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of hate and evil. How and why they did so is the subject of this last chapter. The three I have chosen—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were closely interlinked. The young man John Hay, who was one of Lincoln’s secretaries, and listened as he delivered his address at Gettysburg, later served in his old age as Theodore Roosevelt’s trusted and revered secretary of state. Theodore Roosevelt presided at the wedding of his niece Eleanor, whom he gave away in marriage to his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Franklin idolized his older kinsman Theodore. None of these were weak or irresolute men. Not one of them flinched at taking the harshest decisions, yet to adapt Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite phrase, they succeeded while speaking softly. This might seem counterintuitive, for the harsh tones of the demagogue seem so much more potent and effective. Yet they knew better, and I hope to explain why. How they succeeded has a direct bearing on the politics of the twenty-first century.

ON MARCH 4, 1861, AT A MOMENT OF SUPREME CRISIS IN THE NATION’s history, the recently elected President Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural. He concluded by directly addressing those who were determined to secede from the Union:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Realpolitik made it clear that civil war was likely if not inevitable, but on this most public occasion Lincoln insisted on speaking in terms of reason. The “better angels of our nature” existed on both sides of the divide between union and secession. He asserted, and spoke of, a common humanity and nature. He did not openly demonize his opponents, although he abhorred their actions. A little over two years later, in his address delivered on the battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, he again declined to contrast an evil enemy with his own “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here.”8

This magnanimous tone was a matter of careful judgment.9 Lincoln personified the enemy as if in a mirror, human like himself, fallible and capable of error. He abhorred vituperation, but for practical and political reasons. The ranks of the secessionists were no more uniform or monolithic than his own supporters. He believed that Confederate diehards were a minority in the South, and that once the war was won, he could rebuild a new and united society with the support of the uncommitted majority. In his second inaugural, he was implacable in continuing the war “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” But he also insisted that this was “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Lincoln’s rhetorical skill, his plain speaking, was to lay the grimmest necessities of war alongside the insistent voice of reason. It was this combination, each element bound indissolubly to the other, that rendered his message so potent. Conversely, he exposed the limits of maledicta.

Lincoln’s pragmatism was rooted equally in the harsh reality of politics and in an acute understanding of human nature. He knew what was said and how it was said limited (or expanded) the political possibilities for the future. The two later presidents recognized the same pragmatics. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt reported the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he condemned it with cold contempt as an “unprovoked and dastardly attack,” as “treachery,” and spoke of “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.”10 Unlike Lincoln, FDR sometimes selected a harsher register. In April 1943 he described Japanese executions of American aviators a year earlier as “barbarous,