Like tour guides of ancient Rome, historians have the rare quality of looking back to pluck a few key events to tell a meaningful story to the broadest audience.
Biographer and historian Talmage Boston has mastered that in his latest, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents.
Practicing “applied history,” he crunched the results from his pick of the eight most influential presidents to come up with 24 leadership traits aimed at helping those in business and politics.
“It’s one thing to know history, enjoy history, but it’s something else to be able to apply history to daily living. And that’s what this book is attempting to do, give somebody who either aspires to be a leader, or is already a leader and wants to be a better leader, some really important things to think about as he or she tries to up their game as a leader going forward,” he told Secrets.
Boston, also a Dallas-based lawyer and baseball historian, said that his Mount Rushmore of presidents would include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
In fact, he’d back restarting the stone carving project to include all eight. “I think that’d be wonderful,” Boston said. “These days the focus throughout the news media is on people doing bad things, so little on good people who’ve done good things and great things. And I think that really is important. I think we need to be in the business of paying tribute to truly great people,” he added.
Unfortunately, when our conversation turned to current history and the six presidents since the Gipper, Boston said that he doesn’t see much leadership.
Former President George H.W. Bush, he said, was “one of our top two one-term presidents,” but he failed on the economy. Bill Clinton was plagued with scandal. George W. Bush was underrated and will see his status rise, but not into the top 10. And Barack Obama, he said, gave good speeches but there was little follow-up.
Then there are former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. “Trump and Biden are both gonna be in the bottom 10,” the historian said.
“Our country is heading into the valley of death. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade, a second term for either of them will be disastrous. Because with each passing day, one of them becomes more cognitively dysfunctional, and the other becomes more psychologically unhinged,” said Boston, no fan of either.
“I just hope and pray that somehow, whichever way it is, somehow in the next four years, our country survives, and then gets these guys off the stage. Let’s have a new group of leaders that hopefully will have at least some of these leadership traits that are covered in the eight presidents in my book,” he said.
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Boston has some hope for the GOP in former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who continues to draw one-fifth of Republican primary votes from Trump even though she long ago dropped out of the race. “She potentially could be a real top-flight president,” Boston said.
Not so for Vice President Kamala Harris. “She is a 100%, full-blown, undisputed, unambiguous, empty suit,” the leadership guru said.
