WHERE have all the leaders gone?
"Name me a leader in America today," demanded Congressman Adam Clayton Powell recently, and for once Powell may have said it right. Nearly everywhere, the places of power seem occupied by faceless and forgettable bureaucrats, technocrats or nonentities. "Charisma," one of the dominant clichés of the '60s, is clearly on the wane. Charles de Gaulle has left the Elysée Palace to his former lieutenant, Georges Pompidou, a banker and lover of poetry who, however, shows little poetry in his political style. West Germany has not had an inspirational leader since Adenauer, or Britain since Churchill; a contest between Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Tory Leader Ted Heath would involve a choice of Yorkshire pudding or boiled potatoes. Mrs. Golda Meir has more panache—at least for those who appreciate Jewish mothers —than her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, but she can hardly match that prophet-politician David Ben-Gurion. Revolution has unseated the egomaniacal Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia —no loss to the world, except in drama. Egypt's Nasser and Cuba's Castro still have the messianic leader's power to move his people, although familiarity and failure are beginning to breed contempt. Perhaps the national leader who has the greatest claim to genuine charisma is China's Mao Tse-tung, but Mao is 75 and, despite allegations to the contrary, is not immortal. Nikita Khrushchev, the closest thing to an eccentric the Red world has yet produced, is but dimly remembered in the day of those dreary committee types, Kosygin and Brezhnev. In America, where Richard Nixon seemingly glories in his "low profile," the bland are leading the bland. As New York's Senator Jacob Javits acidly puts it, "We may have reached a balance of mediocrity."
Except in art and conversation, blandness is not a mortal sin; and even in politics, charisma is not always a virtue. Nkrumah and Sukarno stirred the blood of their countrymen, but they very nearly ruined their countries. Two of the most persuasive leaders of the 20th century were also two of its greatest monsters—Hitler and Mussolini. Particularly in advanced nations, the leader who governs by emotion and style is apt to be regarded as a dangerous indulgence, one that people with stable institutions should not hanker for.
Charisma,* as defined in political terms by Sociologist Max Weber, refers to a leader who has a special grace or extraordinary power to rule by the force of personality alone. In more primitive lands, such a ruler was frequently revered as a father figure with magical capacities. Peasants in Turkey, for example, believed that Dictator Kemal Ataturk was impervious to bullets. Even in relatively sophisticated societies, there is a deep-rooted need for magic. The fact that the magician may not really have talent or wisdom is less important than the popular belief that he has.
Lenin was conceivably the only man who could have held Soviet Russia together in the chaos that followed World War I. Franklin Roosevelt may not have been the only American who could have rallied the U.S. in 1933, but it is certain that Herbert Hoover could not have done it. The history of Southeast Asia would be vastly different if South Viet Nam had had a leader like the North's Ho Chi Minh.