Джеймс МакГрегор Бёрнс: Американский историк и теоретик лидерства.

American historian and political scientist (1918–2014)

James MacGregor Burns (August 3, 1918 – July 15, 2014) was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971 Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography for his work on America's 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. Burns shifted the focus of leadership studies from the traits and actions of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit. He was best known for his contributions to the transactional, transformational, aspirational, and visionary schools of leadership theory.

After graduating from Williams College, Burns spent a year as an intern in Washington for Utah Congressman Abe Murdock. He spent a year at Harvard, then six months in Colorado working for the War Labor Board.

After earning his Ph. D. in political science from Harvard, Burns joined the faculty of Williams College in 1947, and taught there for nearly 40 years, retiring in 1986. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served as president of the American Political Science Association and the International Society of Political Psychology. He was also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. During the early 1990s he taught classes at the University of Maryland, where he was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) and was honored with the naming of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership. In 2004 he was also awarded the Laurel Crowned Circle Award, ODK's highest honor. In 2010 he won the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Award for Distinguished Writing in American History of Enduring Public Significance presented jointly by the Roosevelt Institute and the Society of American Historians.

A liberal, in 1958 Burns was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in Massachusetts's 1st congressional district, meeting then U. S. Senator John F. Kennedy and helping him gain Protestant support to get re elected, while Kennedy helped him gain Catholic support. Burns gained personal access that allowed him to write his biography of Kennedy, published in 1960, which calls JFK "casual as a cash register," "quiet, taut, efficient—sometimes, perhaps, even dull," and generally too cerebral and lacking in heart. This angered Kennedy's wife Jackie, who said Burns "underestimated" him. Burns graduated from Lexington High School in Massachusetts in 1935, and then received his Bachelor of Arts from Williams College and his Ph. D. from Harvard University. He and his first wife, Janet Thompson, had four children, whom they raised in Williamstown after he joined the faculty at Williams College. In 1964, he met Joan Simpson Meyers, daughter of renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, in New York City when she interviewed him for her best selling book about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy; four years later Burns and Meyers were married at High Mowing, the family home in Williamstown, where they lived together for the next quarter century. At the end of his life, he lived with his collaborator and longtime companion, Professor Susan Dunn, and remained close friends with his first wife. Burns also advocated repeal of the Twenty second Amendment to the United States Constitution to allow effective U. S. presidents to serve three or more terms of office.