The True Grit of Four American Presidents

LEADERSHIP
In Turbulent Times
By Doris Kearns Goodwin

“The story of Theodore Roosevelt is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.” In her new book, “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” the acclaimed presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes this line from “The Boys’ Life of Theodore Roosevelt,” a 1918 volume by Hermann Hagedorn, one of Roosevelt’s earliest (and most sycophantic) biographers. By regaling young readers with stirring tales of the beloved president’s exploits, Hagedorn aimed not simply to burnish his hero’s reputation but also to forge the next generation of virtuous leaders, who might draw inspiration, as Roosevelt had, from the lives they encountered in books. In a sense, this is also Goodwin’s aim: to purvey moral instruction and even practical guidance to aspiring leaders through the stories of four exceptional American presidents.

Written in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin’s books surefire best sellers, “Leadership: In Turbulent Times” recounts the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The prolific Goodwin has already produced full-length studies of each of these men, starting with “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream” (1976) and continuing through “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” (1994), “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (2005) and “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” (2013). But in her new book she forsakes the strict confines of biography for the brave new world of leadership studies. A booming field of scholarship — or, traditionalists would say, pseudoscholarship — leadership studies is usually taught in schools of business or public administration, geared toward would-be or midcareer executives and often focused on imparting useful lessons to apply in the workplace. Accordingly, much more than in her narrative histories, Goodwin here explicitly takes up the formation of her subjects’ characters and how their most notable qualities equipped them to lead the country during trying times.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/books/review/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership.html?