The Public's Business
by Edwin Dorn
Speech to Leadership Texas
Austin, Texas
February 19, 1998
Introduction
Thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here.
I left Texas after getting my BA 30 years ago, and spent the last 20 years in Washington. It was a great experience. But Washington has become a pretty tough town in recent years. Partisan sniping threatens to paralyze the policy making process; and special prosecutors have grown more common than ticks on a barnyard dog. Nowadays, the most important thing anybody can say after spending time in Washington is, I left there unindicted.
Twenty years in Washington, and the news media never mentioned my name in connection with either sex or money. So I gave up trying and came home!
It's good to be back in Texas, especially in Austin. I grew up in Houston, but this is where I began to mature. This is where I cast my first vote in a national election, where I bought my first pitcher of beer, where I marched in my first protest demonstration.
It's also where, during the 1960s, I made a commitment to public service. Those were the heady and hopeful days of the New Frontier, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society. We changed a lot of things for the better. But the decade of the 60s also was a turbulent and tragic time--assassinations, a divisive war, riots in our streets.
We still don't have a balanced perspective on that period. Indeed, many of our most heated political arguments today are over programs or policies developed during the 1960s--medicare and affirmative action, for example. During several years at the Pentagon, I presided over a military personnel system that was developed in response to the anti-war and anti-draft movements of the 1960s. Today, I preside over a school that was named after one of the pivotal figures of that epoch, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The 1960s
A lot has changed in the past 30 years. Austin is larger, more dynamic. The student body at UT is more diverse and higher quality than the student body of my generation. And, those of us who in the '60s may have seen government as the solution to all our social and economic ills, now have a much more richly textured view of things.
Indeed, one of the startling worldwide changes over the past 30 years is the virtual disappearance of the socialist economic model. Capitalism may not have been proven right, but communism certainly has been proven wrong.
And even if, during the 1960s, we didn't get all the answers right, I think we were asking the right questions--questions about racial injustice and economic inequality, about who we were as a people and where we should go as a nation.
I remember a warm spring day in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice Stadium in Houston. I was one of thousands of high school students in the audience when Kennedy announced that, by the end of the decade, this nation would land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. It was an audatious promise, because at the time, our space program was in its infancy.
We were a CAN-DO people back then. We responded to Kennedy's vision and his energy and, yes, to his audacity. With the resources that this great nation could marshall, we fulfilled Kennedy's dream.
I remember a warm July day in 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall in Washington and pronounced his dream of racial harmony. Millions of Americans came to share his dream; and for several years, we made huge progress.
I remember when President Johnson, in a state of the union address, promised to wage and win a war against poverty. And lest we forget, we made huge progress there, too. The poverty rate of elderly Americans declined dramatically because of increased spending on Social Security. And as a result of Medicare and Medicaid, millions of Americans gained access to decent health care.
From Can-Do to No-Can-Do
This nation made a lot of things better for its citizens in the 1960s. But then, some awful things began to happen. First, we lost our dreamers. President Kennedy, Dr. King, Bobby, Malcolm, Medgar, all slain by assassins' bullets.
Next, 58,000 men of my generation lost their lives in Southeast Asia. The war in Vietnam cost us in lives, and also in spirit.
Then, just as we entered the 1970s, we went through Watergate. That crippling political episode had a highly personal aspect that remains with us today. Political pundits Pat Buchanan and William Safire were in the White House at the time, defending President Nixon, while a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton was working on the staff of the House committee that was considering impeachment.
Finally, there was the Iran hostage crisis, a humiliation that filled our television screens for more than a year. ABC News devoted a special half-hour to it every night. That program, originally called "America Held Hostage", evolved into Ted Koppel's "Nightline." The disastrous rescue attempt only exacerbated our sense of frustration and futility.
Put simply, we lost our confidence. In the course of a few years, we went from being a CAN-DO America to a NO-CAN-DO America. We became a nation of narrow vision and cynical attitudes. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy challenged the young men and women of the nation to uplift mankind through their service in the Peace Corps. By the late 1970s, we had become the "Me Generation." Visions of national improvement and dreams of human betterment degenerated into self-absorption. The best selling books in the 1970s were on self-improvement, self-fulfillment. "Screw everybody else", we were saying. "Look out for Number One."
We carried that atttitude into the 1980s. The movie "Wall Street" captured the sprit of the time. The main character, Gordon Gecko, didn't care about making goods or creating jobs. Remember the way he mocked the union leaders who appealed for fairness? Remember that famous scene, when Michael Douglas faced the shareholders and pronounced, "Greed is good."
All too often during the last two decades, we've been inundated by claims about what we can't do, what we can't afford. Yes, thousands of our roads and bridges may be in disrepair, but we can't afford to fix them. Yes, many of our children are leaving school without learning to read and write. But we can't afford to educate them. Yes, millions of Americans lack health insurance. But, . . .
We can't do this. . . . We can't do that. What we've heard from so many of our leaders over the past couple of decades is not a call to greatness but a litany of inadequacies.
Many times, our leaders haven't sounded like leaders. Instead, they've sounded like dreary accountants poring over the books of a bankrupt company. Well, I don't think this country is bankrupt--of money, of ideas or of moral courage. It's just that our greatness needs to be harnessed to some compelling purpose.
People want to be connected to some purpose larger than personal enrichment. President Bush tried to harness those energies. President Clinton has pursued the idea by establishing AmeriCorps. General Colin Powell has signed on to promote voluntarism. So things seem to be moving in the right direction. Maybe we're starting to emerge from the "Me Generation." Maybe our social pendulum is beginning to swing from greed toward generosity.
The Can-Do Military
I had the privilege of working for four years with a group of people who still believe strongly in service, in self-sacrifice, and in their ability to get things done--the men and women of the United States Armed Forces.
My most memorable lesson in this came in the fall of 1993, during a meeting with a group of soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division. These soldiers had just come back from Somalia. Shortly before they left Somalia, they had lost 19 comrades during an ambush in the congested streets of Mogadishu.
CNN broadcast pictures of one dead American soldier being dragged naked through the dusty streets. Congress responded predictably, with a series of hearings designed more for theatrical effect than for serious fact-finding. My first boss at DoD, Secretary Les Aspin, lost his job.
I expected these soldiers to be bitter about their experience. I approached one of them--a tall, trim, ramrod straight staff sergeant--and asked him about Somalia. He replied, in a deep Southern drawl, "Well, Sir, all I can say is 'God Bless America'."
I thought I knew what he meant. I expected him to complain about the treachery of the Somalis--about how he and his comrades had gone to help and had been shot at and humiliated instead. I expected him to say how glad he was to be back in the USA, and away from the heat, dirt and dangers of Africa.
But that's not what he said. Instead, he went on as follows: "Sir, they sent us over to keep people from starving to death, and we did that. They sent us over to build clinics and roads, and we did that. Sir, we accomplished our mission."
That ramrod straight soldier went on to say that we were the only nation on earth that could or would have done that mission. We had the logistical capability to do it. But more importantly, we had the moral will to come to the aid of strangers.
I have been impressed again and again by the attitude and the ability of our soldiers. Again and again, we ask them to do phenomenal things, and they do it.
- Imagine what the generals must have said to President
Bush on the eve of Desert Shield. "Now, let us get this
straight, Sir. You want us to move a population the size
of Austin halfway around the world and sustain them in
the barren Saudi Arabian desert for six months? Yes sir,
we can do that."
- What must they have said to President Clinton about
Rwanda? "Sir, you want us to build an air bridge
thousands of miles into the heart of Africa, then set up
an operation to provide food, fresh water and medical
care for tens of thousands of refugees? And you want that
done within 72 hours? Yes sir, we can do that."
- And Bosnia. "You want us to move an Armored division across the frozen fields and ice-clogged rivers of Eastern Europe, then use that division to create a buffer between the warring factions? Yes sir, we can do that."
Leadership
Where does that can-do attitude come from? I believe it comes in large measure from the quality of leadership in an institution or in a society. We accomplished great things during the 1960s because we had leaders who challenged us to do great things. We were fortunate that they came along.
However, we should not leave the future of a nation, a city, or any organization to chance. Nor should we think of leadership solely as a matter of formal position. We need to help young men and women appreciate the importance of leadership, give them some practice at it, and let them know that leadership can be exercised from any position on the field.
Unfortunately, we in this society don't do a very good job of preparing people for leadership. Think about this for a moment. Our schools teach academic subjects and technical skills. We're required to study history and geography and literature. But leadership is an extra-curricular activity.
When I was in high school and college, physical education was a required subject. In essence, I was graded on the number of push-ups I could do. But there were no courses that taught me how to organize a group of people to accomplish a common objective.
One of the things I began to appreciate in the Pentagon is how systematically the military goes about developing leaders. They begin with the most basic: how to stand erect before two or three people and get them to respond to a simple command--right face, left face. Over time, they learn the difference between staff leadership and command leadership. They learn how to use information, rank and personality to exert influence. The Air Force colonel and the two Navy captains who served as my military assistants were mastering another leadership skill--how to teach your boss his job without appearing to do so. All three of them earned their first stars. Before they could pin them on, however, they went through another school to learn about other aspects of leadership.
By contrast, DoD didn't do nearly as good a job of preparing civilians for leadership. It was possible, in DoD as in most government agencies, to rise from the ranks of technician into a senior management job without ever taking what I call "Supervision 101"--the most rudimentary forms of leadership.
Our failure to teach leadership two unfortunate consequences. One is that we often put the wrong people in leadership positions. Think about it. Who's most likely to get promoted to sales manager? Probably, the person with the best sales record. Is that the best criterion?
High tech firms are notorious for thinking that technical proficiency translates automatically into leadership proficiency. Well, things don't work that way. Leadership is a skill, just as surgery and sales and computer programming are skills. If it's a skill, it can be taught.
A second consequence is this: if we don't have a systematic way of teaching and assessing leadership skills, then the way we select leaders is likely to be based heavily on "instinct." If we're in a leadership position, the people we're likely to think have the greatest leadership potential are people who look like, talk like and act like us. In short, our current approach to leadership tends to perpetuate the old boy network.
Leadership training is one way we can help more women and minorities break through the glass ceiling. So, one of the things I want to do at the LBJ School is to upgrade our teaching of leadership.
Leadership Texas has been doing this for years. I could learn a lot from you about how to identify potential leaders and nurture their talents. Leadership Texas instills that CAN-DO spirit -- the knowledge that there are important things to be done in this State, and the confidence that the members of this organization can do them.
Conclusion
Let me conclude this way: The LBJ School helps men and women learn how to shape and manage the public's business. Contrary to what some folks in this town profess to believe, however, the LBJ School is not trying to recreate LBJ's Great Society. Nor is it teaching a Democratic as opposed to a Republican way of doing things.
We prepare them to work in government agencies, of course. But much that is important to the public occurs in the private sector. About 30% of our graduates wind up in consulting firms and other businesses that have been contracted to perform a public service. And, about 20% of our graduates work in foundations and other non-profit organizations.
Our graduates leave the LBJ School with solid preparation and a sense of purpose.
The public's business is important. It should be done well.
