Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Leadership is one of those things that is difficult to define because leadership means different things to many people.    

The paragraph below is a description of the leadership style of General George C. Marshall who was chief of staff of the U.S. Army during WWII and was the architect of the buildup to the war and the rebuilding of Europe after the war.

The description is by Charles R. Hook who was president of Armco Steel and the National Association of Manufacturers in 1939 when Marshall gathered manufacturers to talk about what the U.S. might need if it were to be drawn into WWII, already raging in Europe.

“First, of course, is his supreme integrity. You couldn’t know the man and talk with him without being impressed with the fact that what he said he believed was in the best interest of the country. He had a personality that won confidence. He was so perfectly frank. You never felt he was holding back. If there was some important secret military problem that he couldn’t answer he would say so frankly, but there were few occasions of that if he had confidence in the men he was talking to. He was a kindly man. You wouldn’t think of him as a fellow who bulldozed his way through. In other words, I figured that he was a developer, that he encouraged, he gave leadership and knew when to dispense authority and to delegate it. There has never been any question in my mind that whatever move he made he had studied carefully first. He had gotten all the information he could, and then his decision was based upon what was best for the country, irrespective of what it might to do him.”

That pretty much describes what I feel a president should be like. A person of integrity who is knowledgeable, kind, encourages leadership in others and makes decisions based on what is best for the country first.

Now Marshall was in an appointed position, he didn’t have to run for election so the only people he had to please were those who appointed him. And that is certainly different from the politics of a presidential election.

I think we all want a good leader for president, regardless of our political backgrounds. But our political atmosphere these days probably turns off a lot of people from a variety of backgrounds from even seeking an office like the Presidency of the United States.

Granted, candidacies for the presidency are going to be spirited and should be an open discussion of our problems as a nation, possible solutions and the ability of the candidate to deal with them.

But those campaigns often turn into character assassination efforts where people try to point out every possible bad thing about a candidate to make their candidate appear to be better, sometimes even if it is made up.

It should be no wonder that some of the better leaders in this nation, people who have accomplished good things and demonstrated good leadership, choose to shy away from a political campaign where every perceived fault will be attacked as being an affront to the American people.

That means that as we select candidates for the presidency, or even some other offices, the field of those seeking those offices is probably narrower that it should be since some just don’t want to mess with our current state of partisan politics.

Free speech is a key aspect of our freedom in the United States. But the best free speech is responsible free speech. It is OK to agree or disagree and say so. But ramping things up to character assassination because of a disagreement over an issue leads to bitterness that means issues don’t get resolved.

We need good leaders, we need to create a atmosphere where they will step forward.