harvey Schachter Leadership in Turbulent Times