Many of today's best leaders also work out of the national spotlight. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus is not well known publicly, but he has become a legend in the U.S. Army. Even less well known are Bill Drayton and Bill Shore, both sparking a tide of social entrepreneurship.

Yet the selection committee wondered: Why aren't there more good leaders in politics? To be fair, the committee's decision to leave out presidents and potential presidential candidates shrank the field. Still, the committee was dismayed that it could agree on so few other political leaders, in Washington or beyond.

The general public apparently agrees. The first annual confidence index of American leadership, reported in this issue, shows that the public has high confidence in today's military and medical leadership and very low confidence in Congress and the executive branch. The results track with other surveys that have shown relatively low levels of confidence in government generally since Vietnam and Watergate. As Warren Bennis has written, one cannot easily explain why in the early days of the republic, a nation of fewer than 3 million people could produce a half-dozen political giants and today, in a nation of nearly 300 million, we are aching to find just one.

The 20th century taught us that progress is not inevitable. Each generation has to struggle and sacrifice to secure a better future for its children. When it fails, the world slips backward. Whether America moves forward will hinge in significant degree upon the quality and number of those who lead.