The Art of Manliness - #453： Leadership in Turbulent Times

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast are great leaders

00:00:19.540 born or made do circumstances make great leaders or do great leaders change the times these are a

00:00:24.860 few of the big picture questions my guest explores in her latest books her name is doris kearns

00:00:28.760 goodwin she's a polter prize-winning historian and in her latest book leadership in turbulent times

00:00:33.260 she explores the makings of great leaders by looking at the biographies of four u.s presidents

00:00:37.160 who led the country through periods of crisis those are abraham lincoln theodore roosevelt

00:00:41.360 franklin d roosevelt and lyndon b johnson we begin a conversation discussing the ambition all four of

00:00:46.200 these leaders had as young men to do something great and how they connected their personal ambition to

00:00:50.180 the greater good we then discuss the personal setbacks all of them experienced early in life

00:00:54.040 and how these challenges influenced them as leaders doris then shares leadership traits and skills 1.00

00:00:57.980 all of them implemented during their presidencies as well as how they did things differently and

00:01:01.740 we end our conversation discussing whether any other leader could have managed the crisis each of these

00:01:05.660 presidents confronted or if these men were singularly suited to the circumstances out of the show's over

00:01:10.080 check out our show notes at aom.is turbulent and doris joins me now via skype

00:01:16.380 doris kearns goodwin welcome to the show i'm glad to be with you very much so you got a new book out

00:01:31.620 leadership in turbulent times you basically it's basically like a four mini biographies of four

00:01:37.740 presidents you got abraham lincoln theodore roosevelt franklin roosevelt and lyndon b johnson and

00:01:43.640 you take a look at how they handled their respective tumultuous times what criteria did

00:01:49.280 you use to select these four four presidents well i figured that i wanted to select the ones that i

00:01:54.800 knew the best abraham lincoln teddy and franklin roosevelt and lbj all of whom did lead through

00:02:00.860 times of turbulence but since i was going to be looking at them in a new way through leadership i

00:02:07.640 figured i better know them well enough because i was going to be asking a whole bunch of new questions

00:02:11.320 of them almost as if i were talking to them for the first time but i think what happened is that

00:02:15.460 each time i moved from one president to the next i felt a little guilty when i was deciding what to

00:02:20.260 do next as if i were leaving an old boyfriend behind so i decided five years ago instead of leaving my guys

00:02:26.580 for a new boyfriend i would keep them together and look at them through this leadership a subject i've

00:02:31.660 really been interested in since my days in graduate school when we'd somehow stay up all night at least

00:02:37.320 much of the night debating big questions are leaders born or made where does ambition come

00:02:41.540 from you know do the times make the man or the man makes the time so it was really clear that in the

00:02:47.860 bigger sprawling biographies i had their families their colleagues you know all the parts of their

00:02:51.940 presidency and this time i just wanted to zero in and shine a spotlight on questions i hadn't thought

00:02:58.020 deeply enough before so it turned out to be a big adventure well let's talk about some of those big

00:03:02.060 big picture questions you know you talk about this idea of ambition and drive and you take a look at

00:03:08.180 these these four presidents young life when they were young did all these men have ambitions to be

00:03:14.720 great men like quote unquote like thomas carlisle great men no you know it's interesting i mean i think

00:03:20.700 they all had a drive for success which is ambition without which i suppose success is really hard for

00:03:27.200 anybody to achieve in any field but not all of them at the beginning had an ambition you know for

00:03:32.860 the greater good but rather just something for themselves i mean lincoln is is the outlier in this

00:03:38.680 respect because even when he's 23 years old and he runs for office for the first time he talks about

00:03:45.620 ambition i mean in the handbill that he had to give out to the public explaining why he was running for

00:03:50.460 the state legislature from this little town of new salem the first time he'd only been there for six

00:03:55.120 months and he says every man has his peculiar ambition mine is to be esteemed of by my fellow

00:04:00.480 man in a sense to be worthy of that esteem so already he was looking in a different way you know

00:04:05.620 and then i'm young and unknown if the good people don't see fit to bring me into this i will be

00:04:11.680 disappointed but i've been so much disappointed i won't be very much chagrined but then the great thing

00:04:16.500 he says is but failure won't stop me i will try five or six times until it's too humiliating and then

00:04:22.620 i promise i won't try again so he for some reason i think had this inborn sense that he wanted to be

00:04:28.720 something deeper than what he was but for the other three it was different i mean teddy roosevelt

00:04:34.560 admitted that when he ran for office the first time that he simply went because it was an adventure

00:04:39.860 he thought it'd be fun to be in politics he didn't have any sense that he was going in he conceded

00:04:44.200 to make lives of people better you know but then as he became involved in politics and he began to see

00:04:51.180 tenements that were decrepit and people working who were little kids in factories when he was police

00:04:56.660 commissioner he began to see there were conditions of lives that he wanted to change and would make

00:05:02.200 a difference and then his became a deeper ambition for the greater good and fdr too i think when he

00:05:07.880 first went into politics he had had a not very distinguished you know sort of ambitious career

00:05:12.980 up till that point not a great student in any of the schools he'd been in he was a clerk in a wall

00:05:17.700 street law firm and then somebody came to him and said would you like to run for a safe democratic

00:05:23.660 seat in the duchess county area he immediately said yes i would love to showing that he wanted

00:05:30.280 something more broad than his insulated privileged world that he led up till that time and then once he

00:05:36.060 got into politics you know he realized it was his natural vocation but even then i don't think it

00:05:41.760 attained such a sense of for the greater greater good until much later when i think the polio

00:05:46.780 made him think about himself and the world in a different way johnson i think loves politics from

00:05:52.760 the time he's like two years old you just watch him following his father on the campaign trail going

00:05:57.720 to the state legislature and and just wanting to be in it i think for a sense of power he really loved

00:06:04.600 the idea of just gaining power so even when he's in college somehow he figures out the way to get power

00:06:11.480 is to get close to people who do have power thus the president of the college so he takes the job

00:06:16.720 mopping the president's floors outside the office somehow starts talking to the president next thing

00:06:23.100 you know he's in the office next thing you know he's a clerk next thing you know he's assistant

00:06:26.220 and soon he's running the school and it was only much later i think that his his sense of self got

00:06:32.740 attached to a larger purpose but so they all mostly except for lincoln start out with ambition for self

00:06:38.340 but the critical thing is that eventually it becomes ambition for something larger than self

00:06:42.600 so besides this shared ambition that they had to do something great what other things do these four

00:06:49.400 men have in common when they were coming of age when they were young well i think what they have in

00:06:53.660 common is that they all were loving to talk to people i think in the political world that's really

00:06:59.420 important all of them were sort of gregarious if you put them on a you know a zero to ten even though

00:07:05.180 lincoln had a melancholy spirit he also took great pleasure in being with people they all were

00:07:10.680 storytellers you know they loved to entertain people through stories they knew how to translate

00:07:15.820 experience from from whatever they were going through into a story that had a beginning a middle

00:07:21.620 and an end and that became very important i think in their political career they all had a sense of

00:07:28.020 of really you know being able to connect to people a natural ability even to want to listen to people

00:07:35.920 i mean fdr when he's on that first campaign trail even though he's not a great speaker at first they

00:07:41.820 said that he would start speaking and then stop and they were afraid he'd never end because he would

00:07:46.680 have these huge pauses in between but they loved the fact that he asked people questions that he listened

00:07:51.720 to them and i think that was true of all four of them eventually too so a lot of these traits that

00:07:57.000 later become leadership traits i think they show when they're young probably most importantly learning

00:08:03.500 and growing as they're older the beginning lincoln for example when he had an opponent and he mocked

00:08:09.180 him he was very quick with his tongue lincoln and he made so much fun of him that everybody laughed

00:08:14.400 and the opponent left the room in tears and he went over to the opponent's house and when he said not

00:08:19.680 only was he sorry but he would never do that again he would never use his his ability to you know get

00:08:25.700 people uproariously laughing against somebody else to his own advantage and teddy too i think he

00:08:32.780 learned when he was first in the state legislature he had this blistering language he was screaming and

00:08:37.760 yelling at the democrats from the republican side and he made headlines and then he realized that he

00:08:43.500 rose like a rocket and fell like a rocket he said that he'd gotten a swelled head and so he had to learn

00:08:48.440 from that mistake and i think fdr was a little arrogant at first too and and would be very harsh in the

00:08:54.880 way he'd handled his opponents and realized that compromise and collaboration was essential if

00:08:59.140 you're going to get along so there are similarities in them they come from incredibly different

00:09:04.260 backgrounds obviously the two rosell's from very privileged backgrounds and lincoln from an almost

00:09:09.660 impossible background to imagine even existing in and and lbj having hard times they had different

00:09:17.100 temperaments they had different ways in which they dealt with people but somehow they kept moving

00:09:22.740 through politics and i think what was most similar is that they all found at a certain point what

00:09:28.080 william james the philosopher calls that voice within that told them this is the real me they

00:09:33.840 found that in politics when they were young yeah and it was all about the same age too like in their

00:09:38.220 in their 20s yeah what spurred me to do that was that i was at a college campus talking about the

00:09:43.600 roosevelts when i'd written the biographies and a student raised his hand and said well how can i ever

00:09:49.400 aspire to be one of them they're too distant they're on mount rushmore they're on the currency

00:09:53.980 they're in movies and so i realized if i started when they were young they are going to struggle

00:09:58.760 they're going to make mistakes out of cockiness and they're going to learn from them that people

00:10:03.220 could identify with them more easily than if we waited until they became presidents and just did

00:10:07.760 short shrift to those years beforehand so it sounds like there's some this idea the question you had

00:10:13.080 are leaders born or made they didn't all of them seem to have an innate ability for certain

00:10:18.040 leadership traits talking to people socializing storytelling but as you said at the same time

00:10:23.980 they were fine-tuning that they were learning from mistakes they made along the way so it sounds like

00:10:29.700 it's our leaders born or made it sounds like it's both right now i absolutely i mean i think in fact

00:10:34.960 if i had to carry which one had more weight it would be the making part i mean it's true that

00:10:40.560 lincoln is born with a gift for language that probably no matter how hard you might try

00:10:44.560 to give one of his great speeches like the second inaugural or the gettysburg address it would be

00:10:49.800 very difficult because he's got a poetic gift teddy possessed an almost photographic memory for

00:10:54.580 everything that he had seen and read fdr was just lucky to have that optimistic temperament and

00:11:00.200 and lbj had almost an unbounded energy but as teddy roosevelt pointed out he said there's two kinds

00:11:05.780 of success in the world one is where a person has a gift that no matter how hard you try you can't

00:11:10.780 emulate but most success he said means taking the talents you have and then developing those

00:11:16.220 ordinary talents to an extraordinary degree through the application of hard sustained work

00:11:21.020 and that certainly is something that's similar to all of them they really worked hard and and that's

00:11:25.780 and i think that's key for success in any any field i would argue well another thing that these

00:11:30.800 four individuals had in common besides ambition and besides finding their calling when they were in their

00:11:36.560 20s was they all experienced a personal struggle before they assumed the mantle of leadership so

00:11:43.000 you talk about some of their these personal struggles these guys went through yeah in some

00:11:47.220 ways their personal struggles are so harrowing that it seems almost impossible to think we could take

00:11:51.740 some learning from them but i think all leaders all of us go through lives of personal struggle and

00:11:57.720 depends on whether you come out of it with wisdom or perspective ernest hemingway once said everyone is broken

00:12:02.780 by life but afterwards some people are stronger in the broken places i mean for lincoln the struggle

00:12:07.940 was almost from the beginning of his childhood when his father didn't really want him to read and thought

00:12:12.520 it was you know kind of lazy that he would be wanting to read books so much and he had to scour the

00:12:17.220 countryside for books and read everything he could lay his hands on and then he began that slow upward climb

00:12:22.240 he didn't win that first race for the state legislature but he won a second one he was in the state

00:12:27.200 legislature but then what happened is he considered as he was moving upward that the gem of his

00:12:32.220 character was in keeping his word and he had promised the constituents from the time he ran

00:12:37.140 that first time that he would bring infrastructure projects to illinois so that poor farmers could get

00:12:42.560 their goods to market and he backed like a million dollar bill to dredge harbors and widen roads and

00:12:48.700 build new harbors and roads so that people could get their goods to market but then the state went into

00:12:53.840 a recession the projects were never finished they were left half finished the state went into debt and it was a

00:12:59.240 humiliating time for the state and it was blamed on lincoln and at the same time he broke his word to

00:13:04.940 mary because they were engaged and he realized he wasn't sure he wanted to marry her so he cycled into

00:13:10.260 a huge depression and his friends were so worried about it that they took all knives and razors and

00:13:16.140 scissors from his room and his great friend came to his side joshua speed and said lincoln you must rally or

00:13:21.980 you will die and he said i know that but i would just as soon die now however i've not yet accomplished 0.81

00:13:27.980 anything to make any human being remember that i have lived which is incredible that same dream that

00:13:32.500 he had when he was 23 helped to get him through that struggle and that even then when he lost two

00:13:37.780 senate races he still tried again as a dark west candidate for the presidency so there's no question

00:13:42.500 that perseverance and resilience proved to be critical in his life to get him through all the

00:13:47.180 tough battles of the war before victory was achieved and i think with teddy roosevelt i mean he had been

00:13:53.260 learning already as i said when he was in the state legislature but there was still sort of a sense

00:13:59.220 of i'm going to move on from the state senate i'm from the state legislature the state senate and then

00:14:05.040 maybe i'll be a congressman and then maybe a senator and then maybe a governor and then maybe president he

00:14:09.540 was thinking of moving up rung by rung and then all of a sudden tragedies struck he was in the state

00:14:14.940 legislature he got word from a telegram that his wife of 22 years old had given birth to their first

00:14:19.640 child a daughter they celebrated with cigars and and putting their arms around him and he was so

00:14:25.100 happy and then an hour later another telegram arrived saying you must come home immediately

00:14:29.240 your wife is dying and your mother is dying too his mother was only 49 but she had come to help her

00:14:35.740 daughter-in-law with the baby's birth she contracted a sudden case of typhoid fever and died as soon as

00:14:40.880 teddy came home and then hours later his wife died so that double death in the same house on the same day

00:14:47.440 sent him into a depression and he left the state legislature and decided to go live in the badlands

00:14:52.900 where he became a cowboy somehow he thought that physical activity could prevent overthought and he

00:14:58.280 wouldn't be able he'd finally be able to sleep at night but while he was there i think he changed his

00:15:03.380 attitude toward life and he fell in love with nature which becomes of course his great legacy in

00:15:08.360 conservation he decided he would just go back to the east coast after that and take whatever job seemed

00:15:13.420 interesting to him because it might be the last job he'd ever have so he took the job as civil service

00:15:18.220 commissioner police commissioner he was assistant secretary of the navy then he went downward and so

00:15:22.380 it seemed to be a soldier in the army people saying why are you doing that you have more power the other

00:15:26.840 way but just decided these are the jobs i want to do and then eventually that winding experience

00:15:32.060 i think made him into a much better young even though young as he was candidate for the presidency

00:15:37.580 or president rather and and his experience in the west widened his image so that he wasn't just an

00:15:42.600 easterner he was a westerner so those two had harrowing experiences but probably nothing

00:15:48.160 really was as strong and developmental as fdr's polio but here's this athletic man in his 30s

00:15:56.340 loving to swim and to fish and to you know ride his bicycle and to walk in the woods and he wakes up

00:16:02.440 one day and by the end of that day he's paralyzed from the waist down and i think the polio just made him

00:16:08.520 a much more patient man it took years before he could finally learn to maneuver the wheelchair he

00:16:13.840 had to be put down on the carpet to crawl around to somehow get his chest and back stronger than it

00:16:19.100 was to allow him to be lifted in and out of the wheelchair and eventually when he went to warm springs

00:16:24.180 the rehabilitation center he created for his fellow polio patients he became what he said later with

00:16:29.800 great pride doc roosevelt he would supervise the play he would supervise their exercises in the pool

00:16:35.780 and it wasn't just making their limbs better he wanted to make them feel a sense of joy in life

00:16:40.100 once more and he worked on that so they had wheelchair dances and theatricals at night and

00:16:45.780 they all said later in oral histories that you read that he changed their life he gave them a sense

00:16:49.760 that they could live strongly again so that he brought i think when he went to the presidency that

00:16:55.260 sense of joy in living that could be recreated even when some terrible tragedy had approached you

00:17:00.300 and then lyndon johnson had gone from power to power from the time he was young to finally becoming

00:17:06.720 majority leader of the senate but he can then had a sort of sense of questioning himself when he had a

00:17:14.200 massive heart attack and he came into a depression and came out of it saying well what if i died now

00:17:19.100 what would i be remembered for and that's where his ambition got connected to something larger he had

00:17:25.080 exhibits of that when he was a young boy when he first went to this mexican-american school and was a

00:17:29.620 fabulous principal of this poor school and new dealer but then once he lost the first senate

00:17:35.280 race he wanted to become a conservative to fit texas so he'd lost that earlier sense of the larger

00:17:40.180 good but he regained it again after that heart attack and then went on to give the first get the

00:17:45.700 first senate bill through on civil rights and then of course civil rights became his legacy in the

00:17:49.860 presidency so each of these men was totally marked i think by those crucibles that they went through

00:17:55.640 those those moments of trials of fire yeah the uh your book you made me cry doris when i was reading

00:18:01.480 about fdr and his polio experience and it was the moment you describe where you know he kind of

00:18:07.340 withdrew from public life for a bit and then he decided to go to some meeting at some building that

00:18:13.480 had marble floors and he just had the crutches and the braces and he's walking and he slips in front

00:18:19.220 of all these people and he falls down and that i don't know what it was i don't know what it was

00:18:23.940 about that i guess the image of him being this very i don't know outgoing athletic guy and then

00:18:28.860 just being in such a vulnerable position but the thing that was i mean is it's pitiful but at the

00:18:33.880 same time it was inspiring because he was like optimistic during the whole entire time he was just

00:18:37.280 like it's all right let's just get up it's okay nothing to see here and he moved on so that that

00:18:43.140 moment really really hit home for me you know it's so interesting you know it did for me too and i

00:18:47.020 don't know why maybe it's because you know we've all walked in those buildings before with those

00:18:51.480 long marble floors which are kind of slippery anyway and picturing i could just picture him

00:18:56.340 trying to walk in as if he could walk splat on the floor people looking at him his hat falls off his

00:19:02.580 head and ever since then when i've been in one of those big lobbies before elevators i can picture

00:19:07.160 it it's weird i felt that same emotional identification and you're absolutely right what he does is you know

00:19:12.620 get my hat on the bed i'll get up from here here i go you know and there's a there's a similar time

00:19:18.360 so many years later when he's running in 1936 for the um race for the second time and he goes to

00:19:25.680 deliver the acceptance speech and he's being held to walk down the aisle if he had his braces on

00:19:31.280 and they were locked in place and he had canes or he could lean on two strong people he could appear

00:19:36.300 to be walking though he never really could propel himself forward by his own motion but he reached

00:19:41.440 over to shake someone's hand and he lost his balance his braces unlocked his speech the acceptance

00:19:46.480 speech fell off on this is now a national convention and he says get me up again and the speech is all

00:19:52.460 in place and he comes up he gets to the podium and all of a sudden he has this huge smile on his face

00:19:58.700 and he begins the rendezvous with destiny speech one of the great speeches but you know in those days

00:20:04.340 the photographers never took a picture of him falling on the ground there was nothing said about his

00:20:08.260 wheelchair and then they never mentioned that he'd even fallen in this in the stories the next day

00:20:14.080 but there's there's so many times when that's going to happen to him again that embarrassing thing and

00:20:18.360 somehow he was able to contain it within himself and make other people feel at ease by that huge smile

00:20:23.980 so you it's weird that one got to me as well and then all the other ones followed in its wake in a

00:20:29.660 certain sense so let's talk about the tumultuous times these four presidents were presidents so

00:20:35.380 lincoln obviously president during the civil war theodore roosevelt was president when the big

00:20:40.120 coal strike was going on and then franklin roosevelt great depression world war ii and then lbj

00:20:45.880 becomes president after their the assassination of john f kennedy as you looked at these four men

00:20:51.860 they're all different they're all different temperaments but did they have anything did they

00:20:56.320 approach their crises the same way or any similarities there well you know i think the most important

00:21:03.040 thing that i i began to see was that each one of them was fitted for that moment that they were then

00:21:08.900 challenged with even if you interchange them i'm not sure they could have been able to do it in the

00:21:14.780 same way and that's what that's where i think history of the opportunity that's presented and what

00:21:19.600 the person does with it becomes so important because when you think about it only lincoln i think could

00:21:25.340 have had the patience and the perseverance to really just go through those terribly long years when the union

00:21:31.560 was not only not winning but was was really losing that war and of course he had the gift for language

00:21:37.100 to give the struggle that the meaning that it provided for the people that kept them going

00:21:42.700 and i think for for teddy roosevelt he was so used to that fighting spirit that he was the perfect person

00:21:48.940 to come into office and really deal with the problems of the industrial era because they're so similar to

00:21:54.780 our own in many ways you know the globalization and technological revolution that shaped us today

00:21:59.640 was similar back then and the industrial revolution changed the nature of the economy in america and

00:22:04.700 there was a big gap between the rich and the poor and a lot of anxiety and the working class really was

00:22:10.460 in struggle against the capitalists their nationwide strikes of which the coal strike that you mentioned

00:22:14.960 is one and violence in the streets but he comes into it with that ability to fight but instead of

00:22:21.100 fighting for one side or the other he argued that he was fighting for both sides that he wanted a square

00:22:25.840 deal for the rich and the poor for the capitalist and the wage worker and that sense of fundamental

00:22:31.080 fairness really and the desire to knit up the sort of the problems the polarized society that he came

00:22:36.460 into was part of him i think from early on so he was perfectly suited for that and then of course fdr

00:22:42.560 coming in with that optimism and that contagious actual confidence having gotten through his polio

00:22:48.160 struggle to the point where he could become president of the united states paralyzed himself now

00:22:53.120 confronts a paralyzed country and is able to project that optimism onto the country and then of course

00:22:58.780 lyndon johnson a southerner whose roots are so deep in the south but who believes strongly in the importance

00:23:03.580 of civil rights and who knows how to handle the congress i don't know who else could have gotten us through

00:23:08.980 you know that bipartisanship as well as he who knew every single congressman every single senator knew

00:23:13.660 what would move them would call them at five in the morning and 12 at night even called a senator at 2 a.m i hope i didn't wake you up

00:23:20.400 here i am and if the senator's not there he talks to the wife if the wife's not there he talks to the

00:23:24.540 kid now you tell your daddy to come along with me on this bill so i thought about and i thought so each

00:23:30.440 of them had different kinds of strengths that fit the time and if you try to imagine buchanan was there

00:23:36.120 as president before abraham lincoln and the country was already splitting apart and he exacerbated the

00:23:42.660 divisions rather than healing them the way that lincoln eventually would i don't think that mckinley the

00:23:47.560 conservative republican could have dealt with the industrial order's problems in the same way that

00:23:52.560 eddie roosevelt as a greater progressive was able to do so and clearly herbert hoover couldn't have

00:23:57.960 dealt and didn't deal with the depression had a more fixed ideology and not that experimentalism that

00:24:03.020 was so marked by fdr and i don't think that john f kennedy could have gotten the civil rights bill

00:24:08.160 passed the filibuster in the senate so it's just lucky i think for us and for them that they come into

00:24:13.680 office in a moment when their particular set of strengths fit the challenge of the time well yeah

00:24:18.680 that goes to that question is it just circumstances or can a single individual shape the ages and it

00:24:23.580 sounds like it's a mixture of the two again no i think it is a mixture of the two i mean teddy

00:24:28.440 roosevelt actually wrote about this he wrote about a lot of things he loved to think about things in his

00:24:32.940 big essays in this case he was writing that he said if there were no war nobody would know lincoln's

00:24:38.080 name now nobody would know the generals general grant and of course he's right about that nobody

00:24:43.920 in the nation would have known lincoln's name i think people in illinois would have known it no

00:24:47.000 matter what just because he made such a marked impression on the people he knew but the point

00:24:52.120 is that you may have a greater opportunity when there's a crisis abigail adams says great necessities

00:24:57.480 create great virtues that most people would want to live he said she said in some dramatic time like

00:25:02.680 this but you have to be ready when that opportunity presents itself and really have the right set of

00:25:08.360 skills and be prepared for it so that's why i think it is definitely there's no great man that

00:25:13.460 can just go through any period of time probably and you do need the opportunity if there hadn't been

00:25:18.140 the war and perhaps if there hadn't been slavery and its problems lincoln may never become president

00:25:23.180 much less been the wartime president but on the other hand when that opportunity was given to him

00:25:27.900 he's surely exceeded making the most of it because of who he was so of all these four presidents you

00:25:34.160 know i think most people most americans you know lincoln roosevelt both roosevelt's kind of hold them

00:25:39.700 in sort of this i don't know they've they're almost almost it's apotheosis almost right but lbj is an

00:25:46.540 interesting case because what most people think when they think lbj they think vietnam but i mean so what

00:25:52.160 do you think happened there so i mean because you you're talking about the book he ushered in the civil

00:25:56.660 rights act the voting rights act and the big tax cut in the 1960s that you know jfk wasn't able to

00:26:02.460 do why is he remembered for vietnam and not for those other things well i think you know history

00:26:07.760 is beginning to accord him greater credit for what he did domestically because so much of the

00:26:13.260 foundations of the great society are still with us whether it's voting rights or civil rights ending

00:26:17.800 segregation south or fair housing or medicare or medicaid aid to education head start npr it's

00:26:23.340 extraordinary but the war in vietnam cut his legacy in two there's no question and the closer

00:26:29.260 we were to the war the more the memories of the horror of that war and the failure of his leadership

00:26:34.420 i think remained with us so i think over time now there's a way of looking at him a little bit more

00:26:39.900 empathetically but still i think his leadership in the war was almost the opposite to his domestic

00:26:44.960 leadership he had a concrete vision for what he wanted to do in the great society right away that

00:26:49.260 first night he became president when kennedy was assassinated and he sat on his bed with a couple

00:26:54.000 of his aides and he said i know what i'm going to get done i want to get the tax cut to make the

00:26:58.060 economy broaden so that we can use the money for social programs then i want to get the civil rights

00:27:02.500 bill through and then the voting rights bill and then i want to get old harry truman's medicare

00:27:06.920 through and it was incredible that he saw all those things at once but on vietnam what happened is

00:27:12.460 he was simply trying not to fail it wasn't where his energies were it wasn't where his experience was

00:27:18.240 so he'd be told you have to send more troops or it will fail and he couldn't bear the thought of the

00:27:23.020 failure so he incrementally sends troops and then he never really lets the american public know what

00:27:27.840 he's doing so that when the war doesn't do as well as they were telling him the war was doing

00:27:32.220 he lost his credibility and eventually had to say that he wasn't going to run for presidency again in

00:27:37.560 1968 he also thought he could transfer some of the characteristics of his senate leadership

00:27:42.500 over to vietnam i'll just meet with ho chi minh and i'll promise him a mekong river delta project

00:27:47.380 and he'll agree to come to the bargaining table and that those were not translatable when you have

00:27:52.600 ideology on the other side i mean i had my own experience of working for him as a white house

00:27:57.600 fellow when i was 24 and then accompanying him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs those last years

00:28:02.480 of his life and i saw him in those last years and the sadness he felt that the war had cut that

00:28:07.320 legacy ensue and he was so much happier instead of talking about the war luckily i was working on

00:28:12.080 the chapters with a group of people helping the memoirs on civil rights and the congress so i had

00:28:17.180 the happy lbj lucky when he remembered those things he would come to life his voice would have you know a

00:28:22.420 great energy in it when he talked about the war there was just this sense of almost dropping his

00:28:26.800 voice to a whisper and i ended up feeling in that experience i'd been anti-war in the first place

00:28:32.100 i'd been involved in the anti-war movement and actually written an article against him

00:28:36.840 which came out shortly after i was selected as an as a white house fellow with the title how to

00:28:40.700 remove linton johnson from power so i was certain he would kick me out of the program but instead he

00:28:46.020 said oh bring her down here for a year and if i can't win her over no one can so i did end up 1.00

00:28:50.360 working for him as i say and and i did end up feeling empathetic for him even then but now 50 years

00:28:55.800 later i think i put it into even deeper perspective and say that while that war will always hurt who he

00:29:00.940 was and rightly so what he did domestically deserves to be on a par and that's why i think he

00:29:06.120 belongs in this book with the other three people not just because i knew him and he was the first

00:29:10.300 president that probably made me into a presidential historian because of that extraordinary experience

00:29:14.880 of working with him so he's a good lesson that just because a leader is good in some area it might

00:29:19.680 not translate over to other areas as well exactly i think that's the lesson that the terrain of

00:29:24.700 leadership that a person faces will demand certain kinds of qualities and the person may or may not

00:29:30.700 have them it's not a universal thing there's no one size fits all there's no precepts that you can

00:29:35.960 take i mean there are certain human things that i think any leader whether it's a business leader

00:29:40.840 university leader or a political leader share and they have to do i think with the ability to create

00:29:46.600 a team and then to give that team a sense of being able to argue with you and question your

00:29:51.040 assumptions to create purpose and a sense of common mission for that team or my favorite is the

00:29:56.980 ability that they needed to do to relax and replenish their energies so that they could really deal with

00:30:02.800 the anxieties of the moment and again johnson's an outlier but the other three were amazing that way

00:30:08.060 i mean lincoln went to the theater a hundred times during the war and he said when the lights came

00:30:13.120 down he could imagine himself back in the war of the roses and for a few moments channel his thoughts

00:30:17.440 to a different place teddy roosevelt exercised two hours every afternoon no matter what how busy he

00:30:22.760 was and we think we're so busy today these guys certainly were busy but they found time to do the

00:30:26.980 things they needed to replenish their energies and fdr had a cocktail party every night in the white

00:30:31.460 house during world war ii where the rule was you couldn't talk about the war you could discuss

00:30:35.880 movies books and anything as long as you didn't talk about the war and lbj unfortunately was never

00:30:40.840 really able to relax when i was with him at the ranch he had this pool and we'd presumably go

00:30:46.320 swimming in it but there were all these floating rafts with floating notepads and floating phones

00:30:50.400 on them so that you could work at every moment in the pool so you know those kind of qualities that

00:30:56.060 you see they're able to communicate to people in the technology of their time they all shared that

00:31:00.340 they were able to control their emotions pretty much so they had humility which means learning from

00:31:06.320 their mistakes but but none of these qualities you know are universal and none of them were always

00:31:11.460 necessary for the problem that they faced so you're absolutely right it just depends on

00:31:16.000 on what the situation is and whether the person is fitted for the time did these men as soon as

00:31:20.760 they assumed power start thinking about their legacy did it become very self-conscious of that

00:31:24.940 and did it influence the decisions they made or how they acted well the interesting thing is that i think

00:31:30.840 you know all of these men from early on sort of had a sense of what is it you know that i will be

00:31:37.360 thinking about later on or what will people think about me once you get into the presidency i think it

00:31:43.780 becomes escalated that feeling in fact i think more so today than ever before because the media starts

00:31:48.700 talking about the presidential legacy when they're in there for about a month you know when you see

00:31:52.740 you're surrounded by all these pictures of other presidents there are now these historians polls

00:31:56.680 that rank them so that there's much more consciousness of it i think now but these individuals i think

00:32:02.660 really did have that ambition that was different from just wanting to be a celebrity at the moment they

00:32:07.880 wanted to leave something behind and i think that's what made them from good leaders into potentially

00:32:12.660 great leaders because if you're thinking about that hopefully you're thinking about how will i be

00:32:17.320 remembered for having done something positively having made life better more opportunities for

00:32:22.580 the lives of the people and then they they do create these libraries now it's it has become much

00:32:28.080 more conscious but i think it was psychologically in these people at that moment that's what distinguished

00:32:33.080 them maybe from other people who go into office and they're not quite thinking in those futuristic terms

00:32:37.400 so there's a lot of lessons in this book we've talked about a few of them but what do you hope

00:32:42.300 the big lesson is that you hope that readers walk away with after they finish your book well you know

00:32:48.340 what i'd really hope in this really difficult time that we're living in right now where so many

00:32:53.440 people come to me and say are these the worst of times that the reassuring answer that history provides

00:32:59.060 is no these are not the worst of times i mean we talked a little about it but remember obviously when

00:33:04.860 abraham lincoln enters office the country's about to rupture into a civil war it's going to leave more

00:33:09.780 than 600 000 people dead to have lived through that time and not know how that war was going to end

00:33:15.320 would the country be split in two what would be the whole idea of america would it be undone

00:33:20.500 is a much greater psychological existential worry i think than what we can face today when teddy

00:33:26.980 roosevelt comes in the you know there there really was a fear that revolution might be in the air

00:33:31.880 because of the the tense the intenseness of relationships between labor and management and

00:33:37.260 obviously when fdr comes in people are taking their savings out of the banks and the banks are

00:33:42.900 collapsing and the job market is gone and there's a sense maybe that capitalism is is under under siege

00:33:49.600 and for lbj when the assassination first took place there was no question of whether or not could

00:33:55.040 it be a conspiracy of the russians or cuba or the mafia and the country was transfixed with the

00:34:01.260 former president while the new president's trying to take office and racial issues are searing the

00:34:05.860 country which get healed in part through his leadership of civil rights so what makes you know

00:34:11.940 each one of those moments called for leadership but they also called for a two-way street um we had the

00:34:18.000 right leader at the time but what we had also was a citizenry that was active and able to to really

00:34:25.380 mobilize themselves to to do what was necessary when lincoln was called the liberator he said don't call me

00:34:30.580 that it's the anti-slavery movement that did it all and there's truth to that without the anti-slavery 0.57

00:34:35.700 movement the republican party wouldn't have been born it wouldn't have been strengthened and it

00:34:39.440 wouldn't have produced abraham lincoln and clearly the progressive movement had emerged before teddy

00:34:44.420 roosevelt to worry about the industrial revolution and its hurt on the economy and on the people

00:34:49.180 settlement houses were working um there was a sense of the social gospel in the churches

00:34:54.040 and so when he began to use his leadership to help get laws to regulate this or break up the big

00:34:59.180 monopolies there was that progressive movement on the part of the states and the cities that was

00:35:04.120 already in place and same too for fdr and obviously the civil rights movement was essential without whom

00:35:10.300 lyndon johnson couldn't have done what it did so i think the best lesson that i'd love to give to

00:35:15.520 people right now is that you know if we're fearful of where we are as a nation if there's a worry about

00:35:20.860 the frenzied activity of every day breaking news and indictments and not a lack of a shared political

00:35:27.200 truth we may not think that we have the means to reform our broken political system which i believe

00:35:33.060 it really is but we do i mean that's what fdr would always say problems created by man can be solved by

00:35:38.660 man and there are things that can be done congressional districts could be drawn by non-partisan commissions

00:35:44.340 instead of the gerrymandering and there's there's movements in states right it always starts in the

00:35:48.500 states i think the changes that can take place in the national level to do precisely that there are

00:35:53.820 movements in the states to do something about the money in politics by overturning the supreme court

00:35:58.160 decision perhaps on citizens united there's a movement abroad which i love hearing about for a

00:36:03.380 national service program to bring people from the rural areas to the cities or the cities to the rural

00:36:08.040 areas and let them work in a common mission to overcome that sense of otherness that's created

00:36:14.080 between the cultures of our country teddy roosevelt said the rock of democracy would founder if if the

00:36:19.900 people in different regions and parties and religions and races started thinking of themselves as the

00:36:25.120 other so we have to figure out ways through education through mobility through moving people around

00:36:29.640 through having some sort of possible national service program which eleanor roosevelt wanted teddy 0.90

00:36:34.600 roosevelt wanted um there are answers to these problems as long as the citizens awaken

00:36:38.580 and and and we'll see what happens if they go to the polls and they vote and more than that if they become

00:36:44.260 more active so we'll just see if citizens keep that awakening but it happened in every one of these times

00:36:48.720 and history will tell you the combination of that and leaders can really go through these much worse

00:36:54.000 problems than we had and we come out the other end and if the book can make people feel that if history

00:36:58.540 has that power then i'll feel that it's it's done something that will motivate people to action not

00:37:04.560 simply allow them to sit back and worry about where we are right now well doris this has been a great

00:37:10.080 conversation thanks so much for coming on oh thank you so much i really really enjoyed it my guest

00:37:15.200 there was doris kerns goodwin she's the author of the book leadership in turbulent times it's available

00:37:19.440 on amazon.com also check out our show notes at aom.is turbulent where you can find links to resources

00:37:25.840 we can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness

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00:38:07.400 stay manly

The Art of Manliness - October 29, 2018

#453： Leadership in Turbulent Times

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