After a long day’s ride through South Dakota, turning directly south from Sioux Falls to pick up the Louis & Clark Trail again in Iowa, I thought I had seen enough with the emotional visit to the Wounded Knee Museum. Looking forward to a quiet, relaxing stay at a (yet unknown) hotel in downtown Sioux City, I knew something was out of the ordinary with about 50 or so motorbikes parked in front when I pulled in. Having charmed my way to getting the last room available (there’s something you learn after a quarter-century as a civil affairs officer), I discovered that I had come upon the 11th Annual Awesome Biker’s Nights, fortunately only a few blocks walk away. I ambled through historic 4th Street, which had become a pedestrian area bordered with streetside food, drink, and souvenir vendors, and a handful of rock and metal groups on big, high-tech stages playing over the din of Harleys and “crotch rockets” trying to out-rev each other as they cruised at walking pace among the crowds. Boys, toys, and noise.
With my ears still ringing the next morning, I made my way further south past huge corn and grain farms that left me no doubt – I was in the American heartland.
I was ad-libbing the trip from this point on. After making stops at Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri, where after having my picture taken with my bike at its “place of birth”, I enjoyed a delicious steak, some great live blues music, and easy chatter with other patrons. What else in the middle of America?
In front of the Harley-Davidson factory in Kansas City, where my 2010 Dyna Wide Glide was built.
As I embarked the next day for St. Louis, I made an unexpected stop at the Harry Truman Presidential Library in Independence, and realized right away I wouldn’t be in eastern Missouri until much later that day. After visiting the Reagan Library on the West Coast, then seeing Mount Rushmore at the foothills of the Rockies, I thought I had seen enough of presidents this trip. But this was well worth the stop, and it reminded me that I had not really finished my thinking about leadership in America.
This mural at the entrance of the Truman Presidential Library near Independence, Missouri, is a romanticization of the frontier culture Truman's family came into.
Harry Truman was among the most underrated of presidents. Sure, he may not rank among the greatest – with Washington, who set the tone of dignified humility and so many other precedents in our national leadership style; Jefferson, who codified American political philosophy in the Declaration of Independence and, through the Louisiana Purchase, insured U.S. domination of the North American continent; and Lincoln, who preserved the Union and re-defined the meaning of freedom, as well as set in place the final pieces of the definition of the United States as both a transcontinental and thus (eventually) global power. It’s clear that the United States has been fortunate to have had such great leaders; but, it has been just as fortunate to have had a number of them like this heartland president.
Truman, as we know, became the 33rd President under unusual circumstances – after the death of the longest-serving president in the middle of the greatest of wars, whose own great work was unfinished after steering the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, and who loomed larger in the pantheon of national leaders.
Starting with that disadvantage, Truman’s presidency was quickly beset with one situational challenge and contentious issue after another in a time of great transition and anxiety – the decision to use the first atomic weapons; the postwar reconversion of the economy marked by severe shortages and numerous strikes that nonetheless resulted in the rise of the U.S. as the world’s most prosperous nation and the locomotive of a world economy defined by Bretton Woods; the division of Europe, the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and the unprecedented maintenance of a large, standing U.S. military forces overseas; the Berlin Airlift and the National Security Act of 1947; the Marshall Plan and the Cold War strategy of containment; the founding of the United Nations and NATO; the Korean War and the sacking of General MacArthur; and so on. Amidst this plethora of crises and turning points, Truman nonetheless exercised leadership and wisdom along very much the same lines as his more famous predecessors, with history as his eventual arbiter.
At the Truman Library: "If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy, if we wish to retore hope to those who have already lost their civil liberties, if we wish to fulfill the promise that is ours, we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy. We know the way. We need only the will."
While I was aware of these events as illustrative of the Truman years, until I came to Independence, it was not known to me how important a role, for example, Truman played in the initiation of the civil rights movement, beginning with the de-segregation of the military. In fact, Truman’s stand led to the split of his party when Southern Democrats walked out of the 1948 convention (since then, the region has been largely a Republican stronghold). Truman, of course, won an improbable election that year, as if to defy a political cartoon at the time that jabbed: “Would you rather be right or be President?” Turned out he was both.
Serendipity again at play, I came across these passages in John Steinbeck’s America and the Americans on the paradox of American leadership: “In reviewing our blessings, we must pay heed to our leadership. It is said that we demand second-rate candidates and first-rate Presidents. Not all our Presidents have been great, but when the need has been great we have found men of greatness. We have not always appreciated them; usually we have denounced and belabored them living, and only honored them dead. Strangely, it is our mediocre Presidents we honor during their lives.”
“The relationship of Americans to their President is a matter of amazement to foreigners [my own 20 years abroad substantiated this for me]. Of course we respect the office and admire the man who can fill it, but at the same time we inherently fear and suspect power. We are proud of the President, and we blame him for things he did not do…”
“We have made a tough but unwritten code of conduct for him, and the slightest deviation brings forth a torrent of accusation and abuse. The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things we ourselves do every day… We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, and more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him… he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him. To all the other rewards of this greatest office in the gift of the people, we add that of assassination… It would be comparatively easy to protect the lives of our Presidents against attacks by foreigners; it is next to impossible to shield him from the Americans…”
The difficulty of being an effective president has only increased, now perhaps to a critical point of dysfunction. What encumbers the ability of a president, for example, to launch any major initiatives, outside of the most dire of circumstances, or push through any major legislation remotely resembling comprehensive reform, is the 24/7 media world of flattened decision cycles – holding even the most trivial issues to mass scrutiny but not lending to examination of the larger issues in any degree of depth; shortening the flash-to-bang time between initiatives and implementation among a public with shrinking attention spans; and thus prohibiting absorption, reflection, and gaining of context by either the public or its servants.
The other is the incredibly complex processes in especially the executive and legislative branches that characterize the contemporary governing process. With respect to the interagency system alone, the Project on National Security Reform recognizes, in Forging a New Shield, “…no leader, no matter how strategically farsighted and talented as a manager, could have handled these issues without being hampered by the weaknesses of the current system.” It’s hard even to be lucky, let alone good, when the deck is stacked against you more than ever.
Continuing with Steinbeck: “It is said that the Presidency of the United States is the most powerful office in the world. What is not said or even generally understood is that the power of the chief executive is hard to achieve, balky to manage, and incredibly difficult to exercise. It is not raw, corrosive power, nor can it be used willfully… The power of the President is great if he can use it; but it is a moral power, a power activated by persuasion and discussion…”
It was entirely appropriate these latter insights came to me at this time, in the heartland, because, as I learned at the Reagan Library, no president can succeed if he cannot connect (or communicate) with the American people – especially in the core of the country. With respect to Truman, Steinbeck’s understanding of the power of the presidency being largely moral also struck a chord, as Truman often took a moral stand on many of his decisions.
As someone who spent more than a dozen active years with Toastmaster’s International, starting in Germany in the Reagan era during my own formative career years, it has long been apparent to me that the most effective leaders, from the sinister to the saintly, have been effective communicators. Many, such as Churchill and Lincoln, were great storytellers. Not long ago a friend of mine shared an interesting quote from, of all people, the late American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction Randy Pausch that is a good tip for leaders of democratic societies or multifarious organizations like the UN, or those involved in peace operations: “Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they will figure out how those stories apply to them.”
One of the more interesting displays at the Truman Library was an interactive exercise involving what influences decision-making at the national executive level, typified in four factors: interest groups and public opinion (although I would separate these two); personal values; recommendations of policy advisors (i.e., political factors); and, the long-term national interest. The decisions, of course, that we most hold up to history usually feature the fourth and second. Yet, the reality is that the first and third dynamics wield the greatest weight. Thus, the decisions that reflect true political genius somehow accomplish the more important while addressing the more immediate. Considering the near-impossibility of managing the American republic and leading the American people, the fact that there are dozens of such great decisions that mark the history of the nation is little short of a miracle.
Once I left Independence, it was imperative I had to learn more about perhaps the greatest of presidents, considering what I had already learned about his role in the building of the country in the midst of its greatest crisis. Once I crossed back into the eastern United States in St. Louis, rather than go to Springfield, Illinois to see the Lincoln Presidential Library, it turned out fortuitous instead to visit his boyhood home in Indiana. The reasoning: if the presidency is mostly about moral leadership and the ability to connect with people, then what other way to gain insight into this outstanding historical figure than to go where he spent his formative years, between the ages of seven and 21, when his character was forged and his core values formed – as with most of us.
Situated about 20 miles south of Interstate 64 near nothing of remark other than the town of Santa Claus (yes, there really is one), the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial is perhaps the most thoughtfully laid out of the national sites I had seen on this trip. Beginning with the Visitor’s Center, and the nine relief sculptures outside depicting Lincoln’s trademark quotes, you can talk a walk through the woods that the young future president wandered through, reaching the cabin site memorial that approximates his home and, perhaps most importantly, well conveys his rather humble beginnings.
"Have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."
As it was a quiet day at less busy time of year, I was grateful to spend nearly an hour sitting on the stoop of the cabin discussing the 16th President, and presidents in general, with an exceptionally well-informed and dedicated docent who explained he had read about 40 books on Lincoln – who himself had only read little more than a tenth that many when he was there – the Bible, of course; David Ramsay’s Life of George Washington and Ben Franklin’s autobiography (which ignited his interest in politics and presented him with role models); Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress (which helped the young man develop his moral compass, optimism about America, and knack for storytelling); and a few others, including books on ancient history. These literary influences are reflected in Lincoln’s speeches, two of which – the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural speech – are considered among the most essential studies in American civics.
After the fascinating conversation with the caretaker of the cabin site memorial, I paced the Trail of Twelve Stones marking significant moments or phases, reflecting on the journey of his life and its legacy, then climbed back on the Harley to resume the route to Kentucky, the state of Lincoln’s birth. A pit stop at a service station turned into another of a handful of impromptu conversations experienced during this journey, this time over a sandwich and a soft drink, with a local business owner who observed what the much more educated docent made just a short while back.
She held to her belief that most presidents, as most politicians, are well-intentioned and more competent than we give them credit for, and that the we are at our best when we move to the center, when “common sense” prevails over emotion. While our politics have always been contentious and bitter, especially in today’s more venomous climate, I recalled to her one of the sayings on the exterior of the Visitor’s Center meant for a more perilous time, yet no less appropriate: “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Nowhere else was this a more appropriate thing to appreciate than in the heartland.
The inscription on the wall near the Trumans' gravesite reads: "All I want for history is the truth". Amen, Harry.
