‘Leadership’ draws presidential contrasts

Doris Kearns Goodwin examines past leaders’ qualities but “is about today”

After five decades of magisterial output, matching Pulitzer Prize-winning quality with best-selling appeal, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians.

Insight is her imprint, as shown in her grand narratives of Abraham Lincoln “(“Team of Rivals”), Theodore Roosevelt (“The Bully Pulpit”), Franklin Roosevelt (“No Ordinary Time”) and LBJ (“Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream”), all definitive explorations of how American leadership melds character, style and strategy.

Goodwin’s timing is equally peerless. Her new book, “Leadership: In Turbulent Times” (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp.,

★★★★), “is about today,” she affirms, and meant to “shine a spotlight on the absence of leadership in our country …”

Elegantly, she gathers the deeply researched strands of her big books to focus on the formative qualities of her White House heroes. The result is a fascinating study in contrasts.

Lincoln’s transformational touch

At an uncertain point of the Civil War, Lincoln delayed signing a prepared draft of his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves of the Confederacy, until Jan. 1, 1863. Despite fears that it would cause race wars in the South and lead Union officers to resign, the proclamation reflected Lincoln’s gift for measuring diverse opinion and then acting decisively. “The dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he told Congress. Goodwin notes how Lincoln carefully marked “this great revolu- tion in public sentiment slowly but surely progressing.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s crisis management

The Great Coal strike of 1902 was Theodore Roosevelt’s first major leadership test, as the nation’s largest union, the United Mine Workers, pressed a walkout that threatened a U.S. shortage of heating fuel – and a bloody civil disturbance – as winter approached.

Roosevelt had no legal authority to intervene in the strike, writes Goodwin, and risked political disaster if he failed to solve it.

But he believed, like Lincoln, that the presidency required him “to do whatever the needs of the people demand,” unless explicitly forbidden by the Constitution or the law.

Patiently and methodically, Roosevelt was able to resolve the strike.

FDR’s turnaround

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous First Hundred Days remain the exemplar of turnaround leadership. “Roosevelt’s gift of communication proved the vital instrument,” Goodwin concludes.

LBJ’s visionary drive

Taking office amid the trauma of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson was “a master mechanic of the legislative process,” Goodwin notes. His foremost objective was passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that had been floundering in Congress under Kennedy.

Despite Southern opposition, Johnson knew he could win only by simplifying his agenda. He succeeded, Goodwin makes clear, by following the clear examples set by the Roosevelts and Lincoln.