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HENRY STEELE COMMAGER, U.S. historian: Washington and Jefferson. Both had character and intelligence, and people had confidence in them. Leadership is intangible. You can't define all the parts.
MARTIN DIAMOND, U.S. political scientist (Northern Illinois University): In the last 200 years, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and James Madison. Lincoln proved that the highest grace can be attained by a person of ordinary origins. Churchill showed that a person from the aristocracy who excelled in all ways could become a servant of democracy. Madison, a 126-lb. weakling with no charisma, framed perhaps the most incredible document of our time: the U.S. Constitution. Until Madison, no famous or thoughtful person—from Socrates to Montesquieu, from Plato to Hobbes—had ever endorsed democracy.
JAMES GAVIN, U.S. lieutenant general (ret.): Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through the ages, I would consider Mohammed, Jesus Christ, maybe Lenin, possibly Mao. As for a leader whose qualities we could most use now, I would choose John F. Kennedy.
ALEXANDER HEARD, U.S. educator (chancellor, Vanderbilt University): No concept of leadership is complete without the element of zeal and fervor, an almost spiritual element. Martin Luther King had it. Adolf Hitler had it, so did Gandhi and Nehru. The Old Testament prophets had it. It's commitment, it's a kind of self-confidence which can be egotistic and arrogant. But a degree of it has to be there. The leader must have a belief in what he is doing, almost a singlemindedness.
IRVING KRISTOL, U.S. writer, professor and editor (The Public Interest): Abe Lincoln is the prototype—the leader who is uncommon but not beyond emulation by the common man. He's not a Napoleon. This is American democratic politics. You don't want a world conqueror. In latter days John Kennedy had that uncommon-common quality; so did both Roosevelts, T.R. and F.D.R., although they were distinctly below Lincoln.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON, U.S. psychohistorian (Yale): Mao was able to articulate, live out and connect with the aspirations of the Chinese people at a time of crisis. Like most great religious and political leaders, he had some relation to a holocaust (the disintegration of Chinese culture, the warlords, Japanese invasion).
ARCHIBALD MacLEISH, U.S. poet: In my own experience, the man who most obviously possessed the quality of leadership was General Marshall. He was a man of enormous moral authority.
GOLO MANN, West German historian: Marcus Aurelius, emperor and philosopher, valiant pessimist and warm philanthropist, was good for his own age. In our time, vacillating between two very different types, Franklin Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer, I choose the former because his achievements had greater significance for world history. His demagoguery was tempered by humanity; he could not hate. He was fearless and had humor, two virtues that Bismarck, too, possessed; he radiated hope and meant well by people, which Bismarck did not.