A Cry for Leadership

By LANCE MORROW

Five years ago, on the eve of President Richard Nixon's resignation, TIME published a 38-page Special Section on leadership. The world's problems, TIME said, often seemed to be overwhelming the capacity of leaders to deal with them. For its special section, TIME assembled a list of 200 young (45 or under) Americans who already were having a positive impact upon society and who might play pivotal roles in the nation's future. Today, the issue of leadership is more acute than ever. As Jimmy Carter struggles to rally a nation troubled by recession, inflation and the energy shortage, TIME again examines the problems of leaders--and followers. In these pages, an introductory essay analyzes the state of the art that Harry Truman defined as "the ability to get men to do what they don't want to do, and like it." In succeeding stories 24 prominent Americans select the leaders now living who they believe have contributed most to the nation, and there is a review of what has happened to the 200 TIME leaders of 1974. Finally, TIME surveys the nation for promising talent and proposes 50 new faces for the future.

Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command...

--Ortega y Gasset

The season had begun to feel like the summer of 1914, the world's prospects suddenly darkening. The industrial West read OPEC'S price lists and had premonitions of its own decline. Jimmy Carter conceded that a recession was settling in; more apocalyptic imaginations foretold worldwide depression. In the U.S., motorists formed predawn gas lines, like clients at methadone clinics, to await the fuel that had so abruptly become precious. Americans could idle there and wonder if their houses would freeze in the winter, when the last heating oil guttered out of their tanks. Raised on a gospel of infinite resources, they bitterly blamed conspiracies: Arabs, oil companies, middlemen. They also gave Jimmy Carter the second lowest rating of presidential approval in the history of American polltaking.*

The judgment was unfair, in one sense. The problem of leadership in the U.S. goes far beyond the Oval Office, stultifying progress at every level of American society. But Carter was the man at the top, where he had so desperately wanted to be, and Americans were blaming him now for the exhaustion of oilfields, the greed of Arabs and their own insatiability; they were blaming him for much more history than he should be held accountable for. Still, they were right to judge Carter harshly as a leader. In fact, he seems to have judged himself just as severely, as he suggested in his address to the nation after Camp David.

All of the President's frantic exertions since then have represented, among other things, an implicit confession of his own failures as a leader. He seems to have grasped the shortcomings of the Carter Administration as clearly as anyone, although the methods he has used to correct them have seemed at times peculiar and erratic.

In a strange, transitional moment, when the nation is tensely suspended, awaiting its problematic future, Carter has often seemed an inadequate and dispiriting figure. As much as any time since World War II, the occasion has called for leadership. It was said of Napoleon that he "could look upon a battle scene of unimaginable disorder and see its coherence for his own advantage." In the first 30 months of his presidency, Carter has appeared able to see only unimaginable disorder, which until recently tended to send him niggling after details.

Despite his admirable efforts in the Middle East, on the Panama Canal, in the SALT negotiations, in human rights, Carter has not been able to find within himself the passion, the spiritual heat, to inspire. He still gazes out upon his fractious and occasionally ungovernable countrymen with wondering ice-blue eyes too often predisposed to see the small picture.

If his admirers are right when they detect in Carter an honest, decent, compassionate man, his critics may also be correct in thinking him somehow fatally limited. Even a sympathetic observer like Massachusetts Congressman Robert Drinan remarks: "There is something missing in Carter, something intangible." Says Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the N.A.A.C.P.: "I like Mr. Carter. I respect him.

But in all honesty, when he walks into a room, it doesn't light up."

Like far too many figures of authority in Washington and elsewhere, Carter utterly lacks the sheer exuberance of power. Of course it is one of the perversities of Americans that they always want what they do not have: a moral President when they have an immoral one; a cunningly, enthusiastically and effectively amoral President when they have a moral one. Thus, in Carter's reign, there has developed a rather strange and selective nostalgia for the wheeler-dealer manipulations of Lyndon Johnson, and even, here and there, for the darkling touch of Richard Nixon. But when Americans thought that they detected something of that familiar Milhousian style in the Carter loyalty tests and Cabinet firings, they were not so sure that that was what they wanted after all. Effective leadership often requires a subtle exercise of power that Carter and his Georgians have had difficulty mastering.

In some ways, the President is symptomatic of the political age. The procession of candidates now forming to challenge Carter in the 1980 election reflects fundamental problems of leadership. The two who display some size and fire, John Connally and Ted Kennedy (who is resolutely undeclared but watching with interest), come with reputations shadowed by their pasts. California Governor Jerry Brown, with his sleek vocabularies of "planetary realism," sounds like an item from The Whole Earth Catalog. Brown possesses a disco Jesuit allure and what seems to be a gut instinct for the politics of the future, but has far to go before he persuades the nation he is anything but a welterweight opportunist. Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford are ambassadors from the past. Other Republicans such as Howard Baker and George Bush suffer, like the President, from an absence of stature.

In a few nations, it is true, there is firmer leadership than half a decade ago. Margaret Thatcher, Britain's new Prime Minister, has taken a decisive, confident line, though her countrymen must wait to see where it leads. Germany's Helmut Schmidt and France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing govern their countries with an effective margin of strength and popularity.

In contrast to Carter, they have the great advantage of presiding over relatively homogeneous societies, and so does Japan's Premier Masayoshi Ohira. He also profits from his country's tradition of leadership by consensus, a deeply laminated process of communality made possible by centuries of development in isolation. Various rapidly evolving societies in Asia have called forth strong, and sometimes autocratic, leadership, typified by Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. China continues to dismantle the memory of Mao under a collegial leadership, with Deng Xiaoping as the first among equals. The ruling inner circle of the Soviet Politburo, headed by the long-ailing Leonid Brezhnev, is aging, conservative, cautious and somewhat sclerotic in its leadership.

It is a comment on the state of temporal power that the world's most impressive and natural leader is the Polish Pope. By force of personality, John Paul II has asserted a moral presence--in Communist Eastern Europe, in Latin America--that revealed a hunger for more spiritually expansive leadership. The Pope's popularity obviously transcends his often conservative stands on issues like priestly celibacy and abortion, in roughly the way that Ted Kennedy's appeal as a personality is strong enough to override a liberalism that might otherwise be distasteful to some of his following.

In its Special Section on leadership five years ago, TIME said: "In the U.S. and round the world, there is a sense of diminished vision, of global problems that are overwhelming the capacity of leaders." It sometimes appears that Americans in the '70s have developed almost a psychological aversion to leading and to being led, even while they complain that no one seems in charge any more. Simultaneously, the very scarcity of leadership is used as an all-purpose excuse for lethargy and privatism. The problem is profound. It reaches from the presidency down through state and local governments to school boards and neighborhood associations. The philosopher and former longshoreman Eric Hoffer engages in cantankerous exaggeration when he says, "If you ask me, there is not a single leader on this planet." But his complaint is aimed in the right direction. The renunciation of public life and public involvement has now become so pervasive as to be alarming.

Americans have been historically disorderly in their response to leadership: a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had its counterpoint in a Whisky Rebellion in the backwoods. The nation's tradition has been a contradictory mixture of docility and revolt. But over the years, the two major political parties hammered out a discipline of power.

Today the parties seem to be approaching merely decorative or ceremonial status. In an age of direct contact through television, more and more candidates avoid party labels to function mainly as independents. Congress used to operate through party discipline enforced by powerful leaders like Sam Rayburn, who in turn responded to leads from the White House. Now Congress has become a catfight of centrifugal energies, a fractured, independent crew that in its less disciplined moments approaches the opera buffa standards of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. As never before, Congressmen have narrowed their definitions of their responsibilities: they answer to their constituencies and to their special interests. Those arrayed demands do not necessarily correspond to the national good.

Sophisticated lobbying has collaborated with an exquisitely subdivided system to subvert larger goals. "Congress is fragmented into 300 committees and subcommittees now," complains Joseph Califano, the just purged HEW Secretary. The committees almost inevitably grow into guardians of their specialties. Huge staffs, not the elected Congressmen, preside over the drafting of bills, establishing directions and priorities that should be set by leaders, not bureaucrats and clerks.

In the third branch of Government, Warren Burger's Supreme Court has avoided the hobgoblin of little minds. It has developed an almost elegant lack of judicial philosophy. This year's graven edict of the majority may turn up next year as a dissent. Observes Georgetown Law Center Professor Dennis Hutchinson: "The bar and the public are left without the ability to predict what the court will do even in similar circumstances. You don't know where you stand with this court."

Does all this mean that the talent for leadership has abruptly disappeared from the American genes? Absolutely not. The reasons for the current problems of leadership lie deeper. Societies may not always get the leadership they deserve and need, but they get a leadership that reflects the nature of the nation's power and the condition of its followers.

Most people, in some corner of their mental luggage, carry images of F.D.R., Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi, De Gaulle, Mao and other archetypes as large in memory as Easter Island moai heads.

That generation dwarfs the small and ordinary managers of today. Roosevelt and his successors could harness immense resources of economic wealth, political power and military might for the state. The New Deal, Lend-Lease, World War II mobilization, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, the building of the nuclear arsenal and the civil rights legislation of the mid-'60s--all were the work of presidential leaders who used taxation, legislation, executive orders and persuasion to enlist enormous latent resources.

Why doesn't this country have leaders like Roosevelt any more? some Americans wistfully ask. Nostalgia, of course, obscures the tremendous dissension and even hatred that were aimed at F.D.R. in the White House. Still, figures of his size may now be obsolete. The era of great individualists came to an end with Lyndon Johnson, and we are still trying to adjust to the new reality. Johnson lost two wars--the one in Viet Nam and the one against poverty; he demonstrated, among other things, that the resources of the U.S. are finite, a new and chastening realization for Americans. It was with L.B.J. that the U.S. crisis of leadership began.

It started in disillusionment with the American Dream. As Alexis de Tocqueville clairvoyantly saw in 1835, the dream always contained a dark possibility that it might eventually degenerate, in its fulfillment, into a sorry and anxiously sweating materialism, the American elect unsatisfied, wanting more and more, turning the land of plenty into the land of wretched excess.

At length, Government assumed responsibility for the dream. From Roosevelt to Johnson, Government gradually accepted the franchise for the physical, social, economic and moral welfare of the nation. But any Government that promises everything is bound to disappoint nearly everybody. Inevitably aggrieved with Government for not fulfilling its promises, the clients tend to refuse a leader the thing he needs for success--the benefit of the doubt.

There has arisen among Americans in the postwar years a sense of entitlement, an urgent belief that society and Government owe them not only something but a great deal.

It was once possible to assume a very rough underlying consensus of patriotic values among most Americans. But in the past 15 years or so, an aggressive drive to get theirs has seemed to overwhelm much of the spirit of sacrifice and duty many Americans once possessed. A self-transcending zeal, of course, is difficult to engage except in time of war. It waned in the disillusionments of the '60s and '70s: the assassinations, Viet Nam, Watergate--the public dramas that served to drive Americans deeply into their own privacy and cynicism.

If leadership in the U.S. appears confused, it is mainly because Americans have become so difficult to lead; they have become too often touchy, reluctant and irritably pessimistic. They have demonstrated a stunning lack of trust in leaders and institutions. Viet Nam and Watergate robbed the U.S. of its moral confidence: the small minority that started out protesting the war, for example, or arguing the worst about Richard Nixon seemed ultimately to be vindicated. With a suspicion that has become virtually institutionalized, Americans sometimes believe, reflexively, almost the reverse of what they are told by their officials. Says Harvard University Sociologist David Riesman: "The question is not whether leadership is obsolete but whether democracy is governable."

While millions have retreated into their private lives, they have also formed themselves into single-issue constituencies (for or against abortion, affirmative action, capital punishment, gun control, nuclear pow, the Equal Rights Amendment and so on). Armed with computer mailing lists and single-minded zeal, the moral vigilantes can range up and down the political landscape knocking off enemies. The inclination to compromise, even the talent for it, seems to be nearly extinct. Says New Jersey's freshman U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, one of TIME's 200 young leaders five years ago: "At a personal level, the fragmentation results in a me-first idea. At the government level, it amounts to special-interest group pressure, and in politics to single-interest constituencies."

Mussolini once remarked that "ruling the Italians is not difficult, it is merely useless." The day may be coming when much the same could be said about Americans. The U.S. sometimes seems to be a stalemated society, a country locked in a paralysis of contradictory claims and entitlements. The outcry of the '60s had it that the System had broken down. In many respects, the System today works entirely too well: registering and proclaiming so many grievances and demands that the ultimate effect is endless litigation, process without outcome, the overlegalization of society. A pervasive, undiscriminating effort to be fair to everyone means ultimately that it is difficult to be fair to anyone; or at any rate, that all of the controversies of the society seem to be perpetually on appeal. It becomes impossible to build a nuclear plant, for example, or to stop it. The entire nation is tied up in court.

Today's problems resist the sort of simple answers and analyses that were the work of politics two or three generations ago. Says former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis: "It is a lot tougher now to get the right information. How do you really deal with the problem of nuclear energy? Does anybody really know how safe the stuff is, and if you are not a politician who has the technical know-how, how do you get it?"

Aside from the complexity of the tasks to be done, there is a variety of other drawbacks that deflect potential leaders from involvement in public service. The prospect of having one's past and private life minutely picked over and exposed by the press keeps many away.

It is a real threat. Observes Josiah Bunting III, president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College: "Had Disraeli, F.D.R., Churchill and others been subject to the scrutiny of the press, they would not have survived. Churchill drank habitually. Gladstone would walk the streets looking for prostitutes to take home and convert."

This month, on the tenth anniversary of Chappaquiddick, some of the press was again poring over the conduct of Ted Kennedy on the night that Mary Jo Kopechne drowned--a valid question to raise, since it involves the character and stability of a man who may be President. In any case, journalists have resolved not to be fooled again by those with power as they were, say, by Nixon when he lied about the bombing of Cambodia.

The press has become so wary of being misled that it almost does not dare to be positive. Extraordinarily high, and perhaps hypocritical, standards of personal conduct are implicitly applied to public figures. Today's press would have published stories about John F. Kennedy's womanizing, on grounds of the public's right to know. (It might indeed have been harrowingly informative to know that the President shared a girlfriend, Judith Exner, with a Mafia don, Sam Giancana; the effect upon Kennedy's ability to govern would have been incalculable.) The press also applies a far higher standard of professional conduct to public officials than it once did. In that, reporters are merely imitating public prosecutors and regulatory agencies, which have become increasingly intolerant of imperfection.

But many Americans think that the press has sometimes gone too far. Says Ted Sorensen, John Kennedy's top domestic adviser: "I would hope that without abandoning its watchdog role the press would be able to place a little less emphasis on the kind of investigative journalism that seems determined to find evil, whether it is there or not."

By one of the great ironies in American history, the rising level of education in the U.S. has at once improved the talent pool from which leaders are drawn and made followers so critical that they are often impossible to lead. Says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "When the House of Representatives consisted of machine Democrats from the North and semiliterate farmers from the South, and you came to a question of foreign policy, they yearned to be led. Now you have a House where everyone is a college graduate, and most have advanced degrees. And every one of them feels superior to whoever is President." The same is true of constituents. Says New York Labor Mediator Theodore Kheel: "Now everybody knows as much as their leaders. They aren't willing to believe in 'secret plans' for ending wars or solving problems." (Once again, the almost atavistic appeal of Ted Kennedy contradicts the trend. His followers are willing to trust Kennedy in an old-fashioned way, even though they might actually disagree with his programs, or be ignorant of them.)

At the same time, the general level of critical intelligence and intense watchfulness means that leaders cannot creatively manipulate circumstances as easily, either for good or ill, as they did in the past. A political operator of genius, like Lyndon Johnson, would sink into depressed impotence under such restraints--as at last Johnson did.

Significantly, the principal movements that have emerged in the past decade have tended to coalesce around ideas, not leaders: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the fitness movement, for example. Those who participate seem to be too independent, too critical, too wary of the dangers of leadership to entrust themselves to others. The cautionary examples of cults--the followers of Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones--merely confirm the wary in their independence.

Machiavelli said that a strong leader is needed at the birth of an organization or at a time of severe crisis. "In the U.S. now," says Josiah Bunting, "there are proportionately as many Hamiltons, Jeffersons and Franklins as in 1776. But there is nothing which calls their kinds of talents and energies automatically into the public sector. They have available chairs of classics at Brown University and directorships at Gulf Oil, what have you." A Southern Governor agrees: "It was probably much easier for David Rockefeller to be chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, a powerful position in which he exercised leadership and control, than to weather the strains of public office, as did his brother Nelson."

Leadership involves combinations of the inspirational and the managerial. If it is hard to inspire people now, it is even harder to manage their problems. "There is a difference between winning an election and governing," says Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. The first black elected mayor of a major Southern city, Jackson brought a talent for improvisational politics to bear on the construction of Atlanta's new Midfield Airport terminal, which, when it opens in 1980, will be the largest air passenger building in the world. Among other things, Jackson persuaded Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge to summon Georgia Congressmen and federal, state and local officials concerned with the project to a meeting in his Washington office. There they managed to break through a jurisdictional logjam that had stalled the project in the planning stage for eleven years.

North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt succeeded in pushing through a mandatory minimal competency test for high school graduation--normally one of those awful contests between reflexive liberals, who oppose standardized testing as unfair, and the Marines of morality, who want everyone to shape up. Strongly opposed by some blacks and teachers, Hunt tried to persuade the state that he did not wish to punish anyone but simply wanted to establish some basic levels of competence in education. When simple persuasion did not work, Hunt tried traditional arm twisting: dangling teacher salary increases, calling in campaign debts. Eventually he brought it off with remarkable success both for himself and his high school seniors.

The ambitions of new leaders sometimes sink into Realpolitik. To the environmentalists' delight, Dick Lamm, Colorado's newly elected Governor, proclaimed in 1975: "I am going to drive a silver stake through the heart of Interstate 470"--a road that was to be the final link of a circumferential highway around Denver.

Lamm soon found out about the clout of the state highway commission, the citizens' associations, the building trades and local mayors looking for tax bases. What started as Lamm's crusading leadership shook down after almost two years into a political compromise: not an interstate, but a four-lane parkway, with limited interchanges. Compromise has become an increasing aspect of modern leadership.

Despite all the problems, there remains a strong optimism about leadership. Followers persist in the belief that crises produce leaders, in the way that the blitz produced Churchill. But obviously, leadership does not arise automatically, mystically, from need. The Hittites and Mayas went into crisis, and no leaders could rescue them from their extinction. The Black Death swept across the 14th century, and nobody came forward to lead men out of their chaotic misery.

Washington Political Columnist David Broder believes that "we are a nation between clarifying ideas." The endlessly westward-expanding land became a model for the ever booming industrial and technological republic. Now America must formulate a new philosophy that acknowledges the reality, even the desirability, of limitations, of more intelligent, creative, careful use of its endowment. Many believe that a new generation of leaders is now working at the next "clarifying idea." Says former U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer: "Conditions are building that will revitalize leadership. People are not willing to live endlessly with ambiguity. There is something within us that is violated by feeling that we are adrift."

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. subscribes to his historian father's theory of the cyclical rhythm of national events. "We have periods of action and passion and reform," says Schlesinger, "until the country is worn out, and then periods of passivity, negativism, quietism." The first two decades of this century were periods of action. "Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson wore the country out." Then came the relative political torpor of the '20s, followed by the fierce activity of the '30s and '40s, the quietism of the '50s, then the eruptions of the '60s and early '70s. After the introversion of the mid-and later '70s, Schlesinger believes, we may now be on the brink of an explosively creative time. Says Schlesinger: "Two things happen in periods of inactivity and negativism. The national batteries get recharged, and the problems we neglect pile up until they threaten to become unmanageable."

The problems have clearly piled up. But before a common will to tackle them can emerge, thus forming a consensus that would allow a leader to lead, the challenge must be perceived as a national crisis. World War II and the cold war were times of perceived danger. The social and economic problems confronting the nation today obviously have not yet had that galvanizing and unifying effect.

The optimistic view is that once they do, strong and basically decent leaders will emerge as they often have in the American past. But too much ardor to submit to leaders can have its dark side:

throughout history dangerous times have sometimes produced dangerous masters--men on horseback. Those now bemoaning Americans' selfishness and privatism should recall the thunderous shouts of the selfless masses who gathered with Hitler at Nuremberg in 1936:

"We want one leader! Nothing for us! Everything for Germany!"

The possibility of a dictatorial alternative does exist, especially if the huge and absurdly fragile energy supply system were to be disrupted so seriously that the nation suffered catastrophic shortages. A strong man brandishing a solution (which in the case of such disruption would probably mean military action) might look tempting. But Brandeis University Historian Jacob Cohen doubts that the U.S., even if so sorely pressed, would succumb. Says Cohen: "Our institutions are so healthy and the countervailing powers are so cunning that as soon as the man on horseback appears, he is undone. One of the ways we have averted the danger is to speak constantly about him. Aristotle's Great-Souled Leader who was greater than morality, Ahab taking the Pequod--his nation--to its destruction, Joe McCarthy and Nixon have always been among America's greatest fears, and because they are, we protect ourselves against them. If ever there was a person who aspired to the saddle, it was Richard Nixon. But Watergate shows the vengeance we take on such aspirations."

Historian James MacGregor Burns has drawn the distinction between "transforming leadership" and "transactional leadership." Transforming leaders are capable of directing people through fundamental changes of their institutions and societies. "During times when Presidents have to plan ahead and have to ask sacrifices from people instead of sim ply making promises to them," says Burns, "transforming leadership is imperative." The transactional variety of leadership is essentially managerial--competence for a quiet time.

Jimmy Carter clearly spent the first 2 1/2 years of his presidency as a transactional leader; he is now struggling to be come a transforming leader.

But transforming leadership is difficult magic to enact, especially in the U.S. The American system was deliberately designed to fragment power. The U.S. Constitution, in that sense, is an antileadership document.

The sociologist Robert Michels once proposed that democracy and leadership are simply incompatible. The constituent parts of the society tend to function against the whole. That is only natural in a pluralistic society, but when the whole becomes run down, phlegmatic, difficult to manage and, worst of all, aimless, the nation's plural interests threaten to turn into a set of internal Balkan states, into hostile tribes. Jerry Brown's father, former California Governor Pat Brown, declares bleakly:

"Everybody's against every thing, and nobody's for any thing, and as a result, government is disintegrating."

It is, of course, extremely dangerous to freedom when dissension comes to be regarded as intolerable. Democracies must work in a tension between unity and dissent, majority rule and minority rights. But some underlying consensus about common direction is necessary, and that is now difficult to locate. "The lack of leadership is effect and not cause," says Historian Eugene Genovese. "It would be very difficult to point out a set of values about which you could say that most Americans could agree. I think our society has become largely purposeless."

The task of the nation's leaders in the '80s will be to rediscover new themes of purpose in American life. History, of course, may help by assailing the serene with some of its blunt instruments. As U.A.W. President Doug Eraser says, "It is almost impossible to get movement in our society unless there is absolute crisis -- it is a crisis leadership and a crisis government."

John Kenneth Galbraith believes that "the leadership we need for the '80s is that which interprets the collective judgment.

This is the kind of leadership toward which we are moving, a leadership of relatively anonymous people. That is the kind we have in organizations now. Fifty years ago, everyone knew who was the head of Ford, IBM or General Motors. Now nobody knows; what you get is collectivity."

That prospect sounds unheroic and, in Burns' terms, transactional. A certain amount of glamour and drama will still at tend future leaders. But in the absence of war or economic col lapse, the task of leaders will require much more than style.

Through instinct, knowledge, persuasion, intelligence, craft, ex ample, patience, inspiration and compromise, they must construct a new American consensus.

* "Carter's rating in the ABC News-Louis Harris poll in mid-June was 25%. Harry Truman received 23% in the Gallup poll during the Korean War.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.