THIS BOOK IS a product of study and experience stretching over the better part of a lifetime. What I have learned about leaders and leadership has come from a combination of reading, observation, the advice of expert practitioners, and the experience of doing it.
When I was President, I found that preparing a major speech was a very effective discipline, not only for bringing policy decisions to a head, but also for refining my own thinking. The same was true of writing this book. In the course of delving more deeply into the lives of leaders I have known, I found that I acquired a much richer understanding of what they were up against and how they became what they were. I learned a great deal, some of it surprising, that helped explain to me why and how they sometimes acted as they did, and that taught me more about the nature of those who shaped the world in our time.
Like many political leaders, I have long been an avid reader of historical biographies. Even during the White House years, I made time for this. Since then, I have had more time for it. All of the leaders dealt with in this book are ones I knew personally, and my primary impressions of them are those based on my own observation and experience. But I have also learned much from their biographers. I consulted scores of books in the writing of this one. For those readers who want to pursue more fully the lives of these leaders, among the books I would recommend are the multivolume Winston S. Churchill, begun by Randolph S. Churchill and continued by Martin Gilbert; Lord Moran’s Churchill and Violet Bonham Carter’s Winston Churchill; Churchill and de Gaulle by Francois Kersaudy; Andre Malraux’s Felled Oaks; De Gaulle by Brian Crozier and David Schoenbrun’s The Three Lives of Charles de Gaulle; American Caesar, William Manchester’s biography of Douglas MacArthur; Terence Prittie’s Konrad Adenauer and, by Paul Weymar, the authorized biography of Adenauer by the same title; Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev; Chou En-lai: China’s Gray Eminence by Kai-yu Hsu; Mao by Ross Terrill; and Brian Crozier’s The Man Who Lost China.
Those who have contributed to my understanding of leadership include all the leaders profiled here, plus scores of others—particularly Dwight D. Eisenhower, under whom I served as Vice President for eight years. For all that they taught me, wittingly or unwittingly, I am grateful, as I also am to the many persons who contributed their ideas and recollections to this book. I owe a special debt to Dr. Taro Takemi, president of the Japan Medical Association, who served as a trusted adviser and confidant to Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida. He answered many of my questions about Yoshida and provided a number of details that are not generally known in the West.
There are others for whose specific help with this book I am particularly grateful. I relied on Mrs. Nixon, with her keen eye, for help in picture selection, as well as for her memories of many of the events and people. My longtime associate Loie Gaunt was invaluable in searching the archives. Karen Maisa ably supervised the manuscript, together with Kathleen O’Connor and Susan Marone, as well as helped with research.
Two recent college graduates, John H. Taylor of the University of California at San Diego and Marin Strmecki of Harvard, worked long hours and provided immensely helpful research and editorial assistance. Franklin R. Gannon, who had worked with Randolph Churchill before joining my White House staff, was very helpful with the Churchill chapter. Raymond Price, formerly chief of my White House speechwriting staff, served again, as he had for my previous book, The Real War, as my principal editorial consultant and coordinator.
—R.N.
Saddle River, New Jersey
June 21, 1982