An interview with historian Garry Wills

Why leadership' is only half the process

By JENNIFER HALPERIN

Garry Wills has contributed to the public discourse on a wide array of subjects —from Roman culture to the influence of American presidents. He has written more than a dozen books and his essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and the Atlantic Monthly. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln at Gettysburg, published in 1992. And Wills' most recent book. Certain Trumpets, examines the shared qualities of different kinds of leaders. Wills lives in Evanston and is an adjunct member of the history faculty at Northwestern University. In November, he shared with our storehouse bureau chief Jennifer Halperin some of his current thinking on leadership and on the state of political discourse.

Q: Is there any recipe for a good leader?

A: There is no formula. Leadership is a dialogue; it's one-half of the process. Followership is the other half. One can't exist without the other. A good leader is one who is able to join in that dialogue in such a way that both sides move effectively toward some goal. That's, after all, what leadership is: moving people toward a goal. The goal doesn't have to be good, by the way. You can have bad leaders; you can have Hitlers. Leadership of itself just means getting other people to move with you toward a goal.

Q: In announcing he wouldn't seek reelection, U.S. Sen. Paul Simon lamented the tendency of politicians to follow poll results. Does poll-watching bother you?

Garry Wills

A: Not at all. After all, this is a democracy. People are supposed to govern themselves, to influence the course of events. It's a very strange thing to say, "Well, we should ignore what the people think or want." That makes no sense. Now it's true that sometimes a politician has to say "no" to his or her constituents, but you can't do that very often with impunity. So a good politician normally knows how to say, "Well, no on this, but I'll give you that," or, "No, because what you really want is such and such; now let me persuade you on that."

So Lincoln, for instance, wanted to be elected senator from Illinois in 1858, and Illinois at that time was a very racist state. It had voted to allow no freed blacks into the state, and it was racist especially in the south down by Cairo and off in the southeast. So Lincoln calibrated what he had to say in those various places, and his general point that slavery should be stopped in the territory was something so important that he protected it by giving in to the polls on all kinds of other things, saying, "I'm not for black suffrage. I'm not for social equality. I'm not for intermarriage." He went through all the things that he was not in order to get to the point that he could say, "But don't you think we should stop slavery in the territory?" So he was paying very close attention to the polls. Any democratic politician has to if he or she expects to be elected or stay in office.

Leadership is an interaction of wills. What a leader has to do is take what people want and put that in a form in which they can move toward a goal

Q: Would you still consider someone a leader if his or her opinions were shaped by polls?

A: Leadership is an interaction of wills. What a leader has to do is take what people want and put that in a form in which they can move toward a goal. For instance, it's very rare that it's really certain what a vast number of people want on any one issue. Let me take an easy example. Let's say the polls say 60 percent of the people want to cut the national deficit. Well, it's very easy for somebody to get elected by saying, "I'll cut the national deficit," if that's as far as the discourse goes. But it never is, because some people want to do it by slashing the military, some want to do it by raising taxes, some want to do it by working against entitlements. It's when you get

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Q&A Interview

down to that level that a leader is somebody who can put together enough of the electorate on one or another of those issues and mute the objections of the others.

We take a narrow view of what leadership is; we think of it as only people in high political office. There's all kinds of leadership going on

A leader doesn't just come with a vision and say, "This is right; therefore, follow me." Nor on the other hand does he or she come and say, "Tell me what to do," because people tell leaders conflicting things. They have to forge a position that will appeal to the best in all and mute the worst and strike compromises and say, "I've got to oppose you on this, but I'll make it up to you by joining with you on two or three other matters that may be of less importance to you to even things out." That's the real secret of leadership. Otherwise a leader is simply a dictator — somebody with a higher vision that everybody has to kow-tow to.

Q: What effect has television had on public discourse in this country?

A: I don't think it's a simple matter of hurting or helping. It has certainly changed it; it has made it easier for parts of the electorate to make their anger felt. But we have to keep it in perspective. Historically there was at least as much vilification, but it was localized. The electorate largely had very biased newspapers to read. There was no attempt at objectivity through most of our history. For instance, when the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred, if you were not actually there you couldn't read an accurate report of those any place because the papers for Lincoln distorted what Douglas said and vice-versa. You got your information back in those days largely through party sources when there were strong parties at the local level.

The electorate was so disjointed that, for instance, [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt could run with a southerner as his running mate who was a racist. The Democrats for a long time could do that because there was not a national audience, and what was said to southern Democrats was totally different from what was being said to northern Democrats. So we shouldn't imagine that there was some "golden age" of rational electoral procedures.

Now we do have a national audience, and it's much easier to get corrections made than it was in the past. When ads are run that are false, most newspapers now have an electoral watch, which reports on that. People do see debates on television. There's no need to read a distorted report of what happened because they can watch it themselves. We have to take a long view, it seems to me. There are some things that are more insistently vile, but I think overall we've certainly never had as informed an electorate as we do now, with as many sources of information, or as much information.

Q: Is this a good development?

A: In a way, people resent it. In the past they heard just what they were told by their party, by their local organization, by their newspaper of choice. People resent being told about things that normally they screened out in the past. That's one effect of television. When you pick up a newspaper — and I've watched people do it — in the olden days certainly people turned first to the funny pages, sports or the local section and then they read the front page. People switch around, read what they want, don't even turn to pages they're not interested in.

When you look at television news you can't turn the page. You can turn the thing off, but if you're listening you get what comes up next, and you can't start with the funnies or the sports. So in the time of Vietnam or civil rights, people were exposed to reports of things that were happening in the world that they had totally blanked out before, and they came to resent having to listen to that. They'd think, "I don't want to hear America being criticized for being racist. I don't want to see American officials beating up on blacks." In part, this is the price of knowledge.

Q: But haven't we moved away from a time when more attention was focused on debate of real issues?

A: Nobody would believe the dirtiness of the campaigning that went on in the past. For instance, people are often saying, "Why can't we go back to the high times of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?" Well, they weren't so high. Both sides — including Lincoln personally — were involved in sneaking illegal voters into the state to vote. You couldn't get away with that today. Lincoln would be considered a crook, scheming to break the law. But that was just normal practice back then.

Q: What about the proliferation of talk shows in this country; how have they affected discourse?

A: A Times-Mirror poll did a survey of 50 or more talk show hosts themselves and asked them, "Are the people who call in to you average citizens?" And by a healthy majority they said, "No. They're people with a grievance. They don't reflect the broad electorate but a sector of the electorate that's very angry." And, after all, to get onto those shows you have to wait a long time, and be rebuffed a number of times. So it's not like a poll. It's not asking people what they think. These are people who want to get on to complain about something. On the other hand, the newspapers that people read in the past were usually aimed at particular parts of the electorate and you got no chance of an answer; there was no check on what they said. Today, if Rush Limbaugh tells phony stories, there are a lot of people who will point that out. You didn't even have that in the past.

Q: Is the past idealized?

A: Most people who deplore what's going on today have no realistic sense of what went on in the past. That's true in all kinds of areas, not only politics. People have an exaggerated view that the family was so stable and solid, whereas anybody who delves very far into statistics finds out how many broken marriages, higher level of alcoholism and how many drugs there were in our past. So there is no "golden age" of the past.

Q: What will future generations think of the current era?

A: I think it will be looked at as an era of great accomplishment. We take a very narrow view of what leadership is; we often think of it as only people in high political office. There's all kinds of leadership going on around us today, and the proof of it is there's immense social changes.

Overall we've never had as informed an electorate as we do now, with as many sources of information or as much information

They don't occur without some kind of leadership. Take one area: status of women. This will be seen in retrospect, I think, as the most signal accomplishment of our time, when half the human race had its talents tapped in a really broad way for the first time in Western history. It's just a different world that my daughter grew up in from the one my wife grew up in.

Now, that occurred through leadership in all kinds of areas — not only the kind of obvious feminist leadership, but leadership in business, in medicine, in law, in women who became the first judges and heads of medical schools. It's an amazing change, just astonishing because of course it affects everybody. The change in the status of women changed the relationship of woman to man, mother to child. By and large — overwhelmingly, in fact — it's a change for the good.

With all that taking place, when people look back at this point in history, they're going to be astounded.

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