Rising to the challenge

VP Harris is coming to the Berkshires tomorrow

The Paris Olympics start today and I intended to send a letter about cardboard beds and non-a/c cooling (I’m in favor). But I’ve been diverted by Kamala Harris’s campaign, especially because she is coming to the Berkshires.

Vice President Harris is not an accidental candidate. She ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and has been vice president since January 2021. But over the past month there has been a lot of talk about whether she really has the capacity to be president of the United States. Yet she was the obvious and likely successor to Joe Biden. Why would people doubt her abilities, her capacity for rising to this challenge?

This question led me back to our Encyclopedia of Leadership, published in 2004 by SAGE. Among the questions we sought to answer then was How does someone become a leader? Are great leaders are born or made?

A recent example of someone exceeding all expectations is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine. And a story came to mind, from a book I read when a neighbor urged it on me and gave me his copy.

President Harry Truman is often referred to as one of our greatest presidents but, as you’ll see from this account in Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World, there was probably no one who expected Truman to achieve anything very special:

Less than a year before, it was almost unthinkable Truman would ever be vice president, much less succeed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as commander in chief. As FDR prepared to run for a fourth term in the summer of 1944, Democratic Party leaders were looking to push Vice President Henry Wallace off the ticket. He was too intellectual, too far to the left. And with Roosevelt's health declining, they worried he might end up serving out FDR's term as president. But who should replace Wallace? In spite of his poor health, Roosevelt never imagined anyone else leading the country.

While the president let the issue drift, party leaders argued about possible candidates. There was James Byrnes, the former senator and then Supreme Court justice, whom Roosevelt persuaded to leave the Court to run the Office of War Mobilization. Truman had agreed to give a speech at the Democratic convention nominating Byrnes for vice president. Senate majority leader Alben Barkley was also running. And Wallace thought he still had the job. A Gallup poll in July 1944 found only 2 percent of voters backed Truman.

The junior senator from Missouri was likable —a smart, hardworking, gregarious sort. At five feet nine inches tall, Truman was decisive, blunt, used salty language, and thrived on the rough and tumble of politics. His career had been, to put it charitably, circuitous. Farmer, bank teller, salesman, haberdasher. (That last business ended up saddling him with serious debt.) As a young man, he was an Army artillery officer and a decorated combat veteran of World War I.

In 1922, Truman was broke and out of work. But he had served in the Army with a fellow named Jim Pendergast. And Jim's uncle was Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, who needed someone to run for Jackson County judge, essentially a county commissioner.

Pendergast was widely thought to be corrupt, and Truman was good "window dressing." He ran on a platform of honesty—he wouldn't steal any money—and he would pave local dirt roads. He won by fewer than three hundred votes. At age thirty-eight, he started a new career in politics.

His next step up the ladder was just as unlikely. In 1934, a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri came open. Boss Pendergast approached three candidates, and was turned down by all of them. Time was running out. And there was another consideration: St. Louis already had a man in the Senate. Pendergast needed a local senator to protect his Kansas City machine in the western part of the state.

When Pendergast's boys approached Truman, he immediately noted all the reasons it didn't make sense. "Nobody knows me and I haven't got any money," he said. The Pendergast team countered that they would back him—with financing and a strong organization. Truman knew that gave him a chance.

He ran on his record, mostly of paving roads. "He pulled Jackson County out of the mud," one of his teachers said. His platform was just as simple —"Back Roosevelt"—which counted for a lot, two years into the New Deal. Most of all, he had the backing of the Kansas City political machine. When he won the primary, which ensured his election in heavily Democratic Missouri, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed him as "Boss Pendergast's Errand Boy."

But he achieved some measure of attention as chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense program, known almost immediately as the Truman Committee, whose job was to look into the awarding of defense contracts.

In July 1944, he had absolutely no thought of running alongside Roosevelt. And apparently neither did FDR. The president said that month, "I hardly know Truman. He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on me." Party power brokers were making a different calculation. As they surveyed the field of potential candidates, each one had a problem. Truman's strength? To put it bluntly, Democratic leaders thought he would hurt the national ticket the least.

After the election:

Roosevelt promptly forgot about his running mate. And after their inauguration in January 1945, he kept his vice president out of high- level discussions, especially the planning and execution of America's war efforts in Europe and the Pacific.

But now it was noon on April 25 [FDR died on April 12th]. Truman was president. And Secretary of War Stimson walked into the Oval Office. He handed the president a short, typewritten memorandum and waited while Truman read it. The first sentence was a battering ram. "Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city."

Truman knew nothing about what was going on abroad, even though World War II was still being fought, and momentous decisions were ahead.

In my online foray, I discovered an entire book about vice presidents who became presidents, with a title that feels dated: Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America. And, as usual, I found some interesting discussion on Reddit, as well as a quote about another Harry:

“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.” —Albus Dumbledore in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

With hereditary rule and inheritance, especially in times of war, there were often unexpected rises to new responsibilities and social glory. This even comes up in The Claverings, an Anthony Trollope novel I reread the other day. The death of two cousins means a sudden change in prospects for a young man and his bride, and we are left to believe that they will rise to their new and grand social position, successfully:

My readers will easily understand what would be the future life of Harry Clavering and his wife after the completion of that tour in Italy, and the birth of the heir…. "Oh, yes," said Theodore Burton, in answer to some comfortable remark from his wife; "Providence has done very well for Florence. And Providence has done very well for him also;—but Providence was making a great mistake when she expected him to earn his bread."

Let me be clear, because my last tongue-in-cheek letter about Jill Biden was misunderstood. Kamala Harris is well qualified, and much more qualified and experienced than Harry Truman was when he became president. As VP, she’s been next in line to a much older man for almost 4 years. I am confident that she will rise to the challenge of the election itself, as well as the presidency.

And she’s coming to the Berkshires

The fundraising event in Pittsfield - the old industrial city that is at the center of Berkshire County, about 30 miles north of Great Barrington - was planned for the Biden-Harris campaign, with a cast including James Taylor and Yo-yo Ma (both closely connected with the Berkshires and especially Tanglewood) as well as the newsletter historian Heather Cox Richardson. To our surprise and delight, we’re now welcoming a presumed presidential candidate. According to reports, it’s still on, location to be announced. The last national politician who visited the Berkshires was apparently Hillary Clinton, when she was first lady.

A nod to James MacGregor Burns

Professor Burns (1918-2014) was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning presidential biographer and his book Leadership is still considered the seminal work in the field of leadership studies. He was a professor at Williams College, in the northern part of Berkshire County, senior editor of Berkshire Publishing’s Encyclopedia of Leadership, which we developed for SAGE. Here’s a bit from his foreword to the encyclopedia as well as a 15-minute podcast I managed to record on the telephone in 2006, when his Leadership was being published in Chinese.

The following passages are the opening and closing of his foreword to the Encyclopedia of Leadership. This, incidentally, is the first time I’ve noticed that he mentioned the article on “Green Parties,” one of the two I wrote.

The creation of an encyclopedia is a true sign of the coming of age of a new and significant field of study. The publication during the eighteenth century of France's celebrated Encyclopédie not only reflected the rise of the Enlightenment but testified to the remarkable progress of the West in a wide array of fields—and stimulated further progress. Two centuries later, at perhaps a less imposing level, this encyclopedia not only captures the vast accumulation of ideas and data on its subject—leadership—but will surely influence future work on the theory and practice of leadership.

From the earliest times, people have been entranced by stories about leaders, whether Greek city-state rulers, Roman consuls, Chinese emperors, religious potentates, military conquerors, or famous party politicos. A huge mass of empirical data has driven countless biographies and memoirs. But increasingly during the twentieth century, scholars recognized that many of the studies told us much about individual lives but far too little about the broader significance of those lives and the contextual and psychological forces shaping them. This recognition helped foster the study of leadership—the study not only of individual leaders but of followers, the analysis not only of individuals' ambitions but of the mystery and complexity of ambition itself, the exploration not only of the psychological influences affecting leaders but of the rational or irrational feelings of the "masses" as potential followers, the investigation not only of the impact of humanity's great ideas and values on leaders but in turn their validation or invalidation of those received ideas. In knitting together these multiple, interacting, and ever shifting currents, the study of leadership places individual life histories in a much broader flow of causal forces….

As you leaf through the pages of these volumes, you may spot seemingly odd entries, such as "The Beatles," "E-Commerce," "Friendship," and "Green Parties." Do not be surprised. The most remarkable aspect of the study of leadership is its sheer scope and diversity.

Leaders in today's world face enormous challenges: the rise of militant followings that often seek to displace established leadership; the intensified need for collective leadership in the face of such glob- al conditions as massive poverty; the struggle of women, minorities, and other long-suppressed people to rise to leadership positions; the heightened demand for moral, principled leadership. All these dynamic forces, both new and old, make this encyclopedia timely—and timeless. —James MacGregor Burns, Williams College

Podcast: “Revolutionary Leadership and China’s Transformations” with James MacGregor Burns.