But Americans love leadership. We are forever giving people awards for being leaders (even better if they’re “young leaders”); we love saying that someone has “assumed a leadership role.” The political-science canon is full of learned books on leadership, and now Garry Wills. prolific and limpid chronicler of the ties that bind the past to modern times, has added to it. He shouldn’t have bothered.
Wills starts Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (336 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23) with an insight that, unfortunately he never develops-that leaders need followers. “We have thousands of books on leadership,” writes Wills, “none on followership.” Pursue that thought, and we might have got an interesting work; instead Wills gives the reader 16 profiles, each one meant to exemplify a particular type of leadership, and each contrasted with an “antitype.” So Eleanor Roosevelt (a “reform leader”) is contrasted with Nancy Reagan; Martha Graham (an “artistic leader”) is contrasted with Madonna; you get the picture. Some of the profiles are full of detail whose relevance is obscure. Pope John XXIII, we learn at length, had a passion for Alessandro Manzoni’s novel “I Promessi Sposi” (which Wills horribly translates as “The Plighted Couple” “,hen the book is widely known as “The Betrothed”). But the career of Ross Perot is covered in all of four pages.
In the end, the best parts of this book are on two subjects on which Wills has written better before: presidents and religion. No fewer than five of his profiles-six if you count King David-are either religious figures or those who got their inspiration from religion, and there is something unexpected in Wills’s treatment of all of them. In a chapter on Mary Baker Eddy, he shows how only a woman shut out from the opportunities of the capitalist golden age-could have both invented and systematized something like Christian Science. And his chapter on Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, is fascinating; Wills reveals, unintentionally not just admiration for a subject but adoration.
Though he considers only two presidents-FDR and George Washington-the shadow of a third, Abraham Lincoln, covers the whole book. Wills understands presidents and lets us see them in a new way; he is particularly good at placing Washington within the context of Max Weber’s discussion of societies that are shaped by laws, constitutions, bureaucratic hierarchies. But here, once more, Wills doesn’t notice how peculiar America’s attitude to its leaders is. He is quite happy to rank presidents as if they were baseball teams and notes that the ancient Greeks were forever making lists of who among their leaders was up or down. Yet you would never hear a German say, “Yes, Helmut Kohl certainly tops Adenauer, though I fancy he’s a little below Bismarck.”
Non-Americans typically think history moves because great social motors of demography, culture, technology and economics hum away. Even very sophisticated Americans like Garry Wills tend to think that epochs are shaped by “leaders,” especially the one in the White House. Perhaps, in a potentially fissiparous nation of immigrants, a secular figurehead had to be found. Whatever the reason, there’s another interesting book to be written on why Americans celebrate political leadership. Instead, like a tasting menu at a fancy restaurant, “Certain Trumpets” only gives the reader the merest hint of feasts so far uncooked.
