The most efficient executive of which there is any record in history is
clearly that little centurion who could say: “For I also am a man set
under authority, having under me soldiers; and I say unto one, go, and
he goeth; and to another, come, and he cometh; and to my servant, do
this, and he doeth it.”
In my experience as an executive I learned that it was easy to say
“Go,” but that the fellows did not go promptly; I could say “Come,”
and he came--after a while, perhaps, when I had said “Come” again, and
that sometimes, having said “Do this,” I had to go myself and do it, or
leave it undone.
Executive ability is a mysterious quality inhering in personality, and
partaking of its mysteries.
I had gone into the mayor’s office feeling that I was about the most
ill-prepared man for such a job in the town. Naturally I had turned to
Tom Johnson, who had a tremendous reputation as an executive; even his
worst enemy, as the saying is, would not deny his wonderful executive
ability. I went to him in a sort of despair, and he laughed and leaned
over and whispered----
But perhaps after all I should not tell. It was spoken in confidence.
And it is ungenerous and unkind to destroy the cherished illusions of
the world, almost as unkind, I was about to say, as it is difficult,
since there is nothing the world so cherishes and hugs to its sad
old withered bosom as it does its illusions. It may be that they
are entirely necessary to it, it may be that it could not get along
without them. What would this nation have done, after all, if it had
not been for executive ability and the judicial temperament? The
judicial temperament consists, of course, in nothing more than the calm
assurance which enables one to put off till to-morrow problems that
should be decided to-day, for if allowed to go long enough problems
will solve themselves, just as letters unanswered long enough despatch
their own replies.
I had deduced that generalization for myself long ago, while waiting
for judges to hand down opinions, and then in decisions reading the
well-known formula: “The court does not find it necessary to pass on
this particular point at this time.” Why, I applied one time to the
Supreme Court, on a Wednesday morning, for a stay of execution on
behalf of a man who was to be burned alive in our electric chair on
the following Friday, and the judicial temperament who at that time
happened to be chief justice calmly said that the application would be
taken under advisement and a decision handed down in due course, which,
at the earliest, was the following Tuesday morning. But the governor
half an hour afterward said, “Oh, well, don’t worry; if the court
doesn’t act, I’ll reprieve him,” an example, perhaps, of what I had in
mind when I was writing those vague thoughts about making government
human. But executive ability! I had, and still have, great admiration
and reverence for that----
But Tom Johnson leaned over that afternoon, as we sat there in the
committee room of the House at Columbus, and laughed and whispered:
“It’s the simplest thing in the world; decide every question quickly
and be right half the time. And get somebody who can do the work.
That’s all there is to executive ability.”