Real Leaders Have Heart

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted December 8, 2005.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates and Abraham Lincoln waited in their respective hometowns for the results from the first Republican National Convention in Chicago. Lincoln, the longshot, emerged as the victor over his better-known and more accomplished rivals.

With over 1,000 books about Lincoln in print, what remains to be said? In Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin approaches this well-known history through the lives of four men and their families. It was Lincoln's extraordinary empathy, she asserts, that enabled him to bring his opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

Terrence McNally: Reading "Team Of Rivals" has been a revelation. These men and women -- and you give the women a real voice in this book -- are more modern and more like us than I had ever assumed, in their psychology, their emotional communication, and their practice of politics.

One of the most important books in my education was "The Making Of The President 1960" by Theodore H. White. The first half of your book feels like "The Making of the President 1860."

Doris Kearns Goodwin: That was not unconscious. I love that book as well. What was so wonderful about it was the way it created the characters, their motivations, their desires, so that you felt them as full human beings. White could write about his contemporaries through interviews, but because the guys in my book all kept letters and wrote diaries, I was able to recreate them almost as fully as you might have in 1960.

Terrence McNally: When they were away in Congress, for instance, it wasn't uncommon for most of these men to write home every single day.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Even when they were running the Civil War, Seward sends five or eight page letters to his wife each night. We're so distracted nowadays, it's hard to imagine that we would take the time to do that, though email offers a new opportunity.

Terrence McNally: I was impressed with their ability to express emotion. It had been my preconception that this was a modern phenomenon that emerged in the 1940's, '50s or '60s. The self-revealing emotional authenticity of some of their letters is quite surprising.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Seward wrote that he was looking up at the moon and hoping that the silver rays of the moon are the same moon that his wife was seeing so far away from him. In writing such a thing, you can feel that he loves that woman. When Stanton's wife died, he was worried that their little two-year old son would never know his mother. So he wrote a 78-page letter to that child, which included all the romantic letters that they'd written to each other.

Terrence McNally: I was also impressed by the presence of death. It seems that every one of these men lost a wife, a child or two or three... The book is full of people dying at untimely ages.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Chase, who becomes secretary of the treasury, had three young wives who died. The first one died in childbirth. The daughter born as the wife died -- she dies at 5 years old. His second wife, who was 18 when he married her, dies in her early 20s. The third one dies shortly thereafter. It's hard to know how they can keep going, except that it's so prevalent. Bates has 17 children, nine of whom grow to adulthood, which means eight of them are lost. Every single one of them lost somebody.

Terrence McNally: Briefly tell us how the book called to you, how you approached it, what it is, and what it means to you now.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I wasn't sure how to approach it at the start. I only knew that I wanted to study Lincoln and the Civil War. It was scary to consider whether I could come up with my own story. Once I realized that Lincoln put the rivals who'd been against him in 1860 into his cabinet, and the confidence and largeness that took, and how he was able to master them all.... it meant that, used rightly, qualities we normally associate with decency -- sensitivity and compassion, empathy and kindness -- can actually be great political resources.

It made me sad to think what might be possible if we had such a person today, one who realized that human relationships are at the core of politics. If you don't hold grudges, if you tell the truth, if you acknowledge mistakes, if you shoulder responsibility for the failures of others and you share credit -- it's not just that these are good things to do, but you're going to be more successful.

Terrence McNally: -- and the book opened up to you once you found that hook?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: That's right. And I developed such an affection for Lincoln as a result. I'd always respected him as the great emancipator and the great statesman, but it was even more thrilling to find what a brilliant politician he was -- how careful, how crafty, how shrewd.

Terrence McNally: Let me put the next question in some context. It's the late 1850s, early 1860s. With the American belief in progress, half of the nation is moving in a modern direction. They see slavery as an evil. Another set of states says, no, slavery is a cultural institution, essential to who we are.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create 'a world that just might work.'

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