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Lecture notes
Second time thru
[Signature] James B. Stockdale
LECTURE 1
The routine here is straightforward. Professor Joe Joe Brennan is with me today. He's an Emeritus Professor from Columbia. I will talk for about an hour and then we'll go have a cup of coffee and then we'll sit down and he'll give what he calls a postscript. That will last, at his pleasure, maybe a half hour or longer. That's all we'll do on the Wednesdays and then Thursdays we'll (those of you who are not auditing - we do have some auditors here who I'm glad to see) be splitting into two groups and each of you will alternate - once with Joe and once with me. I'll take Group A tomorrow at 1:30 in a little room - I hope not too small a room - but a very classy room here. The one with Admiral Ingersoll's picture on the wall, right at the top of the stairs.
My biggest problem with this course has been to explain to people why I'm giving it. I've tried several ways, but I think it sells itself. Everybody's so conditioned to this immediate payoff that George Wilson of the Washington Post, of course a very unmilitary sort of guy - in fact, sometimes the biggest adversary we've got going in Washington - said in my office on day, "I'd like to be able to say why you're giving it, but I can't understand what it's going to do." He wasn't arguing about it, we were trying to think of something he could
put in the Washington Post that would make sense. I think he'll get it in there eventually.
I could say, first of all, that in my experience, and many o fyou have been with me in some of my experience, I've often had the feeling that I was working for a hierarchy that had no idea what was really happening in my mind and heart. Where things were, I thought, much more important and crucial then were my supervisors were. I remember the old balled, "Down at the hanger they sing and they shout. All about thing they know nothing about. But we're the boys that fly high in the sky. Boozing buddies go boozing." I've had that kind of a high altitude gunnery pattern psychosis from time to time where I had the feeling that I was being led by the blind. In those circumstances I think that what I have to say and what we'll read here will have a lot more meaning to somebody who is usually up there than down in the command center. But it's not only for that reason. I think that it's possible to say with some validity that the establishment has lost its authority. That was certainly the impression I got after having been gone eight years to come back. Some of this I can't make it up each time new; some of you went to church Sunday and will probably be hearing some of the thing that were said before, because I'm going to go very quickly over that Maccoby rationale. The last
part came from a book taht I read written by a man who appeared with me at Taft School last summer - a school in Connecticut - at a one week session in which the subject before the house, and teh house cosisted of all headmasters from all over the country - headmasters of secondary schools - is it proper that a secondary school (and of course in this case a private school) should teach ethics, leadership, or what have you? If so, how do you do it? There were four of us on the program. Two of them were theologians, on was the Dean of the Divinity School at Yale, one was the progessor of religion at Harvard - both of them were more concerned with the secular aspects of religion that what I though we were to talk about. The third guy was a psychoanalyst whose work I didn't appreciate until I got away and though about it a little while. His name is Michael Maccoby. he has also been out of the States for a good period of years. He had been doing some research with Eric Fromm down in Mexico and then came back in 1969. He's interested in what kind of leaders are prominent in societies. What kind of people become leaders. He interviewed, psychoanalyzed if you willmade the ink blot tests and everything else, of course, with their concurrence - of about 250 business executives in 12 or 15 major companies in thr country. After that he wrote a book and it's called The Gamesman. I'll go through this very quickly but I think it makes some sense and it kind of puts you on the map.
He is familiar enough with history to say there are four kinds of leaders around the world. There always have been more or less four kinds, we'll say since 1776. We're just limiting it to the modern industrialized society of America more or less. From time to time different strains of these people have been prominent. I will describe these very quickly. It's not a progression. It's not one of these things where we used to have them. You know, we learned and now we've got it made. That's not the way it comes out. You won't like any of them altogether probably, because they're not altogether loveable.
From teh time, according to Maccoby, of the Revolutionary War until shortly after the Civil WAr, the people that ran America, the people taht were the prominent citizens, the achievers, were known by his term of "craftsmen". The prototype of the craftsman is Benjamin Franklin. We all know craftmen now - Solzhenitsyn is a craftsman. There are many other examples he shows. But a craftsman is a guy who's primarily inner directed. He does not have to compete with somebody to get self-satisfaction. If he competes, he competes with himself. He is the salt of the earth type guy that's interested in his family, he is interested in his self-discipline, he is interested in his self-achievement, he is also a very selfish person. He is kind of cranky and he is suspicious of other people. He likes to control that part of the universe