WHERE HAVE ALL OUR LEADERS GONE?

WHERE HAVE ALL OUR LEADERS GONE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2010

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Some sixty-five years ago, a great war ended. It was World War Two. It was a defining moment for my generation and the crux of my memoir as a novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).

We have mainly stepped off stage with our children and grandchildren taking our place. If the reader's experience has been anything like mine, a disconnect has occurred between generations. Books have been devoted to the subject, which I’ve addressed if obliquely on a number of occasions.

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My children and their children seem to have little sense of what it was like sixty-five years ago. They don’t want their father or grandfather to pontificate about those earlier times, nor are they likely to read THE GREATEST GENERATION (1998) by Tom Brokaw.

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My interest in history has to do with leadership, or the absence of it. I’ve stated in my writing how leaderless leadership and dissonance has filled the void with such disclaimers as,

“We have lost our centers, misplaced our moral compass, and lost our way,” , and, “We have stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”

These are not popular notions. Max Hastings knows. He has written a powerful new book, WINSTON’S WAR: CHURCHILL, 1940 – 1945 (2010), showing how rare leadership is.

Churchill has always been an interest of mine. He resurfaced as I have been writing my novel about South Africa, a place I worked forty-two years ago.

Churchill was a dashing, brash journalist-soldier in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 – 1901 fought in South Africa. His granddaughter, Celia Sandys, has written about his capture and daring escape during that war in CHURCHILL: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE (2005).

You get a sense in reading the book of the young Churchill that leadership and daring are not accidental components of a person. That leadership is in bone marrow of the person's construction from the beginning.

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Hastings, from a sixty-five year perspective, manages to capture the anxiety, the uncertainty, and the chicanery that surrounded Great Britain and the world in 1940. Germany had already taken Czechoslovakia without a fight, marched through Poland, and conquered France with little resistance, leaving England alone to fight Hitler and the Nazi regime. An invasion was eminent across the narrow English Channel. Germany was a sophisticated war machine. England was not.

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A month after Churchill was made Prime Minister in May 1940 the British Expeditionary Force in France was trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. Three hundred thousand (300,000) British soldiers were pinned in along with their fighting arsenal.

Great Britain seemed doomed. This placed her independence as a nation in jeopardy. Fortunately, hundreds of Brits came across the English Channel to the rescue in boats of all description. There cannot have been a prouder day for a people than the “miracle of Dunkirk.”

If you read history of that period, you may be astounded to learn that many people with distinguished reputations were sympathizers or complicit in the Nazi scheme. Our own American hero, Charles Lindbergh, and Great Britain’s own King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, were Nazi sympathizers.

Many British industrialists, people with flexible consciences and flabby moralities, were equally ambivalent in trying to decide what side to support.

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That said few leaders in history have assumed power in such dire circumstances, as did Churchill. To wit in 1940, Great Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, had even launched a peace movement. Seventy years later, the thought of making peace with Hitler from a hopelessly weak position is too scary to contemplate.

Adding to that horrible climate was the fact that the political position of Churchill was weak. His own Conservative Party disliked and distrusted him. It saw him as something of a maverick. In the country at large, he was regarded as a mercurial aristocrat and adventurer, remembering his colossal blunder in WWI as First Lord of the Admiralty with the spectacular disaster in the Dardanelles.

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So, where was Churchill's leadership?

Hastings says his leadership rested upon his personal character and his being a passionate foe of appeasement. “He was a warrior to the roots of his soul," he notes, inspiring confidence in others with the unique strength of his will to save Great Britain from defeat at any cost.

As is often the case in a time of great challenge, there is no one else with the gumption, passion and the staying power to embrace and muddle through all the inadvertent contingencies that leadership invariably encounters.

Hastings claims Churchill was the only politician in Great Britain with the qualities necessary to win the war. He had the twin challenges of gaining the confidence of the British people, while at the same time dealing with the greatest threat to Great Britain in all her history. Hasting writes:

“His (Churchill’s) supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilize Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ was not spontaneous. It was created by rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time.”

We Americans see President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in such terms perhaps forgotting Roosevelt was reelected in 1945 on the promise not to go to war. Pearl Harbor changed all that on December 7, 1941.

Great Britain was a stone's throw from the European continent whereas the United States was separated from Europe by thousands of miles of ocean. It was Churchill that romanced Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor into the “lend lease program,” essentially financing the British war effort.

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Churchill was a leader with much in common with our Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and Churchill were literary men, both men consummate orators, both men had the pulse of their nation, and both men knew how to turn enemies into supporters (see Doris Kerns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln's cabinet, “Team of Rivals,” 2006).

Given this unique formula, what truly sets them apart is that they were able to rally support from “across the aisle,” and across the political spectrum.

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THERE ARE 100 SENATORS BUT NONE WHO WILL LEAD

Fast-forward to the United States Senate of 2010. David Broder’s column in the St. Petersburg Times (August 5, 2010) references the Senate as “the empty chamber.” It finds me recalling President Harry S. Truman calling Congress, “the do nothing Congress.”

Broder writes:

“The Senate was designed not as a representative small-d democratic body but as a deliberately minuscule assemblage, capable of taking up the most serious national challenges and dealing with them appropriately, because of the perspective and insulation provided by its lengthy terms and diverse constituencies.”

He reflects that occasionally senators have risen above partisanship and parochial interests by “summoning the will to tackle overriding challenges in a way that almost shamed their colleagues out of their small-mindedness." Churchill and Lincoln demonstrated similar skills in doing just that.

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One wonders, however, how Churchill and Lincoln would fare today having to deal with the many forces that occupy political leaders -- from money chasing, party realignment, party hopping, to the intrusiveness of 24/7 media coverage. Clearly, politicians must sometimes feel like the deer paralyzed to move staring into the blinding headlights of overwhelming demands.

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Congress and the nation seem to go from pillar to post without an industrial policy or an energy policy.

Two days after the passage of financial reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, clearly exhausted, threw in the towel on energy legislation. Where is the leadership here?

Broder writes that Congress feels powerless to deal with climate change, immigration reform, job creation, education reform, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wild-fire management, judicial appointments and executives appointments. It is left for another day.

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Churchill and Lincoln would find this unacceptable. The blame game had no purchase with them. Unfortunately, the dearth of leadership is not limited to Congress but is a problem of corporate society. It would seem everyone is talking at the problems without doing anything about them.

So it has been with rare exception throughout history. Lincoln saved the nation. Churchill saved Great Britain. As soon as the Civil War was won, Lincoln was assassinated. As soon as World War Two was won, Churchill was relieved of being Prime Minister. Perhaps that is why leaders are so rare.

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