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Presidents, Power, Faith, and the Boardroom
I’ve spent a lifetime trying to better discern Jesus’ great parable on the organic tension between God and mammon. I am always smitten with Jesus’ admonition that shrewdness matters profoundly in the navigation of life.
Having lived my professional life in Washington, D.C., this tension between the world and Providence seems to come to the fore more often than any other single pressure point, and none more so than in our contemporary era.
Plato, the founder of Western philosophy, wrote 25 timeless texts. Among his nuggets of gold: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
Plato was imagining measurable power over the lives of others. I suspect the Greek philosopher also was thinking about the power each of us has over ourselves, the idea of self-mastery—and not merely power over others.
An observation often attributed to another great man in the public square, Abraham Lincoln, but probably not written or said by him, has a cogency that rings true: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
Presidential historian Tevi Troy, a prolific and lyrical writer, has written a delightful new book examining the organic relationships between U.S. presidents and captains of commerce and industry during various vicissitudes of public life.
Troy was a White House colleague of mine in the Bush-Cheney administration. For tourists and other visitors in Washington during this shank of summer, where presidential history seems to lurk around every corner, his book “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry” (Regnery History) is precisely the right book to pack in the suitcase.
“The Power and the Money” helps us better understand how presidents and businessmen and businesswomen have navigated the endlessly fascinating dance of power and influence.
Making more than cameo appearances in Troy’s book: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and a couple of Henrys—Ford and Luce. This is a page-turner to be sure, and 12 other outsize business personalities charm its narrative.
A writer for The Jerusalem Post observed: “What readers will find fascinating is the increasing entanglements of big government with big business, neither of which is popular with the American people.”
Troy effectively negates and dispels much of what we think we know about this so-called bipartisan entanglement of business and politics.
Which is to say that in the American experience, this relationship has been going on from early in our republic. And the author rightly demonstrates that it is a series of relationships that often redounds to the benefit of the public—not the opposite—across nearly 150 years of fascinating American history.
I am particularly interested in how faith infuses or suffuses the relationships between presidents and business leaders. Troy memorably evokes two of these.
The founder of Time magazine, Henry Luce, was born in Penglai, Yantai, China, and raised there by Christian missionaries. Luce was bathed in a deep faith from boyhood.
Decades ago, Luce famously gave voice to how Christian faith informed not only his business practices but his high profile in the public square: “I am a Protestant, a Republican, and a free enterpriser, which means I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.—and if anyone who objects doesn’t know this by now, why the hell are they still spending 35 cents for the magazine.”
A corollary is the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood.
The Warner Brothers, Henry and Jack, were of Jewish faith and their religious tradition was directly related to their pro-American films. The Warners loved America deeply, and their studio’s films reflected that infusion of faith and patriotism.
The famous movie director Billy Wilder once said: “Studios had faces then. They had their own style. They could bring you blindfolded into a movie house, and you opened it and looked up and you knew.”
It is refreshing that an important presidential historian does not ipso facto join the conventional narrative that businesspeople are often up to no good and are only or mostly self-interested when it comes to interaction with the political class—and especially our presidents. Troy gives us ample examples for good and bad, to be sure.
But what is so nourishing and refreshing about this fine new book is that Troy shows the measurable benefits of having keen business minds involved in the dance of public policy, where the tension between God and mammon is as timeless, depthless, and roiling as ever.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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