Choosing Courage
Sometime in 2019 I fell into reading presidential biographies. I don’t entirely know why. Perhaps it’s because I was never a good student of history, and this was my way of making up for lost time. Maybe it’s because the complexity of their role somehow informs the ones I’ve held and hold. In seeing the way they navigated the various challenges of their time, I’m given a deeper reservoir to draw from as I work through the issues of my own.
We know the supposed lauded: Lincoln, Washington, the Roosevelts — each imperfect, but revered all the same. If you were to ask who the worst president of the United States was, however, most people would point to James Buchanan — despite whatever you may feel about any in recent memory. Serving one term from 1857–1861, he was America’s fifteenth president. He was the only president to never marry and, before Biden, the only one to come from Pennsylvania — neither of which contribute to his abysmal standing in history.
Strangely enough, Buchanan isn’t deemed the worst because he had some salacious affair or because he assembled a corrupt cabinet. It wasn’t anything he did. In fact, most people would consider Buchanan the worst president in American history because of what he did not do. He didn’t challenge slavery. He didn’t stop the succession of southern states from the union. When the Civil War began brewing under his nose, instead of acting, he bid his time until Lincoln took office. On paper he looked like the ideal candidate, a wealth of political experience under his belt. But when it came to that national office, he was largely passive, and that passivity ranks him among the lowest presidents in American history.
These days I’ve been reflecting on the reciprocal relationship of leadership and time. It seems to me the times form the leader even as the leader acts in a given time. While there are moments of relative tranquility and prosperity, oftentimes serious, lasting leadership emerges at times of crisis. We remember leaders for the way they’re able to not only interpret the moment at hand, but also act in such a clear, decisive way as to effect positive change. To come to a crisis then and not act isn’t just an abdication of responsibility, it’s a failure of leadership. If history is any indication to us, the only thing worse than taking the wrong action is to take no action at all, to fail to understand that inaction is a form of action.
When I reflect on my own life and leadership, my deeper regrets aren’t from the times when I said or did the wrong thing — those times exist, to be sure — but it’s the moments I didn’t say or do anything at all. Moments when I was too paralyzed by fear of failure or public opinion to act one way or another.
I’ve often admired people who just seem to know what to do. In the fog of confusion, the way forward seems clear in their mind. But perhaps, in those moments when we don’t know what to do, the best course of action is to do something, to be bold enough and courageous enough to commit to some sort of next step and trust that if we’re wrong, God is sovereign and will not let his plan be thwarted by human weakness.
The reality is that leadership isn’t just what you do. It’s also what you don’t. You can wring your hands hoping the moment passes and while that may work sometimes, other times it creates new problems. Leadership, then, demands courage and courage, we know, isn’t the absence of fear but the ability to move forward despite it. Like love or faith, courage isn’t always something we are imbued with as much as it’s something we must choose in a moment.
This takes us back to Buchanan. In a time when the country was splitting at the seams, the man overseeing it hated conflict. That hatred of conflict saw him trying to play the middle, but instead of making peace, he only drew ire from all sides. He was, to borrow a term from Friedman, a “peace-monger” and what’s most telling, in both his and Herbert Hoover’s case, the failure of leadership led to the emergence of the man for the job. Someone whose clear, decisive leadership would push the country through crisis and into the future.
As leaders, the task for each of us is to diagnose the times, the problem facing our contexts, and, after assessing what we contribute to the situation (both naturally and supernaturally), courageously move forward to meet the moment, trusting God with the result.
