Hello and welcome to whistlestop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

For the last few years at Thanksgiving, those of us at Face the Nation have held a book panel on history or on the presidency.

This year, our topic was crisis leadership, leadership in times of crisis. We interviewed Ron Chernow,

the author of recent biography on Grant, Robert Dallick, about his new book on FDR, Nancy Kane,

who wrote a book called Forged in Crisis, which is about five different leaders in the trials and tribulations they faced.

And finally, Mark Uptogrove, who wrote the last Republicans about the Bush family, the 41st and 43rd presidents specifically.

I'm not going to do a book report. I don't want to rob you of the chance to read these books.

But what I am going to do is take some of my favorite takeaways, at least in one episode of WhistleStop.

We may do another episode here because there are a lot of them and

I don't want to take up your entire evening. But these are some of my takeaways, some threads

that run through all the books. And they obviously have something to do with these ideas that

we've talked about here on the podcast. First, I want to start with Nancy Cain's book. She's a business

historian at the business school at Harvard, and she uses David Foster Wallace's definition

of leadership at the beginning of her book. And Wallace, David Foster Wallace, the fiction writer,

defines leaders as individuals, quote, who can help us overcome the

limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do

better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. It's a pretty good definition of

leadership. It's that feel in the in the belly that you get when you hear a strong piece of oratory or when

you're in a meeting where a leader seizes the moment, directs everybody towards a common goal.

One corollary to this, leadership of this kind that makes this emotional pull on you and raises

you raises you to something greater than you might otherwise have been able to achieve on

your own, it's impossible to do through a conference call. Anyway, an aside quickly about Wallace, who gives us this great definition of leadership,

...