James MacGregor Burns


James MacGregor Burns was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971 Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography for his work on America's 32nd president, .
Burns shifted the focus of leadership studies from the traits and actions of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit. He was best known for his contributions to the transactional, transformational, aspirational, and visionary schools of leadership theory.

Biography

Military service

After graduating from Williams, Burns spent a year as an intern in Washington for Utah Congressman Abe Murdock. He spent a year at Harvard, then six months in Colorado working for the War Labor Board.
Burns was drafted to serve in the Pacific theater as an enlisted U.S. Army combat historian, and was awarded the Bronze Star and four Battle Stars. Throughout his military adventures, Burns noticed that when leadership was mentioned, it was in terms of the traits and qualities of officers, but not soldiers.
In 1947 he briefly worked for the Hoover Commission, reviewing the operations of the Commerce Department's National Maritime Office.

Academic career

Burns joined the faculty of Williams College in 1947, and taught there for nearly 40 years, retiring in 1986. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served as president of the American Political Science Association and the International Society of Political Psychology. During the early 1990s he taught classes at the University of Maryland, where the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership was named for him. In 2010 he won the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Award for Distinguished Writing in American History of Enduring Public Significance presented jointly by the Roosevelt Institute and the Society of American Historians.
His students included Georgia Jones Sorenson and Michael Beschloss.

Political career

A liberal, in 1958 Burns was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in Massachusetts's 1st congressional district, meeting then-U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy and helping him gain Protestant support to get re-elected, while Kennedy helped him gain Catholic support. Burns gained personal access that allowed him to write his biography of Kennedy, published in 1960, which calls JFK "casual as a cash register," "quiet, taut, efficient—sometimes, perhaps, even dull," and generally too cerebral and lacking in heart. This angered Kennedy's wife Jackie, who said Burns "underestimated" him. Burns was eventually elected a delegate to four Democratic National Conventions.

Personal

Professor Burns styled himself a Congregationalist. He and his first wife had four children, three of who survived him. In 1964, he met , daughter of renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, in New York City when she interviewed him for her best-selling book about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy; four years later Burns and Meyers were married at High Mowing, the family home in Williamstown, where they lived together for the next quarter century. At the end of his life, he was friends with his first wife, but lived with his collaborator and longtime companion, Professor Susan Dunn.
Burns died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on July 15, 2014, at 95, after publishing more than 20 books.

Views on government

As an admirer of a strong leader in the White House, Burns was critical of the U.S. governmental system of checks and balances, which he viewed as an obstacle to progress in times of a divided or oppositional Congress. In The Deadlock of Democracy and Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court he called for systemic changes, arguing for term limits for Supreme Court justices, an end to midterm elections, and a population-based Senate. Burns also advocated repeal of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution to allow effective U.S. presidents to serve three or more terms of office.

Theory of leadership

Burns' Leadership founded the field of leadership studies, introducing two types of leadership: transactional leadership, in which leaders focus on the relationship between the leader and follower, and transformational leadership, in which leaders focus on the beliefs, needs, and values of their followers.
Excerpts:
His work has influenced other transformational leadership theorists such as Bernard Bass, Bruce Avolio, and Kenneth Leithwood, and inspired Georgia Jones Sorenson to found the Center for Political Leadership and Participation at the University of Maryland, which Burns joined in 1993, causing the center to be renamed in his honor in 1997 as the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership; it later became an independent nonprofit organization. In 2016, the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership will become part of Churchill College and the Moller Institute at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Books