Reflections from a Study of President Eisenhower

I had an easy and interesting time (yes, they often go together) reading Ike’s Bluff:  President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World by Evan Thomas.  Some notable and some surprising facts and reflections:

 

Ike’s high school yearbook predicted that he would end up as a history professor at Yale.

 

As President, Eisenhower harbored two fears.  The first was nuclear way.  The second was the fate that could befall a nation that devoted all its resources to preparing for war.  As he said in his Presidential speech during his term, “the jet plane that roars over your head cost three quarters of a million dollars.  That is more money than a man earning $10,000 every year is going to make in his lifetime.  What world can afford this sort of thing for long?”  

 

Today, many in Congress are celebrating adding another $80 billion to a defense budget greater than the next dozen countries in the world.  Another person claims there was a “20% reduction” in the military budget during Obama’s tenure.  The only way you could get to that number is to count the fact that we have reduced our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Shortly after Stalin’s death, Eisenhower made what he felt to be his first truly important address.  He wanted to let the latest National Security establishment know that he was looking for ways to get off road to atomic war with its bleak alternative of turning the country into a garrison state.

 

Eisenhower was often ill.  He had to take sick leaves.  It was remarkable to read that right after one of them, “Chastened by the severity of his illness, Ike quit (smoking) cold turkey his four-packs-a-day cigarette habit.”  Wow.  I thought I had a problem.

 

The nadir of Eisenhower’s presidency was his “going along” with Kermit Roosevelt’s sadly successful move to displace Mohammad Mossedekh as the Prime Minister of Iran.  He also supported the effort to overthrow the government in Guatemala and, later, to launch the Bay of Pigs planning which created the catastrophic scenario which Kennedy inherited.  Eisenhower said the biggest regret in his Presidency was the fact that he lied about the U2 incident.

 

Winston Churchill liked to paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s belief that courage is the greatest virtue, because without it, man can have no other.  Eisenhower was not given to such philosophical pronouncements, but it is clear that he valued patience above all else, says Thomas.  That wouldn’t be my conclusion.  My conclusion would have been he valued “winning” above all else.

 

A surprising assessment of Eisenhower’s Presidency from Henry Luce:  there was some “substance to the charge that Ike had rather reigned rather than ruled.”  He tended to assume as you can in the Army, but not in the White House, that an order once given is to be executed.  “He has been an easy boss,” Luce said.  

 

Eisenhower responded to Luce with a thoughtful and revealing private response:  “I plead guilty to the general charge that many people have felt I have been too easy a boss...I do not mean to defend, merely to explain.”  Noting that he was operating with a divided and complex government that required cooperation and compromise, he concluded, “of course, I could have been more assertive in making and announcing decisions and initiating programs.  I can only say that I adopted and used those methods in matters that seemed to be most effective.  Finally, there is the matter of maintaining a respectable image of American life before the world among the qualities that the American government must exhibit is dignity.  In turn, the principal government spokesman must strive to display it.  In war and in peace, I have no respect for the desk-pounder, and have despised the loud and slow talker.  If my own ideas and practices in this matter have sprung from weakness, I do not know.  But they were and are deliberate or, rather, natural to me.  They are not accidental.”

 

What a contrast this personal introspection and statement of principle represent to what we see in and hear from President Trump.  More personally, what an apt description it probably is of how many people feel I led P&G.

 

 

 

Reflections from Thomas Rick's Study of George Orwell and Winston Churchill

A fascinating book which presents the beliefs and lives of Winston Churchill and George Orwell.  Most impressive about it is the brilliantly selective use of quotations from both writers and what I found to be wise perspective on the meaning of their lives for today.

 

I also found a good deal in these citations relevant to the life I’ve experienced:  

 

·       I am struck by how often in history the “wisest” writers and thinkers have felt the world was going down the drain.  The historian Arnold Toynbe began the 1930s observing that it was becoming common to think that “the Western system of society might break down and cease to work.”  In 1935, the Shakespearean scholar, A.L. Rowse, wrote that it was “too late to save any liberalism, perhaps too late to save socialism.”  In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the novelist, Virginia Woolf, wrote to her sister, lamenting “the inevitable end of civilization.”  

 

Despite these easy-to-support assertions, “civilization” has shown the ability to sustain itself against great setbacks.  It’s worth remembering that today as we bemoan what’s going on around us.

 

As George Orwell wrote after World War II, lamenting what was going on around him but still looking forward:  “Spring is here, even in London…and they can’t stop you from enjoying it.  The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

 

On the other hand, we must not fail to see how narrow the gap is between calamity and avoiding calamity.  If it hadn’t been for Churchill, a peace agreement might have been reached between the leaders of Britain and Hitler.  Many leaders, including Lord Halifax, wanted to find such an agreement.  

 

In our own history, there were those who advocated that Lincoln agree to the Confederate states withdrawing from the Union.  

 

The challenge Churchill faced in World War II was huge.  As just one example, in 1942, Churchill was crushed one day to learn that, of a convoy of 34 ships coming from Canada, 20 had been sunk.  

 

·       I’ve often remarked on how every life is made up of “successes” and “failures.”  That is certainly true of the lives of Churchill and Orwell.  Churchill’s defeats were many prior to World War II and after World War II.  Yet, he displayed towering strength and willpower during the war.  Without him, it may not have ended the way it did.

 

Orwell’s books Animal Farm and 1984 achieved greater notoriety and success after his death than before.  When he was alive, his book sales were measured in the hundreds and thousands.  Since his death, an estimated 50 million copies of his books have been sold.

 

In Animal Farm, Orwell described an existence that spoke directly to the tragedy of Communism.  Later, he wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of truth.”  It is not just the future that belongs to the all-powerful, but also the past.

 

·       Both Churchill and Orwell were, at their very heart, focused on understanding reality and, drawing from that, conclusions in a direction that fostered individual freedom.

 

I love this from Ricks:  “In war time, people will believe the worst if they are not told the truth, or something close to it, perhaps mixed with a vision of the way forward.”  That is what any leader at any time must provide to his or her organization.

 

Orwell, like Churchill, would spend the post-war period warning of the great dangers that still existed despite the defeat of the Nazis.  In fact, “great dangers” will always exist as part of human nature.  The tendency to exercise power to one’s own or to one’s group’s advantage will be ever present.  We must always stay rooted, to the best of our ability, in the sanctity of individual liberty and human dignity.

 

 

Turning 80--Filled with Gratitude--Reflections

The mother of my daughter-in-law and dear friend, Joani Mendelson, gave me a wonderful little book called Gratitude.  It’s a slim volume of four essays written by a neuroscientist, Oliver Sacks, who had reached the age of 80, knowing that he had terminal cancer.  I was 78 when I received the book. This past week, I turned 80 myself.

Oliver Sacks said many things which I feel, though I could never express them in the eloquent language he used.

“At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms.  A third of one’s contemporaries are dead and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence.  The marks of decay are all too visible.  One’s reactions are a little slower.  (Particularly noticeable for me, walking on the beach and seeing people walk briskly past me!)  Names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all ‘old.’”  (How well that, particularly the last sentence, describes my feelings especially when I am with my children and grandchildren in a place like Pointe au Baril, where we are now.)  

Sacks describes what his father, who lived to 94, often said to him.  He expressed a feeling, as Sacks writes, that he’s “begun to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective.  One has a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others, too.  One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities.  One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts.  One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty.”  (Yes, indeed, above all of beauty.)  

“At 80, one can take long view and have a vivid, live sense of history not possible at an earlier age.  I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

Sacks, in other short essays, writes, “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape and, with it, a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.  This does not mean I am finished with life.  On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”

“This will involve audacity, clarity and, in plain speaking, trying to straighten my accounts with the world.  But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness as well).”

 “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective.  There is no time for anything inessential.  I must focus on myself, my work and my friends.”  (For me, particularly, focus on Francie and my family and, yes, my relationships with those closest to me.)

“I shall no longer look at the ‘news hour’ every night.  This is no indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality—but they are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”   (I don’t quite go that far; but I do remind myself to concentrate on the essential FEW.)  

And in continuing, “I have been increasingly conscious of deaths among my contemporaries.  Each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself.  There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then, there is no one like anyone else, ever.  When people die, they cannot be replaced.”

“I cannot pretend I am without fear.  But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.  I have loved and been loved.  I have been given much and I have given something in return.  I have read and traveled and thought and written.  I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Yes, gratitude, that is my predominant feeling.  It is no mistake that a prayer, which I never forget to say to God when I am in church, is a prayer of thanksgiving for all the blessings that He has given me, above all in my family.

*****

 

It Is His Character Which Makes Trump So Unfit To Be Our President

I am reposting a short piece I  wrote 22 month ago, about a month before Trump won the Presidency. It was my final assessment of his unfitness to be President. 

Sadly, and more importantly dangerously,  the warning posed by this short essay by Frank Outlaw is being borne out daily by Trump's behavior.

"Watch your thoughts; they become your words.
Watch your words; they become your actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."

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Years ago, at Miami University, I was asked to address the  question,  "Does Character Count?"

I was amazed that anyone would think it necessary to address a question with such a self evident answer. 

I concluded my talk: "Without character, nothing counts."

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It is in the end his character which makes Donald Trump so unfit to be our nation's President.

A WARNING FOR THE MOMENT; "The Disbelief in the Very Existence of Truth"

 George Orwell in his all too prescient book "Animal Farm" writes this:  "Totalitarianism demands... the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of truth."

As a result, unless challenged--vigorously, based on facts-- it is not just the future that belongs to the all-powerful, but also the past. We must combat the negation of truth with every bone in our body.

 While what constitutes "truth" will often be hotly debated, what should not be debated is this. We are COMMITTED to identifying "truth", based on the best interpretation of available FACTS.

This lies at the foundation of a functioning democracy organization of any kind.

Doing the Best We Can--Doing What God Would Have Me Do

Today, at a time when we are faced with what can seem like an interminable number of challenges, it is good to reflect on something that Robert Penn Warren wrote in his book, "Segregation",  decades ago:

"We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time. We all live with a thousand unsolved problems of justice all the time. All we can do for posterity is to try to plug along in away to make them think we--the old folks--did the best we could for justice, as we could understand it."

For me two mandates help me on this journey.

Trying to follow the honest answer to the question : "what would God have me do?"

Recognizing that in all I do, everyone counts..that there is no higher calling than making a positive difference in someone else's life.

"Beware of Declaring Premature Victory"

A STERN REMINDER:  "BEWARE OF DECLARING PREMATURE VICTORY"

 

In cleaning out some old files, I came upon a review of a book I read a decade ago:  Giants, the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer.  An element of that review reminds me of a painful lesson I have learned over the years:  “Beware of declaring premature victory.”  I’ve seen that in business; I’ve seen it in the life of our nation; I’m seeing the risk of it today.  The extract below, which draws directly from Stauffer’s fine book, refers particularly to the belief that the Emancipation of the slaves was leading to true “freedom.”  Of course, that was not the case; the fight for freedom continues today.

 

In 1876, Douglass gave a talk to commemorate the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington.  He encapsulated there Lincoln’s principles beautifully.  “In organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict,” Lincoln had succeeded.  “Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union” he would have alienated large numbers of people “and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible.”  

 

As Douglass stood there that day, it had already become clear that “the slave was sinking back to his knees after standing in ‘brief moment in the sun’.”  Douglass’ worst fears from the Civil War years had been realized, yet he remained largely silent.  Why was this?  Like most other black and white abolitionists, Douglass saw the end of the war as the end-point of an era and of his life’s work.  It also marked the end of his continual self-making.  After the war “a strange and perhaps perverse feeling came over me.  I felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded and the congregation dispersed, never to come together again.”  His life’s work was now “among the things of memory.”  

 

It was an astonishing confession, as Stauffer says.  Douglass himself in 1852 had summarized the uses of history by saying:  “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”  But now, the past had become the main theme.  His Freedman’s Monument speech totally ignored what was happening to blacks in the present.  They were being systematically murdered and terrorized by former Confederates, who sought to re-establish slavery in form if not name.  In this sense, he resembled a retired athlete or political leader, whose life work and great achievements were behind him, unable to re-enter the fray with the same passion and in the same way.  Freedom had represented for Douglass and most other abolitionists a glorious culmination rather than the beginning of new struggles.  Emancipation had been the “key to a promised land” but the dream soon turned into a nightmare and the promised land was nowhere in sight.  In the face of growing doubts and disappointments, Douglass (and most of his fellow abolitionists) turned to the past as a source of solace.  

 

There is a very important message for us here.  

 

Recognize that battles won are often just laying the foundation for a new battle to be won.  A message that major undertakings will not proceed on automatic pilot.  A message that new champions need to come forth to replace those that started it.  For, like it or not, energy is not unflagging despite the best effort of those involved.  This is no excuse to give up sooner than one can and should.  But it does underscore the importance of respecting that admonition from Douglass in 1852.  “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”  I don’t agree with that in every dimension, but I do in its basic thrust.