1. Profiling Political Leaders:
An Introduction
Jerrold M. Post, Stephen G. Walker,
and David G. WinterThe influence of a leader's personality upon the course of political
events has been the subject of lively debate. The "great man" view of
history, of which Thomas Carlyle was a prominent proponent, has
often conveyed the march of history in terms of leading political
actors. In the spirit of Carlyle, we often view a nation's foreign pol-
icy in terms of the personalities of its leaders. Thus George III and
Lord North are said to have lost Great Britain's American colonies by
virtue of their stupidity and arrogance. (If only the elder Pitt had
continued in power after 1767!) In 1919, Woodrow Wilson won the
war but lost the peace because he negotiated ineptly, confused
rhetoric with substance, and refused to compromise. Two decades
later, Adolf Hitler set Europe aflame with a foreign policy that
seemed to be rooted in his personal pathology. Perhaps the appeal of
these familiar examples reflects our human tendency to reduce com-
plexity to simplicity, attributing the causes of other people's behav-
ior to their internal dispositions rather than to their situations (Jones
and Nisbett 1972). Certainly in reviewing the history of the twenti-
eth century, it would be difficult to portray the major events as sim-
ply a consequence of historical and political forces, ignoring the
impact of such giant figures as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao
Ze-dong.
Set against these personality interpretations is the counterargu-