IN THE FOOTSTEPS of great leaders, we hear the rolling thunder of history. Throughout the centuries—from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare, to the present day—few subjects have proved more perennially fascinating to dramatists and historians alike than the character of great leaders. What sets them apart? What accounts for that particular, indefinable electricity that exists between the leader and the led?
What makes the role of these leaders so compellingly interesting is not just its drama, but its importance—its impact. When the final curtain goes down on a play, the members of the audience file out of the theater and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.
For the last thirty-five years I have had an exceptional opportunity, during an extraordinary period of history, to study the world’s leaders firsthand. Of the major leaders of the post-World War II period, I knew all except Stalin. I have visited more than eighty countries and have not only dealt with their leaders but also seen the conditions in which they operated. I have watched some leaders succeed and others fail, and have had a chance to analyze the reasons from the perspective of my own experience. Having known both the peaks and the valleys of public life, I have learned that you cannot really appreciate the heights unless you have also experienced the depths. Nor can you fully understand what drives a leader if you have only sat on the sidelines, watching.
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One of the questions I have most often been asked during my years in public life has been “Who is the greatest leader you have known?” There is no single answer. Each leader belongs to a particular combination of time, place, and circumstances; leaders and countries are not interchangeable. Great as Winston Churchill was, it would be difficult to imagine him playing so successfully the role that Konrad Adenauer did in postwar Germany. But neither could Adenauer have rallied Britain in its hour of greatest peril as Churchill did.
The surefire formula for placing a leader among the greats has three elements: a great man, a great country, and a great issue. Churchill once commented of Britain’s nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord Rosebery that he had the misfortune of living at a time of “great men and small events.” We commonly rank wartime leaders more highly than peacetime leaders. This is partly because of the inherent drama of war and partly because histories dwell so largely on wars. But it is also because we can fully measure a leader’s greatness only when he is challenged to the limits of his ability. When awarding the Medal of Honor, I often used to reflect on 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. 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.
The small man leading a great nation in a great crisis clearly fails the test of greatness. The large man in a small country may demonstrate all the qualities of greatness but never win the recognition. Others, though big men in big countries, live in the shadow of giants: Zhou Enlai, for example, who discreetly let the limelight shine on Mao.
One distinction must be kept clear: Those commonly acclaimed as “great” leaders are not necessarily good men. Russia’s Peter the Great was a cruel despot. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon are remembered not for their statesmanship but for their conquests. When we speak of the great leaders of history, only occasionally do we refer to those who raised statecraft to a higher moral plane. Rather, we are talking about those who so effectively wielded power on such a grand scale that they significantly changed the course of history for their nations and for the world. Churchill and Stalin were both, in their different ways, great leaders. But without Churchill, Western Europe might have been enslaved; without Stalin, Eastern Europe might have been free.
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In writing about leadership, it was tempting to include some of the outstanding leaders I have known from fields outside of government. I have watched leaders of giant corporations and labor unions fight their way to the top as doggedly as any politician and then wield power with a diplomatic skill to rival that of a foreign minister. The intrigues of the academic world are fully as Byzantine as those of a party convention. I have known leaders in the news media—Henry R. Luce, for example—who have had a larger impact on the world than the leaders of many nations.
But this book is very specifically about the kind of leadership I know best and which to me matters most: It is about those who lead nations, with not only the power such a position carries, but also the responsibility.
Each person treated here had a goal, a vision, a cause, that to him was supremely important. Some have names that are certain to echo through the centuries. Others may be little remembered outside their own countries. Each has something important to tell us about the nature of leadership and about the conflicts that have swept the world during these decades.
There are many leaders I have known whom I would like to have included but did not: outstanding Latin American leaders, for example, such as Mexico’s Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Arturo Frondizi of Argentina, Colombia’s Alberto Lleras Camargo, and the visionary Brazilian President who opened his country’s interior, Juscelino Kubitschek. Or Canada’s Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker, very different from one another in personality and political orientation, but each with a sense of Canada’s destiny and a clear view of the world. Gulam Mohammed, the Governor-general of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s President Mohammed Ayub Khan. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito. Francisco Franco of Spain, a man so different in private from his public impression. Popes Pius XII and Paul VI, each of whom, in his own way, played a profoundly significant role not only spiritually but on the world political stage. Pioneering leaders of the postwar international community, such as Belgium’s Paul-Henri Spaak, Italy’s Manlio Brosio, and Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet of France. To consider even these few of the many others who might have been included is to remember how broad and varied the world’s array of leadership talent has been in recent decades.
Of those whom I do treat in the chapters that follow, I have chosen some because of their transcendent stature or sweeping impact on the course of history, some because of their inherent interest as people, some as examples of forces that were sweeping the world during this tumultuous period of history. I have not included American leaders, except for Douglas MacArthur, whose most lasting contribution was his role in the shaping of modern Japan.
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Most histories are about events and only incidentally about the men who played a role. This book is about the leaders and how they shaped the events. It is about how they made a difference and how they differed, about the characteristics that enabled them to have an impact and how they did it.
Great leadership is a unique form of art, requiring both force and vision to an extraordinary degree. There has long been a widespread belief in the United States that what the country really needs is a top-flight businessman to run the government, someone who has proven that he can manage a large-scale enterprise efficiently and effectively. This misses the mark. Management is one thing. Leadership is another. As Warren G. Bennis of the University of Southern California’s business school puts it, “Managers have as their goal to do things right. Leaders have as their goal to do the right thing.”
Leadership is more than technique, though techniques are necessary. In a sense, management is prose; leadership is poetry. The leader necessarily deals to a large extent in symbols, in images, and in the sort of galvanizing idea that becomes a force of history. People are persuaded by reason, but moved by emotion; he must both persuade them and move them. The manager thinks of today and tomorrow. The leader must think of the day after tomorrow. A manager represents a process. The leader represents a direction of history. Thus a manager with nothing to manage becomes nothing, but even out of power a leader still commands followers.
Great leadership requires a great vision, one that inspires the leader and enables him to inspire the nation. People both love the great leader and hate him; they are seldom indifferent toward him.
It is not enough for a leader to know the right thing. He must also be able to do the right thing. The would-be leader without the judgment or perception to make the right decisions fails for lack of vision. The one who knows the right thing but cannot achieve it fails because he is ineffectual. The great leader needs both the vision and the capacity to achieve what is right. He hires managers to help him do so, but only he can set the direction and provide the motive force.
The great cause that grips a leader may be one of creating something new or of preserving something old—and often strong leaders on opposite sides of a conflict have causes that collide. A strong leader with a weak cause may prevail over a weak leader with a strong cause, or a bad cause may prevail over a good one. There is no simple set of immutable rules by which to predict history, or for that matter by which to judge it. Often causes, like leaders themselves, look different in retrospect. Sometimes the judgment depends on who wins. Historians tend to be kinder to winners than to losers, among causes no less than among leaders.
All of the really strong leaders I have known have been highly intelligent, highly disciplined, hard workers, supremely self-confident, driven by a dream, driving others. All have looked beyond the horizon. Some have seen more clearly than others.
The years since World War II have been a time of greater and more rapid change than any comparable period of world history. We have seen a clash of titans as the superpowers have risen to confront one another, a series of cataclysmic upheavals as old empires have given way to scores of new nations, a time of mounting peril as weapons developments have stretched even the science fiction-altered imagination. Great events bring forth great leaders. Tumultuous times bring out both the best and the worst. Khrushchev was a powerful leader but a dangerous force. Mao moved mountains; he also crushed out millions of lives.
The years ahead will require leadership of the highest order. It has been said that those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it and, conversely, that if the leaders of one age see further into the future than did their predecessors, it is because they stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. This book is written about leaders of the past, but for leaders of the future. Each of the leaders in this book studied the past and learned from it. To the extent that we in turn can learn from them, the world may have a better chance of moving forward in the years to come.