President Bush’s Sagging Popularity Rating Could Be Improved by Emulating Great Leaders such as Reagan and Churchill

President Bush’s approval ratings are at all-time lows. But as far as second-term presidents go, he is not alone.  For example, less than a year into his second term, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered a similar slump, with rumors swirling that the country was headed into another depression.  What President Bush does to pull himself out of his beleaguered state may ultimately save his legacy.

Indeed, President Bush may wish to consider examining the lives of two of history’s greatest leaders for examples of how to turn his presidency around – Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill.  The parallel lives of these men are the subjects of a new book by presidential biographer Steven F. Hayward.

Recently, Mr. Hayward joined the Center’s Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino on “Your Turn – Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” to discuss Greatness:  Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.  What follows are excerpts from the interview that aired on WEBY 1330AM, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  My first guest is a recognized authority on both Reagan and Churchill, having written The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980, and Churchill on Leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in American studies; he is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, National Review, Reason, and Policy Review, among many other publications. 

Please welcome Mr. Steven Hayward.

HAYWARD:  Good to be with you Renee.

GIACHINO:  Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for writing this wonderful book, called Greatness:  Reagan, Churchill, & the Making of Extraordinary Leaders, a brand new book out written by Steven Hayward and one that I am strongly recommending to our listeners.  It is our pleasure to have you with us this afternoon.

HAYWARD:  Thank you for having me.

GIACHINO:  You have written biographies on both subjects of this book – Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill.  You have described them both as true giants of the twentieth century.  When did you make the connection, that is recognize the similarities between these men, and since writing the book have you been told by any of your fellow historians that the light bulb went off for them as well?

HAYWARD:  Well the book has only been out for one week so I have not heard from too many people yet.  It is still being unpacked at a lot of bookstores.

But, yes, it did take me a while to see how deep and serious the parallels were between these two great men.  Maybe the easiest way to summarize it is this:  In Churchill’s famous iron curtain speech that he gave here in the United States in 1946, one of the things he said was that World War II could have been prevented without the firing of a single shot.  That was the phrase he used.  And then I remembered what Margaret Thatcher said about Ronald Reagan in the 1990s after the Berlin Wall came down.  Margaret Thatcher said “that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War ‘without the firing of a single shot.’”  In other words, she used Winston Churchill’s words to describe what Reagan had done in the Cold War.  The more I thought about that, the more I realized that Reagan had done that by following Churchill’s example and by absorbing Churchill’s lessons about how history worked.  And then I started doing research and discovering little facts like Reagan quoted Churchill more often than every other American president put together.  And that is really something because quoting Churchill is a bipartisan past-time in American politics.

GIACHINO:  It’s interesting because in the book you cite references to where Reagan would quote Churchill.  Do you think he tried to liken himself to Churchill or do you think he idolized him in any way or is it just happenstance that it was so that he quoted him so often?

HAYWARD:  That is a tough question to answer because Reagan is a difficult person to understand in some ways.  He was seemingly a simple guy but we know that he was actually a lot more supple thinker than anyone actually gave him credit for.  We know this from his voluminous writings that have emerged in his own hand.  And I think that what Reagan did was study the example of Churchill and absorb Churchill’s way of thinking.

You see a lot of parallels in their imagination and I think that is the thing that really marks out great people like Reagan and Churchill – they have an extraordinary imagination for what can be done in the future, combined with, strikingly enough, a practical approach to how you get there.  And so I think in a lot of ways Reagan had the same kind of intuition as Churchill had with respect to world affairs.

I don’t know, Reagan was a great actor and he could pull off a lot of different sources.  But he did refer to Churchill as the preeminent statesman of the twentieth century so he may have been more on Reagan’s mind than we think.

GIACHINO:  Yes, you may be right though that it was less role-playing than some might be led to believe.  That immediately came to my mind, simply because he was a famous actor.  And you make a great case that he was not necessarily the B actor that some portray him as, but that he was a good actor in his own right.

In the book where you parallel the lives of two of history’s greatest leaders, you emphasize the four qualities in shaping political greatness.  You have already talked about one of them:  imagination.  The other three that you write about extensively are character, insight and will.  Do you, having studied each of these individuals as much as you have, do you think Reagan and Churchill possessed each of these qualities equally or were some stronger than others?

HAYWARD:  I think that Churchill may be credited with having greater insight.  I realize that from reading the extraordinary history books that he wrote about World War I and World War II and the Duke of Marlborough and so forth.  He has a multi-volume history of English speaking people.  I am not sure that Reagan had the sustained detailed interest in history as Churchill had and could write as brilliantly as Churchill did. 

But I think they both did have incredible insight into the times in which they lived.  And here is what I think is the interesting question to ask about both men:  Oftentimes people said about Churchill and even Reagan “well they are men of the past.”  People said Churchill was great because he was a person of the Victorian Era.  And people said that Reagan succeeded because he had the old-fashioned American optimism.

In fact, a lot of people came from those similar backgrounds.  There were a lot of conservatives in the late 1970s that had the same opinions as Reagan.  And a lot of people in Churchill’s era had similar opinions as he did.  But Reagan and Churchill emerged as distinct amongst their peers for being different and for understanding how to put together their insights and put them into practice in ways that their peers were not able to.

And so there I think you have to say that they had certain qualities in greater abundance than even some of their very eminent peers that were around them at the time.

GIACHINO:  That is interesting.  And you are right; they are two extraordinary leaders who came about at two different times.  Let me take it one step further then and ask you how a Truman would rate under those qualities.

HAYWARD:  Truman was our only president in the twentieth century who did not go to college.  But the think about Truman was that he was something of an accidental president.  He would never have been president had he not been picked as Vice President by Franklin Roosevelt under kind of murky circumstances in 1944.  Whereas both Reagan and Churchill made it to where they got on their own.  They did not owe their chief executive jobs to the accidents of history or the death of someone else.

But Truman I think is a good example of someone who we think of who had street smarts or a person who was self-educated.  Like Reagan and Churchill, Truman was very interested in history.  He read a lot of history on his own and absorbed the lessons of history and put them into practice himself during his very difficult presidency.  And one of the things I do identify about Reagan and Churchill that also applies to Truman is that they are self-taught people.

I am not so sure that we aren’t better off with people who have not gone to college these days because so many of our colleges are so rotten.

GIACHINO:  You are absolutely right about that.

Along those same lines, let me cross over the Atlantic.  You have talked about Churchill and Reagan and Truman.  What about Charles de Gaulle?  What makes him not great or not a statesman?

HAYWARD:  Well I don’t know.  I have never studied him with sufficient detail to have firm opinions about him.  You know he was very unfriendly to the United States at various times.  On the other hand, Churchill admired him and liked him, although he was very critical of him at times and found him exacerbating because he was one of the few members of the French military and French elite of the 1940s who had the will to fight.

What most people don’t know about World War II, or have forgotten, was that the French forces were actually much superior to Germany’s army in numbers and equipment but the Germans just rolled right over them.  And that was because of bad leadership and bad morale.  Now de Gaulle was a subordinate officer at that time but Churchill immediately recognized that here was a guy who had what it would take to be a leader and lead the French out of the abyss that they had fallen into at the beginning of that terrible war.

GIACHINO:  We are talking with Steven Hayward.  He is the author of the hot off the press book Greatness:  Reagan, Churchill & the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.

Mr. Hayward, in the book you write about how each leader, Reagan and Churchill, had a deep sense of personal and national destiny.  What did you mean by that?

HAYWARD:  Well if you want to take the case of each country at the moment when they each arrived at their chief executive jobs, you know in 1940 many people, including Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, thought that Britain was finished.  And many Britains probably thought that the best that they could do was make the best deal they could with Hitler and try to get out of the war with as much of their country intact as possible.  And of course Churchill rejected all of this and said that this country has been a great nation for a thousand years and we can win. 

At the end of the 1970s the morale of the American people really was quite low.  The opinion polls taken as to whether the country was on the right track or the wrong track had the worse numbers ever in our history.  For the first time in history, poll numbers said the more Americans thought that their children’s lives would not be as good as their own lives were presently.  And the real issue of the election of 1980 – well the economy was sort of the central issue, but the issue sort of bubbling beneath the surface was the question of national greatness and whether the country could be restored to its optimism in view of progress in the future that it had always had in the past.  Reagan really rejected the mood of decline and negativism at the time. 

And that is why I think both of them stand out as people who stood squarely against the decline of their nations at a crucial moment and reversed them.

GIACHINO:  I would like, if I can, to read a short passage from the book so that I can set up this next question.  In it you write:  “Greatness is not an art or a science that can be mastered through standardized training.  That is one reason why few are the people on whom we bestow the exalted title of statesman.” 

We’ve already talked about how they each lived in different times but you make an excellent case in the book Greatness that both Reagan and Churchill deserve to be regarded as statesmen.  Do we have any modern figures who you think deserve that designation?

HAYWARD:  One of the things I say toward the end of the book is that oftentimes it is not possible to make these judgments until several years later when you see how the designs of world leaders work out.  And I do mention the case of Tony Blair in Britain and also George W. Bush with the war on terror and say that if their plan for the Middle East works, and Iraq works, and the Middle East begins to become a better place – if they turn the tide on Islamic radicalism, in 20 years we are going to rank both of them as very formidable and very impressive leaders.  We might even call them great.

Right now we are too divided over the issue to reach a calm judgment about that.  But that was also true when Reagan and Churchill were in office.  And you can add Lincoln for that matter.  People who are great leaders are always ferociously controversial while they are on the scene.  And that is something that should not be forgotten as you think about these kinds of questions.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Hayward, have you got a website that people can visit to learn more about you and purchase the book – I know it is available at local bookstores and on amazon.com?

HAYWARD:  I don’t.  There is a website folks can visit that has my bio.  It is on the American Enterprise Institute’s website which is aei.org.  There should be a little tab you can click on there to order the book.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Hayward, you write in the book about the shared gift they had as great communicators.  We know here in the United States about Reagan’s legacy and how it includes the characterization of him as the “Great Communicator.”  Do you think the British regard Winston Churchill the same?

HAYWARD:  Yes, I think they do.  One of the things that you see in British popular culture is that they sometimes like to have people strike a “Churchillian pose” as a way of getting a laugh.  And partly that is because they understand that nobody could do it the way that he did.

One thing that you recognize about both men is that people thought that this came easy to them.  But it didn’t.  Both men worked very, very hard in learning to speak well.  They worked for hours and hours preparing their speeches.  This is something that is not widely known by the public.  You think that because they were so good at it that it must have just come naturally.  When actually it was the result of very hard work.

GIACHINO:  In the new book Greatness you reference this and I suspect in your book about Churchill you go into greater depth about this – and I am sorry that I have not yet read the book, but in one of the chapters in Greatness you reference that the public generally overlooks or does not know of Churchill’s weaknesses.  Can you enlighten us as to some of those?

HAYWARD:  Yes, actually this was Reagan too, although it worked out better in his case.  Both of them I think had enormous confidence in the force of their own personalities and the belief that if they could just sit down in a room with their opponents and negotiate in good faith they could solve almost any problem.  And Churchill always thought he could settle the Cold War if he could just sit down with Stalin in the late 1940s.  And I think that Churchill was overly optimistic about that.

Now Reagan was somewhat more patient than Churchill but he had much the same view.  He had a strategy in the 1980s that culminated with the idea that if I could sit down with the Soviet Union I could reach some real agreements to reduce nuclear weapons.  Ultimately he succeeded in that but it sure was a risky thing to think and it certainly could have gone wrong.

It could have gone wrong for Churchill if he had met with Stalin in the early 1950s before Stalin died.

GIACHINO:  You talked in the first part of our interview a little bit about their upbringings.  In the book there is a whole chapter about their early childhoods and you write about how certain common aspects emerge even though Reagan came from a humble Midwestern background and Churchill’s preparation for greatness was as the son of an affluent family.  One of common aspects you reference is their unhappy childhoods and how they persevered in spite of that.  How much of a difference do you think this made to their characters?

HAYWARD:  That’s very hard to say.  You know there are a lot of psychologists who think that a lot of people from unhappy childhoods compensate by becoming very ambitious and by accomplishing a lot in life.  Interesting thing about both Churchill and Reagan is that although their descriptions of their childhoods sound very unhappy in a lot of ways, neither man considered their childhoods to be unhappy.  They both had this almost willful optimism and they both would say that their childhoods were great parts of their lives. 

But then you see little coincidences.  They both loved toy soldiers.  Now Churchill had a lot more toy soldiers than Reagan did, of course, because he was a richer guy.  They both loved horses and developed a liking for horses as young men.  Both talked about their great love for horsemanship.

And then the coincidences pile up from there.  Both men were almost killed by violent trauma.  Everyone remembers of course Reagan being shot in 1981.  What a lot of people may not know about Churchill is that he was hit by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1932 and almost killed – he was thrown 30 feet in the air and spent several weeks in a hospital in New York.

So there are a lot of little things like that that add up and reach a point where you really wonder how could there be so many things alike about these people?

GIACHINO:  Didn’t I also read in the book that you reference that they both suffered from pneumonia?

HAYWARD:  Yes, they both had serious pneumonia.  In Reagan’s case, he actually had it a couple of times.  That may not be that remarkable; pneumonia is not an extremely rare disease.  But in both cases, they had serious enough cases that their doctors thought they might die.

GIACHINO:  On the issue of their unhappy childhoods and then their succession to greatness – you talk about them also having strained relationships with their own children.  Do you think that is related at all to their unhappy childhoods?  And as you said, and as you say in the book Greatness as well, they would not necessarily categorize their childhoods as unhappy.

HAYWARD:  That is another thing that is very hard to judge about.  I think as a general matter it cannot be easy to be the child of an extremely famous person.  You actually see family tension in a lot of famous families – not just the Reagans and the Churchills.  I think in both cases, I know in Churchill’s case at least, he tried to overcompensate for the distance with his own father with his own children, with mixed results.  And Reagan’s father was an alcoholic who Reagan loved dearly but in his autobiographies he talked very little of his father.  He talked much more about his mother.  So it is very hard to tell whether his own distance and estrangement from his father carried over to his relations with his own children.  That is very hard to unravel because so much of that goes on behind closed doors and it is very hard for any biographer to penetrate the inner sanctum.

GIACHINO:  I am going to make it even harder with this next question.  As a historian and biographer, in this book Greatness you write about Reagan and also in your book Age of Reagan.  I want to ask you this next question with the complete understanding that we really are asking you to dig deep into the recesses of Reagan’s brain, which obviously is impossible.

Newt Gingrich has written a wonderful comment about your book.  He says that “[a]nyone interested in the lessons of leadership will find this a compelling and important book.”  He also says that “[i]n times of crisis, countries need leaders of courage, conviction, and clarity with an ability to rally the nation to overcome its challenges. Churchill and Reagan were two such historic leaders.” 

No doubt our country has recently experienced a national crisis with Katrina.  How, if at all, do you think Reagan would have handled the situation differently?

HAYWARD:  Oh, boy, that is a tough question because I have not thought about that.  But you know, I do remember, because I grew up in California, that we had a number of natural disasters in California – not of them as big as Katrina, of course, but we did a have pretty big earthquake in 1971 in Los Angeles and lost of forest fires always happen in California.  As a general matter, I think Reagan would have followed his limited government philosophy which is not to throw huge federal dollars at it without a serious plan, without finding out who is really accountable for what went wrong, and also without thinking about how a city like New Orleans ought to be rebuilt.  I think it is a dumb idea myself.  I think Reagan would think that it is a dumb idea to rebuild it exactly as it was so that it can flood again in the next 50 years with the next big hurricane to come through.

That’s really hard to say.  I would actually have to go back to see how Reagan responded to natural disasters in California to get a clue into that.

GIACHINO:  Thank you very much.  Mr. Hayward, that’s all the time we have.  Thank you very much for being on the program.  Again, I want to encourage the readers to go out and buy the book – it is called Greatness:  Reagan, Churchill & the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.  It is written by Steven Hayward.  Hopefully we will see it start to appear on high school and college curricula course book lists.

Thank you so much for being with us.

HAYWARD:  Thank you for having me.