But as I reflect on the need for resilience as a fundamental part of our character, there are two other stories of individuals who have faced far more challenging scenarios. Both are contemporaries of mine—both retired as four-star admirals in fact—and their stories are worth mentioning briefly. One is Admiral Michelle Howard and the other is Admiral Bill McRaven.
Let’s begin with Admiral Michelle Howard. As the first black woman four-star admiral, her career at first glance could seem to be one of unbroken success. Yet as an African American in a very white, overwhelmingly male Admiralty, she faced numerous obstacles. From the school playground to the highest levels of military service, going first is a universal mark of leadership, and Admiral Howard has gone first over and over again throughout her career. Between entering the Naval Academy in 1978 (two years after the Academy first opened to women) and retiring in December 2017, she became the first African American woman to command a ship, the first member of the class of 1982 to make admiral, the first woman to graduate from Annapolis and reach flag rank, the first African American woman in any service to reach three stars, the first female four-star in the Navy, and the first woman and first African American to serve as vice chief of naval operations.
Like many of the other admirals profiled in these pages, Admiral Howard’s drive and determination appeared early. Daughter of an Air Force master sergeant, she knew the rigors and frequent moves of military life from a young age. Undeterred, she decided at age twelve that she would attend a service academy—none of which were open to women at the time. Her mother, who has long been one of Admiral Howard’s heroes, backed this ambition to the hilt, telling her daughter that they would file suit if necessary to make the Academy a possibility. In the event, gender integration of the service academies was one instance in which Howard did not personally have to go first. Congress ordered all of the academies opened to women in 1976, and she secured an appointment to Annapolis upon graduating from high school in Colorado in 1978. From the moment she arrived on campus, however, Howard began leading and breaking barriers. I met her first when she was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, playing a role in the Masqueraders (the drama performance troupe at Annapolis), in a Shakespeare play—I think it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though she stands only about five feet tall, Michelle dominated the stage from the moment she set foot on it. She radiates both confidence and grace and has a powerful command voice packed into her relatively compact frame. That is someone to watch, I thought to myself. Over the subsequent decades of her career, I did exactly that, helping at several points as a mentor, while always observing how she consistently paid it forward to the younger officers coming behind her.
After graduating from the Academy in 1982, Howard commissioned and qualified as a surface warfare officer. She quickly distinguished herself in the surface Navy, beginning a meteoric rise in rank and responsibility. Only five years after commissioning, her capability as a leader resulted in service-wide recognition as the 1987 recipient of the Captain Winifred Quick Collins Award, which is jointly awarded by the Navy and the Navy League to one outstanding woman officer each year. At that pace, it is hardly surprising that she became the first member of her class to pin on an admiral’s shoulder boards.
Yet it was not easy. As I moved up through the ranks, I would hear from peers, seniors, and even subordinates about Michelle. It was often commentary plainly driven by resentment of her success—jealousy. While I hope it was not racially based—and I never heard overt comments along those lines—it was clear that many people regarded her success as simply an outgrowth of “being the first black woman.” That is a heavy burden to carry, and it made it necessary for Michelle to be even that much better in how she drove her ship, the way she carried herself, the tactical war-fighting decisions she made at sea, and the way she imposed disciplinary proceedings on others. For any fast riser in the Navy, there is a special level of scrutiny, and Michelle carried an extra burden. To her credit, she maintained an even keel despite provocative comments that leaked back to her (“You should know that Captain Smith is not a friend of yours, Michelle,” and the like). She kept her head down, drove her ships well, made the tough leadership decisions, and earned her way. That is character, and Michelle demonstrated it over and over again.
Although Michelle Howard shone brightly by any measure, her achievements are even more notable for the obstacles she confronted along the way—and the gritty resilience with which she surmounted them. To contextualize the challenges she faced, it is worth recalling Bud Zumwalt’s revolutionary four years as chief of naval operations from 1970 to 1974. Though he fought hard against the Navy’s deeply ingrained racism and sexism (which in his view ran deeper still), Admiral Zumwalt’s tenure ended without long-term solutions to either problem. Many of his most ambitious reforms were rolled back immediately after his tenure too, which only raised the stakes for women and minorities like Michelle Howard. For example, women were not allowed to serve permanently on nonhospital ships until 1978 (the year Howard entered the academy), which would have made it impossible for her to qualify and serve as a surface warfare officer.
In many ways, Admiral Howard’s career fulfilled and institutionalized some of the tantalizing promise that had appeared in the Navy under Admiral Zumwalt, whom she admires. Fittingly, she still has one of his business cards and keeps it close as a memento to this day. One of the most inspiring elements of her story is that she was given neither more nor less than the opportunity to prove herself at every level—and proceeded to do so repeatedly in spite of all manner of suspicion, resistance, and sheer obstructionism. As her mother helped her to see during a moment of self-doubt and frustration along the way, timing was both a blessing and a curse in her career: due to the time when she entered the Navy, her story made history at every step, but constantly going first often felt like going forward alone.
At one particularly low moment, Admiral Howard has said, she called her mother to voice her frustrations. In addition to the increasing nominal responsibilities of her successive jobs—each of which test even those leaders who have everything already going for them—she was constantly under public scrutiny both in the Navy and beyond. Within the service, where her performance each time she went first would set the standard for all who followed, people plainly wanted to see what she was capable of. Meanwhile, she was fielding a stream of publicity requests from beyond the Navy, as more and more people in the public wanted to be inspired by all that she obviously was capable of. “You are where you are historically,” her mother said. “As long as you stay in the Navy, this will not stop. Embrace it now or leave the Navy.”
Thankfully, Admiral Howard chose to stay in uniform, and her faith in the Navy was rewarded by its faith in her. As she progressed into senior leadership roles, she collected some truly impressive firsts, notably becoming the first African American woman to command a warship (the amphibious landing ship USS Rushmore), an experience she has called her favorite in the Navy. Later, as an admiral, she commanded Combined Task Force 151, one of the Navy’s dedicated counterpiracy forces afloat. Just days after her appointment came news of the MV Maersk Alabama’s capture by Somali pirates, which resulted in the events made famous by the story of the ship’s master, Captain Richard Phillips. In those trying days, Admiral Howard was responsible for organizing the Navy’s response and ultimately authorizing the high-risk SEAL mission that resulted in Captain Phillips’s dramatic rescue.
All leadership can feel lonely at times, but the sort of trailblazing leadership that Admiral Howard has exercised for four decades can feel loneliest of all. At the top of the mountain, the strongest winds blow. For her, the lights were always brighter, the microscope closer, and the path steeper. Going first always requires an extra measure of courage and grit, and Admiral Howard had to sustain both nonstop.
What is her legacy? Too modest by nature to think of this herself, Michelle will nonetheless serve as a superb example of resilience. A
ll leaders leave legacies, but not all of them think about the legacies they leave along the way. As a trailblazer, Admiral Howard has not had the luxury of not thinking about her legacy until late in her career. With every forward step she made for women, minorities, and leaders generally within the Navy, she knew that the example she set would become the standard applied to those who followed along the path. Leaders are constantly setting the standard for those around them, and those who come after them. In that way, leaders’ own characters are constantly shaping the character of the people and organizations they lead. Admiral Howard’s experience offers an acutely public example of the importance of character and legacy development for leaders to consider. The grit, grace, and resilience with which she has met and conquered the challenges she has faced offer a powerful example to us all.
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Michelle Howard’s challenges were unique. Let me spend a minute on a challenge that is very, very common. Many of us—indeed, the majority of us—will at some point face a significant medical crisis in our lives. Especially as we head to the wrong side of fifty years old, the chances of a medical setback increase significantly. But hardly any of us will go through such an experience while shouldering national responsibility as the four-star admiral in charge of the Navy SEALs. One flag officer who earned my highest respect in this regard is Admiral Bill McRaven.
Bill McRaven is best known as the man who led the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. As a close second, he is known as the retired admiral who was shamefully attacked by President Trump for having spoken his mind. But I first met him when he was a newly selected captain and I was a brand-new one star. We were in my office in the Pentagon a few months after 9/11 (he was recovering from a horrific parachute accident), talking about the Navy’s response to the attack. The smell of smoke still hung heavy in the air of the badly damaged Pentagon, as it would for weeks afterward. Bill has a kind of laid-back intensity. A proud graduate of the University of Texas, with the sturdy build and height of a middle linebacker, he is also well read, thoughtful in speech and demeanor, and kind to all he meets. Our meeting was the beginning of a friendship that continues to this day and has included both operational and social interactions across several continents and war zones and in the battleground of Washington, DC.
As a fellow combatant commander toward the end of his career, he shared with me the story of his battle against leukemia. We were sitting on a bus being driven from the Pentagon to the White House for a dinner with the president. It came up in a discussion of how long we would each stay in uniform. I had already decided to get out relatively soon after my NATO command tour ended that spring, but I urged Bill to stay on active duty and put his hat in the ring for chairman of the Joint Chiefs—the only higher job either of us could anticipate taking. He told me about his condition—a life-threatening form of leukemia—in a very nonchalant fashion, despite the obvious dire potential consequences. “Hey, it’s just another mission, right? They can blast the cancer back now, and when it comes back they can do it again. It won’t work as well the next time, but after that I know they will have figured out something new.” No fear, no sound in his voice of anything but quiet confidence. That is the kind of deep resilience that is so powerful for leaders at any level. Knowing the challenges that were coming, he decided to retire and focus on his health.
Fortunately, he regained his health after an extensive treatment regime and took up new challenges as the chancellor of the University of Texas system around the time I became the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. We often compared notes on our new lives in higher education. Bill departed that job after three very full years in the summer of 2018. So far, he has continued to deal with his ongoing health issues with grace and courage. The medical world is still “finding something new,” and not only for his sake, but for that of our nation, I hope they keep doing so. Our country needs people like Bill McRaven.
It is worth knowing about Bill that well over a decade earlier, in August 2001, then-captain McRaven, as commander of all West Coast SEALs, was gravely injured in a parachute training exercise. With his legs caught in his own canopy lines as his chute deployed, the opening shock instantly broke his back and pelvis in midair. Emergency surgery saved his life and his mobility but left him with the noxious prospect of months of bedridden convalescence and career uncertainty. Just a few days after that potentially life-changing accident, on September 11, 2001, Captain McRaven watched on live national television from a hospital bed installed in his own home as the character of warfare changed in an instant.
Still recuperating in his bed, McRaven spent the days, weeks, and months after the 9/11 attacks galvanizing the naval special warfare community for the fight he knew was coming. As soon as he was ready to go to work, McRaven transferred to Washington to take an appointment in the White House as a deputy national security advisor and strategic planner for counterterrorism. In that capacity, he literally wrote the book on the coming fight as principal author of the 2006 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. In the remaining eight years of his career, he moved back into the operational world and helped the US special operations forces take the fight to the terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We collaborated closely in those days while I was at Deep Blue—the Navy’s post-9/11 strategic and operational think tank—and he was in the White House on the NSC team. He recovered fully and could not wait to get back to the field, which he did.
A decade later, long after Osama bin Laden had plunged the United States into war, Admiral McRaven’s career came full circle. In the spring of that year, as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, he helped plan and execute the daring Operation Neptune Spear—the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in which JSOC operators killed the world’s most wanted fugitive. The operation was at least as risky in its conception and execution as Operation Eagle Claw, the terribly failed effort to rescue the American hostages in Tehran, had been in 1980. Its overwhelming success (despite a helicopter crash eerily reminiscent of the debacle in the Iranian desert) helped banish some of the lingering ghosts of the failure that ushered US special operations into the modern era. It helped vindicate JSOC’s decades of effort to ensure interoperability among those forces.
In the wake of that mission, during which he had provided real-time commentary on the operation on the live video link to the White House situation room, Admiral McRaven and the SEALs stepped into the public spotlight, a place they had assiduously avoided for decades. The admiral was profiled in national newspapers and quickly approved for a fourth star and command of US Special Operations Command (JSOC’s parent organization), while the Development Group and its operators’ derring-do became fixtures of the national imagination.
A final point on this note, which Admiral McRaven does make explicitly, is that these health situations can easily feel not merely inconvenient but deeply unfair. “Why me?” we are tempted to ask, even when we know the answer is simply, “that’s life.” Admiral McRaven illustrates this with the concept of the “sugar cookie,” a common and sometimes apparently random punishment for SEAL trainees in which they are ordered to get wet and sandy on a beach. “Sometimes,” he says, “no matter how well you prepare or perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.” In order to lead, you’ve got to be able to “get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.”
There could not be two people more physically different than Admiral Michelle Howard and Admiral Bill McRaven. One is a tiny African American woman and an Annapolis graduate, serving in the least glamorous part of the Navy, its surface warfare cadre. The other is a tall, white, square-jawed University of Texas track star who led the most prestigious force in the US military, the legendary Navy SEALS. On the surface, they don’t have a lot in common. Yet knowing both of them well, I would say that each embodies one of the most important qualities of
character, and one that is at the heart of projecting leadership: resilience. Both Michelle and Bill, despite enormous differences in style, personality, and circumstance, evoke for me the words of Isaiah 40:31: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Resilience, whether you are a believer in the good book or not, is the quality that allows you to run and not be weary. Both of these two modern admirals faced hard challenges, and both met them with deep resilience and true grit. Their character is part of today’s Navy, and a fine example for us all.
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