Introduction -- The optimists -- The propensity for risk: Eisenhower in the military and the presidency -- A disengaged president: Ronald Reagan and his lieutenants -- Character and mood in presidential leadership -- The narcissists -- To be single-minded: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and the nuclear navy -- A change agent: Florence Nightingale and medical reform -- The uses of aggression in overcoming bureaucracy -- The managers -- The education of Robert S. McNamara: Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968 -- From monomania to megalomania: Harold Geneen and ITT -- The myth and reality of the managerial mystique -- The empowerers -- Martin Luther King, Jr. and militant nonviolence: a psychoanalytic study -- Frantz Fanon: purgation through violence -- The psychodynamics of empowerment -- The humanists -- Joseph Conrad: sharing the secret of command -- Hermann Melville's Billy Budd: a study of character -- Identity, imagination, and command -- Conclusion -- Character and fitness for command.