On Influencing Leaders: Parents, Peers, Paragons
Winston Churchill
Howard Gardner © 2024
The Leader of the Century
At the turn of the millennium—which seems so long ago—pundits pondered who should be anointed “the person of the century.” My choice was Winston Churchill because, in my view, he had managed to save democracy in the Western world.
But Time Magazine, then the arbiter of views for the chattering class in the United States, chose Albert Einstein. I could certainly see the reason for this choice—Einstein’s theoretical work laid the groundwork for the creation of the atomic bomb, which also saved democracy from fascism. But the fact that the editor of Time Magazine, Walter Isaacson, was a biographer of Einstein may have tipped the balance.
More than once, I have claimed that Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi was the most important leader of the last 1000 years. (I deliberately limit my ambit to a single millennium because I don’t want to be seen as dismissing or downgrading Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad.) But I think that Gandhi was more exceptional for the world than either Churchill or Einstein. Indeed, his influence on individuals—notably Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela—has demonstrated the possibility of protest without violence. Indeed, no less an authority than Einstein agreed. When Gandhi was assassinated, Einstein said: “Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”
Nelson Mandela
Two Form of Leadership
In discussing such figures, we are considering leadership, a topic that I’ve long pondered. (See my 1995 book, Leading Minds and essays on the topic to appear in my forthcoming collection, The Essential Howard Gardner on Education.) I consider Churchill and Mandela to be direct leaders—typically, in positions of power, they affect others (followers) by the messages that they have created and their apparent embodiment of those messages in their own lives. Einstein (and other scientists and scholars) are better considered indirect leaders. By the words and equations that they have created, they affect others. And, of course, many leaders like Churchill, Gandhi and King have spoken and written powerful messages which go on to affect others.
A Powerful Prompt
Given these interests, I was intrigued to learn of a recent publication by British historian David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders who Shaped Him. Until now, I had thought relatively little about the individuals who had affected leaders whom I’d studied; for example, those who had influenced university president Robert Maynard Hutchins, scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, business executive Alfred Sloan, opinion leader Eleanor Roosevelt, and the aforementioned Gandhi and King. Not that I thought they had been born as leaders, but rather that I had seen them—rightly or wrongly—as developing largely on their own.
Clementine Churchill
Here, at last, in Reynolds’ book, was the opportunity to read about a dozen or so individuals who purportedly had helped to make, to mold Churchill into the amazing individual who led England, Great Britain, and much of the Western World during the challenging years of World War II.
At first blush, I was disappointed about the book. It consists of substantive chapters on leaders well known to most readers in Britain—Prime Ministers David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Clement Attlee—as well as international contemporaries of Churchill—German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Italian Prime Minister and Duce Benito Mussolini, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, American president Franklin Roosevelt, French hero Charles de Gaulle, and India’s inspirational figure Mahatma Gandhi. There are also informative chapters on individuals less known—Winston’s father Lord Randolph, who died when Winston had just turned 20, and Winston’s wife Clementine, to whom he was married for 58 years.
In these chapters, as in any good historical biography, one learns a lot about these individuals: what Churchill thought of them (and vice versa) and how they interacted in person—and, perhaps, in his mind—with Winston Churchill. Yet, I felt that I had not learned anything very significant about how Winston’s leadership gifts and achievements were actually affected in significant ways by these other individuals. Or, put differently, I was not convinced that Churchill would have been a different individual or a different leader had there been no Roosevelt, no Mussolini, no Chamberlain—the list goes on.
At this point, I can readily hear a reader of these words—which could conceivably include author David Reynolds—protest, “Howard, you are being, unfair. What about ________?” And you can fill in the blank.
But before registering this protest, please hear me out. Reynolds’ book gave me genuine insights into how Churchill became an admired and effective leader. I can summarize this with the acronym of “The Three Ps.”
No one who learned about Churchill can doubt that he was an exceptionally gifted and courageous person. He read and wrote voluminously from an early age, had enormous energy and was incredibly (even foolhardily) brave, knew how to read most situations well and to act appropriately, and when he made mistakes—and over the course of a long life, he made many major mistakes—he picked himself up, went on, and on more than one occasion, was able to convert an error into a forward step.
Painting of Napolean Bonaparte
PARAGONS
Churchill admired the great leaders of the past—particularly Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Duke of Wellington (who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo). He collected replicas of their soldiers, enacted their strategies on their respective battle fields, consumed their biographies. In fact, according to Reynolds, Churchill collected 300 biographies of Napoleon! He had always wanted to write his own book about Napoleon—though, despite a long and verbose life, he never got around to it.
PEERS
While paragons came from the past, of course, Churchill had to deal with living peers—both colleagues, competitors within the British government and, because of his many cabinet and administrative posts, other would-be leaders. These constitute most of the chapters in Reynolds’ book. We don’t see Churchill learning lessons from or otherwise emulating these individuals. (The closest to a role model was Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who was better able to control his words and actions than the younger Winston). But we do learn what Churchill thought of them—publicly, privately, positively, negatively—and how he managed to deal with this wide array of powerful individuals. While my own work has focused on how leaders affect followers, I learned from Reynolds’ study how leaders interact with one another, both when they are in direct contact with others, and when they have to think or write about them—positively or negatively, publicly or privately.
PATER
Lord Randolph Churchill
Reynolds begins and ends his book with descriptions of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father. As his title indicates, he was considered minor royalty and held positions of some importance in Britain for roughly a decade. It’s well known that Randolph was very critical of his son Winston, and with some reason. Winston was an erratic student, prone to taking physical and social risks. But Winston described a dream he had late in life, in which he dramatized the aspirations that his father (and his longer-lived, American-born mother) had for him, and how he seized opportunities in ways that Randolph either never had or had not been able to handle successfully. As Reynolds puts it: “What [Winston] said [about the dream] expressed some deep personal truths. A septuagenarian who still measured himself against his unknown father. A father for whom his son’s greatness would remain forever unknown.” One does not need to be a Freudian to recognize that the goals that an ambitious parent never achieved—but were evident to insightful contemporaries—could become aspirations for an offspring who has talent, ambition, and luck.
It may well be that some leaders become effective in large measure by studying the examples of elders and of peers—soldier, then leader Dwight Eisenhower comes to mind. But when it comes to the most outstanding leaders, I believe that it’s insufficient to focus on the influence of peers. The example of Churchill convinced me that the power of paragons, on the one hand, and the examples of parents, on the other, provide equal if not more important influences.
For comments on earlier versions of this blog, I am grateful to Shinri Furuzawa, Annie Stachura, and Ellen Winner.
REFERENCES
Gardner, H. (1995). Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. Basic Books.
Reynolds, D. (2024). Mirrors of greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him (First US edition.). Basic Books.