George Washington by James MacGregor Burns

Kennedy worked to boost Catholic support for Burns, while Burns was happy to help Kennedy among Protestants. Burns and Kennedy had gotten to know each other in 1958, when Kennedy was (successfully) seeking re-election to the Senate, and Burns (unsuccessfully) seeking election to the House. Roosevelt was also the rare political leader McGregor credited with being both transformational and transactional.īurns had a more personal and complicated experience as the biographer of a living politician, Kennedy. The book has dated in some ways - Burns dismissed rumors, since confirmed, that FDR had an affair with his wife’s secretary, Lucy Mercer - but “The Lion and the Fox” is still regarded as a landmark.īurns was the first major biographer to present the president without bias, as an idealist and dealmaker - a gifted, crafty, sometimes inscrutable politician who often kept even his allies guessing what he would do. To what extent did he use the tactics of a fox in order to advance the wishes of a lion? To what extent did he have to be a transactional leader to be able to become a transforming leader?” “He was a manipulator, and at the same time he had to be a lion. “I was very interested in how Machiavellian he was,” Burns told The Associated Press in 2007. “Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox” was published in 1956, at a time when little serious work existed on FDR, who died in 1945. Later, he worked on a task force headed by Herbert Hoover and served as a congressional aide in Washington, where he was surprised by private scandal (he recalled hearing one drunken legislator brag about his womanizing), and fascinated by how democracy worked.īurns’ first book, “Congress on Trial,” came out in 1949 and was praised by The New York Times as a timely assessment of how federal legislators were deadlocked by local concerns.

He earned four combat medals and the Bronze Star. He was an Army combat historian during World War II, recording the memories of soldiers just off the battlefield in Okinawa and elsewhere in the Pacific. in government from Harvard in 1947, the same year he began teaching at Williams. He majored in political science at Williams and received a Ph.D. In his late 80s, he wrote a well-reviewed history of the Supreme Court, “Packing the Court,” and at age 95 he completed a book on the Enlightenment, “Fire and Light.”īurns was born in 1918 in Melrose, Massachusetts, the son of a conservative businessman. Burns’ other books included “Leadership,” a 1978 release that outlined his theories of “transformational” and “transactional” and became standard reading among students of business and politics a biography of George Washington written with Dunn and a trilogy on U.S.

George Washington by James MacGregor Burns