Nancy and Bobby: what leadership looks like

On 11 December 2018, Donald Trump tried to ambush the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, by turning a photo opp at the White House into a political debate in front of the cameras.

Pelosi was having none of it. In a few well chosen sentences she demolished the President, even mentioning the need to avoid a ‘a Trump shutdown’ of government. That riled the president who rose to the bait. If he didn’t get the funding for his precious border wall, he knew just what he was going to do.

I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.

She had entirely wrong-footed him.

Trump meeting his match

He has, as usual, changed his tune since. Far from taking ‘the mantle’, he now denies all responsibility for the shutdown, blaming the Democrats instead. But today Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and she can keep the pressure on him. The first step has been to pass a finance bill with no money for Trump’s wall, putting the onus back on the Republicans to keep the shutdown going.

It’s wonderful to see such gutsy and principled leadership in a world that is sadly short of it. Let’s hope Pelosi stays as firm as she promises to. It’s time that Trump had a lesson in the kind of treatment he can expect from a real leader.

I felt for Pelosi and Schumer in that White House meeting. At my own far less exalted level, I’ve also had the experience of talking to a hostile audience. Funnily enough, I find those sessions the most exciting and the most memorable. Generally, I present to customers, and if one of them attacks me, there’s no question of responding in kind. I have to be strictly polite, even deferential. It’s a fascinating challenge to stay that way while giving absolutely no ground.

The best outcome from such a confrontation is to see the critic, or critics, change their position and end up supportive or at least neutral towards us. That isn’t always possible, in which case the aim has to be to win the support of the rest of the audience that is watching the debate. If they leave concerned – even apologetic – for their colleague’s behaviour, and open to my arguments, then I’ve done as much as I could in the circumstances.

Now, Pelosi wasn’t going to win Trump around. Or even the Trump cult followers watching on TV. But she could hope that her performance would consolidate the backing of her base and win the support of some neutrals. That is the way to beat Trump and at the moment she seems to be handling the campaign superbly.

Sometimes, though, as I’ve suggested, one can actually change minds in an audience. And thinking about that reminded of one of the most remarkable instances of leadership I’ve seen in my lifetime, which indeed changed the minds of many of those listening.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. That evening, Robert Kennedy, brother of the murdered President, who had not long previously announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination himself, was due to speak to a rally in Indianapolis. It was being held in a strongly African-American neighbourhood. Kennedy’s advisers and relatives, even the police, told him he should not go, such was the anger in particular amongst the black population. The police had even had reports of young black men with weapons seen near the venue for the speech.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, Kennedy went anyway. He spoke from rough notes he made in his car. And he made what is arguably the best speech of his career. He started, unhesitatingly, by going straight to the news he was breaking.

I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Bobby Kennedy breaking the bad news

It’s worth listening to the speech, if only to hear for the visceral moan from the crowd when he spoke those words.

Kennedy had made a point of not speaking about his brother’s death in public before. But that night he made an exception.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Abie Washington, a young man in the crowd, then only 26, told the Washington Post fifty years later:

I was upset, to put it mildly. I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.

But as he listened his feelings changed.

My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?

That night, there were race riots in 100 cities across the United States. In Washington DC alone, a dozen people were killed. But in Indianapolis, there was nothing. The crowd went home after Kennedy’s speech.

That’s the leadership we need today. I hope Pelosi can provide it. And others too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, or indeed Beto O’Rourke who ran a barnstorming campaign for the Senate in Texas, coming closer than anybody might have expected to unseating Ted Cruz.

In Britain, we need it in the Labour Party, but that’s going to need a major change at the top.

Still, at least we can admire Pelosi. Or that extraordinary speech in Indianapolis. And hold up as a model the leadership offered by Bobby Kennedy.

Who was dead, himself the victim of an assassin, only 63 days later.