Why Has the Study of History Mattered to Me?

(Drawn  from my Conversation with History Honors Majors at Yale University – November 2004)

·     More specifically, why has the learning and acquiring of some sense of history – its events, its life stories, and its illumination of the role of the contingent and unforeseeable versus the predictable – why has this mattered to me?

·     Why has reading – or more to the point, experiencing – the work of great historians mattered to me?

·     And finally, why has the act of personally researching and elucidating certain lessons of history been something I have found useful in my life and, beyond that, extraordinarily enjoyable in its own right?

And perhaps more important than any of these questions, how do I talk about them with you – young men and women whom I don’t know personally, each on your own exciting path of learning – how do I talk about them in a way that offers some possibility of providing an insight of interest and value to you -- and not be just a trip down memory lane for me?  All I can say is:  I will try.

Let me begin with a sufficient amount of personal background to make what I have to say intelligible.

I came to Yale already greatly enjoying history, but thinking I would probably be a math or science major.  My freshman year convinced me otherwise.  I must say, Year I Physics played a major role in this. It became pretty clear that engineering would not be my chosen field.  But even more importantly 

than this negative inference, I got lucky.  I signed up for a course that sounded beguiling ... interesting.  Nicknamed “Cowboys and Indians, it 

covered the development of the West:  History 37 A & B.  The subject matter was fascinating – westward expansion; manifest destiny; diplomatic battles with nations over territories; tension between ranchers and farmers; economic issues intertwining with the political – and yes, lots of detail on cowboys and Indians.  But even more important than the exciting subject matter was that it introduced me to Howard Roberts Lamar, a wonderful professor who eventually became acting president of Yale.  I got to know him.  He inspired me.  I have maintained contact with him ever since.

In my junior year, I encountered the other professor who had the greatest impact on me while I attended Yale:  David Potter.  He was my senior advisor.  Above all, he introduced me to the excitement and the discipline of historical analysis.  Forty-five years after I completed my senior essay, in February 1960, I still hold it as one of my proudest accomplishments.

To complete the biography quickly, the decision for me what to do following Yale was a no-brainer:  three years in the Navy, an obligation undertaken in return for the scholarship I received at Yale.  Those three years made a transformational difference in my life. After the Navy, I had planned to go to law school.  I was accepted at Harvard.  I ended up feeling I’d take one more year off, with something other than studying.  And I turned to Procter & Gamble, a company I had learned about when I was soliciting ads for the Yale Daily News.  I thought I’d go in there for a year and run a business.  And I stayed for a career.  

My 40-year career led eventually to my becoming CEO and Chairman of Procter & Gamble.  I had the privilege of helping lead the Company into China and Southeast Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe.  I had the opportunity to work hard to take diversity to a new level, recognizing what Provost Dick Brodhead once said:

         I have always regarded the intellectual cost of separationism to be as great in its way as its social cost.  In this country, those who have stopped thinking are typically those who have stopped interacting with people who might make them think – people, namely, who do not already think more or less the same as they do.

I tried to create a place of honest and tough-minded dialogue, the kind that should exist in any university like Yale, the kind well-described by my classmate Bart Giamatti when he said:

         We must beware of voices that are scornful of complexity, and contemptuous of competitive views and values. These voices can be encouraged because they are said to be “idealistic” or “decisive”.  What they are is precisely not idealistic, but in their simplifying, reductionistic.  It is that civil conversation – tough, open, principled – between and among all members of the institution that must be preserved.  If it is, community is patiently built.  If it is not, the place degenerates.

People have often asked me – indeed I was asked this question by the captain of one of Yale’s varsity sports teams last month – “Can a history major be of any value in business?”  My answer – “I can’t imagine any course of study being more valuable.”

Which brings me back to the three questions I posed at the outset.

Why has the learning and the acquisition of some sense of the lessons of history – its events, its life stories, its contingencies – mattered to me?

Some of the reasons are probably obvious, perhaps some not, and it would take too long to catalog them all.  But the most important are these:

1.         The striking reality that personal leadership makes things happen.  That while there are trends that in some ways are inexorable, the difference that the individual makes in shaping these trends can be and often is decisive.  

2.         The inspiration I have gained for the qualities of great leaders.  The recognition that it takes wisdom, good judgment, courage and persistence to make a change in anything that’s important.  That had everything to do in how I’ve tried to lead and encouraged others to do the same.  

3.         The recognition that there is great goodness in the world, but also evil, and recognizing that if good people don’t stand up courageously and persistently for the good, we are going to be in trouble.

4.         The study of history has also helped me develop a deep respect for different societies and culture, as I learned about their particular contributions and the challenges they have encountered and overcome.  This recognition has fired my determination at Procter & Gamble respected national and regional identities as we operate globally as a company.

5.         The recognition that great achievements and change are never achieved without setbacks and the wisdom to make course corrections in one’s original strategy.  This has been of enormous help to me as I thought about how to pursue some of the biggest challenges in my career including the development of our business in Russia and China.

6.         The recognition that certain values must prevail and must carry any institution forward, and it is up to us to make those values pertinent and relevant to today.

7.         Finally, the realization that, if great institutions are to survive and grow (a matter that is not foreordained), they must achieve that fine balance of preserving certain core values that are fundamental to success, while being prepared to evolve and change everything else.

Let me now address the second question.  Why has the reading, or more precisely the experiencing of the writings of great historians mattered to me?

Partly, it is the content.  For example, the bringing to life of the characteristics of great leaders.  Or the understanding of the religious, ethnic and political realities that have made the achievement of peace in the Middle 

East so difficult or the knowledge of the historical origins of countries like Iraq which becomes a foundation for assessing what future policy should be.

However, as I reflect on it, just as important as the content has been the learning I’ve drawn from experiencing the intellectual integrityand imaginationof great historians as conveyed by their writing.  Reading such history has served as an example to emulate in my own thought process and expression of thought.

I refer here to the fresh, penetrating, multi-faceted analysis of factors – economic, political, social and individual – that have helped lead to create major events or trends.  I refer to the ability to identify previously un-discerned or at least un-described discriminating details which become related to a broad theme, enable one to see the subject in a new light.  I refer to the expression of all this in writing that has impacted me with such force that I react with thoughts like:

-         I wish I could have expressed it that clearly

-         I can see the applicability of the dynamics described here to my own organization

My appreciation of why experiencing the work of a great historian matters was brought home to me again recently as I read the final work of David Potter, a wonderful book called “The Impending Crisis”.  It deals with the sharpening sectional tensions between 1845 and 1860 that led to the Civil War.  I’m on page 320 of this book, and I don’t think I have encountered a 

page without a sense of admiration and sometimes awe at the substance and the way it’s expressed.  I’m in the hands of a master.  It lifts me intellectually.  It prompts me to try harder to emulate the sensitivity, the precision and the intellectual integrity of analysis that I see here as well as the clarity of how it’s expressed.

Which brings me to the final question.  Why has the act of personally researching, exploring and trying to illuminate lessons of history been something that I have found helpful?

In one way, the usefulness has been situational, highly coincidental, illustrating that you don’t know where your study might lead sometime in the future.  The subject of my senior thesis was “The Influence of the Institution of Slavery on the Diplomacy of the Republic of Texas”.  I worked for two years on it, I’m sure memory pushes aside some of the tougher moments, the countless re-writes.  But it really was a thrill.  It even won a prize.  What did it lead to?

Totally unpredictably, my interest in the issue of slavery and this period of American history was one of the reasons that my interest was immediately piqued when I was asked 10 years ago to lead the development of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.  This institution is committed to bring to life lessons of history – as people have fought for their own freedom and helped others achieve it – as a catalyst for dialogue and discussion, on how we can live and work together better today.  

There were many reasons I agreed to undertake this role – the most important being that I had come to see firsthand the power that comes from people of different backgrounds and experience working together (and the ease with which stereotypes can separate us).  But my interest and I believe my effectiveness in leading this project was clearly enhanced by my deep-rooted knowledge and attachment to this subject. And it has benefited enormously from re-connecting with professors expert in this subject including Yale’s David Brion Davis and David Blight.

But as I say, this is a situational connection.  You may find one; you may not.

But whether such a specific connection develops or not, of this I am sure.  The act of researching, analyzing and writing about this subject brought with it an appreciation of the challenge and, yes, the satisfaction of doing deep analysis that can lead to fresh perspectives as well as an appreciation of the value of clear expression.  This has been of extraordinary value to me.  Indeed, I am certain that these were among the most important qualities which led to the success of my career at Procter & Gamble.

But more fundamentally than that, they fired a love of learning, of curiosity to understand cause and effect, to distinguish between the general and the specific, to understand the difference an individual can make. And this and more has driven me – happily – to keep learning as the years have gone by.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been struck by the difference I see in people’s continued rate of learning:  Their openness to new ideas; their willingness to reach out to try new things; to bring fresh perspectives.  What accounts for these differences?  I know of no simple answer.  Many factors come into play.  But the three factors I have observed most often are:

1.         The extent to which people engage in new experiences -- often challenging, even at first glance, frightening experiences.

2.         The extent to which people build relationships with people who are different than they are, and

3.         Finally, by how much they read – about life experiences, about trends.  History is a key part of this.

So what do you take away from these comments?  I hope at least three things.

1.         Never give up the life of the mind that you are experiencing today.

2.         Develop a relationship with and maintain contact with one or two professors over time.  Professors who have galvanized your love of learning, of analysis, of the art and power of fine expression, and

3.         Save your history term paper!

Love Trumps Hate--In Fact Love Is What It Is All About

We should act on this from President Obama:

 "We have to take these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society."

That is the only way I believe we will thwart the stern warning confronting our nation today -a warning which was issued by Reinhold Niebuhr sixty-six years ago in his book, "The Irony of American History". 

"If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all of the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

We Are Not Alone--My Classmate, Bart Giamatti

We Are Not Alone  -- Independence is Achieved through Broadening our Connections: Intellectual, Spiritual and Human

Bart Giamatti was a classmate of mine.  He served as President of Yale from 1977-86.  His convictions and eloquently expressed beliefs mirror my own.

This is an extract from his address to the entering class at Yale thirty years ago, in fall 1988:

At the heart of the American belief in individual initiatives, in solitary striving and common responsibility, in sacred individual and shared freedoms, in consent leading to liberty leading to a civil order that guarantees liberty build on consent, is the covenant of the family.  And while the idea and the reality of family may be exploited or made banal, while there is always a gap between the ideal of family and anyone’s actual familiar circumstances, nothing can finally lessen the power of the idea of the family or indeed lessen the sum of humanity’s wisdom that tells us the family provides an irreducible and yet splendidly elastic model for the coherence of freedom and order.

And thus by a circuit roundabout but relevant we come back to today.  You have—perhaps for the first time—now removed yourself from family at the beginning of your journey toward what I called at the outset a state of independence.  The University cannot and should not, and will not, displace your family.  Your family, in whatever shape it takes, is and always will be yours, the first seminary of values and affection and connection. But as you grow, the University will provide other versions of family, connections of intellect in common academic pursuits, connections of shared striving in athletic and artistic and social activities, connections of shared and pleasurable daily life in the manageable, intelligible life of a dormitory or residential college.  You will find, to say it all, that a state of independence is achieved by broadening your connections and affiliations, intellectual, spiritual, human.

The paradox into which one gradually grows, through education and throughout one’s life, is that independence is achieved through consenting to interdependence.  I believe we grow in individual liberty in this country when we recognize the human needs and rights of others.  I believe a state of independence comes when we decide through our intellect and spirit to forge human connections.  Without connections, there is no individual coherence. There is no independence to uprootedness, there is only drift and decay; there is no growth of the moral and mental powers of the self if the self alone is the ultimate goal of learning. Independence of an enduring kind, noble and practical, arrives only when one realizes what it means, in all its glory and responsibility, that one is not alone.  

In all I have said of family and a state of independence, I urge you to engage the paradox.  I believe we all come to live, that the individual begins to fulfill his or her potential and power through a deepening awareness of and contact with the differing needs and rights of other people.  I am urging you not to resolve that paradox but to use your opportunity for education fully to fulfill that paradox.  It takes work.  The human race or America or Yale or you in your relationships are not a family because someone says so.  The encouragement to individual strivings and the shared guardianship of freedoms does not occur because someone declares that the family lives. Labels do not make life no matter how assiduously or skillfully applied.  It takes work.

As we all have, you too may find difficult moments here as you grapple with how best to fit together individual initiative and community custom, how best to maintain tolerance while pressing disagreement, how to remember that the freedoms you assume must be maintained for everyone else too, or yours disappear.  Do not doubt for a moment, my friends, your capacities for living fully the paradox of independence and interdependence.  

Empathy: The Golden Coin

Our progress in understanding one another will only go so far as empathy takes us.

 

We can only have empathy if we walk in humility.

 

That can only happen through relationships.  We can fuel our anger and sense of righteousness by e-mails.  We often do.  But we don’t build relationships that way.  

 

Empathy requires presence, proximity, touch, sacrifice, “staying.”

 

To enter into the hurt and sorrow of another person guarantees that you’ll lose something, but you will come out more human on the other end.

  I believe it all has to start by recognizing that we are all created in the image of God.  Equal in dignity, value and worth. I believe it will be fueled by recognizing that we are all on the journey of life, of unknown but relatively short length, and if we are able to help one another along the way, that is a good thing. Empathy allows us do this. 

 

The Role Teachers Play in Building Our Expectations and Helping Us Become Who We Are

Almost thirty years ago, in May, 1989, I addressed a group of award winning K-12 teachers. 

I concluded my remarks saying that there is only one thing that I wouldn’t dream of leaving here without talking with you.  It is something that I have seen played out in my life and in other peoples’ lives again and again. 

I’m talking about the role of expectations and values…and the incredible role that teachers have played for me and my family in building our expectations and values—and hence our future.

My deep, deep conviction in the role teachers play in creating our future goes back to my earliest years.

While I was blessed with a good home and wonderful parents who were ready to make any sacrifice to help me get a good education—still I know I would not be the person I am today if it were not for a handful of teachers that I can vividly remember to this very day.  They influenced my life in a variety of ways.  The inculcated a love of learning and the thrill of discovering new concepts. And they provided a good dose of plain faith and discipline.

But above all,  they conveyed to me the belief that I could do well.  That was so important.  It is one thing—and a very important thing—to have your mother or father express confidence in you, but it is also an enormously important thing to have that confidence expressed by a teacher, particularly one you respect.

In preparing for this talk, I went back to my report cards which, believe it or not, I still have from high school—1952-56.

Some of them brought tears to my eyes as I more than ever recognized the influence of a particular teacher.  I would just like to read you a couple of excerpts from these report cards. While they may not be totally clear in their meaning, they will give you a sense of what this teacher did for me.

His name was Andrew Jenks. He was my homeroom teacher and my math teacher.  Here was his report after he had known me for about six months in my first year:

“John is a very able and likeable boy.  His overall record is a good one for his first term in the regular session—though I am sure it could be improved and I hope he will strive for such improvement.  Just as he is prone to a certain messiness and disorder about his desk, so I suspect he may often be rather distracting from the full excellence he might achieve.  He is quite quick and his thoughts may often get ahead of his writing with this effect.

Perhaps a little greater care would make the difference.  Both Mathematics and French would probably benefit from a more careful approach.  I trust he will work hard to make good his recent gains in Latin without letting any other subjects suffer.  For surely he is well able to do so.”

I think I’d better stop there. He got a little more critical after that.

That report was the tip of the iceberg.  Andrew Jenks talked to me daily.  He didn’t book any compromise.  He could be gruff. But I knew he respected me, I knew he cared for me and I knew he wanted the best for me.

Some years later in my final report, here’s what he said:  “John has an excellent record which he has built up steadily since he came—nor do I feel he has reached the peak of his performance.  I greatly appreciate his good influence in the school, not to mention his bearing with me even when that may have been trying. Frankly, I take this as a great compliment because John knows how important this was to me.”  Indeed I did.  Thirty-three years ago I did.  Today, I do even more.

This teacher was just one of several who gave me a positive understanding of myself…an understanding of what I might become.  He left me with the conviction that I ought to be a top achiever…indeed that I should settle for no less…that I had that responsibility.

And Andrew Jenks conveyed to me what in my life—in school and in all my years with Procter & Gamble, I have come to regard as the single most important principle of human development.  I call it the self-fulfilling prophesy…or the Pygmalion Theory.  It is something that I believe in so deeply and it is something your profession…the teaching profession influences more than any other.  

What I experienced in school has remained true in business.  Neither I nor anyone I know would be where he or she is at Procter & Gamble today if it were not for the confidence and values that associates or teachers brought to us over the years.

And that I have found comes out of only one thing—relationships…personal relationships of trust, of caring, and of high expectations.

Young people do not assimilate values by learning words or concepts of truth and justice and their definitions.  No—they learn attitudes and habits from intensely personal relationships with their families, their teachers and their close friends.  Young people don’t learn ethical principles so much as they learn to emulate ethical or unethical people.  And they learn from role models.

And teachers like you are often the most important role model for them.

Thank you for all you do.

Some Things Aren't As New As We Think: The Partisanship of the Press

In her magnificent new history of the United States, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore recounts the thinking of James Madison in 1791.  In an essay called “Public Opinion,” Madison identified a source of instability which he believed to be particular to a large Republic:  The people might be deceived.  “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained.  That is, factions might not, in the end, be consistent, wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men.  They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold ‘counterfeit’ opinions by persuasive men.”  (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan. We have our own individuals to think of today.)

Madison went on, “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.”  The way out of the political maze which Madison had cited was, in his opinion, the newspaper.

It was an ingenious idea, Lepore writes.  It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of Republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; and the internet would hold the Republic together.  Each time, this assertion would be both rightand terribly wrong.

Lepore goes on to cite the evidence:  Newspapers in the early Republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions.  “Professions of impartiality I shall make none” wrote a Federalist writer.  “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”  Does that sound familiar?

Maligned by the early founders of our nation as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers (as is the case today with cable TV and social media) became its machinery. “The engine,” said Jefferson, “is the press.”

So what we see today on MSNBC and Fox News and the plethora of partisan social media isn’t really as new as we think.

As always, we need to work very hard to sort fact from partisan misrepresentation. Seeking truth as best we can. Our responsibility. 

Have We Ever Had So Many Enemies?

I can't think of a time when we were choosing to have so many "enemies".

What a change from just 15-20 years ago!

Then we saw the opportunity to work with a Russia which had cast off communism and which we believed should see its future as part of a greater Europe.

Then we saw the opportunity to work with China, not as a competitor and threat but as a trading partner and a nation we could work with on matters like climate change to improve the world.

Then we saw Canada and Mexico as partners and good neighbors.

Then we viewed Western European countries as our closest friends and allies.

We did not agree on everything. We knew they had their own interests and that they would not mesh with ours in every case. We knew there were matters of trade we would need to argue through. But we believed we could do with an outcome that better served both nations.

The Trump Administration is picking so many needless fights.

We are facing a world divided. And much of it in my view is needless and more than that dangerous to our own and the world's interest.

Trump is explicitly turning his back on the idea of working together in a global world. I can think of few things more dangerous.

He is thumbing his nose at institutions and agreements built on mutual even if sometimes shaky trust which took years and in some cases generations to build: institutions and agreements like the WTO, NAFTA, Paris Climate Agreement, the United Nations itself.

As a result, we are losing our stature as an ideological leader in the world for the first time in my eighty-year life.

The sources of the rupture of trust between Russia and China and the United States are complex. There is enough blame to go around. Russia should not have taken possession of Crimea. But it has no intent of expanding its global presence as a nation a la the Soviet Union. To do so would be suicide. Putin and every thinking Russian know this.

China is indeed an economic competitor. Naturally. And they engage in some practices in the area for example of intellectual property that need to change. But that need not, it should not make them a geo-political competitor.

The issue of who controls theSouth China sea is real but has to be resolvable. Allowing this to lead to a geo-political clash of arms would be akin to allowing the Balkans lead us into World War I, which in fact is what happened. And the current use of draconian tariffs is a crude and I believe ineffective means to try to solve the intellectual property issue. We seem to have lost our belief in diplomacy. We look to economic and military pressure to get things our way.

More than a half-century ago, President Eisenhower in his farewell address warned the Nation against what he described as a "military-industrial" complex. It is alive and well. Not with nefarious intent. Not at all. It is espoused by well-meaning people dedicated to doing what they believe is right.

I attended a conference this week. I heard talks from two retired senior military officers and a former Secretary of the Navy. They made it clear that the objective of the U.S. was to ensure our military retained its position as the "dominant force." They talked of the "threat" of China as if it was committed to expand its control across Asia as Japan did leading up to WWII. They indicated we now had about 280 ships and were committed to 355, making this something of a numbers game.
The United States military budget already exceeds the next 5-6 countries combined.

The tragedy here is not just that we are spending money that could better be placed against other national imperatives and running up our national debt. Even more important is that it fuels and in some ways calls for the drive to find adversaries against which the weapons this money funds can be targeted and thus justified. That is the biggest risk of the "military-industrial" complex about which Eisenhower warned us.

Let me not be understood. I am not naive. We have people in the world who hold ideologies dramatically counter to are own and are out to bring down our value systems, our way of life. Terrorists, ISIS, some of the leaders in Iran. We need to have the military capability to thwart and defeat their attacks and we need allies, often including in my opinion Russia and China, to do so.

I served in the military.  I respect members of the military deeply. We need them. I am conscious and humbled by how they support our lives today. And have always done so, one family member to the next. A striking fact: members of the military constitute only about 1% of the population. Almost half of them come from military families.

We will always face threats in the world. We must be realistic. But we must recognize the need to work with others to combat these threats. There is nothing new in this. We have always depended on alliances and partnerships. We must treat other countries and their leaders  with respect. We must beware of allowing natural disagreements to lead to the rupture of trust and ability to work together for "win-win" solutions. We must be willing to view the world through they eyes of our partners and yes our "enemies" too.