Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  Commanding NATO and realizing that to do so effectively I had to empathize with not only Americans but Bulgarians, Romanians, Germans, Brits, and every other nation, I had to wake up every morning and think, How does this come across in Paris/Madrid/London/Berlin/Rome and every other capital in the alliance? NATO service is a proving ground for empathy, something many very successful people are not always capable of expressing. Building up wellsprings of empathy is the work of a lifetime. For me, NATO was a crystallizing experience in that regard, but you don’t need to be in such rarefied air. Reading the speech “This Is Water” also helped me understand the need for empathy in the most mundane moments of our life, from standing in line at the supermarket to raising our children.

  Seventh, believing that a sense of justice matters is a powerful part of character. John F. Kennedy famously said that life is unfair. All the character in the world will not undo much of the massive injustice and inequality in the world. But as the Russians have it in a proverb, it is better to light a single candle than to howl like a dog at the darkness. I focused on this even more deeply after I left the military. In military service, it is instinctive to want to create just outcomes. We send our troops to war to protect our nation, deter our enemies, protect the weak, and stop abuses. In the long twilight of the Cold War, I never doubted (nor do I today) that our values are the right ones—democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, gender equality, racial equality. We execute them imperfectly, but they are the right values. And the many times I was involved in combat operations—in the Balkans, the Middle East in Iraq and Kuwait, Afghanistan, Libya, counterpiracy—it was to protect either people or values.

  But after I got out of the military and became a civilian for essentially the first time in my adult life, I began to think more coherently and frequently about justice and see the shortfalls all around me. Over the past five years, after leaving the Navy, I have questioned the fabric of our American society in this regard, as do many. I try to empathize with different groups in our nation in a way I never did through the buffer zone of military service. Today I think about poverty in a completely different way and wonder how families in the rust belt survive without jobs or, in many cases, hope. I see the injustice in that and try to help energize discussions that can address it. Likewise, I try to think about what it must be like to be a young black man in poverty, with a very limited set of choices, under constant suspicion by law enforcement. How do we address that? I wonder why some communities are blessed with good schools, clean water, professional police protection—and others are not.

  This is not to say we are fatally or even deeply flawed. I’m with Winston Churchill, who famously said that “Democracy is the worst form of government . . . except for all the others.” We have tools and ideas for using them that can help us move forward. But it all begins with a desire to seek more just outcomes. Indeed, I have no pat answers for these situations, but I will observe, in the context of character, that the more of us who will at least admit to the injustice in these and other challenges and try to think about practical and meaningful solutions, the better the chances of moving the needle toward a just society. Character can help create that critical mass.

  And let’s face it, part of operating with a sense of justice is exercising self-control. This was a virtue highly prized by the ancient Greeks, and in particular, is part of the approach to life extolled by the ancient Greek stoics. In today’s turbulent, fast-paced world, leaders far too often fail to exercise a sense of justice, and their self-control fails them. When that occurs, they are failing not only to control themselves, but to exercise a judicious sense of character.

  An eighth quality that blends across the admittedly fine line between leadership and character is decisiveness. While good leaders are generally decisive, I have worked for some fine people who took a long, long time to make final decisions. One of them was a lawyer, and simply could not stop balancing the arguments on both sides of the equation. I was in a support role to him when I was a captain, and he could be exasperating in a kind of lovable way as he pondered, brought in more focus groups to share opinions, encouraged everyone in the room to speak up, and simply refused to decide. This collided with the military’s approach, which is to make decisions quickly, move out, and then adjust as necessary. When I became more senior, I worked for President Obama (not directly but through the secretary of defense), and again saw the lawyerly approach. While I commend the idea that we can always get more information before making a decision, I think there are often times when a decisive approach allows a decision maker to seize the initiative.

  One story that haunts me to this day was my own inability to act decisively while captain of USS Barry sailing through the Suez Canal. We started on the northern approach, and the Canal Authority sent us a pilot as was required. He did not inspire a great deal of confidence and seemed more interested in demanding cartons of cigarettes from our sea store than in safely ensuring the passage of the ship through the shallow and poorly marked waters of the canal. Frustrated with the lack of cigarettes (we had offered him a ship’s ball cap, which did not impress him much), he staged a kind of mini-strike and pouted on a folding chair on one side of the bridge.

  Halfway through the Suez Canal is the Great Bitter Lake. In this part of the canal, ships traveling southbound are required to pull over and anchor while the northbound convoy passes through. By the time we reached the Great Bitter Lake, I had been awake for about twenty-four hours and was dizzy and slightly dehydrated, the result of guzzling coffee to stay awake. As we turned out of the channel in the canal and motored slowly across the Great Bitter Lake, the pilot suddenly came alive and shouted for us to steer a certain course. Despite my misgivings about him, I felt he was after all the certified pilot for the canal and a former Egyptian naval officer, so I told the conning officer to come around to the recommended course.

  Suddenly, from behind me at the navigation table, the young lieutenant shouted, “Captain, the ship is standing into danger on that course.” I was stunned, and torn—indecisively—between my own officer, who did not have much experience frankly, and the vastly senior Egyptian pilot. I vacillated, and the ship sailed on at five to seven knots. The navigator shouted again, “Sir, we are headed toward a shoal, we must stop and reverse course.” The pilot said, “Your assigned anchorage is just ahead of us, Captain.” Other ships were coming behind us headed to their designated moorings, and the risk of a collision was increasing. But I was too addled and exhausted to act decisively. Fortunately for me, my twenty-six-year-old navigator, just a couple of years out of Annapolis, was very decisive. He simply said, “This is the navigator, I have the conn, all back two thirds.” The Egyptian pilot exploded, I suddenly woke from my reverie and had the ship’s boatswain escort the pilot to the bridge wing and keep him there, and I directed the anchoring procedure.

  After we dropped the hook (and were almost hit by an approaching tanker), we lowered a boat into the way and sent it over to the designated anchorage with lead lines to cast into the water and definitively establish the depth. My navigator was right—it was a foot too shallow for us, and we would have gone softly aground in the silt and mud of the Great Bitter Lake. My career would have terminated at that moment, despite the excuse that I was simply following the advice of the pilot. That navigator went on to a brilliant career that continues today, and my money is on him to wear an admiral’s stars before too much longer. He was the decisive actor needed at that moment, and I learned several valuable lessons, not only about him, but about character and how exhaustion can degrade your most important qualities.

  A ninth quality of character that emerges from these sea stories is determination. Each of these admirals demonstrated deep levels of determination in the face of true adversity. Think of the overwhelming odds against Themistocles at Salamis; the massive Spanish Armada facing Drake; the entrenched bureaucracy that Fisher had to overcome; the lack of vision facing Rickover—on and on,
we see the value of determination. The ever quotable (and often misquoted) Winston Churchill said it quite simply in October 1941, as his nation reeled from German advances in the early days of World War II: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

  Sound advice—and we need to understand that determination is a quality of character that needs to be handled carefully. For me, a time of testing was during my leadership of NATO in the Afghan war. By 2009, when I became Supreme Allied Commander, we had more than 150,000 troops in the country and a war-fighting budget of billions. We were throwing lives and money at a problem that seemed intractable. My job was to evaluate our efforts to date and make recommendations to the president. After conferring with General Stan McChrystal, who was the four-star general on the ground as the tactical commander, we ended up proposing a significant troop surge. We were deeply determined to win. That is what combat leaders are supposed to deliver.

  Yet in retrospect, I wonder if our determination led us down a wrong path. Perhaps a better strategy would have been a lighter footprint, more special forces, a more aggressive political rapprochement with the Taliban, perhaps spheres of influence within the country. There are fierce counterarguments to all these ideas, and in the end we went with the surge. That resulted in progress on the battlefield, and improvement in the situation that ultimately led to withdrawing 90 percent of the US and NATO/allied troops. We turned the fight over to the Afghans in 2014, and they are maintaining a tenuous hold on much of the urban terrain in Afghanistan today. But these days I often wonder if this was in fact a situation in which Churchill’s exception of “good sense” applied, and that perhaps our sense of determination influenced the calculus of our advice. We’ll never know, and I remain cautiously optimistic that a peace accord can be delivered in Afghanistan—if so, the surge and the turnover to the Afghans may turn out to have been the right strategy. I offer this as an anecdote to illustrate something Churchill knew—determination is a strength, but not when it overturns good sense.

  Tenth and finally, in our voyage of character, we need to understand that in the end we are but sailing in a tiny ship on a boundless sea. This is the quality of perspective, which leads to a sense of humor and the gift of not taking ourselves too seriously. When we look at the oceans, and the great deep waves, we must understand that eternity is rolling out there in front of us, and our time is brief. I used to keep a sign on my desk in USS Barry, my first and much-beloved command at sea, that said, “NOTHING IMPORTANT EVER HAPPENS HERE.”

  It was, of course, written with my tongue firmly in my cheek—certainly the national security missions of the ship were necessary, our Tomahawk missiles could wreak death across 1,500 miles, the lives of my sailors all mattered deeply to me—but in the long run, I would remind myself, the voyage of the USS Barry was nothing but a cosmic flicker on a trackless sea. By maintaining that perspective, it became far easier to take the good and bad in stride, to keep my temper in check, to reduce my ambitions, and to laugh when things went wrong, so often well beyond our control. As mentioned earlier, the tombstone of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis says simply: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” In the end, we will all be freed in the most ultimate sense. Remembering that allows us the perspective we need to sail each day through challenging waters. That is the gift of character.

  Every afternoon on the ship, after I walked the decks and greeted my crew at the conclusion of the workday, I would go up to the bridge wing and spend some quiet time just contemplating the ocean and the sky. They meet at a distant point and whenever I see that horizon at sea, I tell myself that I am looking at something simple and powerful: eternity. Character is knowing that we are decidedly not eternal, and that we should live our lives in the best way we can.

  A final thought that can help illuminate character as you understand it: who are your heroes? Ideally they are people you deeply admire for reasons that stem not from their accomplishments—what David Brooks in The Road to Character has called “résumé virtues”—but rather from their character values—which he calls “eulogy virtues,” as in the things people will (hopefully) say about you at your funeral. Our résumé virtues are the schools we attend, the grades we get, the prizes we win, the salaries we earn, the houses we buy, the books we write; our eulogy virtues are the qualities we embody—and in the case of the principal ones discussed in this book, they include honesty, justice, humor, creativity, balance, empathy, humility, and resilience.

  A good exercise as you sail on the longest voyage you will ever take is to actually write down the names of your heroes on a piece of paper. Select them from wherever you want in your experience—family, friends, people chosen from history, current leaders. Then alongside each name, attribute a characteristic that you find compelling about them.

  All that is not terribly hard—it merely requires you to stop and think consciously about the people you deeply admire. For me, the list would include my parents (for the unbounded love I was offered as a child); General George Marshall (for his steadiness under pressure as a secretary of state, secretary of defense, and wartime chief of staff of the US Army); Simón Bolívar (for the audacity of his vision to liberate all the Spanish colonies of South America); Condoleezza Rice (for her discipline); and Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia (for his political courage in pursuing a peace agreement despite countless doubters). Your list will be different, but the idea is the same—pick a handful of people you truly admire.

  Now comes the hard part—in the column next to the qualities you esteem, indicate how you are doing. I ask myself constantly: Am I as good a parent to my daughters as my mom and dad were to me? Do I have the steadiness of a George Marshall? Is my vision as bold as that of Bolívar? Am I as disciplined in my pursuits as Condi Rice? And am I as courageous as a Juan Manuel Santos? I do better in some categories than others, of course, but the point of the exercise is above all to know yourself. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates at his trial (on charges of corrupting youth, by the way). This constant process of self-examination is at the heart of improving our character, which is indeed the work of a lifetime for us all.

  None of us is perfect, but some are farther along in the voyage of knowing themselves fearlessly and honestly and working hard to improve. That is the voyage upon which I hope you are well and truly embarked, and I wish you Godspeed and open water in all the days of your life.

  Acknowledgments

  First, I offer my sincere thanks to the team at Penguin Press, notably my superb editor and friend, Scott Moyers. He conceived the idea of my previous book Sea Power, and guided the book to a wonderful launch in 2017, ensuring that it continues to help make people around the world aware of the vital importance of the geopolitics and history of the world’s oceans. Scott enthusiastically embraced the idea of Sailing True North as an important way to draw life lessons from those who have plied the world’s oceans.

  I am also immensely grateful to Captain Bill Harlow, a former spokesman at both the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. He has offered me the gold standard of professional advice, editorial assistance, and deeply valued friendship for decades.

  My two research assistants on this project are also brilliant graduates of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, where I served as dean over the two years that went into writing this book: Colin Steele and Matt Merighi. Both are gifted academics and vital shipmates on this voyage, providing solid and accurate research throughout the project.

  I am very lucky to be represented in the literary world by my agent, Andrew Wylie, who is also a keen reader and critic. His work helped make this a better book, and I look forward to being part of his team in the future.

  Finally, my deepest love and thanks to my wife, Laura, and my daughters, Christina and Julia. They are the heart of
my sea story, and always will be.

  Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

  Chapter I. The Power of Persuasion: Themistocles

  Hale, John R. Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy. New York: Penguin, 2009. This is a well-written and highly readable journey through the history of the ancient Athenian navy. It includes good details about Themistocles’s life and his role in founding the navy.

  Herodotus. The Histories. New York: Penguin, 2003. The great historical tome written by the affectionately named “Father of History.” Covering the Persian Wars and the prime of Themistocles’s life, Herodotus is the go-to source for the period.

  Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1998. Any student who has gone through an international relations program or a military war college year knows Thucydides, the opinionated but highly incisive commentator on the Peloponnesian War. His work contains information on Themistocles’s later life and ultimate fall from grace after the Persian Wars (he fell in with the Persians). His sympathetic portrayal of Themistocles is entirely at odds with Herodotus’s contempt, providing an interesting insight into Themistocles’s polarizing character.

  Chapter II. A Sailor of the Middle Kingdom: Admiral Zheng He

  Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. One of the seminal works about Zheng He’s life, his voyages, and what happened after his career was over. It weaves in Chinese language and history to help Western audiences understand the context of Zheng He’s life in greater detail.