Just as Roosevelt and Kennedy made themselves new, and
therefore independent and free, Johnson and Nixon were used
goods, no matter how far they got from their pinched begin-
nings, no matter how high they rose. Roosevelt, Truman,
Eisenhower, and Kennedy invented themselves and then in-
vented the future. Johnson and Nixon were made by their
pasts. They imposed those mean lessons of their pasts on the
present, enshrouding the future. Good leaders engage the
world. Bad leaders entrap it, or try.
Jimmy Carter, who never managed to put a distinctive stamp
on his one-term presidency, was able to reinvent himself as an
international peace-maker. His 1980 re-election doomed as
long as American hostages remained in Iran, he continued to
be shaped out of office by his passionate Christianity. But his
unshakeable convictions were a far better fit with a career as an
almost saintly ambassador of peace than with the office of pres-
ident of the United States. Carter became an inspiring symbol
of what a former president, or any person who has attained and
lost great power, can achieve. With wife Rosalynn ever at his
side, Carter builds homes for the poor with Habitat for Hu-
manity. And whenever Carter feels he is needed, he jets off to
far-flung trouble spots to monitor elections and insure human
rights. Some see his efforts as naive. Many more see them as
evidence of authentic moral leadership, for which he received
the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
In the years since Carter left office in 1981, we have had self-
made men in the White House (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton)
and American aristocrats (George Herbert Walker Bush and his
son George W. Bush). The first Hollywood president, former
actor Reagan proved that leadership is, to an extraordinary de-
gree, a performance art. He earned his reputation as “the Teflon
On Becoming a Leader