Certain Trumpets.

• Author: Califano, Joseph A.

Garry Wills' 18th book is a series of vignettes about individuals he considers leaders in a catalogue of enterprises, counterpointed against snapshots of non-leaders--in the author's jargon, "antitypes."

Wills plays Franklin Roosevelt against Adlai Stevenson; Eleanor Roosevelt against Nancy Reagan; Ross Perot versus Roger Smith; Pope John XXIII against Celestine V (the only Pope forced to resign); Martha Graham against Madonna. Martin Luther King gets the leadership prize for rhetoric; Dorothy Day, the doyenne of the Catholic Worker movement, gets the gold for saintly leadership.

The book can be read as a series of selected short stories, and each category stands on its own. It is not, as was John Gardner's work On Leadership, an attempt to explore the elements of leadership and tap those of special relevance today. Wills admits that he offers little for those seeking to answer the question, "How am I to become a leader?"

The writing is lively, literate, and full of interesting tidbits about the lives of each person he caricatures as leader or antitype. But it's not until near the end that he zeroes in on two key questions in understanding effective leadership: "Leader of whom? Going where?"

Three recent presidents have profoundly affected our nation by their leadership--and each was quite different in style, in substance, and the issues on which he sought to lead. FDR faced the Great Depression and World War II; Lyndon Johnson, whom Wills dismisses as a "superb Senate leader" but "a poor president," revolutionized the nation with his commitment to civil rights (with laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accomodations, housing, and protecting voting rights, and his articulation of the concept of affirmative action and of the need for a war on poverty amidst such plenty). And he altered forever the role of the federal government (with Medicare, Medicaid, aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education, and environmental, consumer, and crime control laws). Later, Ronald Reagan set out to stem the expansion of the federal role in American life. By cutting taxes, he fenced Democrats into a budget corral that is likely to restrain domestic spending for the rest of the century. He brought millions of Americans under his conservative banner and shifted the center of American politics to the right

Where were these leaders going?

Roosevelt wanted to win a war and stamp out fascism and anti-Semitism-- and he had a united nation...