Ep. 67: Jon Meacham - The Perfect Recipe For A Leader: Curiosity, Candor, Empathy And Humility

Jon Meacham, first and foremost is a friend. We were honored to have him speak at both my parents funerals this year and last year. He's also an amazing presidential biographer who's written about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D Roosevelt, and my father, George H.W. Bush. And the truth is, he knows more about our family than, well, our family does.

In this interview, Jon pulls out anecdotal stories which define the personalities and ways of being of our most memorable presidents. He even creates a recipe for the perfect leader based on a combination of four presidents and the traits of: intellectual curiosity, candor, empathy and humility.

We learn that self care, mind body and spirit health, and relationships with families and friends is in a sense a reflection of our health as a nation.

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Show Notes

[00:21] John, first and foremost, is a friend. We were honored to have him speak at both my parents funerals this year and last year. He's also an amazing presidential biographer who's written about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and my father, George H. W. Bush. And the truth is, he knows more about our family than well, our family does. I would bet he knows who my second cousin is. Thrice removed, we'll test him later. He's also a formidable tennis partner. And so thank you, John, for being on our podcast today.
[01:09] John, we view health through a lens of integration and that includes mind, body and spirit. So we want to ask you first who the healthiest presidents are mind, body and spirit? And then tell us who the unhealthiest presidents are mind, body and spirit.
[01:52] Very few Americans have been as close to this as you have, Doro. So you've seen this with both your father and your brother, both of whom were incredibly attentive to their physical well-being, not only because they're two of the most competitive men who ever drew breath, proof compels us to acknowledge, but also because I think they knew that they needed have energy to use for the ultimate benefit and the common good. So their personal well-being was connected to their capacity to be sound stewards of the public good and the public health in a metaphorical sense.
[04:41] His capacity to will himself back into the arena is one of the great stories in American history, really, because as Churchill put it in an essay he wrote about Roosevelt in the 1930s, long before their wartime relationship, not one man in ten thousand would ever have left the house again. And not one man in a million could have risen to the top of the hurly burly of the political arena of such a vast country from a wheelchair. It's really remarkable. The speech we all remember, of course, is the March 1933 inaugural address when he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
[05:46] On the other side, you know, we've had some lethargic leaders. We've had some who were more self-indulgent than others. I think we can fill in those blanks.
[07:00] One, the one sphere of life where they can actually just do something and see that they've accomplished it. Your father, there's unquestionably a link between his sense of what FDR called the science of human relationships and the way he led. My favorite story about this and talking about empathy, which of course is a manifestation of spirit, is the great story about your dad at Greenwich Country Day School in the 1930s was the best athlete and there was an annual obstacle course race that he always won.
[08:56] We live in a safer and better world because George H. W. Bush had a spirit of empathy that led him to pull the kid out of the barrel and led him to take a political hit. George H. W. Bush is the only man I know who would not have gone to Berlin.
[09:12] Any American president would have gone, but his spirit told him that the thing to do was be prudent, be calm, and ultimately that would serve a greater good and it did.
[10:04] And the question becomes, is the mask really who you are? And at what point does the mask become you, at least in the terms of the execution of your public duty? The presidents we memorialize, the presidents we commemorate, the ones we want to emulate. They sort of trip off the tongue pretty easily. Right? It's Washington. It's Lincoln, FDR. It's Kennedy, it's Reagan, it's Bush.
[11:21] Leadership is ... what is the connection between personal well-being and the public discharge of duty.
[12:06] The health of the family. Yes. Is hugely important.
[13:44] If you chose the best traits of every president and put it into one president, what would that president look like?
[13:58] Jefferson was able to write what became the most important sentence ever rendered in the English language that we're all created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, because he had been part of the broad trans-Atlantic intellectual shifts that had happened really since Gutenberg introduced movable type. The Protestant Reformation, the European Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, Copernicus, everything that had been shifting from superstition and accepted authority to individual reason and individual rights. The American Revolution, which continues as we speak, was the clearest political manifestation of that shift in Western life from hierarchy to democracy.
[14:42] I would want the capacity for public candor of an FDR, who said in 1942 when America was reeling from Pearl Harbor, that the news is going to get worse and worse before it gets better and better and the American people deserve to have it straight from the shoulder. He was willing to give us bad news and treat us like grown-ups. This goes so Tricia's authenticity point. He knew intuitively that we were grown-ups and if he tried to slip a fast one past us, it would backfire in the fullness of time. I would want the empathy, as we talked about George H.W. Bush, and I think the humility, and this is not a word that you often hear in this kind of conversation, but you would need the humility to admit that you've made a mistake and therefore the capacity to learn from it that President Kennedy displayed between the Bay of Pigs, which was the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the successful resolution of the missile crisis in October 1962.
[17:13] You don't have to be President of the United States for this to be relevant. It's any job of responsibility or authority, any position, I should say. So running a household, running a bank branch, whatever it is. Anyone who has other people, depending on them, knows what it's like to become a kind of human ATM.
[18:53] And then just to slip into a different world through a book was in itself a restorative and creative enterprise, because he could imaginatively go back to where other presidents were dealing with seemingly insuperable problems.
[19:19] I think on the mindfulness side, on the holistic side, I think common sense goes a long way. There's a great American capacity to assess situations as they are. And I think as hard as it is, I've got to go figure out today when I'm going to go hit tennis balls because I get ready for the Koch Cup.
[20:18] We get the government we deserve, which is a very difficult and perhaps uncomfortable fact to confront sometimes. But in a republic, our dispositions of heart and mind matter enormously because they find their fullest expression in the state of the whole.
[20:45] Before we wrap up here, I actually have a quiz for you because you know more about our family than we do. And you're in luck. It only has one question. OK. My dad gave me a turtle. What was that turtle's name?
[21:44] Well, for your listeners, you should go to Tricia and Doro's book and go to my book and you should find out what Doro said about her father's campaign.

Thank you for joining us on HealthGig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“The way I like to think of it is -- the best we can hope for is that imperfect people will leave us a more perfect union.” - Jon Meachan
“If we take care of ourselves, ultimately the country, will be better taken care of too.” - Jon Meachan
“All these things matter enormously because the state, the country is a quintessentially human undertaking. Politics is not clinical. We get the government we deserve, which is a very difficult and perhaps uncomfortable fact to confront sometimes. But in a republic, our dispositions of heart and mind matter enormously because they find their fullest expression in the state of the whole. And that's the majesty and the mystery of democracy. If we take care of ourselves, ultimately the country, will be better taken care of too.” - Jon Meachan

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