Book that made a President . . . and a murderer
This is a true story about the power of words. in 1936, a failed actor called Dale Carnegie published a book called how To Win Friends And influence People. he had earlier changed his name from Carnagey to Carnegie, perhaps to suggest that he came from one of America’s wealthiest families.
his book became an overnight bestseller. A version of it continues to sell 300,000 copies a year, although the publishers have removed one of the original chapters, Making Your home Life happier, because it contained advice that now seems inappropriate, such as telling wives to ‘give your husband complete freedom in his business affairs’.
The main thrust of how To Win Friends And influence People is that it’s easy to manipulate other people simply by convincing them that you agree with them.
if you want other people to do something, says Carnegie, you must first implant an idea into their heads, and then you must convince them they had that idea first.
Over the years, Dale Carnegie’s influence spread far and wide. One of those who studied his book was a young convict imprisoned in Terminal island Penitentiary in Los Angeles for car theft. in 1957, he passed an iQ test with flying colours, so the enlightened prison authorities fast-tracked him onto a special Dale Carnegie course, to help him forge a better life on his release.
he was considered an outstanding pupil, having absorbed all Carnegie’s key lessons, such as ‘Everything you or i do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.’
he was particularly struck by Carnegie’s advice on how to influence people, for instance: ‘The only way on Earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him how to get it . . . Let the other fellow feel that the idea is his.’
That same year, on the other coast of America, an 11-year- old boy was also studying how To Win Friends And influence People.
The boy’s father, a successful New York property developer, had taken the Dale Carnegie course in order to overcome shyness. he was now determined that his children should follow in his footsteps.
Who were these two young self-help addicts, the small-time criminal and the ambitious young lad? The car thief was Charles Manson. Now aged 82, he is currently residing at California state Prison in Corcoran, serving a life sentence for multiple charges of murder.
Manson will remain behind bars until at least 2027, when he will be 92 years old.
The boy was Donald J. Trump. Now aged 71, he is currently in the White house, having been elected President of the U.s. in 2016.
Unless something goes wrong, he will remain President until at least 2020, and possibly for another four years after that.
President Trump still adheres to the lessons he learned from how To Win Friends. it is thought he re-read it quite recently: over the course of a year he repeated some of Carnegie’s key maxims in a series of tweets.
At 5.53am on November 27, 2012, Trump tweeted: ‘ “Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare” — Dale Carnegie.’
This was followed by: ‘Feeling sorry for yourself is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have’ (July 17, 2013); ‘ if you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy’ (July 19, 2013); and ‘ success is getting what you want. happiness is wanting what you get’ (september 17, 2013).
AND
what of Charles Manson? On his release from prison in 1967, he headed straight for san Francisco, where he dutifully followed Carnegie’s advice.
‘That was Charlie’s big trick,’ a prison friend told Manson’s biographer Jeff Guinn. ‘ he’d decide what he wanted to do, and then talk about it so the girl or whoever would think that she thought of it and it was her idea. i saw him do it all the time. i mean, it was a constant.’
The friends he won — his socalled ‘family’ — were drawn from the lost and damaged souls of the hippy movement; he influenced them into multiple murders.
And so two of the most famous men in America used the same advice from the same book to rather different ends.
One ended up in a high-security prison, the other in the White house. such is the power of words. should Dale Carnegie take credit for one, but not the other? Or should he be blamed for both?