Our leaders must always be readers

“Not all readers are leaders,” President Harry Truman once said, “but all leaders are readers.”

No rational American can disagree with Truman’s assertion which, while true at all times, is an especially imperative truism during national emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic. When faced with major events, shouldn’t we feel secure taking our marching orders from someone who has read a few books (or even detailed reports) on the topics related to those very events?

The only way to truly understand the world is to read. In fact, one of the traits we should look for when the time comes to judge someone’s capacity to hold the most powerful office in the free world is the value that person places on reading.

Based on published accounts by a number of authors and journalists, Donald Trump, other than what was required of him to get through school, never reads books. And now that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, a report that Russia pays bounties for the killing of American soldiers, and more than a dozen other issues that affect national security, his apparent disinterest in reading books, reports and briefings can have deadly consequences. It may already have.

There have been just 45 presidencies. For all the position’s responsibilities, having so few over the course of 244 years gives us an opportunity to look over the lot and make a good assessment of the strengths and weaknesses that in all probability correlate to their ability to lead — and lead wisely.

In terms of reading, most of our previous 44 presidents comported themselves fairly well — some more stridently than others.

Jon Meacham relates a story about one of our Founding Fathers in “Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power,” in which Jefferson offered to sell his personal collection of books to Congress after the British army burned the government’s entire inventory. Jefferson had more than 6,000 in his collection.

A relative of America’s sixth president once said of the boy’s reading habits, “His candle goeth out not by night. I fear he will ruin his eyes.” Quoted in Fred Kaplan’s biography, “John Quincy Adams, American Visionary,” the remembrance is supported by a list of authors that Adams enjoyed, among them David Hume, Samuel Johnson, John Locke, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift, as well as Homer, Aristotle and Shakespeare.

A cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s mother once said that young Abe was hungry for books and read everything he could find. In “A. Lincoln, A Biography,” Ronald C. White Jr. writes that “Lincoln at 23 walked six miles to borrow a book from a farmer.”

Ulysses S. Grant “read every book he could borrow in the neighborhood,” wrote Ron Chernow in “Grant.” He studied everything he read “so that when he got through with a book, he knew everything in it.”

John Kennedy, too, devoured books. According to Michael O’Brien in “John F. Kennedy, A Biography,” when JFK was about to go fight in World War II, he asked a friend to send him all the books from his family’s library on government, economics, biographies, plus any “really good novels.”

Hundreds of other biographies document similar stories of book-loving presidents. By contrast, it seems that none of the published volumes about Trump — and there are now dozens of them — mention any books he read, enjoyed or cited. The January 2018 edition of The Atlantic had a feature titled “The President Who Doesn’t Read” by David Graham, in which Graham states, “He didn’t even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.” Author Tim O’Brien was quoted in the New York Times in November 2018 saying that Trump “doesn’t read at all. I’m not overstating things here. He lacks the patience, curiosity and self-awareness to be a good reader.”

Maybe we can partially blame Trump’s parents, or perhaps his teachers. But even if true, we must still blame his supporters for insisting that it doesn’t matter. It matters. Causing such hate, misery, fear, anger, uncertainty and now potential disaster does not happen in an Oval Office vacuum. It must be surrounded by thousands of unread books and reports.

It is so egregious a leadership flaw that we may even accept Trump just a bit better if he decided to start reading now. Make up for lost time! Even children’s books would do. As Dr. Seuss once said, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Because the truth of the matter is that if this pandemic gets further out of control, there will be fewer and fewer places to go.