Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Jefferson believed the will of an educated, enlightened majority should prevail.

Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.

America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was

Jefferson’s story resonates not least because he embodies an eternal drama: the struggle of the leadership of the nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world.

Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

His bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him from what it was to what he thought it ought to be.

He led the first democratic movement in the new republic to check the power and influence of established forces.

he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past.

The story of Jefferson’s life fascinates still in part because he found the means to endure and, in many cases, to prevail in the face of extreme partisanship, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Jefferson’s political leadership is instructive, offering us the example of a president who can operate at two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future

while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.

“and the way to obtain it is, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.”

By example and perhaps explicitly he was taught that to be great—to be heeded—one had

to grow comfortable with authority and with responsibility.

“from the time when, as a boy, he had turned off wearied from play and first found pleasure in books, he had never sat down in idleness.”64

In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was to be both poetic and prosaic, creating sympathy for the larger cause while condemning Britain in compelling terms. His purpose, he said, was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of … but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take.”

The revolutionary nature of Jefferson’s words was, nevertheless, clear from the beginning. With the power of the pen, he had articulated a new premise for the government of humanity: that all men were created equal.

Jefferson understood a timeless truth: that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning’s foe may well be the afternoon’s friend.

though Jefferson never forgot that it was foolhardy to sacrifice real progress, however compromised, to the dreams of the ideal.48

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.… A friend dies or leaves us: we feel as if a limb was cut off. He is sick: we must watch over him, and participate of his pains. His fortune is shipwrecked: ours must be laid under contribution. He loses a child, a parent, or a partner: we must mourn the loss as if it was our own.

This was a key element of Jefferson’s vision: He wrote beautifully of the pursuit of the perfect, but he knew good when he saw it. He would not make the two enemies. Jefferson

because I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”

He believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient.

“Many declare you an atheist,” Scales wrote to Jefferson, “but be it so, I much rather

a liberal atheist should govern the people, than a bigoted saint, who knows not God.”