The weight of true leadership

In thinking about the 70th anniversary of the launching of Operation Overlord, I was reminded of one particular element, which didn’t make it into most of the coverage over the past few days, but is, I think, a mark of how different things—and men—were then than they are now.

The Normandy landings had been planned with extraordinary thoroughness. I have always stood in shock and awe at the idea that men and women from several nations (not to mention many different military and government branches) put together the strategy, the intelligence, the logistics, the training, the communication plans to get more than 150,000 soldiers and all the necessary matériel from the south of England to the Normandy coast (and beyond).

And they did it without computers. Without whiteboards, if you please!

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall responsibility, of course. Not to mention the heavy burden of keeping rampaging egos like Montgomery and Patton somehow working as members of a team. These days we’d refer to it as herding cats, only those two were very big jungle cats with sharp claws and vicious teeth.

But here’s the detail I’m interested in at the moment. Despite all the meticulous planning of this particular operation, it is a primary maxim of military leadership that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this instance, the weather—critical to safe landing and ongoing support of several armies that were far from operational ports—was a particular crapshoot. The only guaranteed result from pulling the trigger on Overlord was that men were going to get killed. Success was just one possible outcome.

So, in addition to the official “D-Day is underway” proclamation, Eisenhower prepared an alternative announcement, the one in which he admitted that the landings had failed, he’d pulled back the troops and they would have to rethink the whole thing.

And he said, “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He wrote this out in pencil—alone, no SHAEF PR flunkies polishing it, no discussion with anyone in his chain of command—and he put it in his pocket until such time as it might be necessary to have it typed up and transmitted.

These days no one embarking on any crack-brained self-aggrandizing political or corporate or military scheme on someone else's dime even considers the remote possibility that it could go belly-up. So (and probably because of that lack of forethought) when it (perhaps predictably) does go to hell in smithereens, after much behind-the-scenes scuffling and consulting of PR departments, crisis management companies, social media mavens, lawyers and other miscellaneous spin-doctors, a statement is issued in which someone grudgingly admits that “mistakes were made”, but the makers of those alleged mistakes are never named. And they are certainly never the persons reading the statement to the news outlets, Congressional committees or Oprah.

I am not a fan of the uncritical gushing about “The Greatest Generation” that has occurred since Tom Brokaw wrote his paean. The men and women blooded by the Great Depression indeed made the enormous sacrifices they were called upon to make during the years 1939-1945. And I am deeply grateful that they did. But I don’t see how it was somehow a greater sacrifice than what was asked for in the years 1914-1918.

(And if you want to talk military service, do not even try to tell me that the men and women who went to Vietnam were somehow lesser beings than the ones who went to Iwo Jima or Anzio or the Hürtgen Forrest. They suffered from bad military and political leadership and lack of strategy, not from any moral deficit.)

However—when I compare this scratched-out pencil draft of Eisenhower’s intent to accept full responsibility for the failure of Overlord with any no-fault statements made by politicians, generals or corporate executives caught in everything from flagrante delicto to global embezzlement and multiple manslaughter, it is clear to me that something indeed changed in the intervening 70 years.

And not for the better.

D plus 70

I’ve been following some of the coverage of the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, primarily, I guess, because all the surviving participants are creeping into their 90s, and this is probably the last “big” anniversary that will see them tottering or wheeling into those Normandy fields.

And I really don’t want their memory to fade away.

The 50^th anniversary, of course, was huge—concerts, commemorations, gatherings in the embarkation ports of England, and all along the landing beaches of Calvados. I watched and read it all from Washington, D.C. (Remember—this was before the Internet.)

I was in London for the next big one, in 1999, and from all the local reports, you’d have never known that anyone except British and some Commonwealth troops had landed in France in 1944. By 2004 I was back in D.C., where all US coverage of the events marking the 60^th anniversary stopped flat so news readers and blow-dried reporters could fill the airwaves with yacking about Ronald Reagan’s death. Once the announcement was made, there was no longer any news value to it, and the funeral wasn’t going to be for days, but to the last outlet, they dumped Normandy and produced nothing but 24x7 Reagan blather.

But the thing that has remained constant over the years is the genuine affection and appreciation held for the dwindling numbers of D-Day veterans by the people of Normandy. And keep in mind that these would be the people whose villages were bombed, whose farms were torn up and whose occupation force switched from German to Allied with not always much diminution of looting and destruction.

All that is put aside, though, and what remains is the joy at seeing them again, and the joy extends to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Calvados.

I particularly like the story by NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley on the celebration at La Cambe, a village near Omaha Beach—bloody Omaha, the costliest of the landing sites. It’s great that the contemporaries of those old soldiers welcome them as they debark their motor coaches instead of the Higgins boats of 70 years ago. But what I love is that one of the veterans is staying with a family he met back in 1944, and that the third and fourth generations view him as a relative.

(There are three major military cemeteries near the landing beaches: the British in Bayeux, the American at Colleville-sur-Mer and the German near La Cambe. I’ve walked them all. What is common to all of them is how young those men were when their lives were slammed shut; hardly a one of them was older than 22.)

We see the photographs of “les anciens”—American, British, Commonwealth or French—now, and they’re all so frail, with halting steps and hunching shoulders. It’s hard to imagine them in combat. But I expect that these men and women look at one another and see the 19- and 20-year-old versions of themselves; young, vital, adrenalin-charged, turning new pages in their lives and hoping that they’d live to write more chapters.

I recall vividly 20 years ago the group of 40 former paratroopers who basically got the band back together to make one more jump into Normandy—aging from 67 to 83, with some not having jumped for 50 years. There was an enormous flapdoodle from military authorities about the risk to their lives, etc. The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle wrote about both their training and their actual jump. (Sadly, only the former is available online; and I cannot believe that every single one of WaPo’s current D-Day stories is from the Associated Press.)

But in the end—not even the Pentagon was going to win against these guys, and they jumped out of C-47s over Ste.Mere-Eglise. As had happened 50 years before, the paratroopers were scattered by winds far from the drop zone. But this time it was daylight, and there were cafés open. The oldest, René Dussaq, 83, was only found two hours later, having a drink in a bar and regaling the patrons with his combat memories.

Dussaq died two years later of cancer. And all of the others are probably gone now, too.

But they are not forgotten. At least, not by the French

It saddens me that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these D-Day boys (for they were so young then) are largely ignorant of what they took on, of what they accomplished and of what price they paid. Perhaps if we had an app for that…

Civic confusion

Tuesday was the day Primary elections were held in the great state of California, and there's nothing like it anywhere else.

I have to say that the method of marking ballots here is passing strange. First of all: paper ballots, no voting machines. In a state that considers itself the vortex of technological innovation. 

And the ballots? No filling in a circle, or—God forbid—punching out a hole with a slender metal prong. (“You’ll poke yer eye out, kid!”. Plus, the two most terrifying words in all of electoral history: hanging chads.) No—we have to connect the front end and the back end of an arrow-like thingie.

But not just any old way—a very specific, singular way, as you can see from this instruction sheet.

Now, I find this quite interesting. For one thing, all the sample candidates are all dead white males. I’m assuming that George Washington, Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson need no introduction. John B. Weller was the fifth governor of California; can’t imagine how that qualifies to sit in the same company as Washington, Jackson or Franklin. William M. Gwin was one of our first Congressmen; but I imagine his gold-mine wealth propelled both that career and his placement on this sheet.

I always think of John C. Frémont as one of the dreadful political generals of the Union army who held high commands with disastrous results during the early years of the War Between the States. (Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” ran Frémont ragged in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, which in turn frightened the daylights out of the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C.) But he was one of our first U.S. Senators, and a founder of the Republican Party, so what’re ya gonna do?

Anyhow, evidently in our entire 164 years of statehood, there has been no woman and no person of color in the Golden State who has done anything as remarkable as Frémont, Gwin or Weller that would spark the Office of the Secretary of State (which manages election stuff) to use his/her name as an example here.

But the little instruction sheet is overly optimistic, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that people who can’t figure out the right-turn-on-red thing will not be able to pick the correct marking method from among all the options that this thing gives you on marking your ballot. 

Now that I think of it, this may be the reason California does not use voting machines, either.

Hand to heart

This story—this little, news-filler story—really heartens me. Newly-appointed Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein Suzi LeVine took her oath of office with her hand not on a book, but on an electronic reading device.

But for me, that’s not the great part.

The open document on which LeVine rested her hand was not a Bible, but the U.S. Constitution, open to the Nineteenth Amendment. That’s the one that granted women the right to vote.

You know, when you take Federal office or join the military or become a naturalized citizen, your oath is some variant of the notion that you’ll “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States”. Your loyalty and obligation are not to any human or humans, not an administration, a Congress, a political party, a religious sect or any of that nonsense.

The Founding Fathers agreed, in writing that Constitution, that we would be a nation of laws, regardless of which party might be in power. And the deal is—if you want to live here, that’s your price of admission. And if you don’t happen to like a particular law, you don’t toss your toys out of the pram or stamp your feet. You work—through the elective system—to get it changed.

(Yes, we are in the process of debasing that system with our system of lobbyists and campaign financing. But so far, although politicians have been bought, the Constitution hasn’t.)

And, in fact, Article VI, Section 3 flat out states, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Swirl that around your cup, Tea Party. 

Other office-takers have apparently also taken their oaths on copies of the Constitution, although this is the first time an electronic version was used. LeVine used some no-name e-reader, thus taking no position on the Kindle-Nook controversy.

I like all of this.

It's a Texas thang

I had a phone interview a couple of days ago with a hiring manager for a job in Austin. She started the call by advising me that her son’s school was on lockdown, and she might have to cut things short if she got notification that it was okay for her to go pick him up.

Well, sure, whatever. We had our chat and she indicated that she wants to talk further, so that’s being set up.

Meanwhile, I found out that the lockdown was on account of “armed burglars in the neighborhood”.

Well, that got me thinking.

Like—what the hell are burglars doing with weapons? How are you going to haul the swag if you’ve got a .45 in one of your hands? Seems like an inherent inefficiency to me.

But then it occurred to me: hey—this is Texas. Clergy are armed. The kindergarten teacher is probably packing. Why wouldn’t burglars join in the fun?

Well, evidently the situation was resolved, and mother and child were reunited, so it all turned out fine.

Except for the burglars, of course.

Gratitude Monday: Wunderbaren Freundschaft

My friend Dick and his wife have been on a Grand Tour of Mittel Europa. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been their e-letter carrier for periodic updates of the trip. Dick types a brief blurb on his iPod, attaches a picture and sends it to me; I pass it on to about 30 people.

But the precision-timed itinerary ran into a snag in Dresden, when a luggage-bump at a train station turned into a hematoma and as of Saturday the 24^th landed Dick in hospital for draining and observation. There were a couple of setbacks, including a second procedure on Monday and a “healing will be slow and precarious” prognosis, which is not something you ever want to hear about your own or anyone else’s health.

Plus, keep in mind, that Dick’s caregivers' first language is not English, and consider how hard it is to understand your doctors when they are allegedly speaking the same language as you, and you get an idea for the anxiety level that must have been underlying the situation for Dick and his wife Carolyn. Not to mention all the people on the email lists, to whom I was sending the updates.

(By the way, dealing with a device whose primary purpose is not writing large amounts of text, while under the influence of pain and whatever drugs they’re giving him for pain, Dick gave up fighting with Nanny Autocorrect, and Carolyn has now been renamed Carolun for some weird Apple-related reason. Which MS Word does not like, but suck it up, Microsoft; in this instance iOS rules.)

But at last email received (on Saturday), Dick was okayed to leave the hospital yesterday, and they arrived in Berlin safely to complete the last few days of their trip, with the support of a pair of aluminum crutches for him. I am just about to process the first couple of sit-reps from the Tiergarten area.

And here’s the thing: it’s Gratitude Monday and for the past week I have become acutely aware of how deeply grateful I am to have Dick as a friend for the past 20 years.

We met in the choir of St. Anne’s in Reston—he has a lovely baritone—but we didn’t really get beyond the basics until I moved to the UK, and discovered he had an email account. Then we exchanged jokes that were making the rounds, and I got involved in some of the discussions he and his various friends were having about current and historical events.

When I returned to the US at the end of 2001, broken in many ways, Dick was one of the first and most consistent of my supporters. I am never going to be able to drink sangria without thinking of the lunch he took me to at El Manantial in the Tall Oaks shopping center. He bravely sat through me showing him photo scrapbooks of my last two years in Europe. He probably wished he’d ordered more sangria, but he never let it show.

Dick is not the, ah, most technically astute person of my acquaintance. By which I mean he uses Apple products, has had AOL as his ISP since Internet Year Dot, and has never seemed interested in any of the underpinnings of email, web pages or productivity software. This is great for me, because I’m an application product manager and it is absolutely crucial to remember that we’re supposed to be building these things to make people’s lives easier, not to come up with the coolest crap with the most complexity you can cram in per release.

I love it that Dick stops me in my tracks when I assume some level of understanding that he doesn’t possess—and nor should he. I sometimes get to be the one who guides him through some application-induced terrors, and I always find it illuminating when I have to strip down a piece of software’s purpose and operations to its barest essentials to walk him through it.

It’s also good exercise for my communication skills, because this has been done via email or IM. I sent him a step-by-step guide for setting up a blog on Blogger, because I’ve been hoping for years that he’s going to start systematically sharing his life experiences with us all. See below about the need for memoirs.

(I will confess that my attempts to get Dick to read my posts actually on the blog, so I get the “traffic”, have been utterly futile because I’ve not been able to set him up with an iGoogle-type easily-clickable link, and anything more complex won’t work for him. So for the past few years he’s received a system-generated email with the entire post, so he never has to go to my site. But I’m hoping that this can somehow be rectified, and I’ll stay on it.)

Dick spent one career in government service as an intelligence officer, a position for which he is supremely qualified on account of him being the smartest person I know, as well as probably the best informed. He also used to write and edit some of the historical series of Time-Life Books. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been doing analyst and editing work for government agencies through contractors.

(When I say “the smartest person I know”, you should understand this is not hyperbole. He’s also one of the most precise and eloquent writers. So I have to say that what Autocorrect has done to his emails from the hospital is so cherce, I’m saving them; I think I can build an epistolary novel out of them.)

Back BB (Before Blog) when I used to email some friends links to the WSJ’s Eric Felten’s columns on various kinds of booze, I’d sometimes get replies from Dick mentioning the likes of Sunday brunches at the French officer’s club in Saigon, or gin and tonics at the British embassy in Lagos. These bagatelles (to him) hinted of a very exotic life, and I really wished I could hear more of it.

Over the years I’ve also picked up tidbits of how decisions were made during various geopolitical crises of the the last half of the 20^th century. For me it's like reading Lincoln's letters, only without the really bad handwriting and the microfilm.

And through Dick I’ve “met” more smart and interesting people who expand my understanding on a whole range of topics. Many of them come from a military and/or intelligence background, and they keep me on my toes.

(Some of us were preparing a Delta Force-type mission to break him out of the hospital until he reported that it looked like he was going to get out through the front door. Pity, though, as I was kind of looking forward to personally taking out the stout Frau SS Quartermaster who kept hounding him about the crutches.)

One of Dick’s passions is singing. I think he’s given up the Washington Chorale, but he is crazy-mad for the Washington Revels. This production means that in the run-up to Christmas you’re not going to get much of Dick’s attention, what with rehearsals and performances, but lordy, does he have fun.

This year their theme is Irish, and I really hope Dick used “Eileen Aroon” for one of his audition pieces. His voice is just exactly right for that. I think the decisions have been made for this production, and my fingers are crossed that Dick made the cut. But at the very least, I want to see the video that he submitted for the audition.

Every year or so, Dick and Carolun take an extended trip—four to six weeks. Carolun plans it with the attention to detail that was exhibited in the Normandy landings 70 years ago, only with all the advantages of the Interwebs. I’m talking 30-page itineraries with precision-timed schedules, bus routes, restaurant reservations and alternatives in the event of Acts of God (which got a bit of a workout this time out). The one last year was to Japan; previous treks have included Britain, France, Italy and Peru.

I love these trips and I love the schedules. They show such zest in the planning and execution, that it’s almost like I’m going along. I save the itineraries, because in the event that I ever get to take a holiday again, I’m going to piggy-back on all this research. I only wish Dick was better at de-briefing after the trips, because I always want to know their take on the places they visited, but he balances a lot of activities and trip reports lose out.

Just before he and Carolun left on their journey this time, Dick said he thought he might finally have found someone who can do his job with the accuracy and detail that he gives it, so he’s making very serious retirement noises.

You know—second-career retirement.

Well, hurrah! Because he cannot get started on his memoirs fast enough for me. All of those agency postings, all that hum-int/sig-int analysis, all those cocktails—I want the full scoop.

A few weeks ago something happened to his PC hard drive, and he had to leave it with the repair people for a week. That hard drive has the notes for his memoirs on it, and I’m afraid I got a little edgy with him when I begged him to assure me that he’s backed all of this stuff up to the Cloud. Or at least to an external drive. Jump drive? Please? (Note to self: get edgy again when he returns, to make sure this is happening.)

In the meantime, I am honored, privileged and so grateful to have been one of Dick’s many friends for these past couple of decades. My life would have had a lot less color and music in it without him.

And I want him writing those bloody memoirs!