You could probably fill a book with short, pithy sayings about what makes the difference between a manager and a leader.

Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis had a good one when they said, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Stephen R. Covey, in his famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, illustrated the difference by using an analogy.

He says this: Imagine a group of people, cutting their way through a dense jungle with machetes. These are the producers, the problem solvers. They are clearing away the underbrush.

Behind the producers come the managers. The managers sharpen the machetes, write the policy and procedure manuals, hold muscle development programs, and set the schedules and compensation packages for the people with the machetes.

Who is the leader in this scenario? According to Covey, he’s the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”

To which the people on the ground will often reply, “Shut up! We’re making excellent progress!”

Don’t laugh. Ever see the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai?

If you haven’t, it’s about a large group of British POWs in Burma during World War II. The POWs are forced to build a railroad bridge by their Japanese captors. The Japanese botch the job, because they don’t have the necessary engineering skills. When this happens, the POWs’ ranking officer, a British colonel played by Alec Guinness, takes charge of the operation and builds a successful bridge. He does this partly to shame the Japanese, and partly to keep his men busy and their morale high.

The colonel is a by-the-book type who becomes so obsessed with building the bridge that he loses sight of the larger fact that he is helping the Japanese war effort. It is only at the end of the picture that he realizes his mistake and cries out, “What have I done?!”

He was an excellent manager, but he lacked the vision to be a real leader.

So the first quality of a leader is vision. All the other qualities of leadership: qualities like courage, character, charisma – and any others you care to name -- are important to leadership only because they help the leader achieve his vision.

Now, anyone can cultivate the secondary qualities of leadership. You can make a habit of being brave, honest, and generous, for example. You can develop your powers of persuasion. You can be of service in your community.

You can broaden your knowledge base. You can keep learning, so you will have the wisdom you need to make high-level decisions. You can work at different jobs in order to better understand the business you are and to better relate to the different people who work in that business. You can do all that and more –- and you’ll be a more successful person for it, I’m sure. But without vision, you won’t be a leader.

Remember Sputnik? Fifty years ago this October 4, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Even a mere grade-schooler, as I was at the time, felt the shock of the moment. Nor was I immune to the fallout from the Soviet achievement: Sputnik caused Americans to question the quality of the education their kids were getting, and the pressure was soon on the schools for tougher standards and higher levels of achievement, particularly in math and science.

So much for a kid’s perspective. One of the most astute adult observations on the event came from journalist and former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers, who was then writing for William Buckley’s conservative journal, National Review. In a letter to Buckley, Chambers wrote:

They still do not see the point. The satellite is not the point. The point is the rocket that must have launched it. Of course, the scientists and the ranking military chiefs must have grasped this obvious implication at once. But it took three or four days for the organically stupid press to catch on. Consternation, of course. Add in this datum: The satellite passed over Washington. One minute later it passed over New York. We have entered a new dimension. Like Goethe after the Battle of Valmy, we can note in our journals: "From this day dates a new epoch of history; and you can say that you were there." Doubtless, the Americans will soon launch bigger and better moons. That, too, is not the point. Again, the point is: the battle for space is on.

The battle for space was indeed on. Within five years of the launching of Sputnik, President John Kennedy committed this country to landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s –- a goal that was reached in 1969.

But as an editorial in last week’s Economist observed, the most significant and enduring consequence of the space race has been to make us look more closely at our own planet. “The biggest mental change wrought by spaceflight,” says the editorial, “has not been an appreciation of the vastness of the universe, but rather of the smallness, fragility and unity of Earth.”

So the most penetrating comment of all on the long-term effect of Sputnik may well have been written a dozen year before the satellite was launched. It came from a poet, T.S. Eliot, who wrote in The Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of our all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

According to a recent report by the United Nations, over half of the world’s population – 3.3 billion people – will be living in cities by next year.

When I read that statistic, I thought of “The Purse Seine” – a haunting poem that poet and early environmentalist Robinson Jeffers wrote some 70 years ago. In the poem, Jeffers speaks of looking out over the lights of a modern city from a great height. To him, the spectacle below seems like a school of fish caught in a net.

He writes:

How could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations
Incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in …

Jeffers could see no future for the human race trapped in such a predicament, except “inevitable mass-disasters.”

Jeffers himself lived in a stone house in Carmel, California, built of boulders he had dragged up from the beach and mortared with his own hands. The house was remarkably earth-friendly for its day. For example, the ceilings are seven feet rather than eight feet high, so the rooms require less fuel to heat them in cooler weather.

Jeffers thought that human beings should remain close to nature, and economical in their use of natural resources. Otherwise, in his view, they courted environmental catastrophe.

Perhaps this century – with its increasing levels of urbanization and carbon emissions – will prove him right. But I’d like to think that human beings are wise enough and tough enough and adaptable enough to ensure their survival.

William Faulkner, who died the same year as Jeffers, 1962, took a considerably more optimistic view of the future of humanity. In his Nobel banquet address in 1949, he said this:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Only time will tell which of these two literary giants was the true prophet. Is man one of evolution’s mistakes who will resolve the problem of his existence by making himself extinct? Or does he have a spark of divinity within him that will help him save himself from his own follies and excesses before it is too late?

Fifty years ago this week, Ayn Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged, was published by Random House. Critics on both the left and the right immediately savaged all 1,168 pages of it: the left, because it celebrated individualism, free enterprise and the dollar sign; the right, because it celebrated atheism, materialism and sex. Conservative pundit William F. Buckley once quipped that young people read Rand’s novels “less for their jackbooted individualism than for the fornicating bits.”

And yet, Atlas Shrugged would sell millions of copies, be translated in to all the world’s major languages and would remain in print to this day. Some 150,000 new copies of the book are sold every year in bookstores alone, and it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list.

Rand saw herself, grandly, as a “novelist-philosopher.” I would be more inclined to describe Atlas Shrugged as a soap-opera version of capitalism. Like all successful soap operas, it has melodrama, suspense, sex and clearly-identified heroes and villains.

From the marvelous opening line, “Who is John Galt?”, to the hero’s dramatic rescue over a thousand pages later, Rand pulls the reader along by skillful plotting and sheer narrative power. The exception is John Galt’s 60-page radio broadcast to the nation, expounding on Rand’s philosophy of individualism. When I read the novel, over 30 years ago, I read the first five or six pages of Galt’s long-winded broadcast before skipping ahead. The heck with philosophy, I thought. I wanted to find out what happened next.

Rand’s characters have no complexity. They are all either Nietzschean supermen, like John Galt, or else they are mean-spirited, envious parasites with names like Wesley Mouch. Nor does Miss Rand make any serious attempt to deal honestly with opposing points of view.

Consider, for example, Francisco d’Anconia’s “money” speech that occurs about a third of the way through the novel. Francisco is a South American copper magnate, who takes advantage of an elegant party to lecture his American hosts on the true meaning of money. The essence of the speech is contained in these two paragraphs:

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money –- and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being –- the self-made man –- the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose -- because it contains all the others –- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity –- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words “to make money” hold the essence of human morality.

Now there is much truth in this speech. The great industrialists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries –- Carnegie, McCormick, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford and the others –- did make their fortunes by creating wealth, rather than by expropriating it, and in the process they created a living standard for the mass of Americans that was and is the envy of the world.

But the story is not that simple. Even in those early days, a pure, competitive market economy never existed in this country. We industrialized behind sky-high tariffs -– tariffs lobbied for and zealously defended by the business community. The federal government subsidized the building of the first intercontinental railroads through land grants to private corporations. Politicians at all levels were bribed to enact laws favorable to the new industrialists. Initial attempts by workers to strike for higher wages were crushed by police or federal troops, or by private armies of Pinkerton detectives. There was, in short, plenty of chicanery, favor-seeking and resort to brute force by the men Miss Rand calls “the highest type of human being.” As Milton Friedman once wryly remarked, “All any businessman wants is a fair advantage.”

But no character in Atlas Shrugged is allowed to give Francisco d’Anconia a real answer to his argument. The only reply that Rand permits comes from a silly dowager who can say no more than, “I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.” End of discussion.

Rand is supposed to have disliked the operas of Richard Wagner. That is curious, because the two artists were much alike. Both created on a monumental scale. Both invented mythical worlds divided between gods and heroes on one side, and stupid giants and malevolent dwarfs on the other. Both were full-blooded romantics who gloried in sex, violence and epic struggles. But Wagner, at least, was realistic enough to recognize that even the gods had flaws, and that those flaws would ultimately bring about their destruction. Perhaps that was why Rand rejected him: her own immortals are flawless. They have no defects, no contradictions and no doubts. They end up ruling the world in triumph instead of going down in blood and fire.

A century and a quarter after his death, people still thrill to Wagner’s operas. My guess is that people will still read Atlas Shrugged 50 years from now. Most of us know that we are not gods, but there are times in all of our lives when we would like to feel as if we were.

In olden days, it was standard practice for an absolute ruler to kill the messenger who brought bad news.

According to Carol Hymowitz in today’s Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119240607692558680.html?mod=hps_us_editors_picks), times haven’t changed all that much.

Ms. Hymowitz writes:

“Executives know success in business depends on identifying and fixing problems before they become crises. It is the most basic rule in management: No matter how smart your strategies seem on paper, if you don't know how they're being executed and whether there are urgent problems, you won't be successful.

“The higher executives climb, the less likely they are to know what is and isn't working at their companies. Many are surrounded by yes people who filter information; others dismiss or ignore bearers of bad news.”

Well, nothing new in that. As movie mogul Sam Goldwyn used to say, “I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want people who’ll tell me the truth ....... even if it means their jobs.”

Is the Internet good for writers?

Author-professor Mark Dery made a good case for the negative earlier this month -– even if it was in a comment posted on the Net: http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/10/05/is-the-net-good-for-writers/

According to Dery:

“We're drowning in yak, and it's getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter's Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.”

Well, maybe. But I find it hard to believe that Oscar Wilde would have trouble attracting an audience on line. Gay readership alone would be enough to keep him afloat, but of course his appeal is universal.

Wilde was one of the most brilliant talkers who ever lived. Even today he is one of the most quoted, as Dorothy Parker acknowledged in her wry quatrain:

“If with the literate I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.”

Wilde could probably build an impressive readership on the Net simply by offering an epigram a day. His witticisms have filled whole books. Here are just a few:

“Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.”

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

“In the old days men had the rack, now they have the press.”

“One who is an emperor and king may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.”

“It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.”

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Beyond collecting these pearls of wisdom, people would probably access Wilde’s web site for the sheer pleasure of watching him deflate the pompous, the bigoted and the obtuse.

Wilde’s outrageous humor flashed out even on the darkest occasions.

Consider the time when he was on the witness stand, being cross-examined by Edward Carson, one of the most brilliant trial attorneys of the day. Carson was attempting to establish the nature of Wilde’s relations with certain young men who were far below his social circle.

Carson: “Did you become intimate with a young man named Alphonse Conway at Worthing?”

Wilde: “Yes”

Carson: “He sold newspapers at the kiosk on the pier?”

Wilde: “No, I have never heard that up to that time his only occupation was selling newspapers. It is the first I have heard of his connection with literature.”

Later, Carson questioned Wilde about his plying young men with champagne:

Carson: “Do you drink champagne yourself?”

Wilde: “Yes; iced champagne is a favorite drink of mine – strongly against my doctor’s orders.”

Carson: “Never mind your doctor’s orders, sir.”

Wilde: “I never do.”

Wilde’s wit even overcame the ignominy of being sent to prison. Once, he found himself waiting at a railroad station to chance trains. Wilde was in a prison uniform, handcuffed between two constables. If that was not depressing enough, it was pouring rain.

Wilde turned to one of the constables and said: “If this is the way that Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any.”

Would such a fount of healing laughter be “just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt”? Somehow I don’t think so.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it was “entirely realistic” that he will become prime minister of Russia after stepping down as president next March. Putin is barred from seeking a third term as president, so his bid to become prime minister is widely viewed as an attempt to hold on to the political power he has been assiduously consolidating since he was first elected in 2000.

Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule –- his suppression of dissent, his bullying of Russia’s neighbors, his nostalgia for Russia’s imperialist past and what might be called his attempt to establish a Russian sphere of influence in the Middle East –- all recalled to my mind an epigram of Oscar Wilde’s that I forgot to include in my last post.

In 1880, Wilde wrote his first play, a lurid melodrama about Russian revolutionaries called, Vera; or, The Nihilists. It’s claptrap, but it has a few good lines. One of them is particularly pertinent in light of Mr. Putin’s ambitions: “Nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.”

Given Mr. Putin’s KGB past and his actions to date, it seems “entirely realistic” that Oscar’s epigram will be validated.

Veteran speechwriter James C. Humes tells a story of sitting down with President Eisenhower and the rest of the White House speechwriting team to discuss an upcoming presidential address. Eisenhower asked some pointed questions, and when his speechwriters could give him only vague answers, he became visibly annoyed. “What is the Q.E.D.?” he asked, finally.

The speechwriters exchanged blank looks.

“Quod erat demonstandum,” the president snapped. “’That which must be proved.’ In other words, why am I giving this speech? If you can’t tell me the answer to that, you’re wasting my goddamned time!!!”

Does it seem incredible that the President of the United States, or perhaps the CEO of a major corporation, would ask why he is giving a speech on a particular occasion? As a speechwriter, I can assure you that it happens frequently.

Important people are always being buttonholed to give speeches. Maybe a golfing buddy of the CEO asked him to speak at his Rotary Club or trade association meeting. Maybe an organization wanted the CEO as a speaker so badly that they gave him a flattering award or title just to make sure he would accept. Maybe a university offered him an honorary degree. Maybe his wife asked him to give a speech to her favorite charity at a moment when he was feeling uncommonly obliging.

Whatever the reason, the CEO makes a commitment to speak, forgets all about it, and then – maybe a week or so before the event – he sends for his speechwriter and asks, “Why am I giving this speech?”

Unless the speechwriter wants to get raked over the coals, he will have an answer ready. He will have investigated the event and the sponsoring organization. He will have spoken to the people in charge and gleaned some idea of what the audience is expecting to hear. He will have researched the subject matter the speech is supposed to cover and he will have appropriate suggestions to make to his boss as to how the speech should be structured. It’s a big responsibility for the speechwriter, but that’s what we get paid for.

In 1897, on his way to India after making his first political speech, young Winston Churchill sent his mother this urgent request: “I want Lord Beaconsfield’s and Mr. Gladstone’s speeches!”

Churchill, in the words of historian Richard Aldous, recognized that modern British politics began with the clash between these two great antagonists, and that “the legend of both men was somehow embedded in the synergy of their rivalry.” This synergy is the subject of The Lion and the Unicorn (W.W. Norton & Co., $27.95), Professor Aldous’ illuminating and fast-paced account of the thirty-year duel between Gladstone and Disraeli.

The title derives from the popular belief that both politicians were satirized as mythical beasts in Lewis Carroll’s second book about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Punch, the humor magazine, was more explicit. In 1868, the editors ran a cartoon of the flamboyant Disraeli, in Elizabethan doublet and hose, preening himself before a mirror, while Gladstone, dressed as a proper Victorian gentleman, looks on with a scowl of disapproval on his face.

Like all good political cartoons, this one neatly summed up public perceptions of the two men depicted. Amid the staid ruling circles of Queen Victoria’s Britain, Disraeli was as rare and exotic a creature as one of the peacocks that strutted the terrace of his country house in Buckinghamshire. It was incredible that a Jew, a dandy and society novelist should be admitted to Parliament –- let alone become leader of the Conservative Party, prime minister and, ultimately, Lord Beaconsfield. But it happened.

Gladstone’s transformation was nearly as remarkable. A child of privilege, he attended Oxford and entered politics as a High Tory: a pillar of the established church and social order, and a knee-jerk opponent of any reform –- even the abolition of slavery. Yet in time he would become “The People’s William” –- the leader of liberals and radicals in Parliament, the opponent of British imperialism abroad and the champion of the common man at home.

Perhaps it was because both men were to some extent political chameleons that they so bitterly detested each other. Suspicion and hatred ran deep on both sides. Each was firmly convinced that the other was a mountebank and a menace, animated only by vanity and a thirst for power. And each said as much in public.

In 1877, for example, Russia threatened to overwhelm the Turkish Empire and menace the Suez Canal, Britain’s lifeline to India. Disraeli served notice that Britain would fight rather than cede Constantinople to the Russians. In reply, Gladstone launched an offensive of his own, denouncing Disraeli’s policy as “an act of war, a breach of European law.” He made his opposition personal, declaring openly that he had played “the part of an agitator. My purpose has been … to the best of my power, for the last eighteen months, day and night, week by week, month by month, to counterwork as well as I could, what I believe to be the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield.”

Unfortunately for Gladstone, not only did Disraeli manage to resolve the crisis by diplomacy instead of war, he added the island of Cyprus to the British Empire in the bargain. When Gladstone mocked Disraeli’s triumph as an “insane covenant”, Dizzy let him have it with both barrels. “Which do you believe most likely to enter an insane convention,” he asked in a speech following Gladstone’s outburst, “a body of English gentlemen honored by the favor of their sovereign and the confidence of their fellow-subjects, managing your affairs for five years, I hope with prudence, and not altogether without success, or a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponent and glorify himself?”

Rhetorically speaking, Gladstone was at his best as a preacher, making high-flown moral pronouncements at outdoor political rallies. His speech in Edinburgh in 1879, attacking Disraeli’s imperialist policies, is one example:

“Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in the same flesh and blood has bound you by the laws of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

(When Gladstone served as her prime minister, Queen Victoria made the famous complaint, “He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.”)

Disraeli, a master of epigram, rarely made a speech without coining a phrase, such as, “Justice is truth in action,” or, “The English nation is never so great as in adversity.”

He also excelled in the cut and thrust of parliamentary debates. Once, he explained the difference between a misfortune and a calamity by this illustration: “If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone pulled him out, it would be a calamity!”

The Lion and the Unicorn. Small wonder that Winston Churchill studied both of them.

In my last post, I quoted Queen Victoria’s complaint about her prime minister, William Gladstone: “He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.”

That is a complaint she would never have made about Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was an outsider in proper British society, and knew it. He realized that Victoria viewed him, at least initially, with suspicion if not outright disapproval. His method of winning over his prickly sovereign was simple, but ingenious. He was deferential, he was amusing and he flattered. “We all love flattery," he used to say, "and where royalty is concerned, you should lay it on with a trowel.”

But it was flattery of the most exalted kind. Disraeli was shrewd enough to know that even sovereigns needed to have their egos stroked. When he became prime minister for the first time in 1868, Victoria was still in mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert, who had died seven years before. Albert had been more than her consort. He had been her principal advisor and source of strength. Without him, she felt lonely and insecure. Worse, she had withdrawn from public life, putting the whole institution of the monarchy at risk.

Disraeli recognized that the Victoria would not be bullied out of her seclusion. She needed to be coaxed. Hence his extravagant flattery. In every possible way, Disraeli encouraged Victoria to believe that he depended on her advice, rather than the other way around, and that it was she who inspired all his successful policy initiatives. When, for example, he secured the Suez Canal for Britain by a brilliant stroke of personal diplomacy, he immediately congratulated to his royal mistress on her achievement: “It is just settled; you have it, Madame …”

(As a speechwriter, I’ve often found it expedient to attribute the success of a speech entirely to the brilliant insights and touching personal anecdotes that the client gave me in the interview that preceded the writing of the first draft.)

On another occasion, Disraeli visited the queen shortly after she had published selections from her Highland journals. Disraeli, who at the time had over a dozen novels to his credit, gave Victoria a conspiratorial wink and remarked, “We authors, Ma’am …”

By cultivating the trust, interest and friendship of Queen Victoria, Disraeli gained both easy access to her presence and her enthusiastic cooperation with many of his pet projects. Victoria gained, too. By allowing Disraeli to coax her out of her seclusion, she won back the popularity she had lost by remaining for so long out of the public eye.

Between the two of them, these unlikely partners reestablished the British monarchy on a firmer footing, and added romance and glamour to the British Empire. On a much more modest scale, a speechwriter who approaches his client with the right combination of tact and initiative can achieve the same kind of satisfying success.

In honor of Halloween, I have an unusual sort of ghost story to share. Appropriately enough, it deals with costumes –- the theatrical costumes of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

Booth was one of the leading actors of his day, particularly renowned for his performances of Shakespeare. Even for an actor, he was inordinately vain. He expected that murdering President Lincoln would make him a national hero, instead of one of the most execrated men in American history. So, with posterity in mind, he secretly shipped all his stage belongings to Canada before committing his infamous deed.

Booth’s trunk was rediscovered in 1873, and returned to his older brother, Edwin. Edwin Booth was also an actor. Indeed, John and Edwin were the sons of the great English-born actor Junius Brutus Booth, and the three had appeared on stage together. Unlike John, however, Edwin had been a loyal Union supporter during the Civil War, and was horrified when his brother turned assassin. Public outrage against the whole Booth family forced Edwin to retire temporarily from the stage. Edwin’s father had been destroyed by alcoholism and insanity and, for a time, the family feared that Edwin would suffer the same fate. But he emerged in 1866 to become the “Prince of Players” –- America’s leading actor and the era’s most renowned interpreter of Hamlet.

Imagine Edwin’s feelings in 1873, on receiving the trunk containing his brother’s costumes!

Actually, we don’t have to imagine. A call boy at Booth’s theatre named Garrie Davidson witnessed what happened to the trunk and its contents, and later told the story to the actor Otis Skinner, the father of actress and author Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Garrie said that one night, after a performance, Edwin Booth told him that he needed a few hours’ sleep, but asked the boy to wake him at three o’clock in the morning. On being roused at that hour, Edwin got up and had Garrie follow him to the basement of the theatre. There, he ordered Garrie to stoke the fire in the furnace and to break open an old trunk lying in the corner. Inside, dusty and reeking of camphor, were John Wilkes Booth’s costumes, wigs and swords from all his great classical and romantic roles. Edwin took them out one by one, regarded each item tenderly, and then resolutely passed them to the boy, who consigned them to the flames.

“It was awful,” Davidson told Skinner, “to watch him sit there without a word, inspecting each article, touching it as if it were his own flesh and blood …”

Finally, at the bottom of the trunk, Edwin unearthed a long purple tunic and fur-trimmed cloak. The discovery nearly undid him. He sat down on the lid of the empty trunk and said in a choked voice, “My father’s! Garrie, this was Junius Brutus Booth’s costume for Richard III. He wore it in Boston on the first night I went on the stage as Tressell.”

Garrie wanted to spare this particular relic, but Edwin said, “No, put it with the others.” As Garrie stuffed the costume into the furnace, Edwin broke down and sobbed like a child.

The funeral pyre burned for several hours. At last, the costumes were reduced to ashes and even the swords had melted. Edwin turned to Garrie and said, “That’s all; we’ll go now.”