Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster (2018)

Profiles of great leadership “not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives”

I read this book when it was first published and recently re-read it after viewing a series of components of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s briliant MasterClass, “U.S. Presidential History and Leadership.”

Her focus in the book is on four presidents — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ — and three separate but related, indeed interdependent themes: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership, Adversity and Growth, and The Leader and the Times: How They Led. Each theme is uniquely relevant to each of the four presidents.

Goodwin had completed wide and deep research prior to writing a previous book about each of the four. Having done so, she then embarked on additional research “through the exclusive lens of leadership. I felt as if I were meeting them anew. There was much to learn as the elusive theme of leadership assumed center stage…I returned to fundamental questions I had not asked so openly since my days of college and graduate school.”

This more recent research was driven by questions such as these:

Are leaders born or made?
Where does ambition come from?
How does adversity affect the growth of leadership?
Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times?
Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?
How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives?
What is the difference between power, title, and leadership?

The answers to these and other questions guide and inform the narrative in Leadership in Turbulent Times. What we have, in essence, are case studies of four quite different leaders.” Three achieved greatness, one aspired to with mixed results, but all four struggled within what I view as a crucible.

In or near the downtown area of most cities, there is a farmer’s market at which — at least until recently — several merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now offer these brief excerpts:

o On LIncoln: “In the great convergence of the man and his times, Lincoln had driven, guided, and inspired his cabinet, Army, and his countrymen. ‘Fellow citizens, we cannot shape history,’ he told the Congress a month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. ‘The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation….In [begin italics] giving [end italics] freedom to the slave, we [begin italics] assure [end italics] freedom to the [begin italics] free [end italics] — honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.’

“It was through the language of his leadership that a moral purpose and meaning was imprinted upon the protracted misery of the Civil War. So surely did LIncoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States [begin italics] before [end italics] Abraham Lincoln and [begin italics] after [end italics] him.” (Pages 241-242)

o On Theodore Roosevelt: His leadership “during the experimental resolution of that crisis [i.e. ‘the rampart consolidation of corporate wealth that had developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution’] would prove to be the dawn of a new era. Under the banner of his Square Deal, a mood of progressive reform swept the country, creating a new vision of the relationship between labor and capital, between government and the people. As he explained to his friend Bill Sewall of Maine, ‘Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.” (272)

o On FDR: “Roosevelt’s gift of communication proved the vital instrument of his success in developing a common mission, clarifying problems, mobilizing action, and earning the people’s trust. His faith never foundered that if the people ‘were taken into the confidence of their government and received a full and truthful statement of what was happening, they would generally choose the right course.’ This reciprocal connection between Roosevelt and the people he served lay at the heart of his leadership.

“Indeed, if ever an argument can be made for the inclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” (305)

o On LBJ: “When North Vietnam expressed a willingness to come to the table, Johnson’s popularity soared. In a matter of weeks, Congress passed both the tax surcharge and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act. With this housing bill, Johnson proudly noted, ‘the voice of justice speaks again.’ For a time, the president looked and acted, one journalist noted, ‘like a man who had just invented peace of mind, peace of soul, or both.’ Johnson’s euphoria did not last. The initial flurry of peace talks petered out. The war that had ravaged both Vietnam and America continued its ruinous course. The fault line through Johnson’s presidency would split his legacy and haunt him for the rest of his life.” (343)

Of greatest interest and value to me is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s explanation of Lincoln’s unique greatness: how and why he “grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.” (368)

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out four of her earlier works: Team of Rivals, The Bully Pulpit, No Ordinary Times, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Also, Nancy Koehn’s Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders.