Lincoln: A President for the Ages, a book review by Bob Morris
Lincoln: A President for the Ages
Karl Weber, Editor and Contributor
PublicAffairs/Participant Media (2012)
Even without Spielberg’s great film with which it is associated, this book would still be a stunning achievement
Those who have already seen Steven Spielberg’s film may be surprised to learn that this “companion volume” is much less about the film’s portrayal of Lincoln than it is about the content within which Lincoln lived and worked during the last weeks of his life. The literally momentous events are viewed from several quite different perspectives in 13 chapters, the first contributed by Karl Weber who also edited the anthology of essays and selected the “Lincoln’s Words” head note section that introduces each of Chapters 2-13.
As Weber explains, the chapters “chapters produce, in a sense, a new Lincoln; yet the cumulative effect, we think, will be to deepen your understanding of and appreciation for the politic al genius, spiritual wisdom, and profound integrity of the man so many consider the greatest and most representative American.” Weber later adds, we’ve also sought to give Lincoln the opportunity to speak for himself…excerpts from Lincoln’s own writings (which you’ll notice retain the original nineteenth-century spelling, punctuation, and grammar) and enjoy the opportunity to immerse yourself, at least a while, in the spiritually and intellectually invigorating currents of Lincoln’s mind.”
I am grateful to all of the 13 contributors for increasing my appreciation as well as my understanding of Lincoln’s efforts to secure what became Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House on January 31, 1865. Lincoln died 74 days later. These are some of the questions about President Abraham Lincoln to which contributors responded:
o Karl Weber: What are the nature and extent of Lincoln’s legacy?
o Gloria Reuben: What are the unique challenges of portraying Mary Todd Lincoln in a film?
o Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Had Lincoln lived to serve out his second term, to what extent would the Reconstruction period been different?
o Jean Baker: What in fact did he think of “women’s rights”?
o Daniel Farber: What do he and Theodore Roosevelt share in common? In which ways do they differ?
o James Tackach: Had he — and not Harry Truman — made a decision about using atomic bombs, what would it have been? Why?
o Allen C. Guelzo: What would have been his opinions about global organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations?
o James Malanowski: To what extent could Lincoln be accurately characterized as an “outlaw”? Why?
o The Honorable Frank J. Williams: How would he (if president) have responded to 911 and the war on terror?
o Douglas L. Wilson: How effective was he as a communicator?
o Richard Carwardine: How would Lincoln have viewed — and interacted with — a fusion of conservative religion and conservative politics?
o “The Real Lincoln Is an Icon”: An interview/conversation in which Andrew Ferguson and Karl Weber participate
o Harold Holzer: By today’s standards, why would Lincoln be “the unlikely celebrity”?
Yes, several of the 13 contributors (e.g. Gates, Tackach, Guelzo, Williams, Carwardine, and Holzer) respond to “what if” questions about hypothetical situations but their observations are eminently plausible. Of course, Weber was well-aware this book project faced a daunting challenge: “…to offer a version of this familiar story. In an effort to meet this challenge — and to take seriously, even literally, [Edwin M.] Stanton’s encomium of Lincoln as a man who belongs to the ages” — we approached a collection of today’s most eminent historians, journalists, and students of Lincoln with a novel assignment: to offer their own best judgments, admittedly speculative but solidly in historical fact and generations of scholarship, as to how Lincoln might have responded to the political, social, economic, and military crises of times not his own.”
How well the contributors met that challenge is both obvious and compelling throughout the narrative. One man’s opinion, had neither Spielberg nor anyone else made the great firm with which this volume is associated, it would still be a stunning achievement wholly on its own merits.
McCullough is the Right Choice to Commemmorate JFK Anniversary
I am thrilled to read that David McCullough will be the featured speaker for the JFK Memorial Anniversary ceremony on November 22, 2013. This event will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fatal shooting in downtown Dallas.
McCullough has positioned himself as the premier biographer in contemporary literature. You are aware of his prolific work on John Adams and Harry Truman, but I thought that 1776 and The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris were simply over the top.
To read more about his selection as the keynote speaker, go to this link:
I have studied the JFK assassination for many years. I was 9 years old when he came to Dallas. My mother let me stay home to watch his speech on television, which, of course, he never gave. The conspiracy theories are interesting, but when you look at what we know, not what we can speculate about, there was only one killer in Dealey Plaza on November 22. The best resource for this is the amazing and comprehensive work by Vincent Bugliosi entitled Reclaiming America.
The 50th anniversary of this event will bring about many more books. Right now, at the top of the non-fiction list is Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Kennedy. How many more will we see? How many more do we need?
I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I do know this – the anniversary is not a VIP-event, but it does require a ticket. There will be only a few available. You can bet your bottom dollar that I will have one. I will be there – it will be a memory of a lifetime.
What do you think? Let’s talk about it really soon!
The Indispensable Office Stinker
Here’s a recent post by the folks the Drucker Exchange (the Dx) that hosts an ongoing conversation about bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance and build on the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. The Dx was first published as Drucker Apps in 2009 (see Dx archives). Renamed and reconfigured in October 2010, the Dx is now designed to stimulate a discussion of current events that is illuminated by Peter Drucker’s timeless teachings. It is a blog for people who want to get informed, involved and inspired to convert ideas into action.
In previous posts, I’ve expressed my opinion that so-called “indispensable” people tend to create bottlenecks. In the article that follows, we are provided with at least a partial explanation of why they can also be so “fussy, impolite or otherwise disagreeable.”
To check out the wealth of resources and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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No one likes a fussy, impolite or otherwise disagreeable coworker. But dealing with someone like that can be tricky, especially if that person excels at his or her assignment.
Michael Feuer, former CEO of OfficeMax, has published a new book called The Benevolent Dictator, which examines this and other challenges of managing people. The real conundrum, as Feuer told IndustryWeek, is when the jerks in the office “are terrific and get the job done.”
Peter Drucker had little tolerance for bad behavior at work — a subject we’ve taken up before. “Manners,” Drucker wrote, “are the ‘lubricating oil’ of an organization.”
And yet Drucker, like Feuer, also understood that successful enterprises often have to live with people’s flaws, including their personality defects. Both U.S. Army General George Marshall and former General Motors Chairman Alfred Sloan “were highly demanding men, but both knew what matters is the ability to do the assignment,” Drucker explained. “If that exists, the company can always decide the rest. If it does not exist, the rest is useless.”
One key is to structure the organization so that those who rub others the wrong way have minimal contact with their colleagues. “A good tax accountant in private practice might be greatly hampered by his inability to get along with people,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. “But in an organization such a man can be set up in an office of his own and shielded from direct contact with other people.”
This build-on-strengths approach, Drucker noted, applies all the way up to the highest levels of government or commerce. “In picking members of their cabinets, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman said, in effect, ‘Never mind the personal weaknesses. Tell me first what each of them can do,’” Drucker wrote. “It may not be coincidence that these two presidents had the strongest cabinets in 20th century U.S. history.
Joe’s Journal: On Charisma and Leadership
Joseph A. Maciariello
Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.
To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.
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“Charisma is ‘hot’ today. There is an enormous amount of talk about it, and an enormous number of books are written on the charismatic leader. But, the desire for charisma is a political death wish. No century has seen more leaders with more charisma than the 20th century, and never have political leaders done greater damage than the four giant leaders of the 20th century: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao. What matters is not charisma. What matters is whether the leader leads in the right direction or misleads. The constructive achievements of the 20th century were the work of completely uncharismatic people. The two military men who guided the Allies to victory in World War II were Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall. Both were highly disciplined, highly competent and deadly dull. Perhaps the greatest cause for hope, for optimism is that to the new majority, the knowledge workers, the old politics make no sense at all. But proven competence does.” – Peter F. Drucker
This was an important topic for Peter Drucker because of his extraordinarily negative experiences with charismatic leaders, who did what charismatic leaders are frequently prone to do — and that is to begin to believe that they’re infallible and that they know better than anybody else. This can and has lead to great harm.
Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao — especially Stalin, Hitler and Mao — were always on Drucker’s mind when he discussed the danger of charisma and when he wrote the article “Beware Charisma” (See Chapter 8, The New Realities). The problem with charisma in leadership is not charisma itself. If leaders are properly motivated to lead — that is, according to the mission of their organization, and they take on their responsibilities, not as a matter of rank or privilege, but as a matter of work and responsibility – then a charismatic dimension to one’s personality helps. Charisma can be productive. But there’s always danger lurking if charisma is not balanced.
If you go to the other side, Drucker notes that some of the most effective leaders in history, like Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln, were extraordinarily effective but were not known for their charisma. In the case of Truman, Drucker thought that he was about as charismatic as a dead mackerel. And Lincoln was an uncouth, raw-boned man from Kentucky. Drucker favored people for leadership who held socially productive missions; treated leadership as responsibility; and were able to lead effectively during turbulent times. He admired Winston Churchill who led England in World War II and who developed many able leaders.
Even good leaders with charisma face the danger of having success go to their heads. They get into situations where they tend to believe they’re infallible; they pile success upon success and think that they’re invincible. But, the best leaders serve the mission of their organization and do not seek their positions for purposes of power but for service. And they listen to others and take constructive criticism.
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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.
How to rate U.S. Presidents as leaders?
Presidential scholar Richard Norton Smith responded to that question when he spoke at a recent Wharton Leadership Conference. He offered 10 rules for presidential evaluations that stand the test of time. “There is no single rule for assessing presidential performance,” said Smith, who addressed the recent 13th Annual Wharton Leadership Conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Human Resources and the Center for Leadership & Change Management. “Eisenhower illustrates better than anyone the need for each generation to revisit its assumptions” in light of new evidence, the performance of succeeding presidents and the perspective that comes with time.
“Americans have been revising their estimates of presidents for as long as we have had presidents,” said Smith, who has published biographies of Thomas E. Dewey, Herbert Hoover and George Washington, and is the presidential scholar in residence at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. People forget that the revered Washington “was in fact an enormously controversial president” who was burned in effigy and denounced as a “betrayer of the Revolution” while he was in office. Bouts of historical revisionism and counter-revisionism explain why assessments of the nation’s leaders “bounce around like corn in a popper,” Smith said.
Smith offered his personal list of “10 rules to judge a president” as a more objective approach avoiding the distorting effects of changing societal values, such as the pro-government activism of the New Deal and the 1960s. Here is the first of the ten:
1) History rewards the risk-takers. The list of presidents and the bold initiatives that pushed them up in the rankings are obvious, including Thomas Jefferson (the Louisiana Purchase), Harry Truman (stopping Communist aggression in Korea), Lyndon Johnson (Civil Rights Act of 1964), and Richard Nixon (dialogue with Red China).
But risk taking does not always conform to our notion of a “swashbuckling, agenda-setting executive” that began with Teddy Roosevelt 100 years ago. “Sometimes, doing nothing is the most difficult form of leadership of all,” Smith said. He cited George H.W. Bush’s diplomatic refusal, despite strong pressure, to attend “the photo opp of the century,” the destruction of the Berlin Wall that symbolized Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
“By not rubbing Mikhail Gorbachev’s nose in the humiliation of the demise of the Soviet empire, he made it possible for Gorbachev to go along with a peaceful integration of Germany and for the Soviet Union to support Bush’s coalition in the First Gulf War,” Smith said, noting that few would have predicted Soviet acquiescence to these American initiatives.
To read the complete article as well as several others and to receive free e-mail updates from Knowledge@Wharton, please visit this Web site:
knowledge@wharton.upenn.edu
Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob
Q #193: Do you have any unconventional ideas about sales management?
In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.
Unexpectedly, I came upon a few while reading an interview of Daniel P. Amos who is chairman and CEO of Aflac. The interview appeared in the BusinessSunday section of The New York Times on June 28, 2009. Here’s a brief excerpt from that interview:
Initially, “I was in sales, and I was in my 20s, and we worked on all commission. If the people I managed didn’t produce, I didn’t make anything. So I figured out quickly that you had to motivate people to ultimately make money. [As to lessons learned as a young manager,] “One thing I did that was probably different: I never had a sales meeting that I didn’t either have a customer letter read or a customer there.
“In sales you get caught up in trying to tell people how they can make their quota. I always felt it was important for the fundamentals of our business that you understand why people ultimately buy. Because there’s nothing higher than a salesman’s high, and there’s nothing lower than a salesperson’s low. So, you try to level it out because you don’t want to get too high, because when they fall, they really fall.
“The other thing I did: All salesmen have quotas, and I never would give the person their quota. What I did was give them how much I wanted them to make. So I’d say, ‘I want you to make $60,000.’ They’d figure it out. But it was hilarious that when I gave it to them in the form of a compensation number, they never knew exactly what to do, because they couldn’t say, ‘No, I really don’t want to make that much.’ They don’t know how to argue when you say, ‘I want you to make more money.’”
Later during the interview, Amos suggests, “In business, you should treat your employees like they can vote.” I think I understand what he means by that: people do “vote”: in the sense that they decide whether or not to trust and respect those to whom they directly report. Throughout history, the greatest leaders are those who make the most difficult decisions and these decisions are frequently unpopular at the time when they are made. President Harry Truman made several of them. It should also be noted that he received a gift in 1945: A sign pproximately 2-1/2″ x 13″ in size and mounted on a walnut base. On one side, the words “The Buck Stops Here” and the words “I’m From Missouri” on the reverse side. The sign remained on his desk in the Oval Office until 1952 when he retired from public service.
You can read all of this interview and of several others by visiting:
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/columns/corner_office/index.html
Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob
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