Certain Trumpets.

Garry Wills' 18th book is a series of vignettes about individuals he considers leaders in a catalogue of enterprises, counterpointed against snapshots of non-leaders--in the author's jargon, "antitypes."

Wills plays Franklin Roosevelt against Adlai Stevenson; Eleanor Roosevelt against Nancy Reagan; Ross Perot versus Roger Smith; Pope John XXIII against Celestine V (the only Pope forced to resign); Martha Graham against Madonna. Martin Luther King gets the leadership prize for rhetoric; Dorothy Day, the doyenne of the Catholic Worker movement, gets the gold for saintly leadership.

The book can be read as a series of selected short stories, and each category stands on its own. It is not, as was John Gardner's work On Leadership, an attempt to explore the elements of leadership and tap those of special relevance today. Wills admits that he offers little for those seeking to answer the question, "How am I to become a leader?"

The writing is lively, literate, and full of interesting tidbits about the lives of each person he caricatures as leader or antitype. But it's not until near the end that he zeroes in on two key questions in understanding effective leadership: "Leader of whom? Going where?"

Three recent presidents have profoundly affected our nation by their leadership--and each was quite different in style, in substance, and the issues on which he sought to lead. FDR faced the Great Depression and World War II; Lyndon Johnson, whom Wills dismisses as a "superb Senate leader" but "a poor president," revolutionized the nation with his commitment to civil rights (with laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accomodations, housing, and protecting voting rights, and his articulation of the concept of affirmative action and of the need for a war on poverty amidst such plenty). And he altered forever the role of the federal government (with Medicare, Medicaid, aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education, and environmental, consumer, and crime control laws). Later, Ronald Reagan set out to stem the expansion of the federal role in American life. By cutting taxes, he fenced Democrats into a budget corral that is likely to restrain domestic spending for the rest of the century. He brought millions of Americans under his conservative banner and shifted the center of American politics to the right

Where were these leaders going?

Roosevelt wanted to win a war and stamp out fascism and anti-Semitism-- and he had a united nation behind him, as millions of young Americans went into the military, millions more worked in defense production at home, and Hollywood and the news media went after Hitler and his assault on the Jewish people with a single-mindedness inconceivable today. In FDR's time there were far sharper, widely accepted demarcations of good and evil; unlike today, not every idea was assumed to have some merit.

Johnson's goal was a society that acted in accord with its stated constitutional principles of equality and opportunity and justice for all. As he brought out of the closet 200 years of brutalizing blacks and exhorted the nation to right the wrongs, he tackled an issue so controversial and sought to change a feeling so deeply ingrained that it remains the nation's most divisive to this day.

Enter, in 1980, Reagan. His goal was to stop the federal government from getting more deeply into the pants of American society and business. He did it by making the issue lower taxes, appealing to the American resentment of government, and harnessing the libertarian streak in our people while fanning religious fervor among those eager to set moral and social standards for every American.

Who were these presidents' followers? For Roosevelt on the war it was all the people, but after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that was as easy as crossing the untrafficked streets of 1941. By the late sixties, LBJ had spent the largest election plurality in history to help blacks and wage war in Vietnam, and he lost his conservative followers over civil rights and his liberal ones over the Vietnam War. Reagan's followers were white and conservative, with a core of evangelicals.

Leadership in our increasingly fragmented society, with its premium on aggressive pluralism--economic, social, cultural, and religious--is a more difficult task than at any time since the Civil War. I would add two attributes essential for leadership today: courage of conviction and credibility.

Which brings me to the question that I wish Wills, who has written so perceptively on Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy, had confronted in this book: Why are we not producing the kinds of leaders that founded the nation and led it through its finest hours?

For me the answer rests, in part, with us, the followers. Wills puts it this way: "My book has missed its object if the role of the follower is made somehow less worthy than that of the leader." John Gardner makes a somewhat different point: "... [P]eople want to know whether the followers believe in the leader; a more searching question is whether the leader believes in the followers."

The recent adulation of Richard Nixon in death is revealing as to why the nation suffers from a dearth of leaders. The followers have gone well beyond paying due respect to the office and the man. They have chosen to adore a president who obstructed justice, was a criminal co-conspirator in an attempt to destroy the opposition political party, made a calculated judgment to exacerbate racism as part of his Southern strategy, and was the only president who had to resign in disgrace after the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted the first article of impeachment against him. In canonizing such a man, the followers have applied "deviancy down" (to borrow Pat Moynihan's vivid phrase) to leadership in America.

Bluntly put, American followers get the kind of leadership they deserve by the standards they set.