In Search of Heroes--George H.W. Bush--"Does Character Count?"--A Cherished Talk I Gave 25 Years Ago

 

Sat, Jun 1 at 3:42 PM

Jean Becker’s book, “Character Matters,”is a treasure-trove of stories which bring to light, in an incredibly luminous way, President George H.W. Bush's uniquely courageous, decent, and kind leadership.

It would be impossible to pick out the favorite stories; in a way, you don’t need to:  there is such a consistency in how people experienced the President.  He was the same with everybody—empathetic, considerate, involved personally, yet never losing his decisiveness and stature that he recognized went with the office.

There was one compelling story that impacted me personally.  On Friday, January 12, 1990, we were honored to welcome President Bush in Cincinnati to recognize the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative as a “point of light” and give a talk to the Chamber of Commerce.  I wrote in my journal that I “briefed him at lunch, all too briefly, but it went well and, needless to say, it was a great honor.  He did a great job with the children, talking to about 20 of them in a library, and then addressing all the Taft students in the auditorium.”  I am sure they will never forget it.

Little did I know that something else was happening that day.  The President's chief of staff, Andy Card tells the story in Jean Becker’s book.  Before the trip, Card noted a letter from the Cincinnati zip code sent by a woman who might approach the President.  She wanted to meet with him to call him a murderer to his face because her son had been killed in Panama.  He was told not to do that.  He disagreed and met with her.  The story that follows is spine-tingling. It made me choke up as  the President read the a letter the boy's mother gave him. He had written it before going into battle. He told his mother he wanted her to know he volunteered because he loved his country. 

The President and his mother cried together.

Oh, how we miss President Bush and his qualities of leadership. 

I can’t recall a time when the stories illuminating that “character matters” are as urgent and timely as today.  I don’t need to provide my emphasis to that.  

It is ironic that 25 years ago, I was asked to give a talk to students at Miami University.  I asked, “What topic would you like me to address?”  The answer was:  “Does character count?”  My initial response was, “That’s too obvious a question to address.  The answer is clear.”

The response I received surprised and alarmed me.  “No, it’s an issue on our campus.”  I can only imagine that issue being even greater today given the absence of character in so many of our leaders, including our former President.  I’m including a copy of the talk I gave on that occasion.  It is lengthy and some  of the examples are dated, but the principal points it makes stand as tall and true today as they did then. 

Oh, how we miss President Bush and his qualities of leadership. 

 I pray for our families.  I pray for our nation. I pray that we honor the mandate: "without character, nothing counts". 

 

• Speech_DoesCharacterCount_MiamiU_031599.pdf

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Democracy as a Force for the Common Good

 

In a short 250 or so pages James Miller makes clear in hjs book, Can Democracy Work?  A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to our World  that the efforts that have been made to put in place “pure democracy,” meaning that theoretically every person is involved in a decision, has too often led to perverse outcomes, denying the stated purpose of its pursuit.

 

While democracy is said to have been operative in ancient Athens, the fact remained that a large percentage of the population in so-called democratic Athens were slaves.  Many could not vote.   

The success and failure and the tension that rests within each attempt at democracy has been impacted by many human tendencies and instincts:  the desire for power, for money; the inherent conviction by most people, that some people (meaning “we”) are better than others. 

 

The creation of our own Constitution in 1781 reflected the inherent distrust of the capacity of ordinary citizens to make decisions.  There was the belief that had been reflected in previous political arrangements that decisions need to be made by a “meritorious elite who would govern on behalf of all, with a dispassionate regard for the common good.”

 

Of course, what people view as the “common good” has varied and always will vary.  Therein lies the source of conflict.

 

Communism, brought to reality by the 1917 Revolution in Russia, was premised on the idea that everyone is equal and should have a say in what the government should do.  It didn’t take long for that to devolve into Lenin’s and other leaders’ deciding that they needed to decide what was right for the common people.  Greed and the quest for power took over.  The same thing happened in the French Revolution.  It started as quest for everyone to be involved in decision-making; it quickly descended into chaos and then the creation of an autocratic dictatorship. 

 

We see these same instincts in our own democracy today.  Differences in what people see as the common good.  The drive by officeholders to stay in office. The reversion to autocratic methods.

 

Robespierre centuries ago captured the reality in addressing the Convention debating the French Constitution.  The challenge faced by every great legislator, he declared, is to “give to government the force necessary to have citizens always respect the rights of citizens and to do it in such a manner that government is never able to violate these rights itself.”  Rarely had this challenge been met, Robespierre said, because history was generally a story of “government devouring (individual) sovereignty” and of the rich exploiting the poor. 

 

This deep-seeded conviction that the “common man” is not able to decide individually or in the aggregate what the right thing to do is has been prevalent throughout history, to this very day.  Walter Lippmann wrote almost 100 years ago, “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs.  He does not know how to direct public affairs.  He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen.”  As a result, the common interests, he concludes, “can be managed only by a specialized class,”  by informed commentators (like Lippmann himself, in Lippmann’s haughty opinion) with an in-depth knowledge of the facts pertinent to formulating reasonable public policies.  This attitude, driven by self-interest yet, to some degree, the recognition of reality has been the governing force in the development of political systems everywhere over time. 

 

Joseph Schumpeter, in the 1940s, said it only a bit differently:  “Democracy in modern societies like America, as it has come to actually exist, involves voters selecting the least objectionable of the available candidates chosen by rival political priorities to rule over them.”  Here again, this greatly oversimplified view of reality captures an uncomfortable degree of truth. 

 

Certainly it has been proven that it is unrealistic and undesirable to attempt to rule totally by consensus.  Ultimately, there needs to be a structure of decision-making.  That is true in business and it’s true in political life, but at the same time, I insist, that it is possible for business or government to reflect, if not perfectly, largely the common good. 

 

Our experience with participatory democracy teaches the limits of any regime of consensus, which risks silencing disagreements over alternatives that are important to debate openly, I believe.  I am convinced that modern  institutions can do more to appeal to an engaged people’s capacity for reflection and collective deliberation.  As one American philosopher wrote, “We sometimes expect too little” from our democracies “precisely because” we prematurely give up on an “aspirational theory,” one that realistically faces the question “of whether more can realistically be expected.” 

 

I believe this line of thought permeates the Purpose of  the where I spent my career, Procter & Gamble.  It recognizes the need for balance in the stakeholders whom we serve and in how we carry out the responsibility we have to these stakeholders.  It does this with the humility of recognizing while we won’t ever achieve perfection, we can and must continue to learn how to do better.

 

I return, as Miller does and as I always have, to Vaclav Havel who, as much or more than any other philosopher, guides my thinking.  He posits that the view that democracy “is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion and that morality has no place in it” means the unacceptable loss of “the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility—with no guns, no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing.”

 

When Havel wrote his essay in 1991in “Summer Meditations,” he was overseeing Czechoslovakia’s reformation as its first freely elected president.  “I am convinced,” he remarked, “that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is—regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist—humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual and cultural.”  “The best laws and best conceived democratic mechanisms will not in themselves guarantee the legality or freedom or human rights—anything in short, for which they were intended—if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values.”  He concludes as I do:  “I feel that the dormant good will in people needs to be stirred.  People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently and help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”

I hope and pray this conviction will guide the majority of the American public as it chooses its next president in November, 2024.

  

The Last Bastion to Protect Our Democracy--The Judgement and Common Sense of the American People

  

I have often remarked, somewhat naively in retrospect, that our democracy would be protected by a number of factors, including the balance of power.  I was referring here to the distribution of responsibility between the states and the national government and the distribution of power among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government. 

 

These are meaningful checks and balances, but I have come to realize that they are no guarantee of preserving democracy. 

 

For many years, I looked to the Supreme Court as a reliable final arbiter to preserve our democracy. In recent years, there has been the gnashing of teeth among a large part of the population including me about many of the decisions of the Supreme Court. 

 

Most recently, there is the Supreme Court’s apparent decision to kicking the question of former President Trump’s immunity from prosecution down to lower courts, meaning that any court case deciding that issue will not be decided until after the election Not long before that came the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had been in place since 1973, turning the decision on abortion over to the individual states.  The proposition offered by some Justices at the time that this would result in taking the issue out of the courts was preposterous from the start and has been proven absolutely wrong, as the court cases continue to unfurl. I see no intellectual basis for the court's failing to establish a national standard defining what constitutes a legally permitted abortion.  This is a national issue.

 

A few years before that came the decision on Citizens United v. FEC which now perversely allows unlimited corporate spending for elections

 

And the notion, which I once held i that the Supreme Court would reach decisions rising above contemporary political sentiment, is denied by history.  Supreme Court decisions have always been influenced by the temper of the times, including the impact that temper had on individuals chosen for the Court.

 

The Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that African-Americans were not citizens and carried no rights, which Whites were required to respect, grew out of the pro-slavery sentiment that existed at the time. 

 

The decision, Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, upholding racial segregation under the “separate but equal” mantra was also a product of the time. It led to institutionalized racism for decades until it was struck down by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. 

 

There were decisions early in the 20th century in which the Court said that restricting bakery hours to a 10-hour day violated their right to contract for their own work hours.  In 1918, the Court ruled that federal restrictions on child labor violated states’ rights to regulate production.  Five years after that (1923), the Court ruled that it was illegal to set a minimum wage for women, regardless of whether or not they were earning enough to live on. All an outgrowth of a "laissez-faire" philosophy of the times which influenced the decisions of the justices. Another mind-bending example: in 1927, the Court allowed forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded people,” embracing the now utterly discredited theory of eugenics.   

 

Perhaps the point I’m making is too obvious to even justify elaboration.  However, it is a fact that there is no guarantee that the separation of powers will guarantee a continuation of democracy.  No, and this is my point--that will ultimately depend on the choice the American people make as they elect their president and other key offices including at the state level. In these choices the American people will decide and express how they want to live. 

 

Circumstances will influence this, of course.  The Depression of the 1930s put a lie to the "laissez-faire" , free-for-all policies that had prevailed in the early part of the century.  It provided the conditions which made the election and policies of Roosevelt possible. 

 

We now face the most consequential presidential election in my lifetime. The choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It is now apparent that no court case or Supreme Court decision will bar Trump as the Republican nominee. If you believe as I do that the future of democracy is on the line, you will see that it will be the values, sentiment and common sense of the Amercan people who will decide our future. And so should it be.

  Looking back over history, I take heart from the fact that the American people eventually have “rejected” the hateful rhetoric and call of leaders like George Wallace and Joe McCarthy.  I have felt, incorrectly, that the American people would have long since reached the point of rejecting what Donald Trump stands for:  his lack of character, his meanness, his cruelty.  I have been wrong.  There have been underlying conditions leading large segments of our population to understandably feel that they were not being recognized and given respect they deserve. Similar sentiments have provided the fuel for other autocrats donning the mantle of victimhood, personally and on behalf of the people they say they represent. Trump follows in the footsteps of Hitler, Mussolini and other autocrats.  But eventually, the truth came out; the pretense folded.

 

Will that happen again in 2024 with our national election?  I personally think it will.  I hope and pray so. 

 

There have been many elections which we have asserted represent a  binary existential  choice  But never has there been an election where that binary choice is as striking as the one we will face six months from now.  My hope rests on the American people as the last bastion of our democracy.

 

The Need for a Unifying Vision

 

In an essay in  The Atlantic, titled “After Babel:  How Social Media Dissolved the Mortar of Society and Made American Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt argues that social media are at the root of the corrosive decline over the past decade in trust and a sense of unity.  It has decimated our country and indeed the entire world by the fragmentation of just about everything:  our Parties, debates within Parties, life on college campuses and the concern about speaking up, etc. Haidt has now turned this essay into a full-fledged book which is on the NYT best seller list. 

 

While I believe Haidt overrates the unique importance of social media, it, and the associated fragmentation of media, have certainly played an enormous role. 

 

I turn here to a particular aspect of the issue which pertains to our nation and every organization: the importance of having a unifying Vision.

 

Haidt observes that “social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies:  social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions and shared stories.”  He argues that social media has weakened all three.  He is right.  Other elements have weakened it, too; the decline of religion being one of them in my opinion.

 

I go on to identify two things:  

 

1.          A result of this and a cause of the issue is the lack of a unifying vision of what our nation should be.  We have had that vision expressed in words but we have not seen it lived in our politics.  By that I mean, Joe Biden expressed an inspiring unity of purpose for the nation as he advocated recovering “the soul of America.”  But he did not appoint a non-partisan cabinet nor implement an administrative agenda (excepting the infrastructure bill) truly geared to achieve that.  I’ve argued for years we need such a vision and we need to see it responsibly executed.  We don’t have it now.  We need a leader who can do it.  I’m not sure that Biden can recover to do it now with mid-term elections looming, 2024 not far behind and Republicans out for blood. Cooperation is not high on their mind. But Biden must lead the way if he can.

 

2.          I want to underscore the strength of the role an organization or company like Procter & Gamble can play.  What do I mean by this?  Procter & Gamble has a unifying vision and purpose that just about every employee signs on to.  It is service oriented.  It’s not partisan. It is committed to excellence, It recognizes the need for diversity of views and inclusion to carry it out.  It invites debate. 

 

It also benefits from “extensive social networks with high levels of trust.”  I can’t overemphasize this.  The Year-End Meetings, the physical (not just virtual) development courses,  the structure of the organization into discrete units providing dispersed responsibility and accountability, the adherence to a merit-based system--all of these are vital to the continued nurturing  of the culture and the business success of the institution.  

 

And there is also the important element of “shared stories". We must never forget to tell stories about what has worked and what hasn’t, about values being lived and, in some cases, not.  We transmit our values by actions and by telling stories about those actions.

 

I pose the question:  How can we take what we’re doing reasonably well in P&G, something we must never take for granted, and extend it to larger forms of organization?  More precisely, can we apply the success factors employed at the corporate level, as I believe P&G and some other companies have, to other organizations including the government. 

 

I have seen it being done today in some non-profits, universities, hospitals (Memorial Sloan Kettering for example) and in some smaller governmental entities. However, we are far from achieving this at the Federal level. Our polarized state is preventing it. The task to change that is prodigious. I don't know if it can be done short of contending with a threat like WWII. But I hope we won't fail to pursue this as a goal.  One thing for sure. It will. depend on a uniquely wise and inspiring leader and that will require a good dose of luck.

A Missed Opportunity That Will Go Down in the Annals of History--The Failure to Impeach Donald Trump

 

I wrote the letter below last week to one of the senators (unnamed) who failed to move to find Donald Trump guilty for his multiple actions to overturn the U.S. government, actions which far beyond any previous actions of a president represented a total denial of the rule of law and abrogation of our Constitution. 

 

Dear Senator,

 

I am deeply worried about the future of our country.  I find myself looking back on a posting I made just over three years ago on the Senate impeachment trial.  I do so with no small sense of irony but, more, a great deal of sadness.  We missed the opportunity--the Republican members in the Senate missed the opportunity, to label Trump’s action for what it was, impeaching him and removing the threat that he, or any other president doing what he did, represents to our nation.

 

It appears that our future will hinge on the verdict of the American public in the upcoming election.  It shouldn’t have come to this.  Trump is guilty of impeachable offenses under any common sense, ethical perspective.

 

It is no small irony to recall Senator McConnell explicitly underscoring three years ago the availability of criminal procedures against President Trump as a private citizen.  Yet now, there are conservative judges on SCOTUS who are saying that, unless the charges had been validated by impeachment or criminal indictment, the case can’t be tried.  Talk about kabuki.

 

You miss certain opportunities in life.  This will go down in history as a big one.

 

 I pray for the future of our nation.

 

Warm personal regards,

John

 

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How History Will Look Back—The Senate Impeachment Trial

FEBRUARY 18, 2021

 

The trial ended about as one would have anticipated in that there was less than a two-thirds majority of the Senators who voted to convict.  The vote was 57-43 in favor of conviction, with seven brave Republicans crossing the line to join all of the Democrats.  A few reflections:

 

1.     The Senate—more precisely 43 Senate Republicans—abandoned their responsibility to play the role that only the Senate could, in upholding the Constitution of the United States and making it clear that no one, not even a President, could violate his Oath of Office by seeking to overthrow the established principles of our Constitutional government, in this case, honoring elections and securing a peaceful transition of power.

 

Yes, the Republican leader, Sen. McConnell, explicitly underscored the availability of criminal procedures against President Trump as a private citizen, but no criminal or civil action can, even if successful, take the place of what only the conviction of impeachment would have, in explicitly upholding the Constitution of the United States.  That is what was at stake here.  

 

2.     The fact that this was the strongest bipartisan support of impeachment of any president in the nation’s history stands as a stark fact that will not be forgotten.

 

The names of the seven Republicans who stood up will be forever recognized and I believe celebrated by almost all.

 

3.     The incontrovertible evidence that Trump was singularly responsible for spreading the lies, the mythical conspiracy theories, and the vitriolic rhetoric without which this crowd would not have attacked the Capitol, was denied by almost none.  The linkage of this to the deaths of five people and the injury of over 100 people, many seriously, will not be forgotten.  The conclusion of the final commentary by Republican leader Mitch McConnell, even if it followed his “not guilty” verdict, based on a controversial and flawed view of the Constitutional right of the Senate to convict Trump now that he is out of office, will serve as a ringing affirmation of the case which the House prosecutors so ably presented.

 

The defense which Trump’s legal team tried to mount was feeble and not taken seriously by just about anyone, Republicans included.

 

4.     Grassroots support for Trump will not go away.  Nor will he.  He will continue to fan his base with his victim mentality, both for him and for them.  It is hard to say how many of the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020 would do so again.  We will get polls on this.  My guess is the number might drop by up to 20-25% in the intermediate future as the criminal and civil charges against him play out. 

 

The Republican Party faces a huge challenge, with no clear outcome in sight.  What will the Republican Party stand for?  It can’t be for what Trump stands for.  In fact, he doesn’t really stand for anything outside of himself and his spread of victim mentality and his appeal to the baser instincts of division and hate.  Pursuing that as a party would in the end be a fool’s errand, not only bad for the party, but for the country--for the country really does need a viable two-party system.

 

There are leaders whose character, instinct and temperament could play a leadership role.  Who will emerge is anybody’s guess at this point.  Romney will certainly be a senior statesman of the best sort.  Whether he has the will or the means to rally the party around him is very much in doubt.  Many if not most will see him as too liberal.

 

On one thing I do feel sure now.  History will look back on the Trump presidency as a dangerous aberration that carried with it great risk for the country.

 

While having carried far more danger because he occupied the presidency and because of his broad appeal, I believe he will fit into the same type of bucket as Joe McCarthy, Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long.

 

How he is viewed, however, will depend in no small measure on how the Republican Party evolves from here; whether it can find a new purpose and set of principles which continue to rally many of the people who support President Trump, but brings together others who in the past would have been part of the Republican Party.  Who will lead this? I believe someone who is probably still relatively young who will come to see this as their mission in life.  Let's hope this happens sooner rather than later.

 

 

We Have to Walk Away from Mortal Threat to Our Democracy---Looking Back Eight Years

 I rarely repost a blog. I make an exception here because of  the mortal threat to our Democracy which Donald Trump represents. 

"WE HAVE TO WALK AWAY FROM THIS ROAD SHOW"

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

“We Have to Walk Away From This Road Show”

 

These are among the words with which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson concludes her book, “Mother Country.”  It was published in 1989.  She was writing about a somewhat different challenge then.  She described it as a “decline in national self-esteem.”  But in a way, it wasn’t different.  In a way, we are facing much the same challenge today.  I describe it as a “decline in confidence in our institutions.”  

 

Because of this, we are witnessing a campaign by a candidate for the presidency of the United States by Donald Trump unlike any other we have witnessed in my lifetime.  A campaign that relishes in sweeping, categorical defamation of other people, such as Muslims and immigrants.  A campaign that takes delight in pushing the boundaries of outrageous pronouncements, whether that be in vilifying an entire group of people or accusing a former president of the United States of “lying.”  We are perversely taken by Trump’s authenticity, his fearlessness and his complete and utter rejection of political correctness.

 

Trump is feeding off a space filled with the potent mixture of boredom, frustration, hopelessness and anger and the all-too-present human attraction to witness, and indeed even revel, in the bizarre.  His impact is fueled by a media frenzy producing unending coverage and the inability of even the most seasoned, tough-minded interviewer to overcome his steamrolling, self-guided verbosity.

 

Without articulating any policy much beyond “building a big wall, which we’ll have Mexico pay for” and “making America great again” in ways weakly defined, he emphatically says, “Trust me.  I’m great at making deals.”  

 

He has the insidious talent of demeaning, indeed trashing, “others,” while making those he is addressing feel special, valued, even “loved.”  He gets away with this in no small measure because he is so obviously delivering what he says with gay abandon.  He is really enjoying himself.  

 

All of what I’ve written here has been easy to write.  But what is not easy and has never been easy in times of challenge of the kind we face today is to find and support the leader who can bring us together, who can offer a vision for the future and plans to support it that realistically offer an improved life for all and to find a role for our country in the world which advances as far as possible the peace we need while avoiding nuclear disaster and the threat of terrorism.

 

Returning to Ms. Robinson, she closes her book with words I resonate to:  “My greatest hope is that we will at last find the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in the faith that life is good and to be preserved, and to recognize the greatest forms of evil and name them and confront them.”  

 

Paraphrasing her conclusion, we have to walk away from this road show which Donald Trump’s campaign represents.  We need to “consult with our souls, and find the courage in ourselves, to see and perceive and hear and understand.”