Leadership In Turbulent Times

 

Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Leadership In Turbulent Times,” Simon & Schuster, 2018, 368 pp..

Written by one of my favorite authors, this book covers the lives and leadership skills of four leaders Goodwin previously studied: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.  Divided into three sections, the first section covers the early lives and political rise of the leaders. The second part describes setbacks. The final section studies an executive action for each president that demonstrates leadership. As Goodwin's eighth book, Leadership in Turbulent Times was released in 2018 and received positive reviews for its readability, research, and accessibility.  My notes do not capture the essence of Goodwin’s leadership attributes and the development of those attributes; however, reading the book will accomplish that and it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Notes:

LINCOLN:

Pg. 106:  In Lincoln’s day, the judges, lawyers, witnesses, and bailiffs traveled together on ‘the circuit’ eight weeks every spring and fall.  Covering some 150 miles, the traveling bar, like a theater troupe, moved from one county seat to another, holding court and trying cases in dozens of sparsely settled villages and towns.  Villagers came from miles around to witness the courtroom drama. 

Pg. 110f:  While the slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation, every expansion of U.S. territory reignited the issue.  When Missouri, part of the vast territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase applied for admission to the Union, an angry struggle ensued between North and South.  Constructed under Clay’s leadership, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 brought an end to the escalating tensions.  It granted Missouri’s request for statehood, admitted Maine as a free state, and drew an imaginary line: territories north of that line would enter the Union as free states, those below would be slave states.  For the following three decades, the Missouri Compromise kept that peace until Congress was called upon to decide the fate of the territories acquired by the Mexican War. 

Once again Clay was called on to forge another Compromise.  The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but brought Utah and New Mexico into the Union with no restrictions on slavery; it called for an end to the slave trade in the District of Columbia but strengthened the old Fugitive Slave Law.  These more strenuous provisions in the Fugitive Slave Law sparked the fury of antislavery activists in the North.  The Compromise of 1850 only lasted four years and was replaced by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.  This Act would allow settlers in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, both of which stood above the dividing line created by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, to decide for themselves whether they wanted to enter the Union as slave or free states.

Pg. 122:  By the fall of 1860, the slavery issue had smashed the Democratic Party much as it had shattered the Whigs.  John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry had hardened southern attitudes and the southern wing demanded explicit protection from Congress to bring slaves into the new territories regardless of the vote of the people. 

P. 211:  Lincoln was elected to the presidency and on March 4, 1861, was inaugurated.  In the four months between his election and inauguration, seven southern states seceded from the Union.  At a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, these seven states formed a new government. 

Pg. 234f:  Scholars have identified two seemingly antithetical types of leadership—transactional, by far the more common, and transformational.  Transactional leaders operate pragmatically.  They appeal to the self-interest of their followers, using quid pro quo, bargains, trades, and rewards to solicit support and influence the behavior of their followers. Transformational leaders inspire followers to identify with something larger than themselves—the organization, the community, the region, the country—and finally to the more abstract identification with the ideals of that country.  Lincoln was both.

 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: 

Pg. 124:  On the floor of the Albany legislature, in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt received the joyful telegram that he was now father to his first child, a baby girl.  Shortly afterward a second telegram was delivered to inform him that his wife Alice was dying as was his Mother.  Both died on the same day just after Theodore arrived at the house.

Pg. 148:  As soon as Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898, Roosevelt resigned his Assistant Secretary of the Navy post and volunteered for the Army.  He was offered a position of Colonel but declined in favor of Colonel Leonard Wood and instead took the position of Lieutenant Colonel as he felt Wood was much better qualified for the post of Colonel.

Pg. 159:  On September 6, 1901, an assassin’s bullet brought McKinley’s life to a slow end.  At age forty-two Theodore Roosevelt became President.

Pg. 244:  The breadth of Teddy Roosevelt’s hands-on experience at different levels of government, from the state legislature to the police department to the governor’s chair, had sensitized Roosevelt to the hidden dangers of the age: the rise of gigantic trusts that were rapidly swallowing up their competitors in one field after another, the invisible web of corruption linking political bosses to the business community, the increasing concentration of wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the squalid conditions in the immigrant slums, the mood of insurrection among the laboring lasses.

Pg. 246:  The catastrophe a coal strike would bring on by October 1902 was not foreseen in May 1902, when 147,000 miners walked out.  Ultimately Roosevelt had to intervene and arbitrate the dispute, setting a pattern that would be used in the future in similar instances that threatened the public welfare.

 

 

 

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: 

Note:  While the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island in August 1921, Franklin fell ill. His main symptoms were fever; symmetric, ascending paralysis; facial paralysis; bowel and bladder dysfunction; numbness and hyperesthesia; and a descending pattern of recovery. Roosevelt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down and was diagnosed with polio.  Historians have noted in a 2003 study that Roosevelt probably suffered from Guillain-Barre syndrome, not polio. 

Pg. 171f:  Warm Springs, Georgia.  In 1926 FDR invested $200,000 (roughly two-thirds of his fortune) to buy the hotel, the springs, and the cottages along with twelve hundred acres of land at Warm Springs Georgia to develop a facility for the treatment of people, like himself, that had polio.

Pg. 293:  At the end of Roosevelt’s first 100 days before Congress adjourned, fifteen major pieces of legislation had been passed and signed into law.  Billions of dollars were appropriated to undertake massive public works, provide direct work relief, ease mortgage distress, safeguard investors, guarantee bank deposits, ensure decent wages, provide collective bargaining, raise agricultural prices, and generate public power. 

Pg. 303:  Legislation to regulate the banking community was finally signed into law on Day ninety-nine of the hundred days.  The Glass-Stegall Act offered reforms to check the signal abuses contributing to the banking crisis.  Roosevelt believed a crisis had arisen when banks were unable to meet withdrawal demands because they had used depositor funds to speculate in an overheated stock market.  The new bill required banks to make a choice.  They could pursue either commercial activities or investment banking, but henceforth, they were forbidden to do both.  An amendment added an insurance premium on banks to guarantee deposits up to a certain limit.  (Thus FDIC passed in spite of FDR’s strong objection).

Pg. 363: Six years before FDR’s death he bequeathed his papers to the government and pledged part of his Hyde Park estate for the building of a library and museum, a formal act that initiated the system of presidential libraries. 

 

  LYNDON JOHNSON

Pg. 197:  When Democrats, by a single vote, gained a majority in the upper chamber in 1955, the forty-six-year-old Lyndon Johnson was elected the youngest majority leader in the history of the Senate.

Pg. 308:  As soon as Johnson became president he stated to his aides that he was going to get Kennedy’s progressive legislation quickly passed.  He would get Kennedy’s tax cut out of the Senate Finance Committee.  Then he would get Kennedy’s civil rights bill passed.  After that he would pass legislation that allows everyone anywhere in the country to vote.  Then he would provide loans to any person wanting to further their education.  And he did it all.

Pg. 340:  Johnson never recognized that the war in Vietnam was a civil war.  However, his effort to negotiate a settlement may have worked.  Except: (Nixon sabotaged the 1968 negotiations by secretly telling the South they would get a better deal from him—this is not in this book:  Link).

Johnson negatively employed all the skills he had utilized to construct the Great Society when dealing with Vietnam to conceal the full extent and nature of the war from the American people.  To avoid a dramatic announcement of the need for more men, he increased draft calls and extended enlistments rather than mobilize the reserves.