Read to Lead

By Morton C. Blackwell

(Morton Blackwell is the Founder and President of the Leadership Institute.
Widely experienced in and out of government, Mr. Blackwell served three years in the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. In 1984, Mr. Blackwell left the White House Staff to work full-time as the president of the Leadership Institute, his educational foundation which identifies, recruits, trains, and places conservatives in politics, government, and the media)

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Some people bluntly say they don't read. They say they would read if only they had the time.
I will also be blunt: You have time to do what you choose to do. The more you read, the better you read -- and the more you enjoy it.

People who don't read cheat themselves. By not reading, you limit what you can achieve, make mistakes you could avoid, and miss opportunities that could improve your life. Soon, as the gaps in your knowledge become apparent to others, you must reconcile yourself to not being taken seriously.
Before going any further, I must make clear that I do not urge you to spend the rest of your days nestled in a cozy spot at the local library. Far from it.

Actively involved in politics since the early 1960s at the local, state, and national levels, I understand the importance of action. Nothing moves unless it is pushed. Political activists elect candidates, pass or repeal laws, and determine public policy. But while boundless energy and enthusiasm are essential in activists, something else is necessary. To be successful leaders, activists must also be well-informed.

How To Learn
You can learn in three different ways:
1. By personal experience.
You can learn by trial and error. Known also as the school of hard knocks, trial and error is the most painful way to learn anything. I can't deny that this school teaches its lessons well. Its drawback, however, is that by the time you graduate -- if, indeed, you ever graduate -- you're too old to go to work. Students who study only at this school learn things only the hard way. No matter how diligent a
student you are of the school of hard knocks, you cannot learn by first-hand experience everything you should know.
2. By observation.
By paying attention to what goes on around you, you can learn from the experience of others. Careful observation is invaluable to anyone in any field, from sports to science to politics. But again, you cannot be everywhere. Everyone's individual power of observation is necessarily limited.
3. By studying the experience of others.
You can't experience or observe everything, but you can, by reading, learn from the experiences of your contemporaries, the previous generation, and those who lived ages ago.
You can learn from them all by reading their works and books about them.
After you have accumulated a lot of knowledge about how the world really works, you can become highly effective and achieve many things important to you.
In politics, it is not enough to know what's right. To succeed, your command of a subject must be so secure that you can persuade people you are right. And then you must activate them.
You should have such a mastery of the issues that you can frame your arguments to anticipate and render ineffective your opponent's arguments. You should know all you can learn about what works and what doesn't work. How do you accomplish this? Schooling alone will not suffice. All knowledgeable people are largely self-taught.

How To Read
The surest way to acquire a wide range of useful knowledge is to read every day.
My introduction to books came early, before I started school. We had a lot of books in our house. First, my parents regularly read aloud to me. After I learned to read, they did what Samuel Johnson advised other parents to do more than 200 years ago:
I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study.

In time, I moved on from my family's books to my grammar school library and then to the well-stocked children's section of the East Baton Rouge Parish public library. From there I went to the well-stocked library of my junior high school, where I read, if not all, at least a large percentage of its books. After this, at my small rural high school, I read every book in that school's library at least once.

Sometimes my reading is systematic. I took a decade, ending a few years ago, to read at my cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains everything I could about the Roman Republic and the Greek city-state era. I believed the experience of people in those semi-democratic periods might be applied helpfully to modern-day America.
Well-written history books have all the drama of novels and the added merit of being (generally) true. And I systematically read many political biographies. Anyone interested in the public policy process should read biographies and autobiographies of political leaders. Histories and biographies, even if the authors are unsympathetic to conservatives, unfailingly contain a trove of information about how to succeed in the public policy process.

The art of politics cannot be as exact as, say, mathematics or chemistry, because it is so much more complicated. A number doesn't care if it's added or
subtracted; a chemical doesn't care about its history or its future. Understanding people requires wisdom, not just knowledge.

You have time to read, if you want to, every day. Read in bed, before you go to sleep. Read when you wake up in the morning. Read while your car is being serviced. Read on airplanes. Read during the dull parts of meetings you have to attend. Read while you're waiting in those long lines to get your driver's license renewed. Almost every day you can reclaim, by reading, some of your time which otherwise would be wasted.
You don't have to finish a book before starting another. Most well-educated readers read two or more books at the same time. Read some in one book. If you temporarily tire of it, read some in another for a change. There is no shortage of good books available.

Over the years, I have often been asked to recommend books I consider of particular value for conservatives. What follows is a core library of 26 books, all of which can be purchased from online services. Most of them can be found in libraries or in good used-book stores. I introduce the authors in alphabetical order. Every conservative leader should read (and re-read) these books. You can get all of these from sources at the end of this booklet.

No one could agree with every view expressed in these books. In some matters the authors have opposing views. But any conservative will find merit in each one.