COLUMN: Making Good Use of a Fool

By Tobin Barnes
Last time I was talking about putting up with fools. How some people don’t “suffer fools gladly.”

I said these persnickety people were probably miserable all the time, seeing as how humanity is liberally peppered with fools, including just about everybody’s inner fool lurking just below the surface ready to emerge at any given moment.

The only recourse, I said, is to learn to live with fools, even make them useful to a certain extent. Abraham Lincoln was a master at this. He sought the grain in others, even those contemptuous of him, and disposed of the chaff.

His tribulations have been much in the media lately as a comparison to Barack Obama’s massive challenges. You often hear the phrase “team of rivals,” taken from the fine book of the same name, since Obama, like Lincoln, seems willing to go out of his comfort zone for cabinet members and advisors.

Another recent book I’ve read about Lincoln’s superb leadership skills is “Tried by War” by James M. McPherson. Lincoln was not only adept at handling and using fools, he seemed to have sympathy for them: “If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.”

And “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

Sometimes Lincoln was “wise enough to play the fool” himself. Allow others to underestimate him. Think they were dealing with a hayseed hick. Then he’d turn the tables on them. He knew that we make more blunders underestimating than overestimating.

Lincoln was surrounded by underestimating fools. Many of his generals during the Civil War were card carriers and proud of it. Some of his own cabinet members thought they’d make a better president than he. Scoffed at him behind his back.
Fools.

By the end of the war, these fools came to realize who was who: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt,” Lincoln said.

He understood psychological manipulation for benevolent ends, which is what great leadership is all about. Yes, Lincoln understood fools and fooling: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

He was a person contemporaries could seldom fool but were oftentimes fooled by him. And with a kindly air: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

Or “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

His depth of understanding of the human condition is a marvel. And like no other president, he could express the profoundest thoughts in a simple manner that any fool could understand: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”

And his humor was unparalleled by any other politician before or since. Along with all his other great qualities, he was our wittiest President: “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”

“When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.”

“A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.”

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”

And best of all, Lincoln is still speaking to us: “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

“My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.”