Following the Leaders

By John Elson

Where have all our leaders gone? In Certain Trumpets (Simon & Schuster; 322 pages; $23), Pulitzer-prizewinning historian Garry Wills tries to answer that familiar question by posing some queries of his own. Where are the good followers? Wills asks. And where are the great issues and programs that unite leader and led in action? A leader without committed followers is an unheard voice in the wilderness. Followers without a leader who understands their needs are a mere mob. And without a timely, common cause, neither leader nor followers will affect history, for good or ill. Wills describes 16 people in 16 different fields, from Mary Baker Eddy (church) to Ross Perot (business), who have succeeded in directing followers to a common end. Each chapter includes a sketch of what Wills calls "antitypes" -- that is, would-be leaders who for one reason or another failed to truly lead.

Unsurprisingly, Wills' military exemplar is the young Napoleon Bonaparte, whose dazzling early victories were based on mobility and constant attack. His antitype is the dithering Union general George McClellan, who seldom met a battle he couldn't find reason to avoid. The paradigm for politics is George Washington, who orchestrated history's most successful transition from monarchy to republicanism. Washington's achievement, as Wills sees it, was to bring "legal rule out of the false dilemma posed in revolutionary times -- either charisma or chaos." Wills' political antitype is Oliver Cromwell, who became as regal as Charles I, the Stuart king he dethroned and executed.

To Wills the model of an artistic leader is Martha Graham, who invented a vocabulary for modern dance -- "the one art form other than jazz," said choreographer Paul Taylor, who had been a member of her company, "that can be called truly American." The intriguing antitype is Madonna, who briefly studied with Graham's disciple Pearl Lang. The essential difference? Graham "not only performed a dance but preached an aesthetic," Wills argues. When Madonna performs, she merely entertains.

Compared with such important works by Wills as Lincoln at Gettysburg or Nixon Agonistes, Certain Trumpets has an offhand quality; it resembles an actor's phoned-in performance. There are also moments when Wills strains mightily to make a case, notably in the chapter on Perot. Wills argues that Perot, who built Electronic Data Systems into a multibillion-dollar enterprise before peddling it to GM, improved on the theories of two corporate legends who made salesmanship a near science: John Henry Patterson of National Cash Register and Thomas Watson of IBM. Perhaps so, but even by Wills' narrow definition of business leadership -- that it mostly has to do with selling -- someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft, who had much more originality than Perot and built a much more important company, might have been a stronger example of the corporate leader par excellence.

Despite such flaws, Certain Trumpets moves along perkily, if only because Wills is incapable of writing a really dull page. The author has a splendid ability to characterize his subjects. He reminds us, for example, that Washington was as accomplished an autodidact as Lincoln and that the famous portraits of the Father of our Country as an unsmiling, po-faced stuffed shirt do an injustice to someone whose contemporaries thought him the livest of wires, even in a room with the likes of Franklin and Jefferson.

As the author suggests, picking leaders and their antitypes is a game that readers can play on their own after finishing the book. Let's see now. Suppose we choose basketball's retired superstar Michael Jordan as the epitome of a sports leader. Who could be the antitype? Well, why not Michael Jordan, struggling baseball minor leaguer?