When I wrote a book called Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans, I hoped to bring a mariner’s eye to the vast world of the sea. While looking at each of the major global bodies of water, I tried to combine three things: the fascinating history of the various maritime regions; the current geopolitical challenges linked to them, both locally and globally; and my own four decades of seagoing experience. All of this was intended to make a coherent case for the importance of the oceans. It was a book about a long, complicated, and ultimately rewarding voyage around the oceans of the world. When people asked me how long it took to write Sea Power, I would truthfully say “about forty years.” It was the culmination of my professional life, much of which was spent at sea.
In Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character, I have turned the lens of the work away from the physical universe of the oceans and into the realm of the biographical, personal, behavioral, and psychological characteristics of ten admirals whose careers stretch across 2,500 years of history. By using the “sea stories” of this colorful group of historical maritime leaders as a kind of canvas, I hope to illuminate for the reader the most essential qualities of character, demonstrate how they contribute to effective leadership, and make the case that by using this information, each of us can chart a course toward becoming the best we can possibly be within our own lives. In the end, a physical voyage at sea is a demanding undertaking, requiring intensity, energy, forehandedness, and intelligence, among many other qualities; but it is vastly easier than the inner voyage we all must sail every day of our lives. That voyage of character is the most important journey each of us ever makes.
I am also motivated by a growing sense in this postmodern era that we are witnessing the slow death of character, driven by a global popular culture that has turned increasingly away from classic values—honesty, commitment, resilience, accountability, moderation—to a world that moves at breakneck speed and refuses to slow down and consider what is right and just. Attention spans have spiraled resolutely downward. Take reading as an example: we were once ready to willingly read a multivolume work; many (including, according to many reports, our president) now balk at reading a single long book. Some readers avoid long journal pieces and demand briefer and briefer articles in slimmer and slimmer magazines. There is online impatience with long blog posts and we seem to have finally arrived at our current state: a Twitter world where many observers recently opined that they regretted the lengthening of a tweet from 140 characters to 280 because “reading the long tweets is taking up too much time.” One abiding characteristic of most of the ten admirals in this book is that they were thoughtful, intellectually grounded individuals. Perhaps the long periods at sea that almost all of them experienced have something to do with that. Naturally, they manifested a wide variety of differing traits, and some were better and more admirable than others. I’ve selected them to help show the richness of the human character across both time and personality types. And above all, we learn from these admirals that the quality of finding sufficient time to think and reflect is a crucial part of building character. In our frenzied world today, we should learn from their collective example.
Alongside the cultural demands for short, ironic, value-neutral “thinking” comes the utter transparency of our times. As I will say again in this work, character is what you do when you think no one is looking—and in today’s world, someone is always looking. We have lost the ability to hone our character in private, and our lives are on display seemingly from the moment we are born. Our intense self-obsession is reflected in the desire to constantly burnish our images on the endless social networks, something none of these admirals remotely encountered, and we are poorer for this characteristic. We overshare publicly and under-reflect privately on what our individual voyages mean. Do they add up to a journey that matters? Is the destination important? In the small hours of the morning, as we think about our lives, can we honestly say our voyage matters? Or do we drift endlessly on an uncaring sea? The answer to these questions is bound up inextricably in the heart of our character.
Finally, we are much diminished in our ability to learn and tell stories in order to advance our intellectual pursuits. In so many ways, the story of our lives is little more than a collection of the stories we have heard, inculcated, and then created and told about ourselves. Most of us want to be part of a society that is dependable, predictable, and stable—but this turbulent twenty-first century, both at home and abroad in an interconnected world—resembles that less and less. The stories we hear seem chaotic, disconnected, and thematically barren: school shootings of children by other children; wars without end in the Middle East; biological “advances” that presage a godlike power uncoupled from a humanistic, ethical perspective; leaders who routinely lie, cheat, and steal; followers who act out in spasms of anger, fulfilling Tocqueville’s dire nineteenth-century prediction that the tragedy of democracy will be that in the end we elect the government we deserve. Self-talk matters deeply, and we must learn to tell ourselves, our peers, and above all our children the stories that inspire a better world.
In that regard, as I set out on this book, I wanted to tell a different set of stories from those that we see repeated again and again on cable news. I believe there is much to learn about character and what exists at the heart of every woman and man from hearing the stories of those who sailed before us. Because I am a sailor myself, I turned to ten illustrious, interesting, and highly varied naval leaders. Each of them led across decades and in different centuries and locales; their stories are different, and their characters were shaped in dramatically varied circumstances. Therefore, the lessons to be drawn—both about their leadership styles but more important about their character—are richly distributed. And not all are entirely heroic. But I offer their stories, which I believe, if taken in the aggregate, provide a more reassuring narrative than that unspooling before us on 24/7 news channels.
Let’s begin with the difference between two terms that are often confused: leadership and character.
Leadership is broadly understood to be the ability to influence others, generally in order to accomplish a specific purpose. It is a tool, not a quality, and thus can be applied for both good and ill. We think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a good leader, and he was—Roosevelt had the ability to influence people to undertake huge, difficult tasks, from overcoming the Great Depression to winning the Second World War. But evil men can be very good leaders as well, using the tools of leadership to accomplish amoral and cruel purposes. Pol Pot, who conducted a horrific genocide in Cambodia as the leader of the Khmer Rouge in the late twentieth century, was a highly capable leader as well, in that he was able to marshal an enormous national effort to drive home a Communist ideology and ruthlessly massacre all dissidents and many innocents—killing perhaps three million people out of a population of eight million. Shocking? Horrific? Criminal? Absolutely. But Pol Pot’s story is also a demonstration of strong leadership, albeit in the service of extreme evil. Leadership is all about the external effect and the ability to influence others.
Character, on the other hand, is about internal effect and the ability to influence oneself. John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach and a fine leader, summed it up well: “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” It was from Coach Wooden that I first heard the idea that the true test of our character is what we do when no one is watching. Character is at its heart the ability to lead the inner self toward what is just and right. It proceeds from overcoming the strong amoral impulses—what Freud described as the id—and sailing toward the metaphorical light of moral choice. Character, unlike leadership, has both moral and ethical weight and can be more correctly described as either good or bad.
Sailors often have a unique opportunity to chart a course toward a good character. The sea is an unforgiving environment which daily poses hard challenges that depend on deep reserves of character to overcome. Sailing is hard and dangerous work, and the sea itself poses a constant threat, to say nothing of additional man-made dangers, from pirates to enemy aircraft to lurking submarines. It is also a contemplative world, where any sailor can walk out on a rolling deck at night and stare at the distant point where the sky meets the sea and recognize that we are merely the smallest part of a huge and diverse universe that stretches forever unto the mind of God, and which will last far beyond the age of human beings. This combination of attributes—the constant physical and moral challenge in daily life and the endless vision of eternity dangling before our eyes—creates a deepening of character in the best of sailors. And my thesis is that by learning about the lives of these ten admirals, each of us—sailor or not—can improve and deepen our own characters.
While clearly two different attributes, leadership and character often merge in a given individual, and certainly in the case of a number of senior maritime leaders like the admirals in this book. While it’s not always the case, a man or woman of strong and positive character is often a highly effective leader. This is because most other people recognize and are attracted to a high level of moral strength. In many seagoing leaders in particular—where the oceans create such a distinctive backdrop—character becomes a vital part of the leadership skills they can deploy. It is therefore highly instructive to examine a handful of admirals, understand their individual “sea stories,” and plumb the depths of their character—all with the idea of helping each of us navigate more effectively across the inner sea we all must sail.
In this volume we will begin our voyage more than 2,500 years ago with the admiral Themistocles, an ancient Greek facing an existential threat to his city-state, Athens; and conclude our long sail across history in the late twentieth century with a woman admiral, Grace Hopper, who helps bring the Navy into the cyber age. We will then look at resilience and briefly meet two living and recently retired admirals, Michelle Howard and Bill McRaven. All are different sailors, but the inner voyage of character that each sailed offers lessons we can study and apply. As with all ten of these admirals, the basic rocks and shoals of their voyages are roughly similar: the need for truth, justice, empathy, creativity, humility, humor, resilience, and balance, contrasted with avoiding arrogance, anger, pettiness, cruelty, desire, betrayal, jealousy, and hatred. We will see that none of these admirals was perfect—indeed, far from it in several cases. But we can sometimes learn as much from failures of character as we can from triumphs, and the nature of any human is not what they do when the choices are easy, and the metaphorical sun is shining, but rather what they do when the options are morally ambiguous, and the seas are rough. The test of character is taking the “hard right” over the “easy wrong,” and some of these admirals fail that simple test on more than one occasion. We can learn from that failure as surely as we can from the much more common moral and ethical decisions most of these admirals make.
On a personal note, the concluding chapter of the book will draw from my own inner voyage over the years of my life, so much of it spent at sea. As an exercise, I went through my old logbooks recently and totaled up all the days I spent on the deep ocean, out of sight of land. The total is more than nine and a half years, day-for-day. Plenty of time spent out there in busy pursuits from gunnery to missile shoots, to simply standing the long watches steaming across the trackless oceans. But there was also a lot of time to read, reflect, and record internally my thoughts on what makes a life of character worth living. Leadership was an omnipresent demand for a young officer growing up in an ancient profession, rising from a very green ensign to, quite improbably, becoming a four-star admiral. Every day was an exercise in leading others. But the challenges I wrestled with most frequently were inside, as I sought to set my own compass to true north, seeking to live up to the standards I set for myself. I failed not infrequently. But voyage of character is long indeed, and in my case, still underway—although not often at sea these days, something I miss more than I like to admit.
Like the other admirals profiled in this work, I have on occasion succeeded and, on many occasions, failed. In the end, the measure of our lives is weighed on the scales of the choices we have made, and the ability to see oneself clearly is crucial on the voyage to character. In a sense, we each have three lives: a public one, defined clearly by the open statements we make from conversations at work to our posts on social media; a private one, the face that we share only with our very closest family and a few chosen friends; and a deeply personal one, known only to ourselves, where we struggle—often desperately—to make the right choices.
One should never forget that the scale by which you will measure your life is one you make yourself, forging it a bit at a time throughout the years of your life. Here in that truly personal zone, measured on the scale we construct ourselves, are the sea buoys of the channel that we should follow if our voyage is to end at the port of inner satisfaction. And as with any voyage at sea, there are dangers ahead—both obstacles imposed by the world and those we create ourselves. And we cannot simply avoid the hard choices by not embarking on the voyage. Oliver Wendell Holmes correctly said that “to reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.” My hope is that this slim book, with its small flotilla of sea stories, can provide some navigational advice, a few well-marked buoys, and even a sturdy lighthouse or two for all who are sailing on the sea of character. Let’s get underway.