What real leadership looks like.
Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word was the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. I was put in mind of that quotation by our columnist David Brooks’s lament this week for our lack of “a real leader,” one who could find the words to overcome the fear, sadness and anger that seem to be rising along with the summer temperatures. |
David’s invocation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address sent me back to Garry Wills’s masterful book on the speech, “Lincoln at Gettysburg.” As you may know, Lincoln wasn’t billed as the main speaker that day. He followed Edward Everett, a learned Harvard professor and diplomat who held forth for two hours (and was featured first in The New York Times headline the next day). |
Lincoln, in his high-pitched voice, spoke for about three minutes — and transformed Americans’ understanding of their country by deepening and broadening their idea of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. His audience, Wills wrote, “walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.” |
Lincoln lacked Everett’s “superb” education, Wills noted, but “Lincoln was an artist, not just a scholar.” And, as David writes, he had the strength of character to step outside his political role and reveal himself “uncloaked and humbled.” |
Lincoln managed to accomplish so much with just 272 words — about a dozen fewer than in this newsletter. I think it’s helpful to recall standards like this as, in the summer heat, we try to swat away the swarms of tweets emanating from the White House. |
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