Abstract
As Dr Park remarks in his introduction, analyzing leadership effectiveness, historians have largely ignored the medical factor (p xxii). He sets out to remedy this defect by seeking to diagnose illnesses that affected the political judgment and accomplishments of eight 20th-century statesmen: Woodrow Wilson, Paul von Hindenburg, Ramsay MacDonald, Josef Pilsudski, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Adolf Hitler. In each case, he finds that illness significantly affected the statesman's conduct of public office, especially at the end of his career. Dr Park is a neurosurgeon, sensitized to processes of dementia and brain damage, and it is this sort of illness that attracts most of his attention. His diagnoses reflect the different levels of information about the health of the men he has chosen to study. Thus, he is quite definite in dealing with Woodrow Wilson's mild but progressive dementia, possibly occurring on the basis of multiple small-vessel
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call