The Time of Our Lives (27 page)

Failure Is an Option

FACT:
In this age of “everyone knows everything about everyone,” failures are hard to hide. Just ask former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, Nevada senator John Ensign, New York congressman Charles Rangel, former North Carolina senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, evangelist Ted Haggard, actors Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan, or any number of other high-profile personalities who were outed for their indiscretions.

QUESTION:
When was the last time you heard a prominent public or private leader who failed personally or professionally candidly acknowledge the mistakes and pledge to make the lessons learned a central part of the remainder of his or her life?

W
hen the Great Recession hit and three of the most prestigious firms on Wall Street—Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers—either disappeared or were rescued by other financial services companies, the men who ran them and got rich doing so became very defensive. They were seemingly incapable of saying, “Look, this happened on my watch. I screwed up and made some terrible decisions. I’m going to spend the rest of my days and a big chunk of my fortune helping those less fortunate than me. I’ve had the helicopters and country club memberships, the private plane awaiting me on the tarmac and the fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suites. None of that gave me the judgment I should have had to head off these economic calamities.”

THE PRESENT

Those executives and so many other politicians and celebrities caught in their own mistakes could use the lesson that played out across America in June 2010, from the playing field of the Detroit Tigers. Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga was one out away from pitching a perfect game—no hits, no runs, no errors—one of baseball’s most difficult feats.

A Cleveland Indians player hit a grounder to the Detroit first baseman, who made a quick throw to Galarraga, who rushed over to cover the bag. As he caught the ball, Galarraga broke into a big smile—a perfect game, a pitcher’s dream!

But wait. Umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe. Galarraga was stunned but walked back to the mound and retired the next batter as all the television replays showed that the batter on first had clearly been out.

After the game, umpire Joyce reviewed the video and knew that he made the wrong call. A veteran and highly respected ump, Joyce unconditionally acknowledged his error, saying, “I cost the kid a perfect game.”

For the next twenty-four hours the blown call was replayed on all the cable channels and network news programs, re-watched on the Internet, and discussed on talk radio with a lot of intemperate comments about what should happen to umpire Joyce.

The following night at Tiger Stadium, Detroit manager Jim Leyland made a great call of his own. He asked Galarraga to present the night’s lineup card to Joyce at the beginning of the game. Galarraga put his arm around Joyce and smiled as he handed over the card. Joyce teared up and the Detroit fans gave both men a standing ovation.

Once again our national pastime gave us a moment to remember and a simple but profound lesson in the virtues of acknowledging a mistake, forgiveness, and redemption.

It is not easy. We’ve all made large and small mistakes. None of us is perfect but again and again we fail to embrace the healing power of admission and the radiant effect it can have on those around us.

In the spring of 2010, I was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Iowa, an institution that was the backdrop for my own painful experience with failure a half century earlier.

I’ve commented in other places about arriving at Iowa in the fall of 1958 with a whiz-kid reputation and the hopes of my hardworking parents tucked into a new Samsonite suitcase, a high school graduation gift to take me into the wider world.

It was the beginning of a two-year spiral down into a sybaritic maze of too much alcohol, late nights, too many girls, too few classes, parties first and responsibilities last.

As I told the class of 2010 at Iowa, “Woody Allen says ninety percent of life is showing up; I was in the other ten percent.”

Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga and umpire Jim Joyce, the night after Joyce blew a call and cost Galarraga a perfect game; their emotional reunion was a lesson that went well beyond a baseball game.
(Photo Credit 16.1)

I also told the Iowa graduates that my freshman year and the year that followed is a metaphorical ankle bracelet I’ve worn every year since—that my early failure was a kind of house arrest, a reminder of how quickly and how deeply you can sink if you fail to honestly face up to mistakes and act on them swiftly.

These are lessons to be constantly renewed for governments, institutions, faiths, and common interest groups.

THE PAST

Robert McNamara waited more than a quarter century before he acknowledged his mistakes in the prosecution of the Vietnam War, first in a book and then in Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary,
Fog of War
. An aged McNamara answered Morris’s offscreen questions and tried to explain the fog of war, the timeworn expression that should—but too seldom does not—remind us that war is not a mathematical or chemical exercise with a fixed outcome.

It is a deadly mixture of anger, hubris, passion, culture, justification and vengeance, ignorance and delusion, patriotism and courage. McNamara’s recollection of the Cuban missile crisis, when President Kennedy and his civilian advisers chose a diplomatic chessboard move over military options in order to avoid a nuclear showdown, is at once instructive and infuriating.

If McNamara got that, how could he be such an active agent in prosecuting the Vietnam War and staying silent when his doubts began to harden? In lectures, the Morris documentary, and his own book and writings, McNamara spent his last years trying to explain his actions, but he left behind more questions than answers, more anger than resolution. Nonetheless, he did at least leave cautionary lessons on war and the exercise of power:

“If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”

“In the case of Vietnam we didn’t know them well enough to empathize. And there was a total misunderstanding as a result. We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as: a civil war.”

At the end of his life McNamara went to Vietnam as part of his odyssey of self-examination. The former foreign minister of North Vietnam, McNamara recalled, said to him, “Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. Don’t you know we’ve been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years? We were fighting for our independence and we would fight to the last man.”

I knew Robert McNamara slightly during my Washington years, when he had moved on to the World Bank. By then he was a forlorn figure, sitting with his handsome wife, Margie, at Kennedy Center concerts or standing off to the side at big cocktail receptions.

There was none of the bravura of the days of the New Frontier.

When Margie, a woman widely admired in the capital, died, Robert began a giddy affair with a younger woman, raising other questions about his judgment. He was like a character in an Ibsen play, wandering around history’s landscape in search of himself as others looked on in bewilderment or still-seething anger.

The last time I saw him was on a New York to Washington, D.C., shuttle flight. By chance we were going through security simultaneously and I said, “Bob, I thought
Fog of War
was very important, a real contribution.” He was wearing a long tan raincoat, and his signature slicked-back hair was down to a few strands. He looked at me briefly, nodded, and murmured a thank-you as he hurried on to the gate, no one else seeming to notice this onetime intellectual prodigy who was president of the Ford Motor Company by the time he was forty-six, a star in JFK’s Camelot, and a mastermind of a national tragedy.

However sad and poignant his life had become, history will not forgive him for the terrible mistakes he made, for his failure to speak out publicly when he began to realize the execution and the expectation for the war in Vietnam were colossally wrong.

Will Donald Rumsfeld, a principal architect of the war in Iraq, ever have a Robert McNamara epiphany, when he publicly acknowledges his exaggerated sense of certainty that he knew best how to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein?

Credit must go to McNamara for parting words that are a worthy legacy for future decision makers in a world where a mighty military arsenal remains an important instrument for defending our national interests when it is used in concert with diplomatic and cultural offensives.

Otherwise, as we have learned, it is an agent of provocation, capable of hardening anti-American attitudes while attempting to defeat or diminish real and perceived threats to our national security. No one understands that better than modern military commanders, most of whom these days have advanced degrees in political science or history or have spent a year as White House fellows or as fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.

They’re the front line in the fog of war and pay the heaviest price in the burden of responsibility for loss of life or debilitating wounds among their troops. They take the blame for policy failures that should be traced to civilian armchair generals, militant think tank theorists, and sunshine patriots.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s longest wars ever, our best and brightest Army generals were tasked with what proved to be a mission almost impossible: eliminate a terrorist sanctuary, create democratic rule, engender pluralism and a flourishing economy, and provide internal security in two Islamic nations where tribal authority and division is an essential part of the national DNA.

To be sure, some of the military commanders in the combat theaters believed too deeply in their “can-do” training, seeing progress where it was temporary at best. To my eye, very often their perceptions were distorted by the lens of Western conditioning trained on Middle Eastern realities. In the West, we’re accustomed to a beginning, middle, and end of conversations, problems, and disputes. In the Middle East, there is a beginning, maybe a middle, and rarely an end.

The best of the commanders understood that, one telling me as late as 2010, “We’re just now beginning to understand the Afghan culture.” Consequently, the roll call of generals who were retired without glory because they failed to complete that improbable mission is a little-remarked-upon consequence of our involvement. John Abizaid, Rick Sanchez, Dave McKernan, Stanley McChrystal: All are three- or four-star generals whose careers collided with the flawed strategies of their civilian bosses.

Before he initiated his successful surge against continuing terror in Iraq, General David Petraeus spent a year at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, studying the problem of how to reverse the steady erosion of American power in Iraq and use the anger of Shiite chiefs against Sunni fighters.

Astonishingly, he was not given that assignment until we were four years into the war.

John Abizaid, a longtime student of the Middle East and fluent in Arabic, is known to be frustrated by the absence of a new, overarching U.S. strategy for the region. He has personal as well as professional reasons for his unhappiness. His son-in-law, an Army major, has been fighting there for ten years, and he’s been wounded twice. A decade later, Abizaid believes, we have more enemies in the region than friends.

The absence of a national discussion of the policies, execution, consequences, and future of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midterm elections of 2010 was unsettling. In campaigns for seats in the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, next to nothing was said about the wars that by that time had killed almost five thousand Americans, wounded more than thirty thousand others, and cost more than a trillion dollars.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan define the image of the United States in the Middle East and the subcontinent of Asia and will continue to do so for generations to come. They deserved a prominent place in the passionate debates about the economy, taxes, public debt, and the role of the federal government in our lives.

Yet national security as an issue finished well behind heated arguments about same-sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana, and the real and overblown indiscretions of some candidates. That was a shameful commentary on the substance and nature of modern politics and campaigns.

THE PROMISE

We have another opportunity to raise the level of public discourse: The 2012 presidential election season promises to be one of the most spirited ideological clashes of the last fifty years, powered by the Tea Party’s tightly focused message of a greatly reduced federal government influence twinned with the hunger of traditional Republicans to recapture the White House. In defending his four-year stewardship, the president will have the considerable power of the White House bully pulpit to make his case for finishing an incomplete agenda without abandoning federalism as indispensible to the challenge. Citizens demanding a meaningful debate, or even a third party, could have a welcome role, especially if they speak up for a complete airing of military and diplomatic plans.