Lessons of Leadership (SD)

A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who "discovered" and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and dozens of other important writers. After graduating cum laude in 1971, Berg spent seven years expanding the thesis, which became his first book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. The first effort won the National Book Award and earned the young biographer a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped support him while he completed his next book Goldwyn: A Biography, a life of the pioneer motion picture producer, published in 1989.Berg was looking for the subject of his next work when a publisher suggested the life of the controversial aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh had himself written a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was also a distinguished author. Previous biographies had offended Lindbergh with their inaccuracies, and the family had never cooperated fully with a biographer before. Berg spent seven days visiting with Mrs. Lindbergh to persuade her that he would tell her husband's story fairly. He scored the ultimate coup for a Lindbergh biographer: Mrs. Lindbergh gave Berg access to 2,000 boxes of private papers, including 60 years of her own diaries. Berg spent two years in the family's archives, poring over the material. In Paris he rested on the bed in the American ambassador's residence where Lindbergh slept after his transatlantic flight. It took Berg nine years to complete his biography of the flier, but the resulting book, Lindbergh, immediately became a best-seller and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Berg's next project is a biography on the 28th American President, Woodrow Wilson.

A. Scott Berg found his calling early in life. At 15, he already knew he wanted to attend Princeton University. At Princeton he determined to tell the story of 20th century America by writing "five or six biographies" of American cultural figures. At 19 he began work on his senior thesis, a biography of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor who "discovered" and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones and dozens of other important writers. After graduating cum laude in 1971, Berg spent seven years expanding the thesis, which became his first book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. The first effort won the National Book Award and earned the young biographer a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped support him while he completed his next book Goldwyn: A Biography, a life of the pioneer motion picture producer, published in 1989. Berg was looking for the subject of his next work when a publisher suggested the life of the controversial aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh had himself written a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, and his widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was also a distinguished author. Previous biographies had offended Lindbergh with their inaccuracies, and the family had never cooperated fully with a biographer before. Berg spent seven days visiting with Mrs. Lindbergh to persuade her that he would tell her husband's story fairly. He scored the ultimate coup for a Lindbergh biographer: Mrs. Lindbergh gave Berg access to 2,000 boxes of private papers, including 60 years of her own diaries. Berg spent two years in the family's archives, poring over the material. In Paris he rested on the bed in the American ambassador's residence where Lindbergh slept after his transatlantic flight. It took Berg nine years to complete his biography of the flier, but the resulting book, Lindbergh, immediately became a best-seller and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Berg's next project is a biography on the 28th American President, Woodrow Wilson.

At the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, three distinguished public servants address the problems and opportunities facing the modern metropolis. Richard M. Daley is now serving his sixth term as mayor of Chicago. He has earned a national reputation for his innovative, community-based programs to address education, public safety and neighborhood development; he was one of the first mayors of a major American city to take direct control over his city's school system. Antonio R. Villaraigosa was elected Mayor of Los Angeles in a historic landslide in 2005. As leader of America's second largest city, he has taken on entrenched interest groups to promote new approaches to education and transportation. The first Latino to lead Los Angeles in over 130 years, he has quickly emerged as a dynamic national spokesman for urban America. For over 30 years, Willie L. Brown, Jr. represented San Francisco in the California State Assembly. For 15 of those years, he dominated the state's government as Speaker of the Assembly. From 1995 to 2003, he served two terms as Mayor of San Francisco. Presiding over a period of intense growth driven, he is one of the most popular mayors in the city's history. The discussion was moderated by the host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews.

At the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, three distinguished public servants address the problems and opportunities facing the modern metropolis. Richard M. Daley is now serving his sixth term as mayor of Chicago. He has earned a national reputation for his innovative, community-based programs to address education, public safety and neighborhood development; he was one of the first mayors of a major American city to take direct control over his city's school system. Antonio R. Villaraigosa was elected Mayor of Los Angeles in a historic landslide in 2005. As leader of America's second largest city, he has taken on entrenched interest groups to promote new approaches to education and transportation. The first Latino to lead Los Angeles in over 130 years, he has quickly emerged as a dynamic national spokesman for urban America. For over 30 years, Willie L. Brown, Jr. represented San Francisco in the California State Assembly. For 15 of those years, he dominated the state's government as Speaker of the Assembly. From 1995 to 2003, he served two terms as Mayor of San Francisco. Presiding over a period of intense growth driven, he is one of the most popular mayors in the city's history. The discussion was moderated by the host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews.

Make a list of the landmarks of the American musical theater over the last half a century -- West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, The Phantom of the Opera -- and you'll find Harold Prince behind every one of them. He has won 21 Tony Awards as producer and director, a record no one can touch. Prince began his producing career at age 26, enjoying back-to-back hits with The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. The first show also marked the beginning of his collaboration with director and choreographer Jerome Robbins. The pair made history in 1957 with West Side Story, a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story set among rival New York street gangs, with a classic score by composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The collaboration of Prince and Robbins reached its peak with Fiddler on the Roof, the timeless story of a Jewish family in pre-revolutionary Russia, coping with the conflicting pull of tradition and modernity. Prince's attention turned to directing, and in 1967 he scored a hit with Cabaret, a dark-hued tale of Berlin night life on the eve of the Nazi takeover. In the 1970s, he enjoyed a memorable collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, creating some of the most sophisticated works in the history of the musical stage: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and their biggest hit, Sweeney Todd. Prince enjoyed even greater success with two lavish musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera. Audiences around the world were thrilled by Phantom's breathtaking stagecraft and went back to see it again and again. Over the years, Harold Prince has diversified, directing dramas, films and opera, but the musical theater remains his greatest love. Now in the sixth decade of his career, he is still going strong.

In today's politically charged debate over the role of the courts in American society, Justice Anthony Kennedy stands as a model of judicial temperance and objectivity. At 38, Kennedy was the youngest federal appeals judge in the country. Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1988, Kennedy won the unanimous approval of the United States Senate. As a Justice of the Supreme Court, he has resolutely evaluated every case on its merits, without attempting to promote an overriding political viewpoint or philosophy. Even those who disagree with his findings are compelled to admire his carefully drafted opinions. Although he has generally voted with his conservative colleagues on crime issues, he has at times sided with the Court's more liberal members on issues of free speech and privacy. His warm, unpretentious demeanor has enabled him to negotiate compromises between his fellow justices and rise above the political passions of the moment. His longtime commitment to international legal education has insured that his influence will extend far beyond his tenure on the nation's highest court. In this podcast, recorded at the 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, California, Justice Kennedy speaks to the Academy's student delegates about the Constitution and the meaning of freedom. He calls for improved understanding between the United States and other nations and urges the students to rise above stereotypical perceptions of others.

When Desmond Tutu became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he used his pulpit to decry the apartheid system of racial segregation. The South African government revoked his passport to prevent him from traveling, but Bishop Tutu refused to be silenced. International condemnation forced the government to rescind their decision. He had succeeded in drawing the world's attention to the injustice of the apartheid system. In 1984, his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. As Archbishop of Cape Town, spiritual leader of all Anglican Christians in South Africa, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to white supremacy in South Africa. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he helped his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. Now retired from his episcopate, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world.

A devout Muslim, Shirin Ebadi has long argued for an interpretation of Islamic law consistent with democracy and equality before the law. The first woman to serve as a judge in Iran, she was President of the City Court of Tehran from 1971 until the revolution of 1979, when the new Islamic regime barred women from serving as judges. For many years, the theocratic government would not even permit Dr. Ebadi to practice law. When she was finally granted a license to practice law, she courageously took on a series of human rights cases that set her at odds with the conservative authorities. She has championed writers and journalists in freedom of expression cases, and exposed conspirators behind the murder of dissident students and intellectuals. In one of her most famous cases, she represented a mother whose child was taken from her and died of abuse in the home of the custodial stepmother. Against fierce resistance, Dr. Ebadi led a successful campaign for the passage of Iran's first law criminalizing violence against children. Valuing her own faith as she does, Dr. Ebadi is also a committed proponent of religious freedom and has bravely defended the rights of Iran's Baha'i religious minority. The government has jailed her repeatedly, but her courage has never wavered. In 2003, she became the first citizen of Iran to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a college student, John Sexton barely scraped together a 2.1 GPA. Today, he is the pioneering president of New York University, setting it on an ambitious path to become the U.S.'s leading global university. The son of an alcoholic -- by age ten, he was searching for his lawyer-father in the gutters of Brooklyn -- Sexton was an academic late bloomer. He spent 15 years as the volunteer coach of a high school girls' debate team, taking them to two national championships, and only then did he enter law school, graduating at age 37 from Harvard. From that moment, his rise was meteoric. He landed a coveted clerkship with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Warren Burger, and, less than ten years out of law school, he was picked as Dean of the New York University Law School. Under Sexton's leadership, NYU became one of the nation's premier law schools and Sexton himself pioneered a new form of global law study. In 2002, he became NYU's president, and also served on the Board of Governors for the New York Federal Reserve. At NYU, he has challenged conventional university notions of tenure to attract leading academic stars to full-time undergraduate teaching. His fascination with globalization has inspired him to create an NYU campus in Abu Dhabi, slated to open in 2010. His philosophy of education is that the academic quest must include answering the question: "Am I living a useful life?"

"You mean to tell me that me, Toni Novello, the little kid from Puerto Rico who has been in the National Institutes of Health all her life has been picked?" When President George H.W. Bush tapped Dr. Antonia Novello to be Surgeon General from 1990 to 1993, she could hardly believe her ears. She was both the first woman and the first Latin American ever to serve as the nation's number one public health officer. She had come a long way from the little town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where her widowed mother had struggled to raise a child who was sick from birth. Overlooked in the public health system of her native island, Antonia waited 18 years for the operation that allowed her to live a normal life. Undaunted by illness, discomfort or hardship, she excelled in school and embarked on the study of medicine, determined to spare other children the neglect she had suffered for so long. Dr. Novello has specialized throughout her career in the health problems of children and adolescents. It was her work in pediatric AIDS that led to her appointment as Surgeon General. In that role, as representative of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, and as Commissioner of Health for the State of New York until 2007, Dr. Novello has been a tireless campaigner for children's health, and an inspiration to young men and women around the world.