#453： Leadership in Turbulent Times
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Summary
Are great leaders born or made? Do circumstances make great leaders or do great leaders change the times? These are the big picture questions Doris Kearns Goodwin explores in her latest book, Leadership in Turbulent Times. In the book, she looks at the four U.S. presidents who led the country through periods of crisis: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast are great leaders
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born or made do circumstances make great leaders or do great leaders change the times these are a
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few of the big picture questions my guest explores in her latest books her name is doris kearns
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goodwin she's a polter prize-winning historian and in her latest book leadership in turbulent times
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she explores the makings of great leaders by looking at the biographies of four u.s presidents
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who led the country through periods of crisis those are abraham lincoln theodore roosevelt
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franklin d roosevelt and lyndon b johnson we begin a conversation discussing the ambition all four of
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these leaders had as young men to do something great and how they connected their personal ambition to
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the greater good we then discuss the personal setbacks all of them experienced early in life
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and how these challenges influenced them as leaders doris then shares leadership traits and skills
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all of them implemented during their presidencies as well as how they did things differently and
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we end our conversation discussing whether any other leader could have managed the crisis each of these
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presidents confronted or if these men were singularly suited to the circumstances out of the show's over
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check out our show notes at aom.is turbulent and doris joins me now via skype
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doris kearns goodwin welcome to the show i'm glad to be with you very much so you got a new book out
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leadership in turbulent times you basically it's basically like a four mini biographies of four
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presidents you got abraham lincoln theodore roosevelt franklin roosevelt and lyndon b johnson and
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you take a look at how they handled their respective tumultuous times what criteria did
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you use to select these four four presidents well i figured that i wanted to select the ones that i
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knew the best abraham lincoln teddy and franklin roosevelt and lbj all of whom did lead through
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times of turbulence but since i was going to be looking at them in a new way through leadership i
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figured i better know them well enough because i was going to be asking a whole bunch of new questions
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of them almost as if i were talking to them for the first time but i think what happened is that
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each time i moved from one president to the next i felt a little guilty when i was deciding what to
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do next as if i were leaving an old boyfriend behind so i decided five years ago instead of leaving my guys
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for a new boyfriend i would keep them together and look at them through this leadership a subject i've
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really been interested in since my days in graduate school when we'd somehow stay up all night at least
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much of the night debating big questions are leaders born or made where does ambition come
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from you know do the times make the man or the man makes the time so it was really clear that in the
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bigger sprawling biographies i had their families their colleagues you know all the parts of their
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presidency and this time i just wanted to zero in and shine a spotlight on questions i hadn't thought
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deeply enough before so it turned out to be a big adventure well let's talk about some of those big
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big picture questions you know you talk about this idea of ambition and drive and you take a look at
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these these four presidents young life when they were young did all these men have ambitions to be
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great men like quote unquote like thomas carlisle great men no you know it's interesting i mean i think
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they all had a drive for success which is ambition without which i suppose success is really hard for
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anybody to achieve in any field but not all of them at the beginning had an ambition you know for
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the greater good but rather just something for themselves i mean lincoln is is the outlier in this
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respect because even when he's 23 years old and he runs for office for the first time he talks about
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ambition i mean in the handbill that he had to give out to the public explaining why he was running for
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the state legislature from this little town of new salem the first time he'd only been there for six
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months and he says every man has his peculiar ambition mine is to be esteemed of by my fellow
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man in a sense to be worthy of that esteem so already he was looking in a different way you know
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and then i'm young and unknown if the good people don't see fit to bring me into this i will be
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disappointed but i've been so much disappointed i won't be very much chagrined but then the great thing
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he says is but failure won't stop me i will try five or six times until it's too humiliating and then
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i promise i won't try again so he for some reason i think had this inborn sense that he wanted to be
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something deeper than what he was but for the other three it was different i mean teddy roosevelt
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admitted that when he ran for office the first time that he simply went because it was an adventure
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he thought it'd be fun to be in politics he didn't have any sense that he was going in he conceded
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to make lives of people better you know but then as he became involved in politics and he began to see
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tenements that were decrepit and people working who were little kids in factories when he was police
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commissioner he began to see there were conditions of lives that he wanted to change and would make
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a difference and then his became a deeper ambition for the greater good and fdr too i think when he
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first went into politics he had had a not very distinguished you know sort of ambitious career
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up till that point not a great student in any of the schools he'd been in he was a clerk in a wall
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street law firm and then somebody came to him and said would you like to run for a safe democratic
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seat in the duchess county area he immediately said yes i would love to showing that he wanted
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something more broad than his insulated privileged world that he led up till that time and then once he
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got into politics you know he realized it was his natural vocation but even then i don't think it
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attained such a sense of for the greater greater good until much later when i think the polio
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made him think about himself and the world in a different way johnson i think loves politics from
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the time he's like two years old you just watch him following his father on the campaign trail going
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to the state legislature and and just wanting to be in it i think for a sense of power he really loved
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the idea of just gaining power so even when he's in college somehow he figures out the way to get power
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is to get close to people who do have power thus the president of the college so he takes the job
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mopping the president's floors outside the office somehow starts talking to the president next thing
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you know he's in the office next thing you know he's a clerk next thing you know he's assistant
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and soon he's running the school and it was only much later i think that his his sense of self got
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attached to a larger purpose but so they all mostly except for lincoln start out with ambition for self
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but the critical thing is that eventually it becomes ambition for something larger than self
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so besides this shared ambition that they had to do something great what other things do these four
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men have in common when they were coming of age when they were young well i think what they have in
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common is that they all were loving to talk to people i think in the political world that's really
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important all of them were sort of gregarious if you put them on a you know a zero to ten even though
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lincoln had a melancholy spirit he also took great pleasure in being with people they all were
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storytellers you know they loved to entertain people through stories they knew how to translate
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experience from from whatever they were going through into a story that had a beginning a middle
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and an end and that became very important i think in their political career they all had a sense of
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of really you know being able to connect to people a natural ability even to want to listen to people
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i mean fdr when he's on that first campaign trail even though he's not a great speaker at first they
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said that he would start speaking and then stop and they were afraid he'd never end because he would
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have these huge pauses in between but they loved the fact that he asked people questions that he listened
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to them and i think that was true of all four of them eventually too so a lot of these traits that
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later become leadership traits i think they show when they're young probably most importantly learning
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and growing as they're older the beginning lincoln for example when he had an opponent and he mocked
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him he was very quick with his tongue lincoln and he made so much fun of him that everybody laughed
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and the opponent left the room in tears and he went over to the opponent's house and when he said not
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only was he sorry but he would never do that again he would never use his his ability to you know get
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people uproariously laughing against somebody else to his own advantage and teddy too i think he
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learned when he was first in the state legislature he had this blistering language he was screaming and
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yelling at the democrats from the republican side and he made headlines and then he realized that he
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rose like a rocket and fell like a rocket he said that he'd gotten a swelled head and so he had to learn
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from that mistake and i think fdr was a little arrogant at first too and and would be very harsh in the
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way he'd handled his opponents and realized that compromise and collaboration was essential if
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you're going to get along so there are similarities in them they come from incredibly different
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backgrounds obviously the two rosell's from very privileged backgrounds and lincoln from an almost
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impossible background to imagine even existing in and and lbj having hard times they had different
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temperaments they had different ways in which they dealt with people but somehow they kept moving
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through politics and i think what was most similar is that they all found at a certain point what
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william james the philosopher calls that voice within that told them this is the real me they
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found that in politics when they were young yeah and it was all about the same age too like in their
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in their 20s yeah what spurred me to do that was that i was at a college campus talking about the
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roosevelts when i'd written the biographies and a student raised his hand and said well how can i ever
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aspire to be one of them they're too distant they're on mount rushmore they're on the currency
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they're in movies and so i realized if i started when they were young they are going to struggle
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they're going to make mistakes out of cockiness and they're going to learn from them that people
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could identify with them more easily than if we waited until they became presidents and just did
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short shrift to those years beforehand so it sounds like there's some this idea the question you had
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are leaders born or made they didn't all of them seem to have an innate ability for certain
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leadership traits talking to people socializing storytelling but as you said at the same time
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they were fine-tuning that they were learning from mistakes they made along the way so it sounds like
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it's our leaders born or made it sounds like it's both right now i absolutely i mean i think in fact
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if i had to carry which one had more weight it would be the making part i mean it's true that
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lincoln is born with a gift for language that probably no matter how hard you might try
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to give one of his great speeches like the second inaugural or the gettysburg address it would be
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very difficult because he's got a poetic gift teddy possessed an almost photographic memory for
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everything that he had seen and read fdr was just lucky to have that optimistic temperament and
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and lbj had almost an unbounded energy but as teddy roosevelt pointed out he said there's two kinds
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of success in the world one is where a person has a gift that no matter how hard you try you can't
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emulate but most success he said means taking the talents you have and then developing those
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ordinary talents to an extraordinary degree through the application of hard sustained work
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and that certainly is something that's similar to all of them they really worked hard and and that's
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and i think that's key for success in any any field i would argue well another thing that these
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four individuals had in common besides ambition and besides finding their calling when they were in their
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20s was they all experienced a personal struggle before they assumed the mantle of leadership so
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you talk about some of their these personal struggles these guys went through yeah in some
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ways their personal struggles are so harrowing that it seems almost impossible to think we could take
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some learning from them but i think all leaders all of us go through lives of personal struggle and
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depends on whether you come out of it with wisdom or perspective ernest hemingway once said everyone is broken
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by life but afterwards some people are stronger in the broken places i mean for lincoln the struggle
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was almost from the beginning of his childhood when his father didn't really want him to read and thought
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it was you know kind of lazy that he would be wanting to read books so much and he had to scour the
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countryside for books and read everything he could lay his hands on and then he began that slow upward climb
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he didn't win that first race for the state legislature but he won a second one he was in the state
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legislature but then what happened is he considered as he was moving upward that the gem of his
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character was in keeping his word and he had promised the constituents from the time he ran
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that first time that he would bring infrastructure projects to illinois so that poor farmers could get
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their goods to market and he backed like a million dollar bill to dredge harbors and widen roads and
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build new harbors and roads so that people could get their goods to market but then the state went into
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a recession the projects were never finished they were left half finished the state went into debt and it was a
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humiliating time for the state and it was blamed on lincoln and at the same time he broke his word to
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mary because they were engaged and he realized he wasn't sure he wanted to marry her so he cycled into
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a huge depression and his friends were so worried about it that they took all knives and razors and
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scissors from his room and his great friend came to his side joshua speed and said lincoln you must rally or
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you will die and he said i know that but i would just as soon die now however i've not yet accomplished
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anything to make any human being remember that i have lived which is incredible that same dream that
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he had when he was 23 helped to get him through that struggle and that even then when he lost two
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senate races he still tried again as a dark west candidate for the presidency so there's no question
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that perseverance and resilience proved to be critical in his life to get him through all the
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tough battles of the war before victory was achieved and i think with teddy roosevelt i mean he had been
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learning already as i said when he was in the state legislature but there was still sort of a sense
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of i'm going to move on from the state senate i'm from the state legislature the state senate and then
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maybe i'll be a congressman and then maybe a senator and then maybe a governor and then maybe president he
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was thinking of moving up rung by rung and then all of a sudden tragedies struck he was in the state
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legislature he got word from a telegram that his wife of 22 years old had given birth to their first
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child a daughter they celebrated with cigars and and putting their arms around him and he was so
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happy and then an hour later another telegram arrived saying you must come home immediately
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your wife is dying and your mother is dying too his mother was only 49 but she had come to help her
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daughter-in-law with the baby's birth she contracted a sudden case of typhoid fever and died as soon as
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teddy came home and then hours later his wife died so that double death in the same house on the same day
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sent him into a depression and he left the state legislature and decided to go live in the badlands
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where he became a cowboy somehow he thought that physical activity could prevent overthought and he
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wouldn't be able he'd finally be able to sleep at night but while he was there i think he changed his
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attitude toward life and he fell in love with nature which becomes of course his great legacy in
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conservation he decided he would just go back to the east coast after that and take whatever job seemed
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interesting to him because it might be the last job he'd ever have so he took the job as civil service
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commissioner police commissioner he was assistant secretary of the navy then he went downward and so
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it seemed to be a soldier in the army people saying why are you doing that you have more power the other
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way but just decided these are the jobs i want to do and then eventually that winding experience
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i think made him into a much better young even though young as he was candidate for the presidency
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or president rather and and his experience in the west widened his image so that he wasn't just an
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easterner he was a westerner so those two had harrowing experiences but probably nothing
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really was as strong and developmental as fdr's polio but here's this athletic man in his 30s
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loving to swim and to fish and to you know ride his bicycle and to walk in the woods and he wakes up
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one day and by the end of that day he's paralyzed from the waist down and i think the polio just made him
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a much more patient man it took years before he could finally learn to maneuver the wheelchair he
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had to be put down on the carpet to crawl around to somehow get his chest and back stronger than it
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was to allow him to be lifted in and out of the wheelchair and eventually when he went to warm springs
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the rehabilitation center he created for his fellow polio patients he became what he said later with
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great pride doc roosevelt he would supervise the play he would supervise their exercises in the pool
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and it wasn't just making their limbs better he wanted to make them feel a sense of joy in life
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once more and he worked on that so they had wheelchair dances and theatricals at night and
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they all said later in oral histories that you read that he changed their life he gave them a sense
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that they could live strongly again so that he brought i think when he went to the presidency that
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sense of joy in living that could be recreated even when some terrible tragedy had approached you
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and then lyndon johnson had gone from power to power from the time he was young to finally becoming
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majority leader of the senate but he can then had a sort of sense of questioning himself when he had a
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massive heart attack and he came into a depression and came out of it saying well what if i died now
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what would i be remembered for and that's where his ambition got connected to something larger he had
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exhibits of that when he was a young boy when he first went to this mexican-american school and was a
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fabulous principal of this poor school and new dealer but then once he lost the first senate
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race he wanted to become a conservative to fit texas so he'd lost that earlier sense of the larger
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good but he regained it again after that heart attack and then went on to give the first get the
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first senate bill through on civil rights and then of course civil rights became his legacy in the
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presidency so each of these men was totally marked i think by those crucibles that they went through
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those those moments of trials of fire yeah the uh your book you made me cry doris when i was reading
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about fdr and his polio experience and it was the moment you describe where you know he kind of
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withdrew from public life for a bit and then he decided to go to some meeting at some building that
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had marble floors and he just had the crutches and the braces and he's walking and he slips in front
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of all these people and he falls down and that i don't know what it was i don't know what it was
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about that i guess the image of him being this very i don't know outgoing athletic guy and then
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just being in such a vulnerable position but the thing that was i mean is it's pitiful but at the
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same time it was inspiring because he was like optimistic during the whole entire time he was just
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like it's all right let's just get up it's okay nothing to see here and he moved on so that that
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moment really really hit home for me you know it's so interesting you know it did for me too and i
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don't know why maybe it's because you know we've all walked in those buildings before with those
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long marble floors which are kind of slippery anyway and picturing i could just picture him
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trying to walk in as if he could walk splat on the floor people looking at him his hat falls off his
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head and ever since then when i've been in one of those big lobbies before elevators i can picture
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it it's weird i felt that same emotional identification and you're absolutely right what he does is you know
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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
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so many years later when he's running in 1936 for the um race for the second time and he goes to
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deliver the acceptance speech and he's being held to walk down the aisle if he had his braces on
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and they were locked in place and he had canes or he could lean on two strong people he could appear
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to be walking though he never really could propel himself forward by his own motion but he reached
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over to shake someone's hand and he lost his balance his braces unlocked his speech the acceptance
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speech fell off on this is now a national convention and he says get me up again and the speech is all
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in place and he comes up he gets to the podium and all of a sudden he has this huge smile on his face
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and he begins the rendezvous with destiny speech one of the great speeches but you know in those days
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the photographers never took a picture of him falling on the ground there was nothing said about his
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wheelchair and then they never mentioned that he'd even fallen in this in the stories the next day
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but there's there's so many times when that's going to happen to him again that embarrassing thing and
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somehow he was able to contain it within himself and make other people feel at ease by that huge smile
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so you it's weird that one got to me as well and then all the other ones followed in its wake in a
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certain sense so let's talk about the tumultuous times these four presidents were presidents so
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lincoln obviously president during the civil war theodore roosevelt was president when the big
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coal strike was going on and then franklin roosevelt great depression world war ii and then lbj
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becomes president after their the assassination of john f kennedy as you looked at these four men
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they're all different they're all different temperaments but did they have anything did they
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approach their crises the same way or any similarities there well you know i think the most important
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thing that i i began to see was that each one of them was fitted for that moment that they were then
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challenged with even if you interchange them i'm not sure they could have been able to do it in the
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same way and that's what that's where i think history of the opportunity that's presented and what
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the person does with it becomes so important because when you think about it only lincoln i think could
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have had the patience and the perseverance to really just go through those terribly long years when the union
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was not only not winning but was was really losing that war and of course he had the gift for language
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to give the struggle that the meaning that it provided for the people that kept them going
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and i think for for teddy roosevelt he was so used to that fighting spirit that he was the perfect person
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to come into office and really deal with the problems of the industrial era because they're so similar to
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our own in many ways you know the globalization and technological revolution that shaped us today
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was similar back then and the industrial revolution changed the nature of the economy in america and
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there was a big gap between the rich and the poor and a lot of anxiety and the working class really was
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in struggle against the capitalists their nationwide strikes of which the coal strike that you mentioned
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is one and violence in the streets but he comes into it with that ability to fight but instead of
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fighting for one side or the other he argued that he was fighting for both sides that he wanted a square
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deal for the rich and the poor for the capitalist and the wage worker and that sense of fundamental
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fairness really and the desire to knit up the sort of the problems the polarized society that he came
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into was part of him i think from early on so he was perfectly suited for that and then of course fdr
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coming in with that optimism and that contagious actual confidence having gotten through his polio
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struggle to the point where he could become president of the united states paralyzed himself now
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confronts a paralyzed country and is able to project that optimism onto the country and then of course
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lyndon johnson a southerner whose roots are so deep in the south but who believes strongly in the importance
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of civil rights and who knows how to handle the congress i don't know who else could have gotten us through
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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
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
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
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
00:37:42.560
podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:37:46.340
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