Leadership summary

The sound of distant Luftwaffe airstrikes greeted Charles de Gaulle on June 5, 1940 – the day he established his office in the Defense Ministry. He had just recently been appointed the undersecretary of defense after having served as a professional soldier. However, within a week, the French government retreated from the capital. The prime minister resigned, and an armistice with Hitler was planned. Under these conditions, de Gaulle fled to London from Bordeaux.

The day after he arrived, de Gaulle gave a speech –⁠ authorized by Prime Minister Churchill –⁠ calling on all French officers and men in Britain to get in touch with him. Without saying so outright, he was forming a French resistance movement. 

Richard Nixon was always a complicated and controversial figure in American history. His name is inextricably tied to the Watergate scandal, which occurred under his watch and made him the only president to date to have resigned from office. 

However, Nixon also reshaped the nation’s foreign policy during his time in office. He did so based on a strategy of equilibrium, in which he sought a balance of power among the world’s great nations. Nixon viewed peace not as the status quo, but as a fragile and precarious state that must be carefully maintained. This could only happen if nations were balanced rather than one dominating the rest.

Dressed in a khaki military uniform and an overcoat, Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, filled his pipe, lit it, and began smoking. In his deep baritone, he told Kissinger, “I have a plan for you. I have named it the Kissinger Plan.” 

This plan, it turned out, was a version of a proposal that Kissinger had already offered. In it, Kissinger had suggested that, to mitigate the conflict between Egypt and Israel, interim arrangements should be made such that both sides could adjust to the peace process step by step. This proposal had been rejected by Egypt’s director of intelligence –⁠ but now Sadat was accepting it.

Before 1965, the nation of Singapore didn’t exist. 

Originally established as a British colonial trading post, it was technically ruled by British Indian authorities. Then, in 1963, it merged with Malaya as part of a new confederation called Malaysia. However, only two years passed before Malaysia decided to unceremoniously dump Singapore from the merger. The tiny nation was left entirely on its own, and its survival depended on the efforts of its young, dynamic leader, Lee Kuan Yew.

During the 1970s, the common wisdom in politics was that only centrists could win elections. To get votes, you had to capture the middle ground.

One woman, however, disagreed. She asserted that deferring to the center muddied the electoral waters and left voters without real choices. Instead, politicians had to construct and fight for real policies that would clash meaningfully with those from the other side. Rather than seek out the middle ground, she preferred to make the middle ground seek her out.