How can one hundred people be led by a single person?” That was one of the essay questions in my three-hour Cambridge University entrance exam in 1981. It is a question that has fascinated me ever since. Ultimately, it is the art of leadership that explains how not merely one hundred people, but sometimes a hundred thousand, or a million—or in China’s or India’s case a billion—men and women can ultimately be led, for good or ill.
This book started as a series of lectures I gave about how war demands and reveals the best and worst in leadership. I decided to focus on nine great—as in the sense of important—leaders and draw out those aspects of their personalities that reveal their leadership in the belief that there is enough in common to understand essential leadership lessons that would be applicable in more peaceful times.
We tend to think of leadership as inherently a good thing, but as the essays on Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin point out, it is in fact completely morally neutral, as capable of leading mankind to the abyss as to the sunlit uplands. It is a protean force of terrifying power, and perhaps one day we will rue the fact that there was ever a way that even one hundred people could be led anywhere by a single person. In the meantime, as with lethal diseases or nuclear fission, we clearly need to understand its power and try to direct it toward good, as the other seven subjects of these essays did.
Each of these nine leaders had a profound sense of self-belief, an attribute that is central to great war leadership. In some cases, as in Winston Churchill’s, it stemmed from a family lineage and education that had emphasized his specialness from birth and his right to lead and rule. In others, such as Napoleon’s, it stemmed from a growing realization in adolescence and early adulthood of his own remarkable intellect and capabilities. Margaret Thatcher knew by early middle age that she could lead in a way that the men around her seemed incapable of doing. Hitler’s sense of self-belief grew from a recognition of the effect his words of hatred and resentment could have in rabble-rousing crowds of unemployed ex-soldiers in Bavarian beer halls in the early 1920s. Nor were setbacks allowed to dash the hopes of these leaders; rather, they tended to be used to steel them. Failure was an incident, often one that provided a lesson for the future; it was not terminal.
All of these leaders also believed they had a task to achieve, and often it was more than simply winning the war they were fighting: For Stalin it was to spread Marxism-Leninism across the globe; for Nelson the utter destruction of the principles of the French Revolution; for Hitler the triumph of the Aryan peoples through the subjection of all others. They all failed, as did Winston Churchill in his dream to prevent what he called the liquidation of the British empire, but Charles de Gaulle succeeded in his aim of restoring French honor after the catastrophe of 1940, Margaret Thatcher succeeded in reversing the seemingly irreversible decline of Britain, and Dwight Eisenhower succeeded in liberating Western Europe.
The book follows roughly chronologically because some of these leaders learned from earlier ones: The thread through Nelson to Churchill to Thatcher, for example, is a clear one, as is the one from Napoleon to Churchill. Almost all of these leaders—Stalin being the only exception—read deeply in history and biography when they were young, and were able to place themselves in the continuums of the heroes of their countries. Even Adolf Hitler saw himself as a second Arminius, and code-named his invasion of Russia after the twelfth-century German emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa.
When awarding Medals of Honor, President Richard Nixon noted in his book Leaders “how many of those who won it must have appeared to be quite ordinary people until they had risen with supreme valor to an extraordinary challenge. Without the challenge they would not have shown their courage.” He concluded that “in leaders the challenge of war brings forth qualities we can readily measure. The challenges of peace may be as great, but the leader’s triumph over them is neither as dramatic nor as clearly visible.” It would be next to impossible, therefore, for a prime minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace to be a truly great historical leader. That might be a doleful comment on the human condition, but it is so.