Essays

  • Men in the Back Channels of World War II - “My job was to try and oil the wheels between the British and the Americans.  After that first dinner with the President, I used to go out to Hyde Park at weekends.  There were always Roosevelts there, and people like
  • Winston Churchill versus Joseph Chamberlain - Colville noted that Chamberlain “likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.”[1]  As Prime Minister, however, Chamberlain collected critics.  One Conservative ally of Chamberlain noted that the Prime Minister “engendered personal dislike among
  • The Poetry of Leadership - In early 1941, defeated Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie visited London.  He took with him a handwritten note from the American President  for the British Prime Minister.  Franklin D. Roosevelt had written out five lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem
  • Union Leaders - As a young politician, Abraham Lincoln had said: “I know the American People are much attached to their Government; – I know they would suffer much for its sake; – I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before
  • Lincoln and Churchill: Pacing and Prodding - Both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were pacers.  Lincoln paced in hall of the second floor of the White House, usually at night.  Churchill paced in the Great Hall of Chequers, the Prime Minister’s weekend getaway – even later at
  • Leaders, Maps and Globes - In December 1941, just seventeen days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the National Geographic Society delivered a map cabinet to the White House.  Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed the gift, which was installed in the second floor study where
  • Isaiah Berlin in War - Isaiah Berlin in War Latvian-borne Oxford academic Isaiah Berlin was a intellectual fox with many talents. Berlin loved to talk, but he was an even more skilled writer and political analyst. In the summer of 1940, the Russian-speaking Berlin was
  • Revenge & Reconstruction - Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction Mr. Lincoln and Reconstruction President Abraham Lincoln needed to mobilize the North to fight the Civil War. To fight the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill needed to mobilize his own country, the Dominion,
  • Peace & Unconditional Surrender - Abraham Lincoln and Peace Hampton Roads Conference Abraham Lincoln and Alexander H. Stephens Francis P. Blair, Sr. Horace Greeley James Jaquess In February 1862 just before the surrender of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, Union General Ulysses S. Grant
  • Democracy, Liberty & the Legislature - Members of Congress Visitors from Congress Abraham Lincoln and Republican Radicals Abraham Lincoln’s Values and Philosophy “I leave you,” concluded Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln at a Chicago campaign rally in July 1858, “hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn
  • Disappointing Generals: McClellan, Wavell & Auchinleck - George B. McClellan McClellan’s Headquarters George B. McClellan Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan Both President Lincoln and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a remarkable capacity to grasp the complexity of war, but even they needed to work through subordinates
  • Rivals & the Wilderness Years - Stephen A. Douglas Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas and Their Friend John Calhoun When on May 8-9, 1940, a pivotal debate was held in the House of Commons, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
  • Anglo-American Relations - Abraham Lincoln and Foreign Affairs Winning the Civil War required the United States to keep Britain out of the war. Winning World War II required Britain to bring America into the war as the dominant partner. Those challenges shaped the
  • Beaverbrook, Bracken & Browning - Orville H. Browning (Mr. Lincoln’s White House) Orville H. Browning (Mr. Lincoln & Friends) Leaders need friends. Sometimes those friends are not the ones that their other friends would have chosen for them. For Abraham Lincoln, attorneys Mark W. Delahay
  • Managing Personal Finances - Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill presented sharply different profiles in their handling of their own personal finances. Lincoln started with far fewer resources but he also suffered serious economic setbacks as a young man in New Salem, Illinois, where he
  • Courage & Security in War - Security at Mr. Lincoln’s White House “I see hundreds of strangers every day, and if anybody has the disposition to kill me he will find the opportunity,” said President Abraham Lincoln to aide John Nicolay. “To be absolutely safe I
  • William Seward & Anthony Eden - Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward William H. Seward (Mr. Lincoln & Friends) William H. Seward (Mr. Lincoln & New York) In their direction of the Civil War and World War II, Abraham Lincoln and Winston S. Churchill had two
  • Robert and Randolph: Sons in War - Abraham Lincoln and Sons Winston and Clementine Churchill had five children – one of whom died before the age of three. Their only son Randolph served honorably and bravely in World War II as a British commando in the Balkans,
  • Commanders in Chief - Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were firemen in a world which seemed to be burning all around them. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful or till I die, or am conquered, or
  • Clementine & Mary: Partners in Life & War - Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln Mary Todd Lincoln Abraham Lincoln was a principled realist. There is a pragmatism even to Lincoln’s selection of a wife. The future president’s ambition was reflected in his courtship. He was not satisfied to
  • The Personality of Leadership - President Lincoln’s Moods Abraham Lincoln’s Personality Speaking at Cincinnati, Ohio in February 1860, President-elect Abraham Lincoln said: “I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind;
  • Unconventional Organizers - Abraham Lincoln’s Office President Abraham Lincoln and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had unconventional working habits. Lincoln’s longtime friend, Joshua F. Speed recalled: “Mr Lincoln was so unlike all the men I had ever known before or seen or known since
  • Public Opinion & the Power of Persuasion - Abraham Lincoln and Public Opinion “There is no doubt about it at all; people regard him, one and all, as their PM, and I don’t believe there will ever be anyone quite like him,” Elizabeth Layton, one of Winston Churchill’s
  • Technology & Weapons - Abraham Lincoln and Technology Technology was a wartime boon and bane for Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Abraham Lincoln. “Crackpot inventors annoyed Lincoln regularly,” wrote historian Michael Burlingame. “One sought his assistance in persuading the War Department to use
  • Lincoln, Churchill, & Soldiers - Abraham Lincoln and Soldiers and Sailors About 725,000 Americans, North and South, died in the Civil War. In World War II, about 726,000 military personnel from the United States (400,000) and the United Kingdom (326,000) were killed. By the end
  • Musical Tastes - Abraham Lincoln and Music Most nights, President Abraham Lincoln worked “in his office, though occasionally he remained in the drawing room after dinner, conversing with visitors or listening to music, for which he had an especial liking, though he was
  • Friends to Animals - Abraham Lincoln, Pets and Children Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother recalled that he was “lover animals” and generally “and treated them Kindly.”1 Boyhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled that young Lincoln “would write short sentences against cruelty to animals. We were in the
  • Flights of Language, Rhetoric of Leadership - Abraham Lincoln’s Words For Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, words mattered. “Words are the only things that last for ever,” said Churchill in 1938. “The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of time.”1 Words endured.
  • Surviving War; Declining Health - Abraham Lincoln’s Health War is hell. War is hell on leaders’s health. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were firemen who were struggling to put out the fires of domestic and international strife. War was hell for Lincoln and Churchill –
  • Telling Stories in Wartime - Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Humor Mr. Lincoln’s Stories “They say I tell a great many stories,” said President Lincoln in 1864. “I reckon I do, but I have found in the course of a long experience that common people take
  • Lincoln, Churchill & Shakespeare - Abraham Lincoln and Literature In 1849, Abraham Lincoln sought to be federal commissioner of lands. He lost that post and was offered the territorial governorship of Oregon as a consolation prize. Under the influence of his wife Mary, Lincoln turned
  • Lincoln, Churchill & Faith in Wartime - Abraham Lincoln’s Faith Abraham Lincoln and the Bible Abraham Lincoln and Winston S. Churchill were not conventional men.  Their religious faith were not necessarily conventional Christian faiths.  Neither were conventional church goers but they certainly had more than a conventional
  • Food for Leaders - Abraham Lincoln’s Health Thomas Hall Shastid, a young Lincoln contemporary, wrote that Lincoln showed up at his family home one evening as the family anxiously awaited a meal of fresh-killed quails: “Abe sat down at their hearty invitation in the
  • The Faces of Leadership - Abraham Lincoln’s Beautiful Face President Lincoln’s Moods Abraham Lincoln’s Personality The most enduring photo of Winston Churchill from World War II was a scowling portrait of the prime minister in a three-piece suit. The scowl was produced when the photographer
  • Newspapers & War Leaders - Abraham Lincoln and Journalists Abraham Lincoln began his political life as an avid newspaper reader – using his position as a postmaster in rural Illinois to read all the papers that came through his hands. When Lincoln became president in
  • Lincoln, Churchill & the Reids - Whitelaw Reid enjoyed a distinguished career as editor of the New York Tribune and as U.S. Ambassador to both Paris and London. But in the Civil War, Reid was a young journalist, not yet 30, covering Washington politics and the
  • Lincoln, Churchill & Niagara Falls - In August 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Niagara Falls in northwest New York. President Franklin Roosevelt had invited Churchill to the Roosevelt home Hyde Park on the Hudson River. The British prime minister decided to detour to so