Assuming the Mantle of Leadership

In my years of working with organizations – both large and small – and dealing with leaders and managers, I’ve often wondered what makes a leader. Is it something they were born with, something they learn, or a little of both? How do people respond to their new role as leader when it is earned through years of dedicated, hard work? And how does that kind of leader compare with one upon whom the role is suddenly thrust?

            The question of comparison occurs to me as I read Passage of Power, the fourth book in Robert Caro’s planned five-volume biography of Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

            This book covers Johnson’s life from 1958 into 1964, a period when he went from serving as one of the US Senate’s most effective and powerful Majority Leaders, to a stillborn presidential campaign, to a humiliating three-year role as Vice President, to the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, which thrust him into the presidency, a position he had long craved.

            How he responded to the shock of suddenly assuming the world’s most difficult leadership job is a lesson that answers my question – at least anecdotally.

Behind The Scenes

Caro does an extraordinary job, both in writing the story as well as researching it. Certainly, no historical biographer that I’ve read to date can compare with Caro, whose eye for detail and ability to dredge up heretofore-unknown information about highly public people and events is unmatched. Perhaps his most compelling research concerned Johnson’s reactions and actions in the minutes, hours, days and weeks immediately following the assassination, when he assumed the weighty mantle of leadership.

            Lyndon Johnson was a driven man, always on a quest for power. Interviewed about his series and the nearly 40 years he has spent researching the man, Caro said that the books are as much about Johnson’s quest for power as about the man himself.

            Johnson was Senate Majority Leader from 1954 until he became Vice President in 1961. Johnson used the post to its full extent and more, becoming the most powerful Senate leader of the 20^th century, a man accustomed to giving orders and expecting them to be carried out.

            He was enticed into the job of VP believing that, in presiding over the Senate, he could finagle even more power than he had had as Majority Leader. But the Constitutional separation of powers limited the role and assured he would merely be casting tie-breaking votes.

            Once ensconced as Vice President, the power he had known and luxuriated in as Senate Majority Leader was gone. Instead, he became a mere figurehead with little to do. He grasped at roles for himself, but JFK and his coterie of aides and cabinet members, especially Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, nixed any meaningful role for LBJ.

            Johnson’s humiliating three years as Vice President was the most difficult and painful period of his life. And then fate intervened in the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is where the story of power and leadership gets interesting.

Passage of Power

Awaiting word of the gravely wounded president’s condition, Johnson, his wife and an aide were put in a heavily guarded private room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Throughout the interminable minutes of waiting, Caro writes, Johnson stood with his back to the wall, completely silent and absorbed in his thoughts. The power of the presidency passed to Johnson the moment Kennedy was pronounced dead.

            Initially hesitant, Johnson soon took control. Caro’s narrative describing the re-emergence of his powerful personality is remarkable:

“…His demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions – tough decisions – to be made … in those moments he became … ‘quiet and still.’ He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the little room… There was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the past three years. Though he had been for those years restless, unable to sit still, unable to keep his mind on one subject, unable to stop talking, he wasn’t restless in that little room.

“…the hangdog look was gone, replaced with an expression” described as “set.” … "Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him the longest, knew that expression; the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corner turned down in a hint of a snarl, the eyes, under those long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable – and a decision made.”

Very quickly, he was giving orders and making rapid-fire decisions of great import.

            For me, as I noted, it is an impressive story of one man’s passage into power. I doubt many people could rise to such an occasion, as did LBJ. The notion of having to succeed a highly popular president on the heels of his sudden, tragic death just staggers the imagination.

            Johnson did it. And he did it with grace, thoughtfulness (for Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy family), intelligence and tact.

            But he was also aggressive and eager to get himself out from under the Kennedy shadow and mark the presidency as his own. He wasted no time. While he assured the nation he would carry forth Kennedy’s initiatives, he needed something of his own. He alighted on it within his first month in office, designating the “War on Poverty” as his signature cause.

            The central message is this: born leader or otherwise, Johnson had the makeup of a man who knew himself well, his strengths and his limitations, as well as the ability to maximize those strengths and find the right people to make up for the limitations. In other words, a leader.