In the latest installment of our occasional conversations with area newsmakers, Talmage Boston, author of “How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents,” spoke with business editor Bob Francis about the book prior to a discussion about the subject at The Fort Worth Club.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For the unabridged version, please listen to the audio file attached to this article.
Bob Francis: Tell us about the book and how you came to write it.
Talmage Boston: The leadership lessons associated with these top presidents are readily transferable to any person who aspires to lead. The eight presidents I chose — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan — I wanted to identify an average of three top leadership traits per president. So the book has 24 total leadership traits. And in each chapter, I cover that president’s special traits. And then at the end of each chapter, I have what I call a mini workbook, a series of questions about the traits in the chapter you just read. It allows the reader to ask him or herself how am I doing in building consensus or in unifying an organization or in being patient when I need to be or playing hardball when it’s appropriate? All these questions at the end of each chapter seek to bring an interactive component to the reader with the book. It’s what I call applied history. It’s wonderful to know history. It’s even better when you can actually apply it to your daily living. And that’s what this book is, kind of a combination leadership book and presidential history book.
If You Go …
Event: World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth presents “How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Presidents,” featuring presidential historian Talmage Boston
When: 11:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m. April 9
Where: The Fort Worth Club, 306 W. Seventh St.
Francis: What got you interested in this?
Boston: I had a fascination with presidential history since I was 7 years old, a lifelong interest in it. My last book was on presidential history, which came out in 2016. So now I’m well connected in the presidential history community, such that anytime somebody has a new book out, a major new biography out on a president, they come through Dallas on their book tours, and I interview them onstage for a number of programs.
Every single one of my chapters, I sent to at least two major biographers of that president to get them to review it, to tell me if I missed something or misstated something, etc. So the conclusions in the book have been thoroughly vetted by the nation’s leading presidential historians as evidenced by what’s on the dust jacket.
I think it’s important for readers to know that this isn’t just some lawyer’s conclusions about presidential leadership. In fact, I’ve gotten affirmed by the nation’s leading presidential historians in terms of how I selected the eight top presidents. My choice was tied largely to the C-SPAN presidential ranking poll. Every time one president leaves the White House and a new one comes in, C-SPAN polls historians about the rankings. So, the last two polls have been in 2017 when Trump came in and 2021 when Biden came in. C-SPAN gets the nation’s 150 leading presidential historians and they rank all presidents from best to worst, judging them in 10 presidential leadership categories.
And in the last few polls, the numbers have stayed the same. In terms of number one ranking, Abraham Lincoln, number two, George Washington; three, Franklin Roosevelt; four, Theodore Roosevelt; five, Dwight Eisenhower; six, Harry Truman; seven, Thomas Jefferson; eight, John Kennedy; and nine, Ronald Reagan. My only tweaking of the C-SPAN rankings is that I think Harry Truman is overrated, so I pulled him out. And I think Reagan is underrated, so I moved him up. There’s a lot more people interested in reading about Reagan than Truman. But maybe most important, since I’m trying to have a book that gets bought by both Democrats and Republicans in the modern era, I have a balance of FDR and JFK for the Democrats and I have Eisenhower and Reagan for the Republicans. Everybody can see that we’ve had great leaders from both parties, leaders who have traits that are worthy of study and emulation. And so that’s how I rounded my choices.
Francis: Did you look at the key decisions they made or how did you choose?
Boston: For each of the eight presidents, I read the leading biographies of each of them. That’s a lot of work. And amazingly, the conclusions drawn about what caused each of them to be successful as presidents were largely the same. There really wasn’t much conflict.
As I read biography after biography, after taking notes and looking for exactly how did each of them do it, (I asked) ‘What did each of them do to be a successful president?’ I would review my notes for each of the presidents, all of those biographies. I would identify what were his most important traits that caused him to be successful. I would cover those traits in the chapter. At the end, after I’ve covered those traits, I engage the reader by asking him or herself, ‘How am I doing in terms of having those traits in my repertoire?’
Francis: But one of the most interesting decisions I’ve read the most about has been the Cuban missile crisis. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you determined about his decision making there.
Boston: Kennedy was inaugurated in January of 1961. And three months later, we had the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was an international humiliation for Kennedy. And he took responsibility for it. But he learned a very valuable lesson, and that is, you cannot rely on the advice you get from so-called experts. He had relied on his military experts and his CIA to go forward with the Bay of Pigs effort to overthrow Castro. And it was poorly planned, poorly executed. Castro’s army wiped it out almost instantly. It was an international embarrassment, but he learned a very valuable lesson and that is, you cannot do what the experts say. You have to exercise your independent judgment. You have to be discerning. You have to take all expert advice with a grain of salt.
And so, thank goodness, he had learned that lesson, because in October 1962, a year and a half later, when he learned that Soviets were sending nuclear missiles into Cuba, he assembled his team of advisers and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they all together decided what should be done. And over 42 hours of conversations and deliberations about what to do over the course of the famous 13 days, revealed that both his military leaders and his other political advisors were, for the most part, giving him bad advice. He accepted some of it but rejected much of it. They were getting more wrapped up and excited and panicking every day.
He was always calm in the crisis from beginning to end. He made the decision to implement the blockade, which stopped Soviet ships from adding any more missiles into Cuba, but also that triggered the negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev, which ultimately brought an end without a shot being fired. In terms of the trade that was made, Khrushchev agreeing to pull his missiles out of Cuba, if we would agree to pull our missiles out of Turkey nearby the Soviet Union.
The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the importance of staying calm in a crisis. On the one hand, he surrounded himself with top talent. But don’t just swallow that advice whole without doing an independent assessment of how good the advice really is. And thank goodness for him doing that.
He succeeded in bringing an end to the missile crisis, which gave him an impetus for subsequent negotiations with Khrushchev that enhanced his foreign policy before, unfortunately, his presidency was obviously shortened by the assassination.
Francis: In reading all those biographies, did any of the presidents surprise you? Positively or negatively?
Boston: I knew that they were all great presidents. I didn’t have a clear handle on exactly why. But I can take one at a time.
George Washington: I didn’t realize before that he really was not a good public speaker. In fact, he had a breathy, soft voice that came from a childhood respiratory illness.
And he also had lifelong trouble with his teeth because he had these very unwieldy dentures that made speaking difficult. But because he had these incredible achievements, both as the leader of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and the chairman who presided over the Constitutional Convention, most of which he was chosen for unanimously.
He had these achievements that made people want to follow his lead, but he also had this incredible command presence. He was 6-foot-3, which meant he was always the tallest guy in the room. He had ramrod straight posture. He dressed immaculately. He rode a shining white horse wherever he went. He was a great listener. He had piercing eye contact. And he liked people, he engaged with people and he was usually the last guy to speak after he had heard the opinions of others to weigh what he thought was right.
He was a very good decision-maker. He was also incredibly self-aware in that he knew his strengths but he also knew his weaknesses.
For example, he wasn’t a scholar about the history of world governments, which you need to be if you’re going to start over brand new with a new American government.
So he brought in James Madison to prepare the Virginia Plan that became the backbone. He wasn’t skilled at finances and economic policy. So when he became president, we had all these postwar debts. He didn’t know how to handle him, but he brought in Alexander Hamilton, who was a financial genius.
And then last, but certainly not least, he had this incredible integrity. Every word that came out of his mouth had total credibility. You can take it to the bank. And so these traits of incredibly heroic achievements, command presence, integrity, put them all together, and that’s why he kept being chosen unanimously to lead and why he’s always regarded as one of our top two presidents.
Francis: Since I’m the business editor, I’ll ask this question. What traits can business leaders learn from this book?
Boston: I hope business leaders would want to pay attention to the Dwight Eisenhower chapter, because he put together an organizational masterpiece in the White House just as he had done as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II.
And so he totally reorganized the Cabinet. And they would have meetings every Friday morning. It was total collaboration, total brainstorming, total sharing of ideas. Ultimately, Eisenhower was the decision-maker, but he got everybody engaged.
He put it all together and during his presidency there were basically eight years of peace and prosperity, which is why he’s ranked our fifth greatest president. When he came in, Truman had gotten us into the Korean War and had no idea how to bring an end to it. Eisenhower brought it to an end within six months. McCarthyism was rampant. Trumn had no idea about how to bring it to an end. Eisenhower came up with a game plan that worked and put McCarthyism to bed in 1954.
For business leaders who are thinking about how they’re setting up their organization and letting people who are competent do their jobs without micromanaging, this is the story of the Eisenhower presidency. That’s why I think it’s particularly instructive to business leaders today.
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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