On Presidents and Leadership

I have to confess that in the last two years the Presidents Day holiday has been more important to me than ever before.  It has nothing to do with the necessity for a relaxing three-day weekend (though that’s awfully nice) and has everything to do with the ignorant Cheetoh we (or the Russians) have installed in the White House.

For all the imperfections of our past presidents, and there are many, there are also moments when our leaders have helped us to rise above our human frailties.  I teach many of them and on a day like today, so many examples come to mind.  There is Jefferson’s 1801 Inaugural address when he acknowledges the bruising partisan divide of the 1800 election and reminds the nation that we can “unite with one heart and one mind…(and)…restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.”  That Jefferson is able to bring that unity is important, both to the people in his day and to us now.

I look to the words and deeds of Abraham Lincoln in his 1861 Inaugural address, the one that famously closes with a powerful request to his fellow citizens, “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”  Despite Lincoln’s call for unity, a civil war would ultimately follow.  But even during that most bloody of conflicts, Lincoln urged us to heed our better angels as the only way forward.  In his second Inaugural address, he asked the nation to both finish the war and look forward to being truly unified.  He closed that address with powerful words,  “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

I know by heart the words of Franklin Roosevelt as he opens his 1933 Inaugural speech by reminding us that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and then closes with a powerful promise that, “For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less. We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stem performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.  We do not distrust the future of essential democracy.”  FDR wasn’t perfect but he preserved democracy in our nation and in the world; he did it while he asked us to be better.

This history matters; it must matter.  For every failing leader we have had (and Trump is not alone here), we have had leaders who have inspired us to be better.   We can be better.  On this Presidents' Day, at this moment in historical time, I need to believe in that more than ever.