21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (17 page)

On the fourth day, FDR decided to try a different approach. That morning, before they entered the conference room, he told Churchill, “I hope you won’t be sore at me for what I’m about to do.” Churchill had no idea what Roosevelt had in mind. Moments later, they joined Stalin in the conference room As Roosevelt later explained:

The ability to break the ice in order to create trust is an important people skill. Roosevelt had a deep understanding of what makes people tick. He even coaxed a laugh and a handshake out of one of the cruelest thug dictators who ever lived.

In the end, of course, Churchill figured out what his friend, the American president, was up to—and he approved. Churchill not only respected Roosevelt—he treasured their friendship. Perhaps Churchill’s experience as a passenger in Roosevelt’s Ford helped to strengthen the bond between them.

We catch a glimpse of Churchill’s emotional bond with Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in French Morocco, January 14–24, 1943. There Roosevelt and Churchill conferred with Free French generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud and planned their strategy for the next phase of the war against Hitler.

When the conference was over, Roosevelt prepared to return home. Churchill accompanied Roosevelt to the airport and helped him board the plane. Then Churchill turned his back on the plane and said to an aide, “Let’s go. I don’t like to see them take off. It makes me far too nervous. If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”
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The fourth inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was held on January 20, 1945. He left the White House on March 29, traveling to the “Little White House” at Warm Springs, Georgia, for a few weeks’ rest. On the afternoon of April 12, he was sitting for a portrait by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, when he remarked, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” Then he collapsed, having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

A fitting epitaph was offered by a grieving soldier outside the White House fence. Frances Perkins stopped to chat with him and asked what he thought of the late president. “I felt as if I knew him,” the soldier said. “I felt as if he knew me—and I felt as if he liked me.”
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P
OPE
J
OHN
P
AUL
II

The Force of Forgiveness

What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me.
I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust
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P
OPE
J
OHN
P
AUL
II

T
en thousand people thronged St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Pope John Paul II stood in the back of his white Fiat Campagnola “popemobile” as it slowly passed along the barricade. Cheering people reached up to receive his blessing and hand their babies up to be kissed. It was a little after 5:00 p.m. on May 13, 1981, under a bright blue sky.

Standing among the tourists and pilgrims was a man named Mehmet Ali Ağca. He hid a Browning 9 mm semiautomatic pistol under his jacket. Ağca was a Turkish assassin who had murdered Turkish journalist Abdi ?pekçi in 1979. While on trial for that murder, Ağca escaped from a military prison with the help of the terror organization Grey Wolves. Using false passports and multiple identities, he traveled to Rome.

At 5:17, the pope’s vehicle passed close to Mehmet Ali Ağca. The assassin raised his gun at close range. He squeezed the trigger. Shots split the air in rapid succession. Pope John Paul II was struck four times, once in the left index finger, once in the right elbow, and twice in his lower intestines. The pope looked surprised but did not cry out. He stood upright for a moment, mouth agape, then fell back into the arms of his aides, a blood stain spreading across the front of his white cassock.

Two women were also hit, neither fatally.

For a moment, the crowd was stunned to silence by the gunshots. A fast-thinking nun knocked the gun from Ağca’s hand. A security officer and several spectators swarmed over the gunman and dragged him to the ground. Men in suits surrounded the car, which lurched forward and sped away. People screamed, wept, and prayed.

Pope John Paul II was placed in an ambulance and rushed to Gemelli Hospital. On the way, he prayed—not for himself, but for the crowd that had witnessed the shooting and for the man who shot him. While slipping in and out of consciousness, Pope John Paul II asked God to forgive the gunman.
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By the time the pope reached the hospital, he was unconscious, having lost more than half his body’s blood supply. He regained consciousness briefly as the doctors prepped him for surgery, and he asked them not to remove the scapular he had worn since boyhood—two symbolic pieces of brown cloth connected by straps over the shoulders, representing the Carmelite order and a deep devotion to Mary. Pope John Paul II spent five hours in surgery.

One factor in favor of the pope’s survival was his general good health. The assassination attempt occurred five days short of his sixty-first birthday. He had always been an avid sportsman who enjoyed hiking, skiing, swimming, and soccer. As pope, he had continued his regimen of early-morning jogs in the Vatican gardens.

Following surgery, he was listed in critical but stable condition. His condition quickly improved. Just four days after the shooting, he issued a message of forgiveness for the gunman from his hospital bed. Buoyed by prayers from around the world, he spent three weeks in the hospital, and his doctors pronounced him fully recovered on his release. Even so, he suffered pain and impairment for the rest of his life—a constant reminder of his brush with death.

At trial, Mehmet Ali Ağca was unrepentant. He pled guilty, claimed he acted alone, and was sentenced to life in prison. Two and a half years after the shooting, on December 27, 1983, Pope John Paul II went to Ağca’s cell in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison. Ağca, unshaven and still unrepentant, said, “So why aren’t you dead?”

The pope talked to Ağca for twenty minutes. The prisoner seemed darkly suspicious the entire time. John Paul II told Ağca he was alive because he had been protected by the Lady of Fátima—the Virgin Mary, as she is said to have appeared to three children at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917; the assassination attempt occurred on the Feast of Our Lady of Fátima, May 13. Ağca worried that this “goddess” might come to his prison cell and take revenge against him. The pope assured Ağca that both he and the Lady forgave him, though Ağca never asked forgiveness. Like Jesus on the cross, the pope forgave even though forgiveness was unasked.
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Evidence suggests that Mehmet Ali Ağca was paid by the Bulgarian secret services, and that he acted as a proxy for the Soviet KGB. Ağca would eventually tell dozens of versions of his story, making many bizarre and conflicting claims. To this day, his reasons for shooting Pope John Paul II remain a mystery. He was later released and now lives as a free man.

In order to lead people, we must be able to understand their weaknesses, empathize with their problems, and be tolerant of their mistakes and failures. Forgiveness is the heartbeat of all the people skills.

An old French proverb states, “To understand is to forgive.” People will disappoint us and wound us, and it’s easy to resent them for the hurt they cause us. But the more we can understand and empathize with them, the easier it is to forgive.

The value of forgiveness as a people skill has been taught for centuries in our wisdom literature. “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger,” wrote Solomon (Proverbs 15:1). “Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered,” wrote the psalmist (Psalm 32:1).

Pope John Paul II exhibited both sides of this crucial people skill. He freely forgave the gunman, and he sought forgiveness from those who suffered injustice at the hands of the institutional church over the centuries. On behalf of the Catholic Church, the pope made public apologies for more than a hundred historic wrongdoings, including the church’s persecution of Galileo Galilei for his scientific views; the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation; violations of the rights of women; inaction during the Nazi Holocaust; and the church’s inadequate response to sexual abuse by a few in the clergy.

Any organization that is unable to honestly face its own past, with its mistakes and failures, is doomed to repeat those mistakes in the future. Pope John Paul II wanted to cleanse the Church of these stains and prepare the church to demonstrate moral leadership in the future.

Pope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła (pronounced “voy-TIH-wah”) in Wadowice, Poland, on May 18, 1920. He was the youngest of three children born to Karol and Emilia Wojtyła. An older sister died before he was born. His mother died of a heart ailment when Karol was eight. Karol idolized his older brother, Edmund, who became a physician. When Edmund was twenty-six, he contracted scarlet fever from a patient and died; Karol, age twelve, was devastated.

Karol and his father lived in a chilly, one-room apartment. His father sewed together a makeshift soccer ball made of rags, and the future pope and his father spent many hours together playing soccer.

Wadowice was a predominantly Catholic town with a substantial Jewish population. Karol’s father raised him to be a devout Catholic, kind and openhearted to everyone. Karol enjoyed playing goalkeeper in soccer, and games were often organized pitting Catholics against Jews. Karol often volunteered to play on the Jewish team. A Jewish friend, Jerzy Kluger, recalled that because there were fewer Jews in the town, “somebody had to play on the Jewish team and he was always sort of ready.”
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Kluger would later serve as the pope’s unofficial envoy between the Vatican and the government of Israel.

Next to his faith, Karol’s great passions in life were poetry and the theater. In 1938, Karol and his father moved to Kraków. There he attended Jagiellonian University, studying literature and philosophy. He founded a small theater company, Rhapsodic Theater, which met in the apartments of its members. He produced, directed, wrote, and acted in its plays. Like Ronald Reagan, the future pope honed his communication skills by performing as an actor.

When Hitler invaded Poland in late 1939, Karol Wojtyła came to know life under an oppressive government. The Nazis shut down the university and forced all young men in Poland to find jobs. Karol had to close down his theater group and take a job in a limestone quarry. His father urged him to study for the priesthood, telling him, “I would like to be certain before I die that you will commit yourself to God’s service.” In February 1941, his father, age sixty-one, died of a massive heart attack. By age twenty, Karol had lost his entire family.

The Nazis routinely murdered priests and students. Sometimes his friends would vanish without a trace, and he believed it was just a matter of time before the Nazis got him, too. He made up his mind to join the priesthood, though doing so was forbidden by the Nazis. He joined an underground seminary secretly run by the archbishop of Kraków. In February 1944, Karol Wojtyła was on the street when he was struck and severely injured by a speeding German truck. He spent two weeks recovering from head and shoulder injuries, and his survival confirmed to him that God had called him to the priesthood.

On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance staged an uprising in Warsaw, attempting to liberate the Polish capital from the Nazis. The uprising failed, and on August 6—a day known as Black Sunday—the Gestapo swept through Kraków to prevent a Warsaw-style uprising. More than eight thousand men and boys were rounded up by the Nazis. Karol Wojtyła narrowly escaped being caught in the Gestapo dragnet, as historian Norman Davies reports: