Our Views: Two theories of leadership
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In the middle of World War II, the British Foreign Office sent the celebrated Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin to Washington, D.C., on a special assignment. His mission: to size up the state of wartime America and make a report to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Berlin never met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his mission, but for Berlin, the president was central to the success of America’s recovery from economic troubles abroad and military peril abroad.
Or so Berlin recalled in “The Natural,” a profile of Roosevelt published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955 and just reprinted in “The American Idea,” a compilation of the magazine’s best writing.
Roosevelt has renewed currency these days as the United States faces its worst economic decline since the Great Depression and military troubles abroad. Some have suggested that President-elect Barack Obama should look to Roosevelt as a model.
Berlin concluded that there are two types of leaders. The first type has a powerful vision largely unswayed by political winds, a kind of resolve that allows him to “bend events and men to his own fixed pattern.” The other type of leader “is a naturally political being,” said Berlin. “Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends; which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought or introverted feeling, but represent the crystallization of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking in some dim, inarticulate, but nevertheless persistent fashion.”
Berlin, a great admirer of FDR, placed him in this latter category and he mentioned that one type of leader can be just as successful as the other one, depending on what the times require.
Obama, like the leaders in this latter category, seems to lead by sensing the political currents and using them to his advantage, rather than, to paraphrase Berlin, bending events to his own fixed pattern.
But all comparisons to FDR must be qualified, of course. Roosevelt was a political genius who steered the country through The Great Depression and World War II. Would Obama perform as well against equal obstacles?
We hope the problems facing Obama won’t be that massive.
Berlin never met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his mission, but for Berlin, the president was central to the success of America’s recovery from economic troubles abroad and military peril abroad.
Or so Berlin recalled in “The Natural,” a profile of Roosevelt published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955 and just reprinted in “The American Idea,” a compilation of the magazine’s best writing.
Roosevelt has renewed currency these days as the United States faces its worst economic decline since the Great Depression and military troubles abroad. Some have suggested that President-elect Barack Obama should look to Roosevelt as a model.
Berlin concluded that there are two types of leaders. The first type has a powerful vision largely unswayed by political winds, a kind of resolve that allows him to “bend events and men to his own fixed pattern.” The other type of leader “is a naturally political being,” said Berlin. “Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends; which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought or introverted feeling, but represent the crystallization of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking in some dim, inarticulate, but nevertheless persistent fashion.”
Berlin, a great admirer of FDR, placed him in this latter category and he mentioned that one type of leader can be just as successful as the other one, depending on what the times require.
Obama, like the leaders in this latter category, seems to lead by sensing the political currents and using them to his advantage, rather than, to paraphrase Berlin, bending events to his own fixed pattern.
But all comparisons to FDR must be qualified, of course. Roosevelt was a political genius who steered the country through The Great Depression and World War II. Would Obama perform as well against equal obstacles?
We hope the problems facing Obama won’t be that massive.
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