The Presidents’ Book Club

everything from plays to poetry to spy thrillers. But do their reading habits give us any sense of their strength as a leader? Professor Joseph Lutsey explores this in a one day university lecture titled The President's Book Club. He's a professor of comparative literature at Bard College, and he's written books covering topics from Dante to Italian cinema. Joseph says the idea for this talk came to him while he was studying dystopian.

to books and learning. And I thought, well, that's a connection I wanted to explore more. And then I would say the tipping point was there was this article and the Economists that I read shortly before kind of putting the talk together, in which they talked about leadership and leadership training. But they said, you know, instead of corporate retreats, instead of how to books by people in the business world, which of course have their validity, why not look to

great literature for models. And I said, you know, I really want to dig into this topic and see how leaders themselves have approached the world of books. And that sort of got everything rolling.

Washington as a man of action, not an intellectual. We associate John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, some of the earlier officeholders of the presidency with a world of books, not so much with George Washington. He was a general, he was an farmer, he was a statesman. Interestingly, though, I found that George Washington was very committed to the world of books. He designed his own book plate, he had quite a collection of books, and he also was a pretty passionate

reader of one particular play. It's called Cato Cato by Joseph Addison and from the early seventeen hundreds, so It's one of those works that hasn't stood the test of time, but in its time, its effect was profound. Not just George Washington. It was a play about Cato, the ancient Roman who resisted the tyranny of the death of the Roman Republic when Julius Caesar became tyrant and Cato took his own life in defense, and so he kind of

became a symbol to the American revolutionaries. Allegedly, George Washington had the play performed at Valley Forge. He sprinkled his letters with references to it. But it wasn't just him. Patrick Henry's great speech give me Liberty or give me Death is lifted from Cato by Addison Nathan Hale the American Patriot, when he said I regret that I have but one life to give to my country. That also

comes from Joseph Addison's Cato. So it was an example of how a forgotten literary war could actually be in the dna of American democracy. And that was a kind of thrilling discovery for me.

to gently unfriend someone on Facebook. Obviously that wasn't something that George Washington thought about, but these kind of etiquette questions obsessed Washington, and I think it's in keeping with his image as someone who knew how politically to say and do the right thing, who took the quality of dignity and decorum very seriously and sort of trained himself in the images of these early etiquette manuals.

Now that's a bit of a mouthful. It's a lot of eighteenth century political discourse. But I had been teaching in Bard's first year seminar program, and we were reading some of the founding figures of political philosophy, and two figures in particular that i'd been teaching, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. I saw how their ideas were permeating Jefferson's writing and the Declaration of Independence. Let's take this

notion of equality, for example, that Jefferson talks about. Now, one of the engines for that comes from John Locke's idea of thela raza, which means the blank slate, This idea that you know, all people are created equal, that no matter where you're born or when you're born, there's a kind of neutrality to human nature. And you know,

we take it for granted now. And of course it wasn't expressed politically in the eighteenth century because the eighteenth century had terrible forms of inequality, including the evil of slavery. But as an idea that informed the Declaration of Independence, that idea of equality from Jefferson has to be informed

by Locke's notion of the blank slave. And similarly, when Jefferson writes about the governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the government, that that idea of consent is so essential to social contract theory of the eighteenth century, and that's where thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau were so important, where they basically came up with a model saying that when we enter into society through consent, we agree as a people to give up

our individual rights in the name of the collectivity. That can only happen if we consent to do so. So you can see in just one densely written paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, you can see the swirling of intellectual currents from major thinkers like John Locke and Jean Jacquesrousseau.

He grew up on dirt floors the whole incredible rise of Lincoln, and I think that that backstory shaped the way he approached Shakespeare. For example, he said, you know, I don't care too much for the famous soliloquy of Hamlet to be or not to be, because I think he didn't have that much in common with Hamlet. Hamlet was the prince of Denmark. He was to the manner

born as they say. Lincoln instead said he related to He loved Macbeth, and he loved the speech in Hamlet where Claudius as, oh my offense's rank, where he basically says, I know I'm guilty, but I'm not going to give up the crown. And it got me thinking about, you know, what was it about Lincoln and Shakespeare? And I think part of it had to do with Lincoln's moral brilliance, his conscience, the fact that you know, he believed that then evil of slavery had to end. America went to

war because of that. But he also felt the weight of all those deaths of Americans on his conscience. But where I think Shakespeare really drives Lincoln. Think of a

speech like the Second inaugural address. It's one of the most extraordinary speeches in American history, where Lincoln basically says, look, the North is basically going to win this war militarily, but ultimately it's a war in which both sides have lost because both sides fighting were American and so that speech is just this remarkable work of rhetoric when he says, all knew that the interest of slavery was the cause of the war, and then he said, neither party expected

for the war the magnitude of the duration, which is already attained, neither anticipated, and he goes, you notice the repetition of neither. There each looked for an easier triumph. Both read the same Bible. And then he says, and crushing that rhetorical crescendo, the prayers of both could not be answered. And then he says, but let us not

judge lest we be judged. It's an amazing the use of the pronouns, the sort of all both neither, and then this kind of deflating sentiment at the end that this is a war that has taken so many lives. It's not the time to criticize, but it's a time to heal. And I think that that moral vision of Lincoln was nourished by his understanding of a writer like Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a brilliant student of human nature, and he understood that often our virtues are bound up with our vices.

And I think for Lincoln to think with and through Shakespeare's plays over his lifetime enabled him to cultivate his own moral vision that led to astonishing speeches like the Second Inaurgal Address, where literally the fate of the United States and the Union was on the line. The stakes couldn't have been higher.

And it's a poem basically about overcoming obstacles, overcoming challenges, and holding your head high and not letting other people see you suffer. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance, run yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and what is more, you'll be a man, my son. So that's just a brief

citation from the poem. FDR was so drawn to this, and I think we can kind of understand why personally, as we all know or any of us who's spent any time thinking about FDR, he suffered from polio and he couldn't walk for most of his life. And Stephen, the way I think it's so fascinating is that politically, it's not like we can say, oh, he's citing IF here, but I feel echoes of IF in some of his

greatest speeches. When in his first inaugural address, which I think is his greatest speech, in nineteen thirty two, we were in the midst of the depression. It was the interwar period. Fascism was on the rise in Europe. This was not a good time in the world. The world was descending into darkness and it would end up in World War Two, and Americans were starving. There were runs on banks, Ninety percent of the stock market had gone down at one point. He says in that first inaugural

a dress. He says, in such a spirit, on my part and yours, we face common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. And I think that's the message that so many Americans needed to hear then, because the sense of despair and pessimism was so rampant, and here you had a man saying saying, we'll get through this. These are only material challenges. And I think a work like IF that poem helped fuel Roosevelt's sense of resolve and ingenuity.

Being a president and having access to the corridors of power proverbial and literal, he got to meet people like spies and former spies, and one of them that he met was you guessed it, Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond series. So Ian Fleming told Jeffkasey, and I think you like my books in so many words, and JFK did love them and told the nations you

should give these books a chance. So I always joke, you know that Daniel Craig and his fellow actors portraying James Bond should send the Kennedy Estate a thank you note for having helped to make the Bond franchise into the international behemoth that it is today.

So you know, you get the whole gamut recently, as you did historically for every FDR, for every Abraham Lincoln, there was like the likes of Warren Harding, who was rated as a terrible president historically and also considered one who wasn't fond of books. So there's this sense of huge discrepancies throughout the pre of those who are book people and those who are not book people.

but all leaders are readers. So I think the first thing that reading does is it shows your curiosity and your spirit of collaboration. The second thing I think reading does it shows your humility as well. When you open a book, you're basically admitting that the world has something to teach you, that you are open to new ideas, and I think that's sort of an allegory for being open to the input of other people in your organization.

So it's a wonderful kind of sign. I think I've talked about reading as an act of curiosity and collaboration, an act of humility, But ultimately, I think its greatest gift for leader is the perspective that it gives you. It allows you to see the world through other people's eyes. You know, I often speak with my students, you know. Social media is more of a mirror. It reflects your interest back at you. Literature is this prism in which

your ideas come into contact with those of others. It's like seeing the world with an additional set of eyes, and that I think is the most precious thing for a leader, to have the perspective of the people that he or she or they are meant to serve, and to see the world through their eyes. I think literature gives you that extra set of eyes.

Join us next time when we preview King Charles's coronation.