Renowned historian David Hackett Fischer explored yesterday how some of the United States' most revered presidents earned the respect and appreciation of the American people through courageous leadership.
Fischer delivered a speech titled "Open Leaders: Washington, Lincoln, and FDR" at Cabot Auditorium for this semester's Richard E. Snyder President's Lecture.
Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser opened the ceremony, and then President Lawrence Bacow introduced Fischer, who is the University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. Bacow highlighted Fischer's winning of the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for the history book "Washington's Crossing."
Fischer began his talk by explaining why the leaders he would discuss are noteworthy. "The subject is leaders of a particular kind," Fischer said. "It's a question of leading free people who cannot be ordered and compelled to follow you. It's a question of leading by persuasion and conviction and example." He said leading free societies takes a degree of finesse that authoritarian heads of state need not exhibit.
"I'm going to talk today about leaders who got it right," Fischer continued. He described a tradition of open leadership that developed and thrived in America. His intention, he said, was not to celebrate each individual leader, but to "understand how they did it and how they went about this very difficult process."
According to Fischer, the most natural place to look for great leaders is the presidency. He cited three presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who are consistently listed among the best presidents in American history.
Fischer focused on these three leaders and explored the common threads between them, acknowledging that all three existed in very different environments and had different backgrounds, political affiliations and values.
"They were all men who had been severely tested in one way or another," Fischer said. "They were haunted by the troubles in their lives."
Washington had a difficult childhood and experienced many defeats at the beginning of his career; Lincoln was consumed by madness and a fear of death; and FDR suffered from the agony of polio. According to Fischer, these men were tempered and strengthened by these ordeals.
But their greatest similarity was their uncanny charisma, Fischer said. He believes that a style of open leadership and flexibility combined with a strong commitment to personal values sets these presidents apart as great.
Washington was trained in the top-down approach of military leadership and at the beginning of his tenure heading the Continental Army he found it "hugely difficult" to lead a ragtag army of diverse soldiers.
But after a string of humiliating defeats by the British, Washington approached his leadership from a new point of view. He worked with Thomas Paine to frame the revolutionary cause in an inspirational context with a written pamphlet that invigorated the soldiers. Additionally, Washington began to organize himself and his leaders in a new way, incorporating lieutenants of more diverse, and sometimes difficult to manage, personalities and backgrounds.
Furthermore, Washington changed how the Council of War was run, making it an open process in which he would pose a problem before rallying participants to a consensus. This was very different from other war councils at the time, which were shrouded in secrecy and without open participation.
Fischer also emphasized Washington's awareness of the importance of public opinion and how he worked to establish support for his cause by appealing to the people.
According to Fischer, the next 60 years of presidential leadership, from 1776 until 1836, were touched by the example of Washington. Between Presidents Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan, the presidency lost touch with Washington's open style of leadership, Fischer said. This generally resulted in failed leadership, he said.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln revived Washington's great style of leadership. "He did almost exactly the same thing that Washington did" in gathering able, but very different, people around him, Fischer said.
"Only an extraordinarily strong leader could do that," Fischer said. According to Fischer, Lincoln made first-class appointments and invited diversity, ran open cabinet meetings and was very flexible about the means he used to achieve success.
Specifically, Lincoln was amenable to mixing private and public enterprise to fund the war effort. "He was strongly engaged in bringing corporations into the war effort," Fischer said, but "he didn't hesitate to organize a public sector activity" if the private sector was paralyzed.
Lincoln was a man "of strong purposes but not of an ideology," Fischer said. Lincoln based his political actions on the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, the Golden Rule and his belief in the union.
Fischer added that Lincoln's model of leadership deeply affected the presidency for the next 60 years. But between 1920 and 1933, America's leaders had once again lost touch with the tradition of open control.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt "reinvents this system for a very different sort of world," Fischer said. Similarly to Washington and Lincoln, Roosevelt "had intelligence of a different kind," Fischer said. "He read people the way other people read books."
Furthermore, he was an intent listener who based his goals on his career, not on ideologies.
"His purpose was to rebuild the institutions of this troubled country in a way that would serve those purposes of applying ideas of free, fair and decent," Fischer said. Roosevelt was deeply interested in public opinion, and continued Washington and Lincoln's practice of reaching out to the public.
Roosevelt utilized airplanes and the radio to broaden his connection to everyday Americans. According to Fischer, Roosevelt was also "very flexible in his policies within these fixed ideas of 'free, fair and decent,'" and of moving between the public and the private sector.
"It was a model that ran up till 1992," Fischer said, and he thinks that leaders today have once again lost touch with the open tradition.
Fischer did not gloss over the many failures of all three leaders, explaining that despite the effectiveness of their open systems of governance, these sometimes broke down. This caused leaders to act in ways that they otherwise would not have.
Fischer concluded by describing the two jobs facing today's Americans. One, he said, is to choose presidents, and the other is to lead ourselves. "People are developing new and open styles of leadership" in almost every sector of American society, he said.
During the question-and-answer session that followed the lecture, Fischer expressed his optimism that all three major candidates of the 2008 presidential election would exhibit an open style of leadership.
"Wherever we look, we find the same thing happening in almost every sector of American society, perhaps with one exception - at the top, where things do not seem to be opening in quite the same way," Fischer said of current efforts to once again redefine successful leadership.
