On Team of Rivals

Doris Kearns Goodwin found a fresh way into the most written-about figure in American history by looking at the men around him. Team of Rivals, published in 2005, tells the story of Abraham Lincoln through his cabinet, a group that included the very men who had competed against him for the presidency and considered themselves his superiors. The book's argument is in its title: that Lincoln's political genius lay in gathering his rivals rather than banishing them, and turning a cabinet of ambitious, condescending competitors into an effective government that held the Union together through its gravest crisis.

The men Lincoln appointed to his cabinet, his chief rivals for the nomination among them, were more experienced, more famous, and in their own estimation more qualified than the prairie lawyer who had beaten them. A lesser leader, insecure, would have surrounded himself with flatterers and yes-men. Lincoln did the opposite. He brought the strongest figures of his party into his government, including those who privately disdained him, and managed them with a combination of patience, humor, magnanimity, and quiet steel that gradually won their respect and harnessed their talents to the national cause.

Goodwin's portrait of how he did it is the heart of the book: the refusal to nurse grudges, the willingness to take blame and share credit, the political skill to let a rival believe he was leading while Lincoln set the direction, the emotional intelligence to know what each man needed and how far each could be pushed. Several who began contemptuous of him ended in genuine devotion. This is leadership as the management of difficult, gifted people, and Goodwin makes a persuasive case that it was indispensable to the Union's survival.

Team of Rivals sits in a library of the republic as a study in democratic leadership under maximum strain. The presidency is not a throne; it is the management of a government full of strong wills and competing ambitions, and Lincoln's example, drawing rivals close, governing through persuasion rather than purge, tolerating dissent within his own circle, is a model of how a leader in a free system can turn conflict into strength rather than suppressing it. The book became famous partly because later presidents and leaders studied it as exactly that, a manual of inclusive leadership.

It belongs alongside the other Lincoln material on these shelves, the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, and the Civil War history around them. Where those give you Lincoln's words and the war's military spine, Goodwin gives you the political craft, the day-to-day management of power and personality that made the words and the victory possible.

Team of Rivals is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it for the portrait of leadership as generosity and shrewdness combined, and for a fresh angle on a figure it is easy to think one already knows.