I want to conclude with a few thoughts on my own sea story, which may provide a glimpse of one sailor’s experiences, both good and bad, in wrestling with the challenges of character. In the course of nearly four decades of life at sea, I learned that a handful of character traits were at the heart of both good character and effective leadership. I think they are echoed in the successes and failures of the ten admirals in this volume, and I offer them below, each with a brief vignette of my own.
At the top of my list is creativity. Again and again in the stories of the ten admirals, we see the importance of a willingness to embrace the new, despite the difficulties and challenges of doing so. Especially in the cases of Admirals Fisher, Zumwalt, Mahan, and Hopper, we saw the challenge and the ultimate success of pursuing innovation—but not without costs. In my own case, I faced trying experiences several times as I endeavored to do so, especially during my days as the leader of US Southern Command in Miami, with responsibility for military operations south of the United States; and running Deep Blue, the innovative think tank put in place by the chief of naval operations in the terrible days immediately after 9/11, when the Navy needed to make the shift to a significant role in the Global War on Terror. One worked out well, the other not so much.
Let’s start with Deep Blue. Before 9/11, the Navy was focused primarily on traditional global naval missions—sea control (ensuring we had maritime superiority on the deep ocean), power projection ashore (the ability to launch missile and aircraft strikes at targets on land), strategic deterrence (our ballistic missile submarines), and global sealift (moving supplies, US Marines, and other military cargo). We had no idea how to apply maritime power to the post-9/11 world. Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark grasped this immediately and created a small cell called Deep Blue (a play both on the ocean and on the IBM chess-playing computer) that could think coherently about the new role the Navy needed to undertake. I was chosen to head Deep Blue because throughout my career, my reputation as an innovator, a challenger of orthodoxy, and a publisher of controversial articles was well known. I often consider that if 9/11 had not demanded that kind of thinking, I might have retired as a one-star officer. I was lucky that my overriding character trait—a hunger to innovate—met a situation that demanded it.
Clark allowed me to handpick a dozen of the smartest thinkers, writers, and briefers in the Navy. I grabbed the top people from each of the warfare communities and committed to briefing the chief of naval operations with at least two or three innovative ideas weekly. We worked unbelievable hours, tapped into the entire Navy’s intellectual backbone via the War College, Naval Academy, and various training commands, and created a suite of new ideas. Some were terrific and are in place today; others fizzled. Such is the nature of innovation. What I discovered is that when there is a shared sense of mission, a modest application of high-quality resources (especially people), strong leadership at the top (we reported directly to the CNO), and a determination to take risk, mountains can move. The methods of implementing innovation that I experienced and learned at Deep Blue are the fundamental tools that I used for the final ten years of my career, and that I use today as well.
But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command—a massive, cumbersome organization organized strictly to conduct combat operations—was lacking in relevance in the twenty-first century. Both believed that for both Latin America and Africa, it was highly unlikely that we would be engaged in state-on-state combat operations. So the idea was to push the two combatant commands responsible for those regions to try to adapt with a vision that included combat readiness but with a very heavy dose of “soft power” capability—humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, rule of law, personnel exchanges, counternarcotics, strategic communications, interagency cooperation, and so forth.
Given this mandate, I plunged in with enthusiasm—perhaps too much enthusiasm. I underestimated the strong desire of many within the massive command to continue on its current, traditional war-fighting trajectory. When I completely reorganized the staff, getting rid of the Napoleonic traditional military staff system, it created real confusion and resentment. While most of the team went along, cooperation was grudging and halfhearted in many cases. While I continue to believe we had outlined the right mission for the command, I pushed too hard, creating antibodies, and the project crumbled after my departure—effectively negating three years of demanding work. The lesson I took away is that innovation matters deeply, but even if you have the right answer, you must be capable of bringing along the nonbelievers.
So this is a tale of two expressions of the innovation character trait, with the same innovator driving them—one to success and the other a failure. I continue to believe that character drives innovation and, given the right circumstances, it can lead to the most positive and powerful outcomes.
A second vital character quality is resilience. It is insufficient to be capable and good when things are going well, because sooner or later they will go badly. We see this in the cases of every one of the admirals, perhaps most vividly (and painfully) for the young Zheng He, undergoing castration as a young boy; or in the case of Nelson, who faced the most difficult of wounds in losing his right arm and an eye. While, thankfully, I’ve not faced those kinds of physical or medical challenges, I have known my share of career defeats, including at the most senior level. As I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, I went through a very difficult inspector general investigation from 2011 to 2012 while Supreme Allied Commander at NATO—it fundamentally reshaped my career and life. But I learned from the experience, set new goals, achieved many of them, and sailed on. Generals Allen, McChrystal, and Petraeus—superbly talented leaders all—similarly suffered career reversals but have all rebounded and are leading spectacular second acts. Admiral Michelle Howard faced racial and gender barriers and fought through them, and Admiral Bill McRaven overcame life-threatening leukemia to succeed in command of the nation’s special forces. Resilience is a key element in human character, and near the top of the list for success.
Third, we need to find our way to humility in the search for good character. Arrogance is a toxic quality in a leader, especially in today’s era of total transparency. But even 2,500 years ago, we see the perceived arrogance of Themistocles lead to his humiliation and exile. So often the evil doppelgänger of success is arrogance, and we need to strive against it on the voyage of character. In my own life, I have fallen short many times in this regard.
Perhaps the most vivid example of this occurred in the mid-1990s when I was lucky enough to command a brand-new Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, USS Barry. I loved that ship, and it had a superstar crew. We won competition after competition on the waterfront in Norfolk, and many of us—especially this young captain—started to believe our own press. Big mistake. We were sent to sea one nice day to conduct a huge and important engineering inspection. All started well enough, and we headed out to sea very confident—arrogant—believing we’d be back in port with another smashing success. Instead, we had a terrible engineering casualty that was so bad we had to stop and lock our propeller shaft and be towed back into port. We were towed right down the waterfront past all the other ships. There is nothing more embarrassing for the commanding officer of a warship than to be towed home. We didn’t look so hot anymore.
Eventually—with a lot of assistance from other ships, by the way—we fixed our problems and eventually passed the inspection with the lowest passing grade, a “satisfactory,” far short of the “excellent” or “outstanding” ratings we were expecting and had routinely delivered previously. My executive officer (second in command), who would go on to be a three-star admiral, called it “the best SATISFACTORY ever.” I tried to smile when he said that. What I learned was the importance of humility, of knowing that things will go wrong and that resilience matters. It is a lot easier to be resilient when you are humble to begin with.
A fourth quality is the need to find balance in our lives. The ancient Greeks knew this, and carved two aphorisms on the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself” and “All Things in Moderation.” In modern parlance, this can be translated as the need for balance between our natural ambitions and our drive to succeed as opposed to our love of family and time in contemplation. Most of the admirals in this book fail this test, driving themselves relentlessly forward throughout the long sail of their lives. This is certainly an area in which I have failed again and again.
Of all the times I remember the dichotomy between doing what I desperately wanted to in all my ambition and zeal to excel and feeling the need to care for a beautiful family, the most dramatic was in 1998. On August 7 of that year, Al Qaeda blew up US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 people including 12 Americans, and injuring 4,000 others. For most of us it was the first time we had heard of Osama bin Laden. In retaliation, President Clinton approved a series of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. As the commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21, I was forward deployed under the overall command of the head of the US Central Command, General Tony Zinni (who is one of my idols for his balance and character, by the way).
My mission, executed on August 20, included launching missiles from four destroyers and one submarine under my command. I spent much of the day in the Tomahawk launch center, a long, long day of planning, spinning up the missiles, directing the launches, and evaluating the results. It was exhilarating and exhausting. When the day ended, I went to my small cabin in the carrier Lincoln and lay down on my bed. Something was nagging at me. Then it hit me: it was my daughter Christina’s twelfth birthday. I had spent it firing missiles. I looked at her picture, and my wife Laura’s, and thought to myself, What the hell am I doing with my life? I vowed to be a better husband and father—and came back to the Pentagon, made rear admiral, and promptly fell again into the trap of failing to balance my life.
On that fateful date in August, we just missed killing bin Laden. He had departed just before our missiles landed in the training camp in Afghanistan we attacked. The missiles I ordered launched nearly killed him—and in an odd twist of fate, several years later, on September 11, 2001, he almost killed me. I was in the Pentagon on the side of the building hit by American Airlines Flight 77, perhaps 150 feet off the point of impact. I wonder what bin Laden was doing that day. I suspect neither of us were very good at finding balance in our lives, but I’m still here and trying. And let’s be honest—it is ambition that so often drives this lack of balance. Struggling with it is an act of character for us all.
Fifth, a crucial element in the development of character is honesty—being truthful, no matter the cost. You learn that early at Annapolis, where the honor code of “a midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal” is driven into the young eighteen-year-olds who show up on the Severn River campus every summer. We see failures in this regard repeatedly in our society at large, especially in the political realm, where lying seems to be an art form at times.
As I mentioned earlier, on the wall in my office hangs an oil painting of USS Maine, the US Navy warship that exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana in mid-February 1898. Without knowing exactly what caused the explosion, the Navy seized on the idea that it was the result of “terrorists” under the command of Spain, which at the time was the colonial ruler of Cuba. Whipped to a frenzy by the yellow press—the fake news of the day—of William Randolph Hearst and others, we launched into a “splendid little war,” as a young Theodore Roosevelt called the Spanish-American War. He would earn the Medal of Honor at San Juan Hill, many people on both sides would die, and the United States entered the modern era and became a colonial power for the first time.
One lesson of the Maine for me is that of resilience, as we discussed earlier. As a person of character, you simply must accept that your metaphorical ship could blow up at any moment, and be ready with a Plan B. Disbelief, whining, and weakness are unacceptable. Men and women of character display resilience in adversity. But there is another meaning to the painting for me, and it goes to the quality of honesty and respect for the truth.
How does truth enter into it? When the Navy salvaged the ship decades later, we discovered that the explosion almost certainly was internal in character. There had been no mine attached to the hull by Spanish “terrorists.” Yet we launched heedlessly into a war and changed world history when the United States took over both Cuba and the Philippines. Even at the time, there was no real sense of certainty about what had caused the explosion, so both the government and the media filled in the blank space. It was a war built on a lie, and the result was bitter indeed. Truth matters for us all, but especially for leaders whose decisions shape the world. Character that is built around a respect, really a veneration, for the truth is the sort of character to have.
And of course, we all fall short in this regard, in things both large and small. But truth becomes a habit, and it is a good one to cultivate.
Sixth, empathy is a fundamental and powerful attribute of character. Most of us are terribly self-centered. The world wires us that way, and nothing that ever happens to us occurs without our presence at the center of the little drama of our lives. The best depiction of that trait of self-centeredness I know is in the brilliant and memorable graduation speech at Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water.” He exhorts the young graduates to fight against the tendency to see everything in a deeply personal and self-important way, and to begin to develop a lifelong habit of trying to put themselves in the shoes of the other.
At heart, this is a matter of character. A virtuous person begins every encounter with the world not from their own perspective alone, but rather by trying to understand the situation, mindset, and challenges that others are facing. There are both moral and pragmatic reasons for doing so. I learned this best toward the very end of my career when I became the Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO alliance. It was a job that demanded a deep well of appreciation for each of the other twenty-seven nations. I thought one of my predecessors, General Wes Clark, summed this up nicely when he was criticized by the then secretary of defense for not paying sufficient attention to the needs of the United States—his own nation. General Clark said, “Mr. Secretary, I am intently listening to you with one twentieth of my mind” (there being at that point twenty nations in the alliance). What he meant was that as the overall commander of NATO, he had to represent the interests of every one of the nations in the alliance.
Commanding NATO and realizing that to do so effectively I had to empathize with not only Americans but Bulgarians, Romanians, Germans, Brits, and every other nation, I had to wake up every morning and think, How does this come across in Paris/Madrid/London/Berlin/Rome and every other capital in the alliance? NATO service is a proving ground for empathy, something many very successful people are not always capable of expressing. Building up wellsprings of empathy is the work of a lifetime. For me, NATO was a crystallizing experience in that regard, but you don’t need to be in such rarefied air. Reading the speech “This Is Water” also helped me understand the need for empathy in the most mundane moments of our life, from standing in line at the supermarket to raising our children.
Seventh, believing that a sense of justice matters is a powerful part of character. John F. Kennedy famously said that life is unfair. All the character in the world will not undo much of the massive injustice and inequality in the world. But as the Russians have it in a proverb, it is better to light a single candle than to howl like a dog at the darkness. I focused on this even more deeply after I left the military. In military service, it is instinctive to want to create just outcomes. We send our troops to war to protect our nation, deter our enemies, protect the weak, and stop abuses. In the long twilight of the Cold War, I never doubted (nor do I today) that our values are the right ones—democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, gender equality, racial equality. We execute them imperfectly, but they are the right values. And the many times I was involved in combat operations—in the Balkans, the Middle East in Iraq and Kuwait, Afghanistan, Libya, counterpiracy—it was to protect either people or values.
But after I got out of the military and became a civilian for essentially the first time in my adult life, I began to think more coherently and frequently about justice and see the shortfalls all around me. Over the past five years, after leaving the Navy, I have questioned the fabric of our American society in this regard, as do many. I try to empathize with different groups in our nation in a way I never did through the buffer zone of military service. Today I think about poverty in a completely different way and wonder how families in the rust belt survive without jobs or, in many cases, hope. I see the injustice in that and try to help energize discussions that can address it. Likewise, I try to think about what it must be like to be a young black man in poverty, with a very limited set of choices, under constant suspicion by law enforcement. How do we address that? I wonder why some communities are blessed with good schools, clean water, professional police protection—and others are not.
This is not to say we are fatally or even deeply flawed. I’m with Winston Churchill, who famously said that “Democracy is the worst form of government . . . except for all the others.” We have tools and ideas for using them that can help us move forward. But it all begins with a desire to seek more just outcomes. Indeed, I have no pat answers for these situations, but I will observe, in the context of character, that the more of us who will at least admit to the injustice in these and other challenges and try to think about practical and meaningful solutions, the better the chances of moving the needle toward a just society. Character can help create that critical mass.
And let’s face it, part of operating with a sense of justice is exercising self-control. This was a virtue highly prized by the ancient Greeks, and in particular, is part of the approach to life extolled by the ancient Greek stoics. In today’s turbulent, fast-paced world, leaders far too often fail to exercise a sense of justice, and their self-control fails them. When that occurs, they are failing not only to control themselves, but to exercise a judicious sense of character.
An eighth quality that blends across the admittedly fine line between leadership and character is decisiveness. While good leaders are generally decisive, I have worked for some fine people who took a long, long time to make final decisions. One of them was a lawyer, and simply could not stop balancing the arguments on both sides of the equation. I was in a support role to him when I was a captain, and he could be exasperating in a kind of lovable way as he pondered, brought in more focus groups to share opinions, encouraged everyone in the room to speak up, and simply refused to decide. This collided with the military’s approach, which is to make decisions quickly, move out, and then adjust as necessary. When I became more senior, I worked for President Obama (not directly but through the secretary of defense), and again saw the lawyerly approach. While I commend the idea that we can always get more information before making a decision, I think there are often times when a decisive approach allows a decision maker to seize the initiative.
One story that haunts me to this day was my own inability to act decisively while captain of USS Barry sailing through the Suez Canal. We started on the northern approach, and the Canal Authority sent us a pilot as was required. He did not inspire a great deal of confidence and seemed more interested in demanding cartons of cigarettes from our sea store than in safely ensuring the passage of the ship through the shallow and poorly marked waters of the canal. Frustrated with the lack of cigarettes (we had offered him a ship’s ball cap, which did not impress him much), he staged a kind of mini-strike and pouted on a folding chair on one side of the bridge.
Halfway through the Suez Canal is the Great Bitter Lake. In this part of the canal, ships traveling southbound are required to pull over and anchor while the northbound convoy passes through. By the time we reached the Great Bitter Lake, I had been awake for about twenty-four hours and was dizzy and slightly dehydrated, the result of guzzling coffee to stay awake. As we turned out of the channel in the canal and motored slowly across the Great Bitter Lake, the pilot suddenly came alive and shouted for us to steer a certain course. Despite my misgivings about him, I felt he was after all the certified pilot for the canal and a former Egyptian naval officer, so I told the conning officer to come around to the recommended course.
Suddenly, from behind me at the navigation table, the young lieutenant shouted, “Captain, the ship is standing into danger on that course.” I was stunned, and torn—indecisively—between my own officer, who did not have much experience frankly, and the vastly senior Egyptian pilot. I vacillated, and the ship sailed on at five to seven knots. The navigator shouted again, “Sir, we are headed toward a shoal, we must stop and reverse course.” The pilot said, “Your assigned anchorage is just ahead of us, Captain.” Other ships were coming behind us headed to their designated moorings, and the risk of a collision was increasing. But I was too addled and exhausted to act decisively. Fortunately for me, my twenty-six-year-old navigator, just a couple of years out of Annapolis, was very decisive. He simply said, “This is the navigator, I have the conn, all back two thirds.” The Egyptian pilot exploded, I suddenly woke from my reverie and had the ship’s boatswain escort the pilot to the bridge wing and keep him there, and I directed the anchoring procedure.
After we dropped the hook (and were almost hit by an approaching tanker), we lowered a boat into the way and sent it over to the designated anchorage with lead lines to cast into the water and definitively establish the depth. My navigator was right—it was a foot too shallow for us, and we would have gone softly aground in the silt and mud of the Great Bitter Lake. My career would have terminated at that moment, despite the excuse that I was simply following the advice of the pilot. That navigator went on to a brilliant career that continues today, and my money is on him to wear an admiral’s stars before too much longer. He was the decisive actor needed at that moment, and I learned several valuable lessons, not only about him, but about character and how exhaustion can degrade your most important qualities.
A ninth quality of character that emerges from these sea stories is determination. Each of these admirals demonstrated deep levels of determination in the face of true adversity. Think of the overwhelming odds against Themistocles at Salamis; the massive Spanish Armada facing Drake; the entrenched bureaucracy that Fisher had to overcome; the lack of vision facing Rickover—on and on, we see the value of determination. The ever quotable (and often misquoted) Winston Churchill said it quite simply in October 1941, as his nation reeled from German advances in the early days of World War II: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
Sound advice—and we need to understand that determination is a quality of character that needs to be handled carefully. For me, a time of testing was during my leadership of NATO in the Afghan war. By 2009, when I became Supreme Allied Commander, we had more than 150,000 troops in the country and a war-fighting budget of billions. We were throwing lives and money at a problem that seemed intractable. My job was to evaluate our efforts to date and make recommendations to the president. After conferring with General Stan McChrystal, who was the four-star general on the ground as the tactical commander, we ended up proposing a significant troop surge. We were deeply determined to win. That is what combat leaders are supposed to deliver.
Yet in retrospect, I wonder if our determination led us down a wrong path. Perhaps a better strategy would have been a lighter footprint, more special forces, a more aggressive political rapprochement with the Taliban, perhaps spheres of influence within the country. There are fierce counterarguments to all these ideas, and in the end we went with the surge. That resulted in progress on the battlefield, and improvement in the situation that ultimately led to withdrawing 90 percent of the US and NATO/allied troops. We turned the fight over to the Afghans in 2014, and they are maintaining a tenuous hold on much of the urban terrain in Afghanistan today. But these days I often wonder if this was in fact a situation in which Churchill’s exception of “good sense” applied, and that perhaps our sense of determination influenced the calculus of our advice. We’ll never know, and I remain cautiously optimistic that a peace accord can be delivered in Afghanistan—if so, the surge and the turnover to the Afghans may turn out to have been the right strategy. I offer this as an anecdote to illustrate something Churchill knew—determination is a strength, but not when it overturns good sense.
Tenth and finally, in our voyage of character, we need to understand that in the end we are but sailing in a tiny ship on a boundless sea. This is the quality of perspective, which leads to a sense of humor and the gift of not taking ourselves too seriously. When we look at the oceans, and the great deep waves, we must understand that eternity is rolling out there in front of us, and our time is brief. I used to keep a sign on my desk in USS Barry, my first and much-beloved command at sea, that said, “NOTHING IMPORTANT EVER HAPPENS HERE.”
It was, of course, written with my tongue firmly in my cheek—certainly the national security missions of the ship were necessary, our Tomahawk missiles could wreak death across 1,500 miles, the lives of my sailors all mattered deeply to me—but in the long run, I would remind myself, the voyage of the USS Barry was nothing but a cosmic flicker on a trackless sea. By maintaining that perspective, it became far easier to take the good and bad in stride, to keep my temper in check, to reduce my ambitions, and to laugh when things went wrong, so often well beyond our control. As mentioned earlier, the tombstone of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis says simply: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” In the end, we will all be freed in the most ultimate sense. Remembering that allows us the perspective we need to sail each day through challenging waters. That is the gift of character.
Every afternoon on the ship, after I walked the decks and greeted my crew at the conclusion of the workday, I would go up to the bridge wing and spend some quiet time just contemplating the ocean and the sky. They meet at a distant point and whenever I see that horizon at sea, I tell myself that I am looking at something simple and powerful: eternity. Character is knowing that we are decidedly not eternal, and that we should live our lives in the best way we can.
A final thought that can help illuminate character as you understand it: who are your heroes? Ideally they are people you deeply admire for reasons that stem not from their accomplishments—what David Brooks in The Road to Character has called “résumé virtues”—but rather from their character values—which he calls “eulogy virtues,” as in the things people will (hopefully) say about you at your funeral. Our résumé virtues are the schools we attend, the grades we get, the prizes we win, the salaries we earn, the houses we buy, the books we write; our eulogy virtues are the qualities we embody—and in the case of the principal ones discussed in this book, they include honesty, justice, humor, creativity, balance, empathy, humility, and resilience.
A good exercise as you sail on the longest voyage you will ever take is to actually write down the names of your heroes on a piece of paper. Select them from wherever you want in your experience—family, friends, people chosen from history, current leaders. Then alongside each name, attribute a characteristic that you find compelling about them.
All that is not terribly hard—it merely requires you to stop and think consciously about the people you deeply admire. For me, the list would include my parents (for the unbounded love I was offered as a child); General George Marshall (for his steadiness under pressure as a secretary of state, secretary of defense, and wartime chief of staff of the US Army); Simón Bolívar (for the audacity of his vision to liberate all the Spanish colonies of South America); Condoleezza Rice (for her discipline); and Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia (for his political courage in pursuing a peace agreement despite countless doubters). Your list will be different, but the idea is the same—pick a handful of people you truly admire.
Now comes the hard part—in the column next to the qualities you esteem, indicate how you are doing. I ask myself constantly: Am I as good a parent to my daughters as my mom and dad were to me? Do I have the steadiness of a George Marshall? Is my vision as bold as that of Bolívar? Am I as disciplined in my pursuits as Condi Rice? And am I as courageous as a Juan Manuel Santos? I do better in some categories than others, of course, but the point of the exercise is above all to know yourself. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates at his trial (on charges of corrupting youth, by the way). This constant process of self-examination is at the heart of improving our character, which is indeed the work of a lifetime for us all.
None of us is perfect, but some are farther along in the voyage of knowing themselves fearlessly and honestly and working hard to improve. That is the voyage upon which I hope you are well and truly embarked, and I wish you Godspeed and open water in all the days of your life.