Welcome to this latest installment of Ask Gleaves, and Ask Gleaves Seminar. Today I'm scheduled to talk about courage. And this is a topic that's just an amazing topic, because you have the opportunity to tell such great stories, to expose apprentice leaders to such great stories.

I want to start by going through some notes that I've taken on my blog site, a little essay on courage. So I'm going to walk you through that and then at the end I'm going to give you a copy of the essay that I wrote about this. And you'll see the other essays that I've written on Gleaves Whitney at BlogSpot, where I've developed certain leadership themes. And I hope you will go into that site and mine it anything that you need as you learn more and more about the virtues and the effectiveness of good leaders.

Our mission at the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies is to foster ethical, effective leaders. And courage is the essential virtue for both of those. As Saint Paul famously expressed it, "if the trumpet gave an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself to the battle?" If the leader is not courageous, does not show courage, no one probably underneath the leader will feel like rushing into the breach.

Courage is essential to ethical readership because it ensures that decisions will be made and that people will be handled with integrity. It's essential to effective leadership because it ensures that the decisions will be implemented. Without courage people don't get things done.

Courage is one of those cardinal virtues that go way back in Western history. If you go back to Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, they regarded it as a cardinal virtual along with prudence, temperance, and justice. Cardinal comes from cardo, the Latin word for "hinge." And the concept is very simple-- your moral life hinges on these four virtues. If you're courageous, the course of your life goes better, it takes a better turn. If you lack courage, the course of your life takes a worse turn. And the same goes for prudence, temperance, and justice.

Very briefly, justice is given to each person that person's due. Dealing with them honestly and forth rightly. Temperance, of course, is the ability to control your appetites. Prudence is the ability to make good decisions. It has been said that prudence is the most important virtue that a leader has. Because it's the prudent person who knows what decision should be made in the first place and whether courage then should apply to the decision that has been made.

There's a there's a great line from High Noon, and-- does anybody know that movie? High Noon. You know, it's Grace Kelly and no-- who is it? Two stars. It's--

Wrong crowd.

Yeah, wrong crowd. I need Cathy here with me.

I know one with Tom Skerritt.

These are two great actors. But anyway, the theme song in High Noon talks about a craven coward, which is redundancy, but without courage we end up being craven cowards and things can really get bad in a hurry. The prevailing definition of courage, if you just look it up in Merriam-Webster, is "the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty." Aristotle famously defines courage as a mean between two extremes. Recklessness, total recklessness on the one hand, and the paralyzing fear that overcomes us, on the other hand, at times.

It's important to realize that courage is not disengaged from the feeling of fear that we can have. If you don't feel fear, then you don't have the opportunity to be courageous. Think about it. So it's not the absence of fear that causes people to rush into a burning building and drag people out. It's overcoming the fear, is the courage. And that's an essential thing to understand.

If you lack fear in the face of real danger, then you're pathological. You've got some disease, psychologically. Or you're just dumb. You don't understand, at that point in your life, that you are facing a situation that requires you to exercise caution.

So courage takes into account, always, the fears you have. It's normal to feel that.

Leaders need courage or fortitude in two areas. The less apparent area is in their inner life. The inner life is the most important part of a person. Because if your inner life is agitated, if it's not at peace, if you don't have integrity, you're not going to treat other people the way they need to be treated. The inner life is essential for developing character.

That's what education does. Education mostly takes place in our inner life. No matter what the discussion is outwardly, no matter what classes you take, what your transcript says, what's going inside you counts a lot more.

I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with Marty Allen. He said his mentor taught him the most important thing when hiring somebody is judgment. And you see it from the very first minutes of an interview. Good judgment. He said, I'll train them. Whatever their lack is, I'll train them. But, boy, if that person shows me they lack good judgment, write them off right away. He also added good taste. People have good taste and good judgment, which is kind of interesting. That was Dick [? Gillette's ?] advice to Marty Allen at the beginning this career.

So education, whether it's good judgment or courage, it takes place in a struggle inside ourselves. It's a lifelong process. That's the most important place where courage happens. Because it will help you overcome your deficiencies and weaknesses-- that we all have-- face your inner demons. Those are the things that require the most courage. If you have a habit that needs breaking, if you consistently show bad judgment and people are trying to give you the signal, hey, you shouldn't be doing this, and you don't face your inner demons and change, that's a lack of courage. That's a lack of a cardinal virtue. And your character suffers as a result, and you don't develop and grow as a person.

So that's the tough part. It takes courage to face down one's interior demons and do the hard work to change for the better. To do what's right. To do what's effective. And to do what's good for the team.

We think of courage, though, in leadership seminars, and the other sense. It's important, but I would argue not nearly as important as what's going on inside you, but it's in fulfilling your public duties and your work duties, no matter what sector you're in. Whether you're in the for-profit sector, the government sector, the nonprofit sector. We have duties as leaders.

Courage is that capacity to make the tough decision-- the 51-49 decision-- and then to implement it, regardless of the backlash of angry colleagues, offending people who say they have sensitivity in this particular area, regardless of special interests, regardless of a potential nose dive in public approval. Leaders cannot become paralyzed for fear of disappointing people. Courage helps them stay focused on doing the ethical and effective thing.

And besides having the courage to make the tough decision and to implement the tough decision in fulfilling your public duties, you need to have the courage to go back and reevaluate the decision you've made as implemented. It takes a lot of courage to say you're sorry. And people who can't say they're sorry lack courage, in addition to lacking prudence. People who can't say, I made a mistake when I implemented this decision and our policy suffers as a result, they'll be voted out of office. If they don't learn to train themselves and discipline themselves, the world will discipline them. It's just the way it works.

It's one of the things I think we parents tell our children. We discipline you with love and patience. Patience, some of the time. If you don't learn the lesson at home, the world's going to discipline you and you'll find out real fast what people will and will not put up with.

So you have to have the ability after you've implement something to say, oh, wow. I blew it there. Or, I shouldn't have done that. And then go back to the people involved and say, we've got to correct course, here. And that offends people, too. Because people buy in to whatever you decided in the first place, you now you've got to go back to them and say, uh-uh. We're not going to do it that way. They've got to accept the consequences, you've got to accept the consequences. Failing that, the team is not helped.

There a lot of great illustrations of courage. As I say, it's one of my favorite topics because there are so many things you could talk about. And in fact, I want to make sure that we all have the opportunity. While I'm giving you four or five examples of courage, I would like for you right now to start thinking about an example of a courageous leader in your own experience or reading that you could share with us. I'll share with you a few of them that mean a lot to me.

One of them strictly local here. President Gerald R. Ford. He comes into office on the heels of a disgrace presidency, President Richard Nixon, who violated the public trust when he lied. Lying is one of the most craven, cowardly things that human beings do.

Nixon lied about his involvement in Watergate, what he knew. And it became constitutional issue once people started being subpoenaed and he was called on to be truthful.

He resigned in disgrace, President Ford takes over. This is on August 9, 1974. Within a month, President Ford would see all of the problems unfold that the country was facing, that he had to deal with as President of the United States. Economy was in a shambles, we'd had an energy crisis, we were on our way to another energy crisis. Long gas lines. You guys have no idea what that's like, see lines of cars going out blocks to fill up your tank. Turn off the car each time. It was a nightmare. I was in high school.

We had fallout from the Vietnam era still. America had lost its confidence. We really did not know what we were doing in foreign policy because we had, settled over us, the Vietnam Syndrome. And so a lot of our leaders were paralyzed.

Domestic trouble on college campuses. Unrest because students had been part of the draft. If you want student activists, make them part of a draft and then all of a sudden-- you're a generation of complacent students-- all of a sudden they become very activist. When you have to go to Afghanistan, all of a sudden you start marching. People don't do that unless it's their hide, usually. In great numbers.

But it was in great numbers in the '70s, in my generation. I had to get a draft card, for example. So I was part of that cohort.

Ford had so many problems that every time he held a press conference in his first days in office-- because he was trying to reestablish trust and faith in the American people in the office of the President, in himself. Because he was still relatively unknown. He was from a congressional district in Michigan-- he had not been elected under the terms of the Constitution. He became Vice President under the terms the 25th Amendment. So he's the only president we've ever had who was not elected to the office.

So he's trying to establish trust in the office and in himself and he's trying to heal the nation that has been wounded by so many divisions because of war, energy crises, domestic confusion, chaos. Truly a sense back then, if you lived through that era, of, we could break into a civil war. There was so much unhappiness, publicly.

So he gets to these press conferences in his first days in office, and what do the journalists want to ask about? Even though you have this galloping inflation and everything else going on, what are you going to do with Nixon? You going to pardon Nixon? There's a rumor that you're going to pardon Nixon.

And he said, again and again, it had becomes an urban legend-- you know, they didn't use that term back then. But everyone was convinced, erroneously, that he was going to pardon Nixon. That there had been a deal. Now of course, that was the conventional wisdom of the day, and we all know that that was false. Subsequent history has never turned up any deal. Even people like Ted Kennedy and Bella Abzug and another Democrats who were not fond of Ford admitted that that was just crazy talk at the time. But crazy talk has a tendency to become it's own reality sometimes.

Ford kept saying, you know, we've got to get beyond Nixon. I can't continue to worry about Nixon and pardoning Nixon and solve the problems in our foreign policy and domestic challenges. We've got to get over it, folks. We've got to move on.

Ford estimated that 25% of his time was being taken up, especially at these press conferences, by questions of Nixon's pardon. And he kept saying, will you all listen? There was no deal for me becoming president in exchange for pardoning him. I don't care what you think. There was no deal. But people can be stupidly stubborn about such things.

So he had a real mess on his hands. He finally decided one weekend about a month in the office, after he consulted pastors here in West Michigan, including Duncan Littlefair at Fountain--

[AUDIO GLITCH]

and others, he finally decided that he needed to depart from justice, the cardinal virtue of justice, which is to each according to his due, and Nixon deserved to be punished, but exercise mercy, which transcends justice.

So it was the quality of mercy, after talking with the theologians, his pastors, and other very wise people, and said, the humane thing to do is not strictly to render justice here. The humane thing to do to Nixon is to exercise mercy. The man has already been punished. At that point people thought he was dying because of the disease he had. He looked horrible. He was going to be punished in his own conscience. He was going to be punished because of his isolation now from public policy. And his body was being punished. Almost as though the gods were conspiring to cooperate with this sense of outrage at him. Because he had done wrong.

Ford went to church on Sunday, the 8 of September. He settled in his decision, he came back to the Oval Office, and he signed the papers to pardon Richard M. Nixon. This meant that Nixon would not be prosecuted for any crimes, specifically crimes associated with Watergate.

Well, that was one of the toughest decisions I think a chief executive has ever made. The poll numbers showed it. Here he'd just been in office a month. Within 24 hours his approval rating went from 71% to 50%. It's the largest 24 hour drop in approval ratings in polling history of a President of the United States.

Ford knew. He had been advised that if he made this decision, he probably would not be reelected two years later during the campaign of 1976. Excuse me, I shouldn't have said reelected. He was never elected under the terms of our 25th Amendment. He would never be elected on his own right two years later. But Ford was willing to make that tough call and stand in front of people and say, I know you think there was a deal. There wasn't. I can live with my own conscience, I don't care what you say.

And he lived with his own conscience to the end. And history proved him right. He was vindicated. History proved that Nixon suffered because he did not get a deal. And Ford has been vindicated. In fact, he got the Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Foundation back in 2001. Where all these journalists like Richard Reeves and Woodward and Bernstein and all these guys came forward and said, we thought you were wrong. We thought there was a deal. We were convinced. We had been echoing the same to ourselves so many times. We thought we had the story. And we know. We've been humbled. We were wrong, we apologize to you. The tables totally turned.

So President Ford does deserve that Profile in Courage Award for a remarkable act on behalf of his country. It saved his administration from being preoccupied. Because when he took Nixon off the table and said, we will not pardon Nixon, we will not prosecute Nixon, he was saying, I'm going to go about the people's real business here. We've got to get this inflation under control. We've got to get a sane energy policy. We've got to get our foreign policy under control.

So that right here, locally, we have a great story about a Profile in Courage. And if you want to learn more about it, go over to the Ford Museum across the street and go to the cabinet room. And they have four decisions, tough decisions, that President Ford had to make while he was president, and the pardon of Richard Nixon was one of them. And go through the little exercise there, and you'll find it interesting.

Good leaders know how to make courageous decisions, the tough decisions. Even when it goes against the grain, it goes against what everybody else is thinking. Ford even had to deal with, by the way, the resignation of one of his top aides. He said, if you do this, I'm resigning. It was a friend and an aide back here in West Michigan. Ford said, I'm sorry. I had to do the right thing.

So courageous leaders know how to go against the popular thing. You know, the seeming right thing, by conventional wisdom, when they sense otherwise. And they have to follow their informed conscience.

Another example that I like to talk about is Admiral James Stockdale. He was an amazing man. You might have heard from him in presidential history because he was Ross Perot's presidential running mate in 1992. Ross Perot ended up getting 19% in that election, the Perot/Stockdale tickets. It was one of the largest showings of a third party in the 20th century.

A fine man, an incredible man. Anybody here seen the movie, Hanoi Hilton? Well, Hanoi Hilton came out probably, I think it was in the late '80s. And if you watch that movie you'll never quite be the same. Because you realize what our vets went through who were captured in North Vietnam and taken to Hanoi. At the Hanoi Hilton they suffered excruciating pain and torture and shock.

Stockdale was in one of the first sorties over North Vietnam when he was shot down. 1965. First of all, when he ejected the flak came up, his plane was going down. When he ejected there was something happened that malfunctioned and he broke his back during the ejection. And because his back was broken and he's coming toward the ground, you know, it's coming closer and closer, he just has to be the best he can for that landing. He breaks a leg during the landing itself.

He's found, he's dragged, he's beaten. Eventually transferred to Hanoi, the infamous hellhole called the Hilton. He's tortured numerous times because he will not break. He will not give those sons of bitches what they want. He will not. He's loyal. He will not betray his team. That's courage.

Several of those guys were so tempted to betray the team, and it would've been understandable because of the pain. Stockdale was the lead, the commander in the Hanoi Hilton. Developed a communication system of taps

[TAPPING]

and they were able to communicate with each other with a tin cup, whatever they had at hand. Or just something like a little piece of grout from the cement. He was able to communicate and keep their morale up. This was a man who would be shocked to the point of electrocution by death. And yet he would come back and communicate. Because he knew the team-- it was essential.

That's courage to face that kind of personal danger to your life, not knowing whether you would ever make it out alive and see your wife, your children, your family, your loved ones. Die, perhaps anonymously. And yet, to be able to face that kind of pain numerous times, broken bones numerous times. In fact, he was so loyal-- courage and loyalty go very closely together, here-- he was so loyal that he tried to commit suicide at one point because he was afraid he couldn't withstand the pain anymore. Another torture. And the North Vietnamese revived him.

And you know what happened? The Commandant at the Hanoi Hilton saw him shortly after he had been revived and he said, I'm going to leave you alone. You have proven yourself a worthy enemy. Your loyalty is amazing to your team. And not everybody's been loyal in here, but you have been. We're not going to torture you anymore. He didn't want any favors from them, but that's the way it turned out.

And he was able to return. He was never the same man. Physically, he limped. The lines in his face were deeper. His hair went from brown to white. But morally, he was one of the tallest human beings in the world. And you read his story-- and we have his story, he tells it in 30 pages-- you read his story, this is a great man. That's courage.

I'll be very brief, here. A third example is Martin Luther at the beginning of the Reformation. 16th century. One of the famous lines-- and I'll say it in German-- one of the famous lines of the beginning of the modern era, where Martin Luther is taking on the entire Catholic Church, the entire institution. I'm Catholic, so I'm not bashing. I'm taking a swipe at my own church, here. The Catholic Church had done wrong. The Catholic Church had not reformed where it should, and it was doing some things that were very, very denigrating to the faith.

And Martin Luther looked at the Catholic Church and even though he was an Augustinian monk, and even though he was a doctor who taught theology, he said, I will support this pope, I will defend this faith, but it has to be grounded in natural law and in the Bible. He said, here's the standard. But I'm not going to go along with these corruptions.

And there's point at his trial where he's not physically tortured, but he is mentally tortured. This man agonized so much-- he worried-- he had kind of a high anxiety personality, anyway. And at his trial he was so tempted to break. Because everybody kept saying, if you just agree that you're wrong, then you can go about living your peaceful life again. And there was that temptation. He kept going to it. He'd go back to his cell and he would think.

And finally, one day he said, no. And he said, in German, hier stehe ich. Ich kann nichts andreres. Here I still. I cannot do anything else. I will stand with the truth. And I don't care what torture, what manner of death, what manner of criticism you put in my face. I'm standing with the truth. Period.

He went up against the institution of the Western world. And he survived it. And he went on to translate the Bible and write a number of very interesting tracts.

It doesn't matter whether you're Lutheran or even Christian, it's a story that's incredibly powerful. Whether it's a Ford standing up to the American people and their conventional wisdom, or whether it's an Admiral Stockdale standing in front of a brutal enemy, or a Martin Luther standing in front of a whole institution, know and do the right thing. Do you see the theme in those first three? It's what happened inside, the schooling of virtue, inside that person's character that made it possible for these individuals to prevail outwardly.

Because I'm a Texan, I've got to a use a Texas example. Sam Houston. He was governor in 1860, 1861. He was the guy who had made himself famous. He had been talked about as presidential candidate before he ever moved to Texas. He was from Tennessee, he had served there. But when he goes to Texas, he becomes the first President of the Lone Star Republic.

He later became a senator, and then when the Civil War broke out in 1861-- 150 years ago-- he was Governor of Texas. And the pressure on him by 90% of Texans, and certainly as unanimous in the legislature, was Texas secede from the Union and become part of the C.S.A., the Confederate States of America. And he said, no, I won't do it. The Union must stand.

And so here a governor takes on his own people, who had elected him. Said, I don't care what you say. I don't care what you think. You're wrong. We've got to keep the Union. If the United States starts to break off, then we will not have learned our lesson from the founders and from George Washington, in particular, who, in that farewell address said, we have to stay together. Team loyalty. Courage and loyalty, as I said, go together.

So Houston had to resign. And in fact, the Union Army, President Lincoln offered him an army to come down. And if he raised an army he could have reinforcements and he could even fight the Confederates that he was going against. But he decided he didn't want bloodshed, but he was going to do the right thing. So he stayed in retirement. And he died a broken man a few years later.

John F. Kennedy, by the way, in the famous book Profiles in Courage, mentions Sam Houston as one of the dozen examples.

The last example. I would not want us ever to neglect literature. Great literature offers lots of opportunities to study courage, offers many profiles in courage. Brilliant ones.

And I think the most dramatic, one of my favorites, is Antigone by the playwright Sophocles in fifth century, B.C., Athens.

Why? Because Antigone is a teenage girl in a man's world. In an adult world where adults make decisions. She is a niece of the king, so she's the subject of a king. And as a teenager she decides to oppose her uncle, who's the head of the family and the King of Thebes.

In a man's world, an adult world, she has four things going against her. Who of you would expect a teenage girl to be able to stand up to the head of the family clan, Creon, who also happens to be the king. I mean, just standing up to the king would be tough. Just standing up to your uncle would be tough. Just standing up in an adult world as a teenager would be tough. Just standing up as a woman in a man's world would be tough. But Antigone does all four.

She has incredible courage, and it comes down to the decision-- her loyalty is expressed not to a very flawed man who makes a very flawed ruling not to bury her brother, her loyalty is to the gods, and natural law as she understands it. Her brother dies. And Creon says about his nephew, he shouldn't have a proper burial. He was treasonous. And Antigone says, that outrages everything I've ever learned. Every human being deserves a burial, regardless. And actually, my brother didn't do anything wrong, but that beside the point, he deserves to be buried. He's a human being.

The interesting thing about this play Antigone is that the chorus comes in. The chorus represents conventional wisdom. [AUDIO GLITCH]

theme I'm developing here is that no matter what conventional wisdom says, no matter what you hear on the street, it can be wrong. And a courageous person says, I'm going to go against conventional wisdom. I'm not going to follow it, because there's a principal at stake, there's truth at stake, or whatever.

The conventional wisdom was represented by the Theban chorus that kept saying, Antigone, you have got to obey the king. And he's your uncle. And he knows better because he's the man and you're just a woman. And he's an adult with all this experience and you're just a teeny bopper. Get over yourself. Obey conventional wisdom, here. So that's what the Theban chorus, which represents CW, that's out there just keeps saying, we're the conventional wisdom, here. We know from the wisdom of the species, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]-- this is what you should do. Just pipe down.

And Antigone says, no. I won't back down. And in Greek it means, unbending. Antigone. Her name means unbending. I will not bend on this. This is a matter of principle. I will not let Polyneices, my brother, go unburied where the worms and the animals are tearing his body part.

She does managed to bury Polyneices. Her sister refuses to help her. Her sister is terrified. Her sister reflects conventional wisdom. Ismene. Ismene turns out to be not a bad person, she just goes with the crowd. And she's wrong.

Antigone holds her ground. And Creon says to her, when they have a confrontation, I told you don't bury Polyneices. I regarded him as a traitor to our polis. And she said, I'm sorry dear Uncle. I'm sorry Your Highness. I don't even know what to call you. I'm sorry, but I had to do the right thing. The gods decree that all human beings, upon their death, deserve a burial. It's part of the order of things.

And so Creon does something that's especially cruel. It's the flip side. You have the brother, who is not buried, put under ground dead-- according to Creon. He orders his niece Antigone to be buried alive. So she's going to be-- Polyneices is dead above the ground, she will be alive below the ground. So he violates natural law a second time.

Conventional wisdom, when it hears the senates-- remember we were talking about mercy versus justice? Technically, if you read Sophocles, Creon has his point. Sophocles pretty much makes it clear that you must obey the king. He sets the rules. But Sophocles also shows that Creon is wrong. That conventional wisdom can be changed.

And in fact, the chorus, once they see what's going to happen to Antigone, begins to have second thoughts. OK. It's right to obey the king. It's right for a teenage girl to obey her uncle, the oldest remaining male authority-- because her father had died. But Creon, in this case, is wrong. The chorus changes. Conventional wisdom changes. And note what happens. It's because of her tiny voice, her tiny but mighty voice, that conventional wisdom changes.

Now that's the amazing thing about this story. Sophocles isn't writing in a women's world. Or in a teenager's world. Or as a minor relative or as-- I mean, he is a subject of a king. Or of the law of Athens. But he's able to show how one person can make a difference. And I think that that play by Sophocles is instrumental. It's used as an object lesson for the rest of Western history. How you have the right and the duty to stand up for what is right, but you have to cultivate the courage.

Antigone had obviously had incredible education prior to her decision, whatever it came from. We don't know from the information in Sophocles. But her character was such that she could stand up in a man's world to the males, to the adults, to her king, and to the head of her family. And all the individuals that I've mentioned had something in that character of theirs that made it possible for them to do likewise.

That's really where courage meets the road. Of course, what makes the headlines is what happens on the outside. But again, I want to emphasize-- courage, like all of the cardinal virtues, is an interior disposition that is developed. And the only way we develop it is by exercising it. It's by examining ourselves in the face of danger and saying, I'm going to do the right thing. I'm going to be loyal to what is true and good. I'm going to be loyal to what is right. And I don't care what people think. I can live with myself if I do that. That's courage.