Roosevelt Leadership Quotes

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.

Eleanor Roosevelt commented, "Life is like a parachute jump; you've got to get it right the first time.

I represent the public, not public opinion.

When those who are responsible for the leadership of State begin to move in villainous ways; when they begin to destroy the fabric of what it is that our nation is held together with; when they violate the Constitution of our nation and begin to do things that are false to our dreams and our hopes--it is incumbent upon every citizen by right, but also by responsibility, to challenge that administration, to raise their voice in vigorous dissent and to challenge the way in which the state is doing business. And those who fail to do that, should be charged with patriotic treason!

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

feel sorry for the country, however, as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit.

If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore “the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.

It was the flexibility, the originality, and the independence of thought—combined, of course, with our vast resources—that made American business grow so rapidly. If the seeds of growth are made sterile, if men become passive followers instead of developing qualities of leadership—and courage—we may find someday that our way of life has been superseded.

The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” one Democratic speaker suspected.

Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt’s self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.

It was not only that he was a great man, but, oh, there was such fun in being led by him.

Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life.

if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he liked to say, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

Both Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Howe recognized from the outset that Franklins spirit would be destroyed if his political ambitions were throttled. If he didn’t have political hope; he would die spiritually, intellectually and in his personality.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.” Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

No one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambas-sadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state- condoned violence. Hitler’s brown- shirted paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild, arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fi fty of these so- called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in “protective custody”— Schutzhaft—a risible euphemism. An esti-mated fi ve hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock drownings and hangings,” according to a police affi davit. One prison near Tempelhof Airport became especially no-torious: Columbia House, not to be confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called Columbus House. The up-heaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been crossed.

Weakness is still what I see: weakness in the sense of a great gap between what is expected of a man (or someday woman) and assured capacity to carry through. Expectations arise and clerkly tasks increase, while prospects for sustained support from any quarter worsen as foreign alliances loosen and political parties wane.

With “not the slightest sign of an end to the strike,” Roosevelt readied a second plan—the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union.

You will also notice a profound pattern of character traits that take hold early in his life, but later these traits get tempered by tragedy and introspection as Roosevelt learned how to shape events, interpret people, and humble himself. It is clear that Roosevelt was not born the right person for the times but assiduously cultivated the opportunity to become its spokesman. He learned how to lead the individual, which allowed him to lead the country.

Throughout his political career, Roosevelt’s conception of leadership had been built upon a narrative of the embattled hero (armed with courage, spunk, honor, and truth) who sets out into the world to prove himself. It was a dragon-slaying notion of the hero-leader, and Roosevelt had the good fortune to strike the historical moment in which he could prove his mettle. Under the banner of “the Square Deal,” he would lead his country in a different kind of war, a progressive battle designed to restore fairness to America’s economic and social life.

The breadth of his 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 classes.

Other disappointments went unlisted. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had been effusive in his praise at Casablanca, and Eisenhower felt unappreciated. “His work and leadership had been taken rather for granted,” Butcher wrote on January 17. The “absence of clear-cut words of thanks from the president or prime minister showed that they had their noses to the political winds.” Harry Hopkins told Butcher at Casablanca that taking Tunisia would prove Eisenhower “one of the world’s greatest generals,” but without such a victory his fate was uncertain. “Such is the life of generals,” Butcher mused.

What had become of the singular ascending ambition that had driven young Roosevelt from his earliest days? What explains his willingness, against the counsel of his most trusted friends, to accept seemingly low-level jobs that traced neither a clear-cut nor a reliably ascending career path? The answer lies in probing what Roosevelt gleaned from his crucible experience. His expectation of and belief in a smooth, upward trajectory, either in life or in politics, was gone forever. He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.” Thereafter, he would jettison long-term career calculations and focus simply on whatever job opportunity came his way, assuming it might be his last. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” he liked to say. In a very real way, Roosevelt had come to see political life as a succession of crucibles—good or bad—able to crush or elevate. He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. “No other nation,” he wrote in Diplomacy, “has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism.” Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.

You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.

A week before the election Roosevelt had sufficiently recovered to deliver his final speech of the campaign at Carnegie Hall. In contrast to the caustic tone toward opponents that had marked his campaign, he now focused solely on the principles for which the Progressive Party stood. He believed, he told his spellbound audience, that “perhaps once in a generation” the time comes for the people to enter the battle for social justice. If the continuing problems created by the Industrial Age were not addressed, he warned, the country would eventually be “sundered by those dreadful lines of division” that set “the haves” and the “have-nots” against one another. “Win or lose I am glad beyond measure that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent.

In the incongruous role of the insurgent party-builder, he made crystal clear the whole host of inferences we have drawn from the experiences of Monroe and Polk: that innovation, however orthodox, is inherently destabilizing; that the purely constructive leadership project is an illusion; that the affiliated leader cannot assume independent ground without ultimately embracing the role of the heretic; that the only way ever to be president in your own right is to become yourself a great repudiator and set yourself directly against the bulwark of received power; that political disruption parallels presidential significance. Roosevelt's insight was not simply that new achievements do not rest securely on old foundations, but that to save the handiwork of his presidency he would have to reconstruct its political base.

The real things of life were getting a grip on him more and more,” Jacob Riis observed. In an essay on “fellow-feeling,” written a decade and a half later, Roosevelt maintained that empathy, like courage, could be acquired over time. “A man who conscientiously endeavors to throw in his lot with those about him, to make his interest theirs, to put himself in a position where he and they have a common object, will at first feel a little self-conscious, will realize too plainly his aims. But with exercise this will pass off. He will speedily find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to stimulate was really existent, though latent, and is capable of a very healthy growth.” Indeed, he argued that a “very large part of the rancor of political and social strife” springs from the fact that different classes or sections “are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.

We no longer have merely domestic issues. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the question I am asked everywhere in the world: “We hear you Americans pay to keep land out of production because there is too much to eat. Is there no better way to use your ability to produce food than to get rid of it?” This is a home question; it is literally of vital moment to the millions of starving in the world who look to us. I do not see how we can retain world leadership and yet continue to handle our problems as though they concerned us alone; they concern the world. We feel that a surplus of food is only an embarrassment. We solve it as though only we were concerned. But think of the hungry people and their bitterness as the food that could save their lives is plowed under. To say they think it highly unfair is to put it mildly. We have never put our best brains to work on the ways we can produce to the maximum, give our farmers a better income, and still employ our surpluses in a way to solve the pressing needs of the world, without upsetting our economy or that of friendly nations who might fear we were giving food to markets they are accustomed to selling to.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

nullified their citizenship, and forbidden intermarriage with Aryans. By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh’s was a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of a sizable audience during the country’s hard times. It was in November 1938—the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of Europe in eighteen centuries—that the worst pogrom in modern history, Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all across Germany: synagogues incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed, and, throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands forcibly taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When it was suggested to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented savagery, perpetrated by a state on its own native-born, he might consider returning the gold cross decorated with four swastikas bestowed on him in behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he declined on the grounds that for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of the German Eagle would constitute “an unnecessary insult” to the Nazi leadership. Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate—just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love—and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in

Hoover was deeply respected by both parties. In 1928, the Republicans nominated him for president. In his acceptance speech, delivered at the height of prosperity, Hoover proclaimed that Americans were “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” His profound belief in individualism, voluntarism, and the fundamental strength of the American economy blinded him from realizing, until too late, that government had to exert a primary role in helping people through what was fast becoming the worst Depression the country had ever known. At the slightest uptick in the stock market, Hoover believed and summarily proclaimed that the worst was over. When the economy continued to flounder, he came under blistering assault. Still, he would not admit that voluntary activities had failed. He adopted a bunker mentality, refusing to countenance the worsening situation. By contrast, Roosevelt had adapted all his life to changing circumstances. The routine of his placid childhood had been disrupted forever by his father’s heart attack and eventual death. Told he would never walk again, he had experimented with one method after another to improve his mobility. So now, as Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency, he built on his own long encounter with adversity: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

There is a persistent theory, held by those who prate most steadily about "the American way of life" that the average American is a rugged individualist to whom the whole conception of "leadership" is something foreign and distasteful—and this theory would certainly seem to be in accord with our national tradition of lawlessness and disrespect for authority. But it is not entirely consistent with the facts. We Americans are inveterate hero worshipers, to a far greater extent than are the British and the French. We like to personalize our loyalties, our causes. In our political or business or labor organizations, we are comforted by the knowledge that at the top is a Big Boss whom we are free to revere or to hate and upon whom we can depend for quick decisions when the going gets tough. The same is true of our Boy Scout troops and our criminal gangs. It is most conspicuously true of our passion for competitive sport. We are trained from childhood to look to the coach for authority in emergencies. The masterminding coach who can send in substitutes with instructions whenever he feels like it—or even send in an entirely new team—is a purely American phenomenon. In British football the team must play through the game with the same eleven men with which it started and with no orders from the sidelines; if a man is injured and forced to leave the field the team goes on playing with only ten men. In British sport, there are no Knute Rocknes or Connie Macks, whereas in American sport the mastermind is considered as an essential in the relentless pursuit of superiority.

America capital has taken up this easy banner of world disorder and we are simply the poor willing fools that follow on behind. We are expected and asked to beat the Russians to death, and yet we are the ultimate victims ourselves: we socialists, we democrats, we progressives, we liberals, we republicans. Though it isn't the private crusade of America, American capital is conducting it, financing it, directing it, and using it, because America to-day is in the hands of violent expansionists, imperialists, capitalists, fascists—call them what you like. They believe the world is theirs, with their atom bomb and their sickening dollars. They are men who have seized America from the feeble hands of a frightened man, and through him they are directing a brazen attack upon the common liberties of all men. With our Imperialists they ask the world to stop Russia! Stop Russia for what?...So that American capital can extend its economic and political dominion over this entire universe, even to the poles! Like our own--these American imperialists are terrified of any movement for social and economic freedom because their Imperialism cannot exist in a better world and they know it. It cannot exist while Russia remains an example in social ownership and social courage. If we ever looked to America for leadership in human affairs, we may have looked to the late President Roosevelt, but these men are not Roosevelt men. Roosevelt's men have gone. Instead we have the new men of America. The men of capital representation, of military ambition, of political threat, of economic force. These are the men we are expected to follow in this great campaign against Russia. But it isn't only Russia that they attack. Their war is upon a world of resisting people who seek self-determination and some ultimate, simple, liberty. Their war is upon every progressive citizen, particularly those desperate partisans who fight for their liberty in America itself. Already the American schemers have the world by the throat. This very nation they have buttered with their silver dollars, saving us from the sins of all-out Socialism. Our entire economy to-day is primed and based on the American loan. What more dominion could one nation have over another?

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. “When you’re in politics you have to play the game,” he told a friend.

For reasons I find hard to fathom, readers with government [Harvard?] experience follow my argument more easily that do some of those for whom it remains theoretical. (xv)

and then filling the Oval Office with laughter the next. It was the only way to get through the job—to intentionally inject some fun and joy into it. But in the White House that day, my friend Bob Trono found nothing joyful or humorous about his meeting with the president. “Who’re we waitin’ on?” Bush asked, after he entered the Roosevelt Room five minutes before the scheduled start time. Someone answered that Comey was downstairs in the Situation Room. “Jim can catch up when he gets here,” Bush said. “Let’s get going.” Bob could feel the perspiration trickle down his neck. The meeting marched through the departments, as various principals gave the president their

Power I defined as personal influence of an effective sort on governmental action.

They will not be identical unless by chance: human prediction about other humans is not good enough. Why that is sometimes hard for readers inexperienced in government to see, I cannot tell (xvi).

The United States was no longer the overwhelming military power in the world, no longer sure of never losing wars. no longer confident of having learned how to maintain employment and to check inflation, no longer reveling in resource independence, technological supremacy, favorable exchange rates, and the privileged life abroad. (xiii)

In all such instances of which I am aware, the Presidents do not think hard enough, carefully enough beforehand, about foreseeable, even likely consequences to their own effectiveness in office, looking down the line and around corners (xviii).

When God puts His hand on a plain, ordinary person whom He has destined for leadership, that person is given mountain-matching abilities, whether he be a Roosevelt, a Lincoln, a Nehemiah-or a person like you or me.

Now he and other former allies, such as newspaper publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, began to question Roosevelt’s emotional stability and subsequently the leadership of Washington, who continued to remain loyal to him.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” —Theodore Roosevelt

If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.

The self-destructive nature of Clinton’s sexual addiction subverted his ability to lead. That is the distinction between Clinton and other presidents who had extramarital affairs. Well Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy all had affairs, Levin says, they differ from Clinton in that their “private indiscretions were not self-destructive and did not compromise their leadership.” Clinton’s certainly did.

The self-destructive nature of Clinton’s sexual addiction subverted his ability to lead. That is the distinction between Clinton and other presidents who had extramarital affairs. While Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy all had affairs, Levin says, they differ from Clinton in that their ‘private indiscretions were not self-destructive and did not compromise their leadership.’ Clinton’s certainly did.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” — ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Speak softly and carry a big stick . . . This way, for them to hear you, they will need to come close. That's when you hit them with the stick." ~ LJL and Teddy Roosevelt

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. Theodore Roosevelt

These were “times of stress and change,” and Roosevelt had thought much of the responsibilities of the Presidency in 1932. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick during the campaign. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington had personified the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. “Isn’t that what the office is—” he suggested, “a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct we always go back to? I stress the modern application, because we are always moving on; the technical and economic environment changes, and never so quickly as now. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are bogged up or lose our way, as we have lost it in the past decade.

To Roosevelt, faith—powerful, resilient faith—was key. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” Roosevelt said in closing his first inaugural. “The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: "He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas.

I] believe in waging relentless war on rank-growing evils of all kinds.

Theodore would follow the maxim that the leader that really mattered was the doer. In a letter regarding Ulysses S. Grant, Roosevelt stated that it was the duty of future generations to embrace “the great memory” of previous leaders “to serve forever as an example and inspiration.” But Theodore warned that “[M]ere lip-loyalty is not loyalty at all . . . the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not of words.”26

What people describe as impulsive,” a classmate clarified after seeing Roosevelt operate over time, was nothing more than “a keen power of drawing information from all sorts of questions quickly and making deductions with such rapidity as to appear to be merely acting on his impulse.”54 The odd freshman was not so much challenging professors and students, as much as he was trying to obtain information quickly and vigorously, the only way he knew how. Never forced to refine his social skills in elementary school, his bombastic and brash manners seemed accusatory. Evidently, his family members never sought to curb his overbearing ways.

At Harvard, Teedie obviously did not feel it necessary to temper his odd idiosyncrasies. He made no effort to comply with the culture of indifference prevalent in Harvard society. Instead he chose to act as he wanted to—odd, verbose, energetic, and active—regardless of the deeply rooted cultural norms that surrounded him. This trend would carry throughout his entire life.

But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character,” Roosevelt claimed as belief. “He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched.”85

Like most young men in politics, I went through various oscillations of feeling before I “found myself.” [Roosevelt later wrote] At one period I became so impressed with the virtue of complete independence that I proceeded to act on each case purely as I personally viewed it, without paying any heed to the principles and prejudices of others. The result was that I speedily and deservedly lost all power of accomplishing anything at all; and I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.108

John Hay on Lincoln: "He always worked with things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire to make them better.

knew that judges had no idea what they were deciding upon. They had not actually spent any time in the tenement housing looking the poor in the eye, smelling the stench of rotting tobacco and foul bedding. Almost a century later, in the 1970s, the business leadership saying “management by wandering around” became popular, a style of managing whereby executives walked through the workforce in an unstructured manner, just listening and interpreting. Several historians believe that it was Abraham Lincoln who first implemented the informal management style when he visited Union Army camps to inspect the troops in the early part of the Civil War. For Roosevelt, the Cigar Bill incident was a learning experience: leaders learn best by interpreting a situation firsthand.

Years later Theodore would admit to his failure. He learned, rather spectacularly, that an adaptive leader can only lead others by listening, truly listening, to understand what the followers believed at that moment in time. It cannot be done by charging ahead alone, simply espousing virtues. Once a leader knew what his followers believed—as well as their prejudices—he could empathize with them. Only then could he lead them.

John Hay indicates that dealing with people directly as a holder of political office "requires a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I possess.

righteousness of justice. “The caveat emptor side of the law, like the caveat emptor side of business, seemed to me repellent”, he claimed, “it did not make for social fair dealing.

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” -Franklin D.  Roosevelt

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated. Presidents of course can take executive actions, especially in foreign affairs, that have dramatic effects. But only sometimes, for many snags—bureaucratic inertia, the capriciousness of public opinion, partisan opposition, interest group pressures, Congress—hem in presidential designs.

This was my first real lesson in politics… If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men.

In appointing you I have only one qualification to make. Colonel Goethals here is to be chairman. He is to have complete authority. If at any time you do not agree with his policies, do not bother to tell me about it - your disagreement with him will constitute your resignation. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Popular government is unworkable except under the leadership and discipline of a strong national executive.… Any group of 500 men, whether they are called Congressmen or anything

Here I would mention Samuel P. Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, and almost any book by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (in particular his The Cycles of American History). I would also recommend Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics; Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture; and the personal book by Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education.

The twin threats of deforestation and fire prompted the private and public sectors to act. Large firms like Weyerhaeuser began fire prevention programs and invested in sustainable yield research. The federal government instituted measures to conserve the nation's forests in 1891 with passage of the Forest Reserves Act. Under the leadership of President Grover Cleveland and later President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government set aside 12.5 million acres in forest reserves in Washington, more than 25% of its total land mass.

Sometimes Roosevelt’s ambassadors and State Department advisers failed to grasp the significance of important events and sometimes they gave poor advice, but they often informed the president and helped shape his thinking. In the end, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, alone, made historic decisions about American engagement and leadership in a volatile world. As he told Wendell Willkie after the election in 1940, “Some day you may well be sitting here where I am now as president of the United States … you’ll learn what a lonely job this is.

title nor the institutional support that accompanies the position today, Harry Hopkins was America’s first national security adviser. Sometimes Roosevelt’s ambassadors and State Department advisers failed to grasp the significance of important events and sometimes they gave poor advice, but they often informed the president and helped shape his thinking. In the end, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, alone, made historic decisions about American engagement and leadership in a volatile world. As he told Wendell Willkie after the election in 1940, “Some day you may well be sitting here where I am now as president of the United States … you’ll learn what a lonely job this is.

Tremble in His midst so as to never falter in the midst of the grave responsibilities of life. Humility properly placed is the only sure foundation of leadership.

are strengthened through sibling relationships; they learn to play, bicker, fight, and play again, to accept criticism and bounce back from hurt, to tell secrets and become intimate. “If there remained in Franklin Roosevelt throughout his life,” Boettiger Jr. continued, “an insensitivity towards and discomfort with profound and vividly expressed feelings it may have been in part the lengthened shadow of his early sheltering from ugliness and jealousy and conflicting interests.

Men will thank God on their knees, a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and direction to the activities of their government, in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western World.

Lewis was interested in bringing into existence industrial unions like his own, in which he had always believed. Roosevelt was interested in bringing into American labor unions as many voters as possible and in capturing their leadership to be used to build up a powerful labor faction which could control the Democratic party and which he and his allies could control through the vast power of the government and the vast powers of the labor leaders, along with the immense financial resources that so great a labor movement would have. The Communists were interested in getting into the unions, into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution. I think we have to be fair in saying at this point that neither Roosevelt nor Lewis realized the peril to which they were exposing both the unions and the country. This thing called revolutionary propaganda and activity is something of an art in itself. It has been developed to a high degree in Europe where revolutionary groups have been active for half a century and where Communist revolutionary groups have achieved such success during the past 25 years.

He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too “careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.

Roosevelt’s leadership style was, in actuality, governed by just such a series of simple dictums and aphorisms: Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds,” Roosevelt frequently charged.

In times of great crisis, Americans have traditionally turned to their president for leadership, and they did so with Roosevelt now.

My father was the best man I ever knew,” Roosevelt later said. “He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness

I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something.

Temperament,” Richard Neustadt argues in his classic study of presidential leadership, “is the great separator.” Four days after Franklin Roosevelt took the presidential oath on March 4, 1933, he paid a call on former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was celebrating his ninety-second birthday. After Roosevelt left, Holmes famously opined: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.” Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt’s self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.

At this introductory stage of his career, Roosevelt viewed politics in a puritanical light, as an arena where good battled evil. He had seen his father’s dreams of high office undone by corruption; he had absorbed his father’s warning that the country could not much longer stand “so corrupt a government.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt,” one biographer has suggested, “is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, “need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

With the coal strike, Theodore Roosevelt had grasped the historical moment that signaled the clear emergence of a domestic purpose for his young administration—to restrain the rampant consolidation of corporate wealth that had developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The speed and size of that consolidation, Roosevelt powerfully felt, “accentuates the need of the Government having some power of supervision and regulation over such corporations.

Kaleidoscopes and pendulums—Roosevelt’s images connoted an abiding belief in the hard lesson of his crucible philosophy: All one can do is to prepare oneself, to wait in readiness for what might come.

Roosevelt’s irrepressible optimism, his tendency to expect the best outcome in any circumstance, provided the keystone strength that carried him through this traumatic experience.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days. from 1933 inaugural Address.