Doris Kearns Goodwin

As ever, immediately beneath the skin of [FDR’s] vision lay the sinew and bone of pragmatic action.

Any man who has been successful, [Theodore] Roosevelt repeatedly said, has leapt at opportunities chance provides.

While their personal stories came to very different ends, they were all looking beyond their own lives, hopeful that their achievements had shaped and enlarged the future. The fame they craved, the recognition they sought, bears little resemblance to today’s cult of celebrity. For these leaders, the final measure of their achievements would be realized by their admittance to an enduring place in communal memory.

As [Theodore] Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. ‘It is never well to take drastic action,’ he liked to say, ‘if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

To better illustrate the situation, he [FDR] reverted to a sports analogy. He likened himself to the quarterback of a football team who ‘has a general plan of game in mind.’ He knew what his first play was going to be but could not tell you the play after that ‘until the next play is run off. If the play makes ten yards, the succeeding play will be different from what it would have been if they had been thrown for a loss.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and [Theodore] Roosevelt ‘the greatest of companions.’ Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

When Roosevelt first described the plan to the cabinet, Perkins considered it a ‘pipedream.’ How would a quarter of a million young men be recruited? How would they be transported to the forests, clothed, fed, and housed? Who would design and supervise the work projects? How could the program possibly be up and running in three months’ time? The answers to all such questions lay in Roosevelt’s leadership style: Establish a clear purpose; challenge the team to work out details; traverse conventional departmental boundaries; set large short-term and long-term targets; create tangible success to generate accelerated growth and momentum.

Worried that Teedie [T. Roosevelt], like [his mother] Mittie, was becoming an invalid, Thee took his son aside: ‘Theodore, you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must *make* your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.’ Teedie responded enthusiastically, promising his father: ‘I’ll make my body.’

‘I have often thought,’ American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, ‘that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me!’

While the nature of the era a leader chances to occupy profoundly influences the nature of the leadership opportunity, the leader must be ready when that opportunity presents itself.