The Right Stuff; Road Ahead: Great men balance pragmatism with true belief, and George W. Bush can look to his dad for some key lessons.

Byline: By Jon Meacham

He was, as he put it, "a nervous, out-of-control dad." By Election Eve 2004, George H.W. Bush, a friend said, had turned into a "nervous wreck." To calm himself the 41st president of the United States first tried to give up caffeine and then his nightly cocktail, but he failed, and on the morning of the voting Bush was so anxious that he was reduced to eating saltine crackers to soothe his churning stomach. "We live in interesting and difficult times," he told me on the telephone that day. "I look at the world now first as a father; people find that hard to believe, but it's true." It was not always so: when the first President Bush was about to strike Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91, he sent a touching letter to his children. "My mind goes back to history," Bush wrote on New Year's Eve 1990. "How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late '30s or earliest '40s? How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers, or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today's crisis as 'good' vs. 'evil'--Yes, it is that clear."

Like father, like son. Given 41's internationalist bent and 43's image as a go-it-alone gunslinger, this is a counterintuitive notion, but the two men have more in common than is usually thought, and their not entirely dissimilar styles shed important light on the art of presidential leadership. Both believe in American power. Both believe in America's special role as a force for global order. Both believe in viewing the conflicts of the age in moral terms--that there is a right and a wrong, and that the presidency is about encouraging the former and combating the latter.

There are, of course, crucial differences between them. Forty-one spent much of his life in government, 43 in business or baseball; 41 is fundamentally gregarious and delighted in building personal bonds with allies, 43 keeps more to himself and seems to take a kind of perverse pleasure in his global unpopularity; 41 is a thoughtful, probing, questioning leader, 43 tends to eschew argument and virtually never second-guesses himself or his decisions.

Taken together, their two styles illustrate the twin elements of leadership which can produce transformative change: pragmatism and true belief. Remarkable leaders cannot get by with one or the other: ...