Word: leadership
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lyndon Johnson, and even, here and there, for the darkling touch of Richard Nixon. But when Americans thought that they detected something of that familiar Milhousian style in the Carter loyalty tests and Cabinet firings, they were not so sure that that was what they wanted after all. Effective leadership often requires a subtle exercise of power that Carter and his Georgians have had difficulty mastering...
...some ways, the President is symptomatic of the political age. The procession of candidates now forming to challenge Carter in the 1980 election reflects fundamental problems of leadership. The two who display some size and fire, John Connally and Ted Kennedy (who is resolutely undeclared but watching with interest), come with reputations shadowed by their pasts. California Governor Jerry Brown, with his sleek vocabularies of "planetary realism," sounds like an item from The Whole Earth Catalog. Brown possesses a disco Jesuit allure and what seems to be a gut instinct for the politics of the future...
...nations, it is true, there is firmer leadership than half a decade ago. Margaret Thatcher, Britain's new Prime Minister, has taken a decisive, confident line, though her countrymen must wait to see where it leads. Germany's Helmut Schmidt and France's Valéry Giscard d'Estaing govern their countries with an effective margin of strength and popularity...
Does all this mean that the talent for leadership has abruptly disappeared from the American genes? Absolutely not. The reasons for the current problems of leadership lie deeper. Societies may not always get the leadership they deserve and need, but they get a leadership that reflects the nature of the nation's power and the condition of its followers...
...adjust to the new reality. Johnson lost two wars?the one in Viet Nam and the one against poverty; he demonstrated, among other things, that the resources of the U.S. are finite, a new and chastening realization for Americans. It was with L.B.J. that the U.S. crisis of leadership began...