Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018) by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the most distinguished presidential historians of the past fifty years. Her extended profiles of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson have all been best sellers; some have even won the Pulitzer Prize. In “Leadership in Turbulent Times” (2018), Goodwin seems to traverse from the Harvard history department to Harvard Business School as she seeks to extract timeless leadership lessons from her executive fearsome foursome. In the end, I found “Leadership” to be a fun and easy read, but hardly insightful or transformational.

To begin, Goodwin argues that each future president was glaringly ambitious from a young age and confronted a grave personal crisis early in life that molded their temperament and future leadership style. For Lincoln it was the crippling mental depression of his 30s, a mental health collapse so severe his friends felt compelled to remove all sharp objects from his room. (To this day It is unclear what triggered Lincoln’s depressive episode.) Teddy Roosevelt lost his beloved mother and young wife on the same day in the same home on February 14, 1884. Franklin Roosevelt, fresh off his losing but invigorating campaign for vice president on the Democratic ticket with James Cox of Ohio, battled for his life against polio in the summer of 1921. For Lyndon Johnson it was his razor thin loss for a senate seat in Texas in 1941. This basic but well-written background information on the four subjects covers well over half the book.

Next, Goodwin uses one specific event from each man’s administration to highlight their leadership lessons. The author doesn’t strive to keep her lists neat and tidy. For instance, in looking at Lincoln’s leadership in announcing the highly controversial Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Goodwin highlights no less than seventeen specific lessons. Teddy Roosevelt’s leadership throughout the 1902 anthracite coal strike garnered nineteen noteworthy lessons from the author. Franklin Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days gathers sixteen lessons, while Lyndon Johnson’s fight for civil rights in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination nets eighteen. All told, “Leadership in Turbulent Times” captures an astonishing seventy distinct leadership lessons. I suppose no reader can complain about not getting their money’s worth of leadership lessons.

Goodwin is a great storyteller and each case study presented in “Leadership” is fast-paced and satisfying. Here are my favorite lessons from each. For Lincoln, it was his extreme self-confidence that impressed me most. He lacked formal education, good looks, and style, but he more than made up for it in character, patience, humility and empathy. Lincoln surrounded himself with a “team of rivals” – bitter political opponents that looked down upon the 16th president as an ignorant prairie baboon. Lincoln was able to “transcend personal vendettas” in the pursuit of a noble cause. “For Lincoln,” Goodwin writes, “pragmatic, transactional strategies provided the nuts and bolts of principled, transformational leadership.”

One of the key breakthroughs in the 1902 coal strike came when Teddy Roosevelt agreed to perform a bit of political legerdemain or what the author calls “Find ways to save face.” The coal mine owners steadfastly refused to accept any proposal put forward by John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers, including the rather reasonable idea of having the ongoing dispute mediated by a panel of independent experts. To break the impasse, Roosevelt convinced the owners to make the suggestion for the panel themselves and, somewhat surprisingly, they accepted. The five member panel was to be made up of a military officer, a mining engineer, a Pennsylvania judge, a businessman familiar with the coal industry, and an eminent sociologist. Once again the mine owners refused to have any labor representation on the panel, which Mitchell considered a must. However, the president was able to get the intractable capitalists to accept E.E. Clark, head of the Order of Railway Conductors, to the panel, but as an “eminent sociologist” and not a labor leader. The strike was peacefully concluded after 167 days. The miners received a retroactive 10 percent pay increase and a one-hour reduction to a nine-hour workday. Their union, however, was not formally recognized by the owners. Goodwin says Roosevelt’s performance marked “the dawn of a new era.” Gone was the long-established precedence of federal non-interference in disputes between management and labor. The new Roosevelt administration had found its cause: “to restrain the rampant consolidation of corporate wealth that had developed in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.”

The famed Hundred Days of 1933 is the focus of Goodwin’s third leadership profile. “The steps Roosevelt took during [the Hundred Days] to stem the immediate banking crisis set in motion a turnaround that would forever alter the relationship between the government and the people,” Goodwin says. Roosevelt affected this change mainly by speaking frankly and simply about the crisis and its proposed remediation. “With simple, plain language devoid of metaphors or eloquence,” Goodwin writes, “Roosevelt had accomplished his purpose of explanation and persuasion.” But perhaps most important of all, FDR was always open to adapting to circumstances and changing course quickly when necessary, a feature unnatural to large-scale government. “Nothing was set in stone,” the author says. “Nothing was final.”

Lyndon Johnson is sort of the odd man out in Goodwin’s presidential quintuplet, the one man whose historical legacy lags far behind the others, thanks mainly to the quagmire in Vietnam. The author served as an aide to Johnson in the final years of his administration and during his brief retirement in Texas. She is clearly heartbroken that her former boss’s landmark achievements around civil rights and social justice have been overshadowed by the tragedy of Vietnam. Johnson was a gifted legislator and was a genius when it came to successfully navigating controversial bills through the political minefields on Capitol Hill. Goodwin credits Johnson with seizing the moment to pass groundbreaking legislation when he had the chance. In short, Johnson planned to turn “the dead man’s program into a martyr’s cause.” Within three months of Kenedy’s assassination Johnson had managed to pass the late president’s tax cuts. Six months after that Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Johnson’s gargantuan ambition, driving temperament, and unique legislative experience all converged to make the most of this rare moment of opportunity,” Goodwin writes.

In closing, “Leadership” is a crisp and often delightful read, but nothing about Goodwin’s four leadership vignettes is particularly novel or inspiring. I suspect this book will be more satisfying to history buffs than management gurus.