Leaders with strong character

Back in the late 60’s at Warner Barracks in Bamberg, West Germany, Sergeant First Class Schmidt ran a mortar platoon so well that no rank either above or below him questioned his performance. He was big, loud and gruff, with an accent that reminded listeners of his origins in Hungary, from where, as a lone teenager, he had fled ahead of a 1950’s Russian threat.

I was a squad leader assigned to the same company, but as a scout rather than a mortar man, when in the summer of ’68 the Russians briefly invaded nearby Czechoslovakia. I thought that if things really blew up, my best bet for survival would be to get re-assigned to Sergeant Schmidt’s mortar platoon, because those mortar guys had real leadership. We scouts at that moment did not; we were going to be spending our nights wandering the German countryside with no real understanding of our mission, and nobody watching our back.

No organization has a foolproof system of predicting leadership capability, though every organization takes pains to make such determinations. But whether or not the system works, those who serve know intuitively who above them is a leader and who is not. Knowing SFC Schmidt was a man of skill and character, and that he put his people before himself, the mortar guys worked like happy sled dogs. Their intuition bred trust, and trust bred performance.

In his book The Road to Character (Thorndike Press, 2015), David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, explores in depth what character is and does. He says character happens in a life that seeks virtue and centers on some kind of unselfish service to others. He says that since WWII, Americans have drifted toward a more selfish approach to our lives than in past generations, and that we pay less attention than we once did to such selfless abstractions as sacrifice, honesty, duty, and honor.

I don’t know whether Brooks has hit the nail on the head or is just hammering around in the general vicinity of something disturbing. I do know that if character can be defined as a life lived deliberately seeking some kind of virtue, I want to follow such a person, because my inclination is to work as one of those happy sled dogs rather than be the leader. But, I don’t want to follow someone who doesn’t demonstrate at least some of those virtuous tendencies.

This preference is what turned me against Donald Trump. He works much harder blaming someone else for problems than he does at taking responsibility as a leader. I see that as an all-encompassing selfishness so blinding that he cannot understand how he humiliated both himself and the nation. Regardless of other accomplishments, without some marks of character, no leadership can be trusted.

Harry Truman made famous the words “the buck stops here.” George W. Bush showed true character when in January of 2007 he said in a televised address, “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people … where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” And SFC Schmidt proved daily that he was indeed first class, and that class – character -- matters.

It’s been frustrating (and most recently frightening) to watch Trump’s lack of character play out (or Tweet out), but it is even more frightening to see how many Americans, perhaps giving proof to Brooks’ criticism, have enabled Trump by ignoring the fact that in presidents, weakness of individual character weakens the nation both internally and internationally, most currently to the point of historic and perhaps irreparable damage.

Ron Rude, Plains