IN QUEST OF LEADERSHIP

The pop cosmologist Erich von Daeniken conjures up primordial heroes from the plain of Nazca and the temples of Palenque --extraterrestrial astronauts who strayed to this planet long ago and then vanished. Today heroes and leaders bred on the earth seem almost as scarce. "There is a very obvious dearth of people who seem able to supply convincing answers, or even point to directions toward solutions," says Harvard President Derek Bok. "Leadership," observes Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti, "is one of those things you don't know you need until you don't have it." In the U.S. and round the world, there is a sense of diminished vision, of global problems that are overwhelming the capacity of leaders. As Journalist Brock Brower wrote three years ago, if Martian spacemen were to descend and demand, "Take me to your leader," the earthlings would not know where to direct them.

Americans have a special sensitivity to the problem now, but it existed well before Watergate and is far broader than that shabby attempt to corrupt the U.S. constitutional system. Moreover, the phenomenon is worldwide. In one country after another, chronic, debilitating inflation tends to undermine the social contract.

Waves of strikes and shortages erode public confidence.

A number of democratic governments are merely crippling along. Since 1973, the governments of all nine Common Market nations have changed hands. Shaky coalitions exist in Belgium, Finland and Israel, vulnerable minority governments in Britain, Denmark and Sweden. Italy stumbles on with virtually no government at all.

Changes of government are not in themselves a discouraging sign. On the contrary, they may signal the emergence of fresh leadership. In France, Georges Pompidou was succeeded by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, whose narrow victory over Socialist opposition marks the end of Gaullism but may mark the beginning of a new, more human exercise of power that will test whether France can exist short of "grandeur" without lapsing into disorder. West Germany's Willy Brandt resigned amid scandal; yet even in resigning he displayed a sense of responsibility that is itself an element of leadership. He was succeeded by fellow Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, who may yet prove to be a better manager. Portugal's authoritarian regime was ousted with at least a chance, slim though it is, that democratic leadership may take hold.

Yet along with these modest gains, there remains a sense of unease, not only of giants having departed, but of mere competence being all too scarce. Partly the malaise is due to the fact that large areas of the world have gone through the war, the cold war and anticolonial revolutions --all situations in which good and evil could be sharply perceived. Leadership is easier in such times. Now this relative simplicity has been succeeded by confusion and pessimism, a sense that the real problems of the world are so technical and complex that the traditional way of running things is inadequate. Perhaps for the first time, even Americans, the world's foremost solvers of technical problems, have been afflicted by this feeling. "Governments are trying to do a 20th century job with 19th century methodology," says University of Pittsburgh Historian Joseph Malone.

"There is a kind of administrative sclerosis around the world that breeds mass suspicion and distrust. Leadership casualties result."

Leadership usually begins with a vision of success, a glimmering intuition that solutions are possible. Now, as Critic George Steiner has said, "we no longer experience history as ascendant." At the same time, there seems to be something naggingly excessive about such gloom, out of proportion with the great amount of skill, intelligence and energy that exists in America and elsewhere. Even while the largest problems (including the largest cities) seem to have grown unmanageable, there have been countless new examples of leadership, imagination and dedication on a lesser scale: in smaller communities, in many organizations, in business. The gallery of rising American leaders that appears following this story contains many examples. Thus there should be hope for the emergence of a new generation of leaders--if only, somehow, the stubborn obstacles in their path could be understood and reduced.

What Blocks Leadership?

Some reasons for the loss of leadership can be identified readily enough:

> Institutions are changing in ways that their leaders cannot always grasp. Churches have been dramatically altered by internal disputes over questions of social activism, morals and even creed. Educators have grown uncertain about the social and intellectual purposes of education. Politicians throughout the West have trouble determining the boundaries involved in a free-enterprise system mixed with government control. Moreover, in place of the heady economic expansion of the past quarter-century, they must now cope with the counterfeit of growth--inflation. Even those who do not accept the gloomy prophecies of the Club of Rome realize that at least some limits to growth must be expected. The feeling of having reached a frontier, a limit of possibility, brings on grave anxieties and confronts politicians with an issue that they sidestepped for years: if there is no longer an ever-expanding pie, how are the portions to be parceled out?

> Such changes have contributed to the fact that leaders are increasingly naked and vulnerable. Newspapers, magazines and especially television subject potential leaders to devastating scrutiny. Says Columbia University Historian Henry Graff: "We have become a nation of Madame Defarges. We sit in judgment on our political leaders because we know them so well. We have a kind of Naderism in politics. For the first time since man came down out of the trees, government no longer operates in a cocoon of mystery. I suppose the world changed a lot when Eisenhower's bowel movements were described by Paul Dudley White."

At the same time, politics has been frequently contaminated by the law of celebrity. It works two ways. According to Andy Warhol's dictum that "in the future, everybody will be famous for at least 15 minutes," overexposure or premature adulation tends to burn up talent too quickly; the public becomes bored. There may also be a deeper 20th century Western instinct that anyone or anything believed in too long may turn the believer into a fanatic. Despite a real desire now for some public inspiration from leaders, there is also a wariness and skepticism about it. Simultaneously, press and television journalists have the habit of falling into ruts, of overcovering the same familiar figures and failing to seek newer talent. The process, says John Gardner, head of the public lobby Common Cause, represents "bad horticulture," for it destroys the seedbeds of fresh leadership.

> Politics is frequently perceived as a somewhat unappetizing career, and not only in America. Historian Henry Steele Commager notes that "talent grows in whatever channels are available and are popular. It goes where the public rewards are." Thus the birth of the U.S. was attended by a breathtaking array of intellectual talent--Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin--because public service was the ideal and one of the few outlets for talent in late 18th century America. But in the 20th century, says Commager, talent is best rewarded in private enterprise, and the better leaders leave politics to the mediocre. He might also have mentioned that in the late '60s and early '70s, some promising young talents exhausted themselves in protest. Gardner has calculated that in proportion to population, the U.S. should now have some "850 Jeffersons and Madisons." He believes that today, Jefferson would probably be a university president, having started out as a high-energy physicist.

> In every industrialized society a common problem for leaders is the proliferation of demands upon them. Observes Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell:

"More and more issues get thrown into the political arena, and the political system becomes overloaded with a multiplication of claimants, constituents and contending groups, which results in more frustrations and resentments building up for leaders to deal with." To cope with the load, bureaucracies become fragmented and specialized, sometimes competing with one another, frequently smothering political initiatives. The whole immense mechanism of the central government grows so ponderous that it is virtually immune to necessary change.

The Special U.S. Malaise

In the U.S., there are some further and all too familiar reasons why leadership has lost much of its psychological accreditation: the assassinations of the 1960s which introduced an unprecedented measure of terror into American politics; the era of riot and protest, offering glimpses of a hitherto unthinkable challenge to the entire social system; the Viet Nam War--a deeply confusing experience to a people schooled in the justice of its wars and the infallibility of its technology. In that strange enterprise, conventional American leadership failed badly and at great expense --or so the outcome of the war was widely perceived. And Americans do not yet know how to go about forgiving themselves for failure.

On top of the disorders of the '60s, the nation had, back to back, two Presidents who left it deeply cynical, suspicious that the Government had grown incapable of telling the truth. Says one House Democratic leader: "We've had two men widely viewed as cynics and manipulators. Johnson created a credibility gap, which is a polite way of saying that your Government lies to you.

Then Nixon came along." Nixon exercised bold and imaginative leadership in foreign policy, demonstrating that old patterns could be broken and people could be brought to see the world in new ways. But the situation at home was drastically different.

In early June, Pollster Louis Harris found that 59% of Americans feel disaffected with the country compared with 29% in 1966. The sharpest rise, from 26% in 1966 to 63% today, came in response to the statement: "People running the country don't really care what happens to you." Fully 78% believe that "special interests get more from the Government than the people do."

Says Gerry Studds, a young liberal Democrat from Massachusetts: "People aren't happy with either the President or Congress, and that's why there's hope.

I think that bumper sticker--IMPEACH SOMEONE--says it all."

Is there really hope in anger? Perhaps. But, as Commager observes, "there is no consensus. There is less harmony in our society, to my mind, than at any time since, say, Reconstruction.

Perhaps the '60s and '70s are a great divide--the divide of disillusionment."

How can this divide be bridged? The almost ritual answer is, "Through leadership." But the argument becomes tautologous: the way to get leadership is through leadership.

For and Against Heroes

And no one of course is sure just what leadership is. Historians and others who have thought about it cite innumerable definitions and distinctions involving politics and war, moral force and intellectual power, good and evil (see box page 26). Among the most lucid and sweeping definitions is this one, proposed by the French critic Henri Peyre: "Leadership can be but a broad ideal proposed by the culture of a country, instilled into the young through the schools, but also through the family, the intellectual atmosphere, the literature, the history, the ethical teaching of that country. Will power, sensitivity to the age, clear thinking rather than profound thinking, the ability to experience the emotions of a group and to voice their aspirations, joined with control over those emotions in oneself, a sense of the dramatic . . . are among the ingredients of the power to lead men."

Most definitions emphasize honesty, candor and vision combined with sheer physical stamina and courage. Not that courage without brains was ever sufficient. An episode from British history emphasizes the point. When the British Cabinet summoned the Duke of Wellington and asked him who was the ablest general to take Rangoon, the unhesitating reply was "Lord Combermere." "But we have always understood that your Grace thought Lord Combermere a fool," the Cabinet protested. "So he is a fool, and a damned fool," said Wellington. "But he can take Rangoon."

What of that mysterious quality called charisma? "It would be nice to have charisma," says M.I.T. President Jerome Weisner. "But you would like it to be based on an understanding of what the hell is going on." (Weisner adds that anyone who claims to understand all the issues is a fraud.) Forget charisma, suggests Columbia University Historian Richard Morris. "Do we really need the charismatic, individualistic leadership that the nation boasted in its infancy?"

he wonders. "Perhaps our century has had a surfeit of charismatic figures. Today we could do with honest ones." Like many other historians, Morris seems to perceive two starkly contrasting types of leadership--the charismatic v. the more or less commonplace. More often the two poles are defined as the romantic and the functional.

It was Thomas Carlyle who articulated the beginning of the modern romantic cycle. "The history of the world," he wrote in 1841, "is but the biography of great men." Hitler elaborated the argument with Hegel's theory of the "world-historical figure" -- the heroic genius who emerges when the historical moment is right to lead a people to their preordained destiny.

That thought merged a kind of messianism with Hegelian and Marxian determinism, the idea that vast and blind historical forces sweep across the world's stage without important regard to personalities. But of course that Marxist thought is invalidated by Marxist his tory -- the crucial "heroic" role played by men like Marx himself, and Lenin and Stalin. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that "men have lived who did what no substitute could ever have done; their intervention set history on one path rather than another. If this is so, the old maxim There are no indispensable men' would seem another amiable fallacy. There is, then, a case for heroes."

Henry Kissinger does not deny that this case can be made, but he worries about the damage that such towering figures can cause. "Institutions are designed for an average standard of performance--a high average in fortunate societies, but still a standard reducible to approximate norms," Kissinger wrote six years ago in an essay on Bismarck.

"They are rarely able to accommodate genius or demoniac power. A society that must produce a great man in each generation to maintain its domestic or international position will doom itself."

Can Leadership Be Taught?

Such exceptional figures remain one of the enigmas of civilization. Leaders, wrote Peyre, "are indeed mystery men born in paradise or some devil's pit." In his brilliant study of Gandhi, Erik Erikson detected a "shrewdness [that] seemed to join his capacity to focus on the infinite meaning in finite things--a trait which is often associated with the attribution of sainthood." The rule that great leaders are summoned forth by great issues can be persuasively argued from, say, the Churchillian example--a brilliant, irascible aristocrat who was settling into a relatively unsuccessful old age when the war called him forth to embody a people's grand defiance.

Another example is Charles de Gaulle, who lived through his country's defeat and waited through political exile before he re-emerged and then managed through a combination of shrewdness, style and, indeed, charisma to act on the world stage as if France were still a great power. But he also had the courage to ignore passion and face reality in Algeria, cutting his country's losses in a disastrous colonial war.

In the U.S. perhaps only Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt played comparable roles in profound crises that threatened the very survival of the society. But the phenomenon is wholly unpredictable; there have been numerous upheavals in human history--the medieval plagues in Europe, for example--in which the event did not summon a savior. Ireland's eternal troubles illustrate history's frequent refusal to beckon a great leader with a solution. At the same time, great leaders throughout history have arisen seemingly from nowhere, like the Mahdi, an Islamic mystic who drove the Egyptians and their British allies, led by General Charles Gordon, out of the Sudan in a 19th century holy war.

Men have often dealt with the unpredictability of leadership by citing a hero's or prophet's appearance as divine intervention, since ordinary historical rules could not explain it. Thus Moses. Thus the emergence of Mohammed, whose startling religious and political career could scarcely have been predicted at the time.

The darker side of the thesis that great issues summon great men is the fact that great issues often mean simply great confusion, and that chaos can just as well call forth monsters. Psychiatrists D. Wilfred Abse and Lucie Jessner believe that "in its most extreme form, the leader-follower relationship exists in the rapport of hypnotist and subject." In the periods of instability, when a people feels itself lost and humiliated--Weimar Germany, for example--a world-historical banality like Hitler can somehow give expression to the frustration and lead his people --not a primitive, uneducated people, but one with the highest intellectual traditions--into bestial ecstasies. The holocaust is perhaps the single most important reason for the Western wariness of great leaders. In a way, as George Steiner has said, it was mankind's second fall. From it emerged a lesson: never submerge a people and its diversity in a single vision, a single personality. Accordingly, the Fuehrerprinzip, so often linked with the cult of personality, has made 20th century man healthily skittish of having a visionary ego at the nuclear trigger.

In the U.S., the balance between charismatic and pragmatic leadership has usually been weighted toward the latter. The earliest American concept of leadership was really neither; it had its roots in the Age of Reason and Greek political philosophy. Plato's intention was to make the joys and sorrows of every citizen the joys and sorrows of all.

The individual was an integrated part of the whole social body striving for excellence. The ideal was total noblesse oblige, an excellence of virtue based on justice, or paideia. Something of that ideal informed Jefferson's notion of the aristoi--the natural aristocracy based on virtue and talents whose members were the best governors for society. It survives in the deepest roots of the American establishment, even though the aristocratic tendency runs counter to Jacksonian exuberance, the more egalitarian American strain that makes every man a king.

Whether aristocratic or egalitarian in concept, can leadership be taught? It is one of the more tantalizing questions at a time when the quality is seen to be in such short supply. The military has often proved an effective, if not the only, school for leadership--consider Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. The late Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has documented the stunning extent to which the military has been the route to power for men of humble origins. "Of 92 Roman Emperors," Sorokin wrote, "at least 36 climbed to this position from the lowest social strata up the army ladder; of 65 Emperors of Byzantium, at least 12 were really upstarts who obtained this position through the same army ladder." In the U.S. a military career has rarely led to wider leadership in this century except in the very special case of Dwight Eisenhower.

Various societies have set about schooling their young for leadership. It is an ambiguous enterprise. Four of the nine British public schools known as the Clarendon Schools (Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby) have produced a disproportionate number of leaders over the years. Someone who passed through the system wrote: "It was assumed that every boy would be in such position as Viceroy of India and must be brought up with this end in view. The government of the country was made an almost personal matter." So too with Oxford and Cambridge, which have produced British leaders for centuries. At work there was a deep tradition of elitism and stability, a continuity of assumptions and expectations.

But the English aristocracy was capable of disastrous follies. There is no more perfect indictment of such leadership than the fatuously self-confident direction by the Lords Raglan and Cardigan of the charge of the Light Brigade. The event must be seen in retrospect not just as a piece of heroic military stupidity (worse ones have occurred since), but as a symbol of what happens to a trained elite that is closed to new blood and new ideas.

In the U.S. perhaps the most important form of leadership training has been the legal profession. However one may feel about lawyers, their predominance among U.S. political leaders suggests a deep American desire to mediate between opposing passions.

But Americans have had little patience with formal leadership training outside the military academies and some business-management courses, where the emphasis is often on case studies and field work.

"Leadership can be developed and improved by study and training," General Omar Bradley once told a class at the Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kans. "But don't discount experience. Someone may remind you that Napoleon led armies before he was 30 and Alexander the Great died at 33. Alexander might have been even greater if he had lived to an older age and had had more experience. In this respect, I especially like [the] theory that 'judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.' "

The U.S. has generally operated on the theory of a laissez-faire of merit. Despite its injustices--the disastrous schooling of the poor, for example--the diverse system has remained sufficiently open to allow leadership to rise from nearly every rank of the society. In fact, the WASP establishment has long wondered what went wrong, how it lost control to the coarse ethnic heirs of Jacksonianism. The dispossessed of American life are to be found in The Education of Henry Adams as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that democracy would have the effect of flattening the peaks of excellence while elevating the sub-par or the average. The danger is that in glorifying the least common denominator, democracy mandates mediocrity. The hope is that such a system will encourage a universal standard of excellence in every pursuit. Tocqueville took it for granted that the leveling process in a democracy would produce a mean--but not a happy mean.

Nonetheless, democracy possesses a resilience and fluidity that are capable of defying such predictions: classes rise above themselves, ambition remains plausible. Indeed, Americans hardly realize how revolutionary--and vulnerable--is the idea that a nation can have leadership without a trained elite, a leadership subject to popular mandate.

There is widespread fear today of new "men on horseback," of new demagogues. As governments wrestle with the problem of distributing ever more limited resources, thinkers like U.S. Economist Robert Heilbroner foresee a Hobbesian descent into authoritarianism and a siege economy in many nations--even in America. Heilbroner believes that perhaps modern man's aggressive and competitive instincts can be transferred from nature-destroying production to services--education, health care and the arts. But he doubts this can be done without paying a "fearful price" in democratic freedoms.

Defying Determinism

The validity of such visions and the nature of leadership itself depend very much on time and place, the deepest patterns of a society. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler constructed cyclical, organic theories of history. All civilizations, they said, passed through similar stages of growth and decay and eventually perished, whether from internal or external wounds. The 14th century Berber historian Ibn-Khaldun prefigured the idea by concluding that history repeatedly moves through the same cycles. According to Ibn-Khaldun's theory, a youthful, growing society is animated by asabiyya, the spirit of social solidarity found in what he called "the desert aristocracy." But as the society becomes more "civilized," the cohesive group feeling begins to deteriorate in the face of the luxury and diversity of pursuits that become available. Mao Tse-tung might well be a student of Ibn-Khaldun; he deliberately plunged China into the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 to prevent precisely the sort of deterioration foreseen by the Berber sage. But Ibn-Khaldun also warned that such interventions would prove futile.

"Several rulers," he wrote, "have sought to cure the state and restore it to normal health. They think this decay is the result of incapacity or negligence in their predecessors. They are wrong. These accidents are inherent in empires and cannot be cured."

Ibn-Khaldun, and later, like-minded prophets, did not calculate that the cycles could be broken, that history could simply veer off in another direction. As Journalist-Critic A.J. Liebling noted, Ibn-Khaldun's determinism was refuted by "the vigor of Renaissance thought, the technological advances and the discovery of the New World."

Societies have the talent for lumbering on, and more than any other country, the U.S. has always defied determinism. No successful American leader is likely to believe that he is presiding over the twilight of his culture.

Patterns Around the World

Regardless of where the U.S. may stand today in its historical cycle, a look at the rest of the world confirms the rarity of democratic leadership. Given the vastly diverse needs, traditions and social assumptions of the world's nations, it is extremely risky to venture any cultural generalizations. But some patterns seem evident nonetheless. In Black Africa, where the idea of a powerful paramount chief was deeply ingrained long before the white man's appearance, forms of dictatorship come naturally.

Respect for authority is taught from birth, and in Africa as nowhere else, might means right. Most Africans shrug and accept the winners in the power game. Opposition in much of the continent is regarded as not only unhealthy but also a bit improper. Leaders tend to be military usurpers; there have been two dozen military coups in the past decade. New leaders emerge literally overnight, but Africa is not fruitful ground as yet for the steady and gradual development of leadership.

In South America, as a young Peruvian politician says, "it is very difficult to get to the palace by political means; the usual way is by money or guns." The continent has been much dominated by the military. Youth counts for little. When the late Juan Peron won the presidency of Argentina last fall he was 77, and his closest rival was 69. The very frequency of military coups makes party politics an unattractive career. The best of the young either go into private business or the law, or they join leftist guerrilla movements.

In non-Communist Southeast Asia, men like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia's Suharto developed their talents during or soon after their countries achieved independence. All received a heavy dose of Western culture, and their concepts of national leadership were molded in the pattern of the imperial traditions by which they had been ruled. They were indoctrinated in character patterns thought necessary in the West to achieve supreme power in industrialized political democracies, although the traits, such as charisma or coolness under fire, have often degenerated into parody. Such leaders are less concerned with providing a sense of moral direction than with exercising a firm managerial hand. Inevitably, their countries endure considerable political apathy, and the average under-30 citizen of Malaysia or Singapore does not think of challenging the state of affairs. As long as the economy is not doing badly, he expects no more "leadership" than a General Motors assembly-line worker expects from the corporation president.

In Japan, none of the Westernized notions of personal leadership apply.

According to an old Japanese proverb, "A nail that protrudes is hammered down." The qualities of individualism, original thinking and outspokenness are not admired. What counts is reliability, confidence that the chosen man will not violate the defined perimeter of consensus. Within that perimeter, he should have a talent for manipulation and accommodation so as to minimize friction and confrontation.

Needed: Followership

In sharp contrast, the U.S. still believes in self-reliance and initiative (though not as strongly as in the past). But even in the U.S., the danger in the concept of leadership is that it can all too easily become a talisman, a form of magic. Instead effacing the problems and working at them, people tend to sit back and hope for leadership. "Everybody is looking for somebody else to do something for them, to take the responsibility," says Nelson Rockefeller. According to Chicago Psychoanalyst Jules Masserman, "We never get over being children. We're always looking for a parent figure." In a democracy, leadership always requires collaboration between the leader and the led. As George Shultz and others have pointed out, the problem is not just a lack of leadership but a lack of followership.

It is apt to be a circular dilemma: Is a leader chosen only after a critical, reasonably mature, well-informed public has decided roughly where it wants to be led; or does a leader appear first to tell the public where it wants to be led? Woodrow Wilson held that leadership is "interpretation" or articulation: "The forces of the public thought may be blind; [the leader] must lend them sight; they may blunder; he must set them right." But Wilson cautioned that the leader must not get too far ahead of his public: "He must read the common thought; he must test and calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in politics." (On the League of Nations issue, Wilson himself failed to heed his own advice and indeed got too far ahead of the country.)

But what if hard solutions to hard problems turn out to be unintelligible or unpalatable to the majority? Always assuming that the leaders and their experts have figured out what the solutions are in the first place, leadership then requires an extraordinary effort of persuasion and education--beginning in the home, which is everybody's first leadership class.

When this fails, as it often will, the leader must have the courage to "go against the weight of public opinion because he knows such a course is right," as Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan puts it. "He must be willing to get out in front and wait until his constituents catch up with him."

There are not nearly enough political leaders today willing to heed this truism. But everywhere there seem to be people ready and willing to play a role, but somehow without quite knowing where to take hold, where to fit in, in what way to bring their energies to bear.

No one has yet furnished a workable solution to that dilemma, but it is clear that leaders and potential leaders will have to work in three interrelated yet distinct areas: 1) institutional reform; 2) political philosophy; 3) personal attitudes.

Reform: Balance of Powers

Long before Watergate, it was obvious that the balance of power between the U.S. presidency and Congress (as well as, to some extent, local government) had been seriously upset. For American leadership to reassert itself, this imbalance will have to be righted, and the current constitutional struggle relating to Watergate is only part of the picture.

What has become known as "the imperial presidency" troubles many Americans, although quite a few see nothing wrong with the aggrandizement of the office ("Leave it to the President; he knows more," is the often voiced sentiment). The office, having reached out to meet the crisis of the 1930s, then a world war, and finally the cold war with its threat of apocalypse, has grown so huge that it dominates and distorts a Government built upon the principle of coequal branches.

Yet, says Stephen Hess, once a speechwriter for Dwight Eisenhower:

"Most of the social progress in our country has been initiated by our President, and those who would limit his power may well regret it when they have a President with whom they agree. You must think of powers you'd give a President you agree with and one you disagree with. You can't have a double standard."

While two generations of Presidents have been concentrating power in the White House, Congress has been relaxing its grip, sometimes to the point of irresponsibility. Says former Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus:

"When I was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, I saw Congress pass bills on clean air and clean water when they knew--absolutely knew--that the goals couldn't be fulfilled." Both Houses are poorly led. The machinery is creaky, the resources scant, and efforts at effective reform seem once again to have been smothered.

Another area for urgent institutional reform: the cumbersome way in which presidential candidates are chosen. The nominating process is an interminable circus, an obstacle course of costly and wearing primary campaigns culminating in a political convention which, whatever its advantages as spectacle, seems an unreliable way for the nation to go about selecting its leaders. The Democrats in 1972 tried to open the process to more popular participation, but the results were mixed, and the party became distracted by being bogged down in arguments over minority quotas and the like. Also obviously needed are reforms in campaign financing, to enable candidates to run without requiring huge amounts of money, and an effort to cut short the grueling length of most political contests.

Politics: Recovering Consensus

Leadership is impossible in the abstract without a framework of more or less shared goals. The U.S. still seems able to articulate goals in general terms, but it is deeply divided on the specifics, the realities. It has, in short, lost its national consensus (although that consensus may never have been quite so solid as it has appeared in times of surface unity, such as of the Eisenhower years).

No clear majorities exist today. Says Massachusetts' State Representative Barney Frank: "Up to World War II, there were many more majority-type issues than there are now--Social Security, labor benefits, social and economic programs. Today most issues are not of concern to the majority, and we can't count on it to be self-sacrificing enough to pass them." Of course, inflation is becoming the new majority concern, along with such matters as energy, health care and food prices. But constructing new majorities for action, and creating even the beginnings of a new consensus, remains the most formidable task of all.

This process cannot succeed without a willingness to compromise. That is not the easiest requirement in an era that still hears echoes (fortunately diminishing) of "unconditional demands" and "nonnegotiable terms." Nor is a meeting of minds foreseeable in the bitter era of Watergate. Indeed, any kind of reconciliation or unified action will be impossible for a long time, unless Watergate ends with a sense of justice having been done.

To persuade people of the need to effect compromise, to restore the belief in consensus, not only inspiration will be needed but, perhaps more important, a very old political skill. Harry Truman spoke of it when he said: "You know what makes leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don't want to do and like it." That really amounts to a redefinition of self-interest. As Barney Frank puts it: "The great leader is the one who can show people that their self-interest is different from that which they perceived."

Unfortunately, that ability does not seem much in evidence in U.S. politics today. Its outstanding example lies in the international field, where Henry Kissinger has so brilliantly practiced it. At its heart are intelligence and the imagination to put oneself fully in another's place. The principle will have to be applied to a divided U.S., and it will take leadership on all levels to show that, if it fails, the result is common disaster.

Personal Attitudes: Trust

To make leadership possible, the essential link between leaders and followers must be restored: trust. As Toynbee has put it, the leader must "make his fellows his followers." This can happen only if they trust him enough not to examine or attack each of his individual actions and are willing to go along with him for a while. At what point does this partly automatic following, which Toynbee calls mimesis (literally, imitation), turn into blind obedience and abdication of responsibility? That is the crucial problem in a democracy, and it can be solved only if leaders and would-be leaders are far more open in their dealings than is customary in U.S. politics.

But for leaders to be open, followers must help. They must pay serious attention to the issues, for otherwise leaders have no incentive to take them into their confidence. Followers must be willing to forgo the cliches and platitudes that an indifferent or impatient public almost forces its leaders to utter. On the personal side, followers must also be more willing to accept their leaders as they are and less ready to buy the tiresome public relations conventions that require the American politician to be always one of the boys and hide every trait that might cause alarm--from intellectuality to a bad temper--behind a smiling mask.

True, most politicians have an instinct for the phony, but the American public need not accept it. Indeed, there are signs that Americans are readier than ever to be dealt with frankly, even if it takes some effort to live with frankness.

In sum, in a democracy, to be led is not a passive exercise; it takes work, and work by many people. As John Gardner put it: "Leadership in the U.S. is not a matter of scores of key individuals. It is a matter of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of influential men and women [who] create the climate in which public opinion is formed."

Among its vast assets, the U.S. retains a remarkable reservoir of talent (see portfolio beginning next page). Will all that talent find release, a chance to make a difference?

The magnitude of today's problems could easily lead to a chronic sense of helplessness.

But it could also lead to a new sense of concern and commitment. And such a sense could prove to be the crucial ingredient that has been missing from the elusive formula for successful leadership in the modern world. Says Duke University Political Scientist James David Barber: "Sore as the public is, there is strong evidence that they are American to the core: uninterested in revolution, increasingly concerned for the civil liberties, ready for sacrifice on an equal basis with the privileged and, above all, watching and waiting for leadership to express and effect their new sense of the country's commitment to community, humaneness and candor."

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