Leadership: In Turbulent Times

Four Presidents, One Question

Doris Kearns Goodwin has spent her career in close proximity to American presidents — she knew Lyndon Johnson personally, and has written landmark biographies of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedy era. Leadership: In Turbulent Times is her synthesis: a comparative study of four presidents who faced crises that tested everything they were, asking how they developed the leadership qualities that rose — or failed — to meet those crises.

The four presidents are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Each is examined in three phases: the formative years in which their character was shaped, the specific crisis each faced at the height of their power, and what their response to that crisis revealed about the nature of leadership. Lincoln and the Civil War; Theodore Roosevelt and the coal strike of 1902; FDR and the first hundred days of the New Deal; LBJ and the Civil Rights Act.

The Development of Leaders

Goodwin’s most interesting argument is about how leaders are made. None of the four men were the products of smooth, uninterrupted ascent. Lincoln endured profound depression, repeated political failure, and the deaths of people he loved. Theodore Roosevelt remade himself after childhood illness and his wife’s death on the same day as his mother. FDR was transformed by polio. LBJ’s ambition was shaped by the poverty and humiliation he witnessed growing up in the Texas Hill Country.

The crises that shaped them — and the resources they developed in response — became the foundations on which their presidential leadership was built. This developmental argument is Goodwin’s most substantive contribution: leaders are not born but made, and the making happens in the difficult years before the great stage.

The Value of Comparison

The comparative structure allows Goodwin to identify what the four men shared across very different personalities and eras: the willingness to acknowledge mistakes and course-correct, the capacity to communicate directly with ordinary people, the ability to attract and manage talented subordinates, the skill of knowing when to push and when to wait. These are not abstract virtues but specific capabilities illustrated through specific historical episodes.

Four Crises, Four Responses

The heart of the book is its central section, in which each president is matched to the defining crisis of his leadership, and the comparison is illuminating precisely because the situations differ so sharply. Lincoln, facing the existential threat of secession and the moral catastrophe of slavery, models what Goodwin calls “transformational” leadership — the Emancipation Proclamation timed with exquisite political judgment. Theodore Roosevelt, confronting the 1902 coal strike that threatened to freeze the nation, demonstrates “crisis management,” forcing capital and labor to the table through sheer institutional nerve. FDR’s first hundred days answer the Depression with “turnaround” leadership and experimental energy, while Lyndon Johnson channels the trauma of John Kennedy’s assassination into the “visionary” passage of the Civil Rights Act. By isolating a single defining episode for each man, Goodwin turns abstract leadership qualities into concrete, observable decisions, and the parallel structure invites the reader to weigh how different temperaments meet pressure.

Goodwin’s Unique Vantage

Few writers could attempt this synthesis with Goodwin’s authority. She has spent a career producing landmark works on these very figures — Team of Rivals on Lincoln, The Bully Pulpit on Theodore Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time on the Roosevelts in wartime — and she knew Lyndon Johnson personally, having worked in his White House as a young woman and assisted with his memoirs. This combination of deep archival scholarship and, in LBJ’s case, direct personal observation gives the book a texture that pure research cannot. Leadership: In Turbulent Times reads, in part, as the distillation of decades of immersion in the American presidency, the seasoned reflections of a historian who has lived with these men’s papers and, in one case, with the man himself. That long acquaintance is what allows her to move so fluidly from the documentary record to shrewd judgments of character.

Leadership Lessons, Honestly Drawn

The book flirts with the conventions of the leadership-advice genre — it even closes with explicit lessons — but Goodwin is too rigorous a historian to flatten her subjects into management parables. The qualities she identifies as shared across the four presidents (the capacity to acknowledge error and course-correct, to communicate directly with ordinary citizens, to attract and manage gifted and often difficult subordinates, to sense when to push and when to wait) emerge from specific historical episodes rather than from abstraction, and she is candid about her subjects’ flaws and failures alongside their triumphs. The result avoids the hollow uplift of typical business-leadership writing; the lessons feel earned by the narrative rather than imposed on it. Readers in business or politics will find applicable wisdom, but it arrives embedded in genuine history rather than extracted into bullet points.

Why It Resonates Now

Published in 2018, Leadership: In Turbulent Times arrived at a moment of acute anxiety about American political leadership, and Goodwin’s implicit argument — that the office has been filled, in its hardest hours, by men of resilience, empathy, and moral seriousness forged in adversity — reads as both reassurance and standard. Without polemic, the book offers a portrait of what tested leadership has looked like, inviting comparison with the present that it never has to make explicit. Its developmental thesis is ultimately a hopeful one: that the qualities great crises demand are not innate gifts but capacities built through hardship, failure, and growth. For readers seeking to understand how character meets history, and how the difficult years before power shape its eventual exercise, Goodwin’s comparative study is a lucid, humane, and quietly urgent guide.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A readable, substantive distillation of Goodwin’s career-long engagement with American presidential leadership — essential for anyone interested in how leadership is developed and tested.