Leaders

Nixon's 1982 character studies of major world leaders

Tradition: Political realism / Cold War political tradition

Nixon's 1982 character studies of major world leaders

Leaders (1982) is Richard Nixon's (1913-1994) book of character-studies of nine major twentieth-century world leaders he knew personally — Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Douglas MacArthur, Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, Shigeru Yoshida, Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai), Konrad Adenauer (paired separately), and a final synthetic chapter on what makes a great leader. Nixon's distinctive vantage: he had served as Eisenhower's Vice-President 1953-61, conducted the famous 1959 'Kitchen Debate' with Khrushchev in Moscow, served as President 1969-74, conducted the historic 1972 China opening (the Mao-and-Chou meetings), and remained an active foreign-policy observer-correspondent across his post-presidential decades. The book is therefore based not on academic-biographical research but on Nixon's direct personal observation and conversational record with the leaders concerned. Nixon's interpretive framework: great leaders share certain decisive personal qualities — strategic-and-moral imagination, capacity for solitary decision-making under pressure, deep historical literacy, comfort with sustained adversarial confrontation, willingness to surprise both allies and adversaries — and these qualities can be observed across very different national-political-cultural contexts (Churchill's parliamentary aristocratic-democratic context, de Gaulle's French-presidential-revolutionary context, Mao-and-Chou's Chinese-revolutionary context, Adenauer's post-war-German rehabilitation context). The book also functions, like The Real War (1980), as part of Nixon's post-presidential rehabilitative-political project — establishing his credentials as a serious comparative-political thinker on world leadership, drawing on his own first-rank diplomatic experience, and implicitly making the case that the qualities of great leadership transcend the partisan-political controversies that had brought him down. Leaders was widely read in foreign-policy and political-leadership circles in the 1980s and was followed by Real Peace (1983) and No More Vietnams (1985) in Nixon's late-Cold-War strategic-and-political book corpus.