The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton by Marvin Olasky

The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton Reviews

• 
  Will Messer

  Olasky is a monumental idiot. Very little objective reasoning when he breaks down the presidents - confused, irrelevant metrics when giving abrupt judgement. Gave it 2 stars for the chapter on Booker T.
• 
  Tim Chavel

  This book written by Marvin Olasky is a great book for those who like to learn about historical figures. He covers thirteen of some of the prominent people in American history. The book is an insight on how their moral character affected them as leaders. I have some quotes below that intrigued me and thought they might be helpful to others. If you desire to read about history from a conservative worldview then this is a great read for you! Please note I do not cover all thirteen men in this review on good reads because of lack of space, however if you want to read them all please visit my
  blog.
  
  George Washington
  Publicly, Washington continued to emphasize the thoughts of his farewell address in 1796: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion, and morality are indispensable supports.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of sound public policy, he declared: “Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?” Political works without faith were dead, Washington insisted, for there was no evidence “that morality can be maintained without religion.”
  
  Thomas Jefferson
  Pro-Jefferson Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, sent him [Jefferson] a letter protesting the continued preferences that Congregationalists received from the Connecticut state government. Jefferson responded to these political allies with a king letter similar to those politicians write by the hundreds each year: I agree with you. My hands are tied, but I’m with you and I hope you succeed. Jefferson thanked the Danbury folks for “affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation,” and told them, “My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents.” Then came the “I’m sorry” line: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” In other words, Jefferson was noting, Congress – the American legislature – can make no law in this instance.
  
  Jefferson was not at all saying that the Connecticut establishment of religion was unconstitutional. Everyone in those days knew that was perfectly proper. Everyone knew that the purpose of the First Amendment was to keep the federal government from doing anything to interfere with whatever local arrangements were made. Jefferson could merely conclude his letter with words of hope: “I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights. …”
  
  The Jefferson Memorial displays a line from Jefferson’s autobiography concerning slaves: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free.” The memorial leaves off the next two sentences: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Native habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” Blacks were one day to be free – and the next day deported. Jefferson, like other leaders of his time, favored African colonization.
  
  Andrew Jackson
  Jackson was the most Bible-rooted, principled, and combative of our nineteenth-century presidents. (Ironically, many among the conventional eastern clergy opposed his candidacy).
  
  During the weeks leading up to the Battle of New Orleans, while others panicked at the thought of fighting British regulars who had defeated Napoleon, Jackson prayed ardently and told others, during and after the battle, that they should fear neither life nor death because “the unerring hand of Providence” is always active amidst the “shower of Balls, bombs, and Rockets. …”
  
  Jackson continued the practice he had followed for two decades of reading three chapters of the Bible daily. That immersion in Scripture had not kept Jackson from fighting duels, but it did show when Jackson wrote to Secretary of State James Monroe following the New Orleans rout. Rather than taking credit for the victory, Jackson wrote, “Heaven, to be sure, has interposed most wonderfully in our behalf, and I am filled with gratitude.”
  
  When his wife, Rachel, sickened and died following Jackson’s election to the presidency but before his inauguration. Jackson wrote, “We who are frequently visited by this chastening rod, have the consolation to read in the Scriptures that whomsoever He chasteneth He loveth, and does it for their good to make them mindful of their mortality and that this earth is not our abiding place; and afflicts us that we may prepare for a better world, a happy immortality.”
  
  Jackson also bequeathed a legacy to his successors in government: Like Washington he raised the bar of presidential expectations. He understood sin – his own and others – and the need to war against it. In marrying Rachel and remaining faithful to her for thirty-seven years, he learned to control his lust; he spent a lifetime to control his anger. His strict constitutionalism suggests that Jackson was willing to be a man under authority, and his worship of God while president showed that he was not making an idol of governmental power. A post-Jackson president was to be not only a benign presider over state affairs, but also a vigorous defender of citizens and opponent of haughty bureaucrats.
  
  Henry Clay
  Clay dominated Washington legislative pursuits for decades. From the War of 1812 through his death forty years later, Clay was first Speaker of the House, then the Senate’s most influential leader, and throughout a perennial presidential candidate. He was often the person journalists predicted was most likely to succeed to the presidency, yet Americans never gave him their full confidence. Clay apparently freed himself from sexual restraints and undermined constitutional restraints, but he learned that most American voters trusted the Constitution, not him. Why Clay never made it to the presidency reveals much about the early-nineteenth-century electorate’s view of character and statesmanship.
  
  Clay became expert at what later would be known as the salami strategy: getting what he wanted, one slice at a time.
  
  Abraham Lincoln [one of my least favorite presidents]
  Lincoln followed Clay on not only economic issues but social and foreign policy ones as well. Like Clay, he favored schemes to transport blacks to Africa, and he opposed the Mexican War. But Lincoln, like Clay, primarily emphasized breaching the wall of separation between federal expenditure and private interests – a wall established by the Constitution, bulwarked by Madison and Monroe vetoes, and reinforced by Jackson.
  
  In 1837, after Lincoln had questioned the accuracy of the Bible and the divinity of Christ, one local politician, James Adams, called Lincoln a “deist,” and therefore untrustworthy. Religious accusations plagued Lincoln again in 1843 when an opponent in the race for a congressional seat noted that Lincoln was a deist who “belonged to no church.”
  
  Several long talks with Phineas Gurley [around 1862], pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, helped him go through “a process of crystallization,” which Gurley described as a conversion to Christ. “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go,” Lincoln explained to Brooks. “My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for that day.”
  
  Lincoln needed the church and the Bible. By 1864, Lincoln was even recommending Scripture reading to Joshua Speed, his fellow skeptic from Springfield days. When Speed said he was surprised to see Lincoln reading a Bible, Lincoln earnestly told him, “Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.” When the Committee of Colored People in 1864 gave Lincoln a Bible, he responded, “But for this book we could not know right from wrong.”
  
  The conquest of Atlanta probably made the difference between Union victory and defeat. Had elections occurred in August 1864 rather than November, Democratic candidate McClellan likely would have been elected, and the war probably would have ended with negotiations and southern independence.
  
  Journalist James Gilmore, interviewing Lincoln after the Atlanta victory, came away thinking that the president saw himself as God’s agent “led infallibly in the right direction.”
  
  Curiously, that speech [Lincoln’s second inaugural address], with its call to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” is often cited as evidence of Lincoln’s emphasis on reconciliation. But the address also showed Lincoln’s theological changes during the war. “Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away,” he said. “Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
  
  What is often ignored when we think of Lincoln as a monument is that he went to Washington as a Clay-lover but found that wheeling and dealing did not answer deeper issues of meaning as the Civil War raged. Profane as a youth, he became devout during the war as he realized its enormity was too big for him to comprehend. His wartime devotion tended to be fatalistic: God ordains whatever happens, and thus whatever happens is right. The Bible, however, teaches that whatever God ordains is right, yet man has the responsibility to choose the right by studying the Bible in order to think like God’s thought after Him. The subtle but important difference between Biblical and Lincolnesque faiths raises many questions: Because the Union won the war by breaking with constitutional restraints and traditions of humane warfare, were those policies right? Did Lincoln ever put himself under God’s authority, or did he come to believe that his high-minded ends justified hellish means? There are many mysteries, but one thing is clear: When Lincoln’s assassination left Americans overlooking his disunities and remembering his willingness to give all he had for Union, the bar for presidential successors was raised.
  
  Booker T. Washington [one of my most favorite people in history]
  Booker T. Washington’s critics never liked his essential agreement with Andrew Johnson that education and hard work would pave the road to political rights. Some also thought it strange that religion was more important than politics in his life; as Washington’s daughter, Portia, said, “We never at home began the day without prayer, and we closed the day with prayer in the evening. He read the Bible to us each day at breakfast and prayed; that was never missed. Really he prayed all the time.”
  
  He spoke of how Christians should remember not only God’s love but also God’s holiness, realizing that “If we would live happily, live honored and useful lives, modeled after our perfect leader, Christ, we must conform to law, and learn that there is no possible escape from punishment that follows the breaking of law.”
  
  He wanted students to do everything, corm deo, “in the sight of God”: “A student should not be satisfied with himself until he has grown to the point where, when simply sweeping a room, he can go into the corners and crevices and remove the hidden trash which, altogether it should be left, would not be seen.”
  
  He also saw that formal education by itself did not change live unless there was the will to work hard in economically productive tasks.
  
  Booker T. Washington would have made a great president. Like Andrew Jackson, he was a fully integrated personality who set a course and stuck to it, without distraction or double0mindedness. He expressed faith in God and refused to turn to what some believed was a higher power, government. Like George Washington, he did not write or speak much about the indwelling nature of sin and the need for a Savior, so it is hard to know how deep his Christian faith went, but from all appearances there was bedrock. Whether he saw religion primarily as external good or internal necessity, Booker T. Washington showed no contrast between his public and private duties, and no willingness to concede that the ends of racial equality could justify anything other than the means of statesmanlike uprightness and perseverance.
  
  John D. Rockefeller
  Rockefeller was baptized at the Erie Street Baptist Church in Cleveland in 1854, quickly started teaching Sunday school, and “was contented and happy … with the work in the church. That was my environment, and I thank God for it!” In no other place besides home, Rockefeller said, did he feel so at ease.
  
  Love and discipline are both needed in the raising of a child who feels comfortable with himself but not so comfortable that aspirations disappear. It is not clear how much love Rockefeller received, but he did receive discipline and later disciplined himself by, among other things, abstaining from tobacco, alcohol, caffeinated products, and – from all available evidence – prostitutes. Rockefeller avoided debt and bought inexpensive “clothing such as I could pay for, and it was a good deal better than buying clothes that I could not pay for.”
  
  The life-styles of Rockefeller and some of the tycoons of our era could not be more different. Rockefeller was in church every Sunday, unless traveling, and frequently went to church suppers and picnics, but not to theaters.
  
  When Rockefeller moved to New York in 1884 he maintained patterns of domesticity, leading family prayers at seven-thirty sharp each morning. His children grew up wealthy but generally unspoiled. Once, when spending requests were too high, Rockefeller said, “Who do you think we are, Vanderbilts?” He taught a Sunday school class, “Don’t let good fellowship get the least hold on you. … [E]very downfall is traceable directly or indirectly to the victim’s good fellowship, his good cheer among his friends, who come as quickly as they go.” Family remained.
  
  Rockefeller’s Christianity, as it turned out, did not go very deep. He liked a precise listing of dos and don’ts in church. He believed in and practiced family values. But there is no indication that he ever developed a clear sense that God – and not man’s work, however meticulous – saves sinners. Nor is there evidence of Rockefeller developing a Christian worldview, a sense of how the Bible can be applied thoughtfully not only in church and family devotions, but in all aspects of life and within every department of a university.
  
  Rockefeller had built a university (University of Chicago) that would teach anti-biblical ideas, but he could take comfort in not endorsing the theater in general.
  
  Rockefeller was a man who gained great wealth by paying attention to small things; a world now sliding on oil owes debts of economic gratitude to him. By making it possible for poor as well as rich people to have light at night in the nineteenth century and mobility in the twentieth, he was one of the great philanthropists of his age. In his philanthropy through contributions, however, Rockefeller did not pay attention to critical matters. Foundations he set up with much of his money, like his university, eventually turned his attention to undermining the market system that he had mastered.
  
  Grover Cleveland
  Cleveland brought a sense of honor back into the national government.
  
  Cleveland had practiced being out of the swing of things while serving his apprenticeships as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York. In Buffalo, because he stood against raids on the public treasury, he gained the nickname “Veto Mayor.” In Washington, opponents called him the “Veto President.”
  
  But if what Cleveland did during his six busy workdays did not trouble him, it was because on the seventh he worshipped at the First Presbyterian Church.
  
  He worshipped the God of Scripture, saying, “the Bible is good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought up. I do not want notes, or criticism, or explanations about authorship or origin.”
  
  Cleveland believed in a Lord who proclaimed objective truth and challenged men to do their duty.
  
  In 1893, when he fought off cancer by having his left upper jaw removed, Cleveland wrote to Thomas Bayard, ambassador to England, “I see in a new light the necessity of doing my allotted work in the full apprehension of the coming night.”
  
  Young Cleveland studied the Westminster Shorter Catechism and found some of the memorization difficult, but as president he told reporters that he could recite it from beginning to end. He wryly commented, “those are not apt to be the worst citizens who were early taught, ‘what is the chief end of man?’” (The catechism answer is, “To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”)
  
  In 1853 and 1854, Cleveland was an assistant teacher at the Institution for the Blind in New York City. Fanny Crosby, the blind writer of hymns such as “To God Be the Glory,” was another assistant.
  
  Cleveland was the first incumbent president to be married in the White House.
  
  Cleveland defeated Harrison in another very close contest, becoming the first president to return to office after a four-year furlough.
  
  Grover Cleveland died in 1908. His last words were, “I have tried so hard to do right.” He had. A prodigal son who fathered a child out of wedlock, he tried to do right in making sure that his son grew up in a strong adoptive family. A rocklike constitutionalist, he fought those who planned to stretch the Constitution’s meaning by transferring tax money to influential individuals and groups. Cleveland provided integrity at a time it was desperately needed, but had trouble holding the allegiance of those who wanted not good government but a government that would feel their pain. He had many of the qualities of a George Washington but not the stature gained by successful military leadership. Cleveland thus could start the second age of the presidency down the right road, but his route could readily be abandoned by those who would follow.
• 
  Tommy Kiedis

  Private morality impacts public action. This is a lesson Marvin Olasky wants us to see in The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton. Olasky draws a line between religious beliefs and public policy. He demonstrates his thesis by examining the lives of ten United States Presidents and three citizens of notable repute. Reader beware. There are surprises in these pages, both delightful and disappointing.
  
  The author wants us to grapple with the notion of compartmentalization, i.e. one can lead a duplicitous life in private while publicly parading steady statesmanship. Olasky is out to discredit that belief. He writes, "Integrity stores up principal for future generations, but compartmentalization always leaves a bill, although one that might not be presented for years."
  
  His case is compelling. His scope is impressive. His work is interesting and instructive.
  
  Here are four reasons to read The American Leadership Tradition:
  
  1. Olasky's careful treatment of the presidents (as well as Henry Clay, Booker T. Washington, and John D. Rockefeller). I particularly appreciated his efforts to "unveil" the darker side of Thomas Jefferson, Clay, and John F. Kennedy. I did not feel this was a vendetta or a paparazzian effort, but a careful scholarly look.
  
  2. Olasky's treatment of the impact of the social gospel vs the gospel of grace.
  
  3. Olasky's emphasis on the mistrust caused by compartmentalization and how such mistrust, unexcused in the armed forces, is tolerated in politics.
  
  4. Olasky's bibliography is stellar. He outfits any reader who wants to dig deeper into the lives of Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Rockefeller, Cleveland, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton, with an solid group of works from which to begin that study.
  
  My only critique is that despite the outstanding bibliography, Dr. Olasky (a thorough scholar), did not source his work throughout this volume. Overall, I highly recommend The American Leadership Tradition.
• 
  Connor

  The American Leadership Tradition is one of the worst psudo-history books I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Olasky uses his scant understanding of history to support his arguments of moral and Christian superiority while ignoring any evidence that runs contrary to his premise. His attempt to demonstrate the history of moral strength throughout the United States' history crumbles when actual historical facts come into play. This book has no historical value, and provides only a blueprint to how facts can be ignored or warped to fit a personal agenda. Before reading this book, I would highly recommend doing background research into each of the figures he focuses on, and then reading the book with a very large grain of salt.
• 
  Tom

  Olasky demonstrates that many of our so called great leaders had no moral compass and could not keep their penis in their pants. Henry Clay, FDR, JFK, Wilson and others fit this category. Jackson, Cleveland, TR and Booker T. Washington are stellar examples of proper moral vision.
  A good read in light of the lack of moral vision in the present administration.
• 
  Benjamin Alexander

  Very interesting book on the personal lives of saints and scoundrels in the American Presidency and other leaders.