{"id":48,"date":"2014-06-23T13:18:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T13:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=48"},"modified":"2014-08-11T21:17:40","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T21:17:40","slug":"considering-goodwins-team-of-rivals-abraham-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/considering-goodwins-team-of-rivals-abraham-lincoln\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering Goodwin\u2019s Team of Rivals \u2013 Abraham Lincoln and Poignant Lessons of a Great, Moral Leader"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I consider Goodwin\u2019s delineation of Lincoln choosing, Stanton, Chase, Seward, and Bates \u2013 his direct political rivals \u2013 to become major figures of his political team, I am reminded of the writer Baltasar Gracian and his text The Art of Worldly Wisdom<\/em>.\u00a0 Gracian was a 17th<\/sup> century Spanish Jesuit philosopher who among other things wrote of how to adroitly navigate the turbid waters of the political and civic milieux of the time through the employment of wise aphorisms.\u00a0 Gracian is akin to a moral Machiavelli.\u00a0 And this leads back to Lincoln.\u00a0 Lincoln was an astute judge of his own abilities and needs related to governance as well as the strength and needs of the nation that he was governing.\u00a0 He saw much of the strength he needed for the task at hand in his rivals and so in many ways employed the classic, \u201ckeep your friends close and your enemies closer\u201d motif. \u00a0In many senses, I find Lincoln to be a grounded or rooted optimist; an optimist well aware of the surrounding context, but one who refused to lose hope because of his understanding of the Great Hope of humanity.<\/p>\n

Of his cabinet level members of these four men, it was only Salmon P. Chase, who Lincoln appointed Secretary of the Treasury, who never ceased to be a consistent thorn in Lincoln\u2019s side.\u00a0 However, even in this, Goodwin notes that Lincoln was able to see the good that the man was doing in his role as the Secretary of the Treasury.\u00a0 Thus, it wasn\u2019t until a \u201cthird strike your out\u201d scenario that Lincoln finally accepted the resignation that Chase offered.<\/p>\n

Lincoln\u2019s humble beginnings are fairly well known and the general population of any land can take comfort in this \u201crags to riches\u201d (in the sense of power and influence especially) life.\u00a0 As well known, but less trumpeted at times is Lincoln\u2019s dogged perseverance and morality.\u00a0 These qualities are both build more character and take more character.\u00a0 Perseverance and morality are qualities that require work, effort, discipline \u2013 and in no small sense, the grace of God.\u00a0 People like to hear that people beat the odds.\u00a0 People don\u2019t as much like to hear Ben Franklin\u2019s sentiment that \u201cdiligence is the mother of good luck.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I like about Linclon\u2019s formation of his cabinet as described in Goodwin is that long before the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 under the Kennedy administration, Lincoln was avoiding something that Kennedy had to contend with and that nearly cost us the destruction of the world \u2013 that is, Lincoln managed to avoid the negative in-group bias of \u201cGroup Think.\u201d\u00a0 Group Think is the name given to the phenomenon that occurs when groups reach agreement together at the expense of critical evaluation of issues at hand; an agreement that can prove significantly detrimental due to the lack of critical evaluation.\u00a0 The reasons for this Group Think can stem from multiple roots, but it amounts to a preference for in-group bias over against rational out-group assessment.\u00a0 Lincoln recognized that at a time of such significant national instability he didn\u2019t need to circle the wagons per se in his own camp. No, he did not.\u00a0 Instead he saw that he needed to spread the net wide to encompass some of those differing perspectives within his own team and overcome those differences there so as to better be able to navigate those issues in the broader political arena.\u00a0 And navigate them he did in both places\u2026that is why our sixteenth president is remembered so honorably to this day.<\/p>\n

I also appreciate Goodwin\u2019s recognition that while Lincoln is the architect of this team of rivals in the end, it is a \u201cteam.\u201d\u00a0 That is, in the end, if all of the people chose to combat Lincoln all the way through like Chase did and not buy in to his vision, then it is very likely we would not have the chance to read Goodwin\u2019s book today because Lincoln\u2019s efforts would have failed.\u00a0 That is, rivals or\u00a0 not, it takes a team to run a country.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the too quick, too short, to be fully just leadership take away from Goodwin\u2019s book? One, remember that our rivals \u2013 despite all of the disagreements on emphasis and importance of particular policies \u2013 may well offer strengths we lack and show us areas of engagement that we need to further consider.\u00a0 Two, like with both Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., the goal is not ultimately to win, but to reconcile.\u00a0 As MLK Jr. said in his sermon titled \u2018Loving Your Enemies,\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThird, we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding. At times we are able to humiliate our worst enemy. Inevitably, his weak moments come and we are able to thrust in his side the spear of defeat. But this we must not do. Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goodwin\u2019s text gives us a glimpse into the difficult workings of a team that didn\u2019t fully come together for the right reasons, but that nonetheless did come together and accomplished great things during a time when our country desperately need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I consider Goodwin\u2019s delineation of Lincoln choosing, Stanton, Chase, Seward, and Bates \u2013 his direct political rivals \u2013 to become major figures of his political team, I am reminded of the writer Baltasar Gracian and his text The Art of Worldly Wisdom.\u00a0 Gracian was a 17th century Spanish Jesuit philosopher who among other things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp-lgp4-goodwin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1362,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/1362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}