the westernized world continues to shape global politics, and
peace in the Middle East is as elusive as ever.
As the late John Gardner pointed out, when the Founding
Fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution,
America had a population of only 3 million, yet six world-class
leaders were among the authors of that extraordinary docu-
ment. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and
Franklin created America. Today, there are 304 million Ameri-
cans and we wonder, every four years, why we can’t find at least
two superb candidates for the nation’s highest office.
What happened?
As eighteenth-century America was notable for its geniuses,
nineteenth-century America was notable for its adventurers,
entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, and writers, the titans who
made the industrial revolution, the explorers who opened up
the West, the writers who defined us as a nation and a people.
Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell, Lewis
and Clark, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and
Twain. These men and women whose vision matched their au-
dacity built America.
Twentieth-century America started to build on the promise
of the nineteenth, but something went terribly wrong. After
World War II, America was chiefly notable for its bureaucrats
and managers, its organization men, its wheeler-dealers who
remade, and in some cases unmade, the institutions and orga -
nizations of America, in both the public and private sectors.
There have been bright spots, including the rise of the civil
rights movement and extraordinary American accomplishments
in science and technology. But even though we emerged from
World War II as the richest and most powerful nation on earth,
On Becoming a Leader