Dragons - Chapter 44 (DRAFT)

By the time I got back to the convention hotel, the registration desk we had set-up in the foyer of their biggest ballroom was open for business and lines of early-morning conference-goers were already lined up under the signs reflecting the starting initials of their last names. A dozen or more redcoats were expertly rifling through the line of battered boxes that contained their registration packets, handing the right one over to each visitor with a smile and sometimes a friendly pat on the hand. We called them redcoats because of the polyester blazers they all wore, undoubtedly issued to them by the local Convention & Visitors Bureau who provided them to traveling conventions like ours for something between the minimum wage and the union contracted labor wages of the teamsters, electricians, and riggers who set up our exhibit hall and hoisted our lighting trusses into the air. The redcoats were invariably retirees, mostly blue-haired ladies, who liked both the people contact and the supplemental income the task provided. Working amongst them were three of our own staff members -- Jeff Hatchler, Jurgis Pavlov, and Bethany Bishop.

I went behind the registration tables like I belonged there and made my way over to Bethany. “How are things here?” I asked her.

“No,” she was saying to one of the redcoats, atypically a man, with the word STANLEY punched onto the little plastic nametag pinned to the lapel of his red blazer. “Only the people with the red stars on their envelopes get the red tickets. They’ll need them to claim one of the box lunches on Monday.”

STANLEY nodded and returned to his station under the letters E-H.

Bethany turned towards me, obviously expecting another redcoat with another question.

“How are things here?” I asked again.

She nodded several times, placing her hands on her lips on surveying the mostly organized chaos around her. “Good,” she said with some satisfaction. “Couple of hiccups getting started, but things are working now.”

“Hiccups?”

She hooked a thumb towards Jurgis, hunched over with his tie hanging in the guts of one of the laser printers.

“None of the printers would take our badge stock, but Jurgis is getting them to respond.”

I looked toward Jurgis. “Good,” I said.

“What happened with Mary?”

It was barely a whisper, shushing out of Bethany’s lips as if it was afraid to be seen in the light.

“What?” I asked, turning back toward her.

“Mary,” she whispered again. “Didn’t you talk to her? About Caroline?”

“No,” I said easily, unthinkingly, more out of a desire to shut down the conversation than to lie. “She was too busy with the VIP breakfast to get into it with me.”

I stopped. STANLEY was back at Bethany’s elbow.

“Excuse me,” he said boldly, holding up a roll of blue tickets. “Is everyone supposed to get one of these?”

“What?” Bethany said, torn between what more I might say and the demands of the busy registration desk.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “Mary and I are meeting at nine-thirty to discuss the situation. You go help Stanley. I’ve got an exhibit hall to open before then.”

“What?” Bethany said again. “Oh, okay.”

And with that I left her there, moving out from behind the registration desk and into the open foyer of the ballroom. As I passed through to the escalator that would take me to the lower level exhibit hall, I accidently caught Jeff Hatchler’s eye at the other end of the desk. Like Bethany, he was there to guide the redcoats and pitch in when necessary, but he seemed to have found a brief lull in the blizzard. With some heavy flurries continuing to fall all around him, he was just standing there with his arms crossed on his chest, a sea captain smugly satisfied with the exertions of his sailors.

Seeing me, he nodded and winked.

I kept moving.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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What Really Matters by John Pepper

I got more out of this book than I thought I would. It was another one of those books sent to me unsolicited, suspecting that I might want to hire John Pepper to speak at one of the conferences my association hosts. Unlike Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream, What Really Matters was not signed or otherwise inscribed by the author, so I’ve lost track of when I might have received it and how long it’s been sitting on my to-read shelf.

John Pepper, if you don’t know, is a former president, CEO, and chairman of Proctor & Gamble, just about the largest consumer products company in the world, and frequently one of those “best in class” companies written about in business books. Pepper’s book title is intentionally provocative, and here’s the paragraph in his preface that explains why he chose it.

My intention is to share certain principles and insights based on what really matters -- on what, over the course of a career of more than forty years, I have come to believe is essential to the development of enduring brands, to the meaningful growth of organizations of all kinds, and to individual careers. This book isn’t meant to be studied academically or read passively. Instead, I want to make a difference in your understanding of what leads to success, both personally and professionally. Most important, I want to underscore the responsibility each of us has to help shape the success and character of the institutions to which we belong. Under the right conditions and the proper leadership, I have witnessed countless acts of heroism and sacrifice that have profoundly affected the success of companies and the quality of life of customers, employees and communities. These acts were seldom the result of grand financial gambits of the kind you read about in the paper, but rather were carried out by ordinary people with vision, courage, and resolve working individually and together.

I was at first skeptical that Pepper’s corporate brand focus would carry many lessons for me -- the executive of a non-profit trade association -- but I think I was wrong about that. As I read, I stumbled into more parallels than I would have imagined. Here’s a not-so-quick summary of those lessons.

Work/Life Balance

Here’s a quick one, right out of the book’s preface.

By reading this book I hope you will learn, as I have, that a deep and sincere interest not only in the men and women working in your organization, but also in their families, makes a special contribution to the building of community and to feelings of loyalty and ownership among employees. Try as any company might, there are no simple and clean divisions between personal and work lives, and it is impossible for people to pretend they live in two entirely separate worlds. Because we always wanted whole people working at P&G, we extended our social range beyond employees to family members, and welcomed those who wished to participate in this larger community.

It’s refreshing to see this idea stated so simply and obviously. People have both personal and professional lives, and the best and most satisfied people are those who don’t have to pretend one doesn’t exist while they’re operating in the other. For your benefit, and the benefit of your employees, let’s all stop pretending as if there is anything that needs “balancing”.

Brand-Building Success Factors

Five factors are critical to any company’s ability to create leadership brands and keep them young year after year, decade after decade. Only when all of these factors are present -- not three or four, but all of them -- will companies be able to create and build these important and profitable leadership brands.

When Pepper talks about brands he’s talking about things like Ivory soap, Tide laundry detergent, and Bounce fabric softener. In a company like P&G, these brands are essentially business units of their own, each with its own “president,” and a team of people responsible for the R&D, production, marketing, and sales of the brand. As I said earlier, I was at first skeptical that this environment would have any parallels to mine, but as I read I quickly saw the advantages associated with adopting more of a “brand mindset” for the various programs and services my association runs.

Let’s take a look at Pepper’s five brand-building success factors and see what lessons each may have for us.

1. A Passion for Providing New Benefits to Customers

Two motivations drive the passion of successful corporate leaders: to improve the lives of consumers through company brands, and, by doing so, to help their businesses continue to lead and grow. P&G in particular operates with the mindset that its growth depends on both its ability to create brands with new benefits and its proficiency in establishing whole new businesses capable of growing over time. This is what disposable diapers and fabric softeners did when they were introduced years ago. It is what Febreze and Swiffer are doing today. This commitment to provide benefits never before available and to build businesses that didn’t exist is not the province of any one person or position; instead it must be present at every level, from the CEO to the women and men who take the brands to consumers in the most remote areas of the world.

This may be the most critical and the most difficult lesson for associations to learn. Every new program or service we launch, or every new enhancement we make to each existing program or service, should improve the lives of our “consumers”, and at the same time should be built on a business platform that is capable of growing over time. If we can successfully do that, we build both the essential connections that we need to our members, and we enable the sustainability that we need to keep those connections functioning over time. Way easier said than done.

2. A Commitment to Understand Consumer Needs

Proctor & Gamble was the first company to conduct broad-based, reliable consumer research. The endeavor started in 1924 as market researchers fanned out across the United States, calling on consumers in their homes. A commitment to effective consumer research has been a P&G tradition ever since. When its leaders have failed to honor this commitment, perhaps through undue focus on speed or a cavalier assumption that they know more than consumers, the business has suffered predictably.

This one associations are better at, but that phrase “perhaps through undue focus on speed” really hits home. Too often, associations are encouraged to act more like for-profit businesses, and that is often interpreted to mean that they need to move more quickly. I try to be a vocal advocate for the opposite, that an association’s slower pace is one of its strengths, not weaknesses, but only when it uses that slower pace to do things like what Pepper is advocating in this paragraph. Understanding what members need is something we can best learn from the members themselves.

3. An Ability to Create Winning Strategies and Business Models

What constitutes a winning strategy and business model will vary by brand and by category. The models also may change within brands as consumer needs and preferences evolve and new technologies emerge. Still, a winning brand strategy and business model are invariably built on the following three elements: (1) Providing consumers with a product of superior performance that addressed a very important need. … (2) Communicating these benefits to consumers through distinctive and compelling marketing. … (3) A product price that provides superior value for consumers and adequate financial returns for the company.

This one feels like it overlaps with Pepper’s first point, and suffers from my most dreaded attribute of business books. Here’s a list of five things. Now, the third thing is actually made up of three things. And that second thing, we’ll that’s actually got four parts to it. I exaggerate, but you get my point. Still, this is pretty solid advice for associations, with of course the recognition that the “product price” in question is often the dues that a member pays to the association, and through which all or many services are delivered.

4. An Ability to Develop Technologies Internally and Externally

Proctor & Gamble is perhaps engaged in work across more technologies than any other consumer goods company in the world. From surfactants to polymers, from nitrates to nutritionals, from bone-building elements to flavors and fragrances, P&G has improved a product in one part of the business by using breakthrough technology originally developed in another part of the business.

Pepper will go on to cite several examples (e.g., the ability to control calcium to achieve superior cleaning in its laundry detergent led to technologies controlling bone mineral resorption in their osteoporosis-fighting drug), and they are all dependent on a very literal understanding of the word “technology”. For associations, I would recommend a looser definition, one that includes business practices, marketing tactics, and engagement strategies. Any large or decentralized association is clearly doing things in one part of the business that other parts of the business could benefit from. Finding ways to foster and accelerate a cross-fertilization of ideas is probably one of the most important tasks of the association leadership.

5. The Role of the “Champion” Corporate Leader

Brand-building successes are often described as if they were destined to happen, but of course, they were not. They occurred only because of the insight of individuals who were unrelenting in pursuing their visions for a great business. They happened because someone saw a way to bring forth and innovation to satisfy customers or gain stronger support from trade customers. They happened because people were determined and able to gain a big edge over the competition.

Here, Pepper will go on to cite several examples of people in his organization who made success happen because of their conviction, courage, and persistence. And, I think, it is the same in associations -- perhaps more so. I regularly preach to my employees the value of personal initiative and persistence. Most of the things we’re trying to do as an association are hard, and new programs can easily get squashed for lack of attention, definition, or promotion. The role of the individual program manager -- what Pepper might call the brand manager -- is critical in this competitive environment. People who believe in their programs, and fight aggressively for them, frequently have the best program outcomes and separate themselves from the apathy and ease that might otherwise surround them.

Making Decisions Based on Principle

Pepper spends a lot of time in this book talking about principles, and the importance of letting them guide your business decisions.

It will always be the tough decisions that require us to choose between short-term expediency and long-term goals, and that determine whether our commitment to do the right thing is merely a nice-sounding pledge, or something we live by no matter what. Consistently making decisions based on principle is not always easy. A few lofty words in a book can make it sound simple and commonplace, but it is not. Ed Harness at P&G confronted this reality head on: “Hardly a day passes when each of us doesn’t have the occasion to make a decision, large or small, involving a choice between the expedient and the principled. Making a hard decision, the decision based on principle, usually seems to involve a short-term sacrifice on the part of the Company. Our history clearly demonstrates that we’ve gotten where we are through consistency in making our decisions as a matter of principle. This Company must continue operating on the principle of what it believes is right rather than what will make everyone happy next week.”

The fact that Ed speaks of a capital “C” company might give you a clue as to where he’s coming from. More important to me, however, was the realization about this time in the narrative that “making decisions based on principles” was an abstract principle in and of itself. The rubber only hit the road when you took time to define what those principles are. And that, although Pepper had not specifically pointed it out, based on his running commentary, it seemed the only principle that made sense in Ed’s context was the one that said “we will always do what it in the interests of long-term growth and profitability.”

Here’s an example that Pepper himself provides.

Just ask Jorge Montoya, former president of our Latin American business in 1985. It was a difficult period. The business was fragile, making less than half-a-billion dollars in annual sales and virtually no profit. Montoya arrived in Mexico to learn that P&G’s major account, representing 30 percent of our business, was literally boycotting every P&G brand. Why? One of the buyers had asked the company to give him a new car, and Jorge had said “No way!” It took three months to get past the boycott, during which the company lost money. Finally a friend told the buyer that P&G just wouldn’t change its policy, and the boycott was withdrawn.

In other words, an expedient decision that keeps people happy may be to succumb to the extortion threats of your buyers, while a principled decision that aligns with what the Company thinks is right may be to resist extortion and treat all buyers fairly and equally. In the first case, the problem is resolved in the short-term, but a deeper, more systemic problem is created when other buyers realize you can be extorted. In the second, a lot of short-term pain occurs, but when all the buyers realize you will treat them fairly, they are more likely to do business with you and to support your long-term growth.

All that makes sense. But all of that is squarely in the domain of stakeholders with the ability to threaten the long-term growth of the company. What happens when the choice deals with stakeholders that have no such power -- low-level employees, for example, or maybe the environment. The expedient decision that keeps people happy would seem a lot more appealing if the downside only threatens other people’s livelihoods. Something other than “making decisions based on principles” is going to be needed for a company to successfully navigate those waters.

It Starts With Consumers

This one probably resonates with my association-based perspective the strongest.

We must be intimate with consumers. We cannot merely consider them some aggregate compilation of statistics or demographics -- instead, we must put ourselves in their shoes and their mindset, respecting and liking them as individuals. The day we stop thinking about consumers as living, feeling individuals, and the day we stop caring about what we can do to make their lives better through the brands we create and the information we provide, will be the day we stop helping our institutions be the best they can be.

Read that paragraph again with the following word substitutions. Replace “consumers” with “members.” Replace “brands” with “programs.” Replace “institutions” with “associations.”

Yup. That.

"Liking then as individuals" is a critically-important piece of this spot-on advice. Association staff must like the members of their association as individuals if the association is going to be a successful association. Someone besides me should write an entire book on the importance of that single fact.

Key Leadership Skill Behaviors

Finally, I found this chart compelling.

As I read it through, I found myself asking how many of these bullets routinely get lost in the shuffle? Answer: Too many. And therefore, how do I give them more focus? One idea I plan to act on is to pin it up on my bulletin board in my office, and make it a kind of daily devotional.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 43 (DRAFT)

I got out of there as quickly and as discreetly as I could. I wanted to avoid any possibly incriminating conversations with the other board members, but found that, on the walk back to the convention hotel, I couldn’t avoid such a conversation with myself.

What the hell had I just done? I had told Mary what had happened, but what else? Anything? Was I any closer to dealing with the issue that Wes Howard and Amy Crawford had created for us? No, I wasn’t. In fact, it felt like I was farther away than I had been before. Previously, I hadn’t known what I was supposed to do, but was free to act in any manner that I saw fit. Now I had passed the buck to Mary, and would have to wait until at least nine-thirty before I could take any action, and then it would have to be whatever Mary determined for me. Was that what I was looking for when I marched myself over to Eleanor’s hotel? To remove any responsibility that I might have for solving the problem?

That thought stopped me dead in my tracks, Gerald’s condescending voice ringing in the ears of my recently remembered past.

Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that?

No, Gerald. I guess I don’t. Up there in the heights of Eleanor’s seventy-five dollar breakfast and seventy-five hundred dollar view, the idea that this was my problem to solve had completely slipped my mind.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Invisible Bridge by Rick Perlstein

I can only assume that the title comes from the quote shown on the book’s first page. It’s attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, and described as advice he gave to Richard Nixon.

If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

Imaginary. Invisible. Guess that one must have been changed by the editors. Either way, the point is the same -- and it is a wonderful metaphor for this book’s main protagonist and the political divide he helped create.

That protagonist is Ronald Reagan, and the political divide he would come to straddle was first spiked by Barry Goldwater in Perlstein’s first book Before the Storm, and then split open by Richard Nixon in Perlstein’s second Nixonland. In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein will help us understand how Reagan first leveraged and then would come to represent the essential divide of American politics -- the one between liberals and conservatives, the one that still drives so much of our rhetoric today.

A Polarity of Opinion

As usual, Perlstein’s preface provides a helpful frame that will help you understand his subsequent 800 pages.

Before Reagan had served a single day in any political office, a polarity of opinion was set -- and it endured forevermore. One one side: those who saw him as a rescuer, hero, redeemer. … On the other side: those who found Reagan a phony, a fraud, or a toady.

But this divide is not really about Reagan the man, as evidenced by the reaction Perlstein got from a “Reagan-hating” friend when he asked her to review his manuscript. She refused, admitting that she could not think straight about Reagan for her rage.

Her beef, and that of millions of others, was simple: that all that turbulence in the 1960s and ‘70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world -- to grow up -- but Reagan’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud. Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment, the sweeping eighteenth-century intellectual-cum-political movement that saw all settled conceptions of society thrown up in the air, which introduced radical new notions of liberty and dignity, dethroned God, and made human reason the new measure of moral worth -- a little like the 1960s and ‘70s -- as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” For these citizens what Reagan achieved foreclosed that imperative: that Americans might learn to question leaders ruthlessly, throw aside the silly notion that American power was always innocent, and think like grown-ups. They had been proposing a new definition of patriotism, one built upon questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms. Then along came Ronald Reagan, encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.

This, pointedly, is the part that is not about Reagan, but about the larger dichotomous current of American life that he represented. When confronted with evidence of our own failing, two different sets of Americans react in two different ways. One wants to push through the ugliness and repair the damage that has been done. The other wants to ignore the ugliness and return to the days when such things weren’t talked about. Perlstein’s friend was in the first camp. Ronald Reagan was in the second.

The Protective Bubble of Propaganda

Again and again throughout Perlstein’s narrative we see these forces acting in opposition to one another. And the most compelling are when people in one camp are rudely confronted by the viewpoints of those in the other, often leaving them, and the reader, somewhat shellshocked by the clash.

Case in point is the effort during the peace talks that would eventually end the Vietnam War, when American housewives, somewhat as part of a political publicity stunt, worked honestly and diligently to secure the release of the prisoner-of-war husbands.

On Christmas Eve, three airliners leased by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot lifted off. One, christened “The Spirit of Christmas,” bore fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four of their children to demand a meeting with Communist negotiators in Paris. The others, christened “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men,” tried to deliver thirty tons of Christmas dinners, holiday gifts, clothing, and medical supplies directly to the prisoners in Hanoi.

But, outside the protective bubble of propaganda, the women were in for a rude awakening, which Perlstein conveys in a parenthetical comment..

(In Paris, the wives were lectured on truths stern-faced North Vietnamese diplomats considered self-evident: that the way to free their husbands was to prevail upon their government to stop the futile and sadistic terror bombing of North Vietnam, for which there was no sanction in international law. A wife asked: “What should I tell my son, age nine, when he asks where is my father and when is he coming home?” An apparatchik responded: “Tell him his father is a murderer of North Vietnamese children and that he is being punished.” The wives emerged too shattered to speak to the press.)

It’s not my intent to take sides here, to claim that one perception (that of American POWs as heroes) or the other (that they are murderers) is the correct one. I’m merely pointing out that the perceptual divide here exists -- and that like many of the political fights that swallow our ability to make progress, the divide is deep and unbridgeable (by spans visible or invisible).

But there is propaganda here, and propaganda is often comprised of lies of the simplest construction. To use Khrushchev’s phrasing, they are the imaginary bridges that politicians build over the imaginary rivers of their supporters.

As one immediate example -- and an example of the kind of revelations that come from reading Perlstein’s well-researched text -- is the issue of how many American prisoners of war were held after the war by the North Vietnamese.

Operation Homecoming had returned 587 American prisoners of war -- but for years Nixon had referred to 1,600 Americans being held in North Vietnam. That number folded in more than one thousand personnel, mostly pilots, who crashed in the dense Vietnamese brush and in previous wars would have been classed as “Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered” -- but had been reclassified as “MIA” so the president could make the North Vietnamese look bad for his Paris negotiations. Now the families of those other 1,013 were making insistent noises: what was the government going to do about them?

It was a lie, like many on the political right, that would take on a life of its own.

[U.S. Representative] Clem Zablocki, meanwhile, opened hearings on the Vietnam “Missing in Action” issue. The point was to debunk a spreading fantasy. It failed. That 1,300 men were still counted as MIA was just an artifact of misleading statistics, he said: from the testimony both of the returnees and of the North Vietnamese, we know “there are no missing in action or prisoners of war in Southeast Asia at this time that they believe are alive.” Which only meant, to many POW-MIA families whom the White House had politically organized for cynical reasons in the first place, that Congress was part of the cover-up. “Why are you willing to believe the enemy on this subject when they do not tell the truth on any other subject?” the Corpus Christi, Texas, chapter of the National League of Families soon raged in a letter to the Pentagon. “The fact is, you have no proof our men are dead.”

Like the lie of welfare cheats described in Before the Storm, and like the lie of forced busing described in Nixonland, this seems to be another one of those political lies that spawned a movement -- years, if not decades, of angst, agitation, and activity focused on bringing home men who would have otherwise been assumed dead. All but for the carefully placed words of a conservative icon with a particular axe to grind.

Political Lies

And if I can take an aside inside of an aside, I found here in Perlstein’s text what might be the first appearance of what I consider the biggest political lie of them all. In a bitter re-election fight while in the California governor’s mansion, Reagan was caught talking out of both sides of his mouth regarding an economic stimulus plan.

It was true that his statistics did not add up. In fact they contradicted each other -- a circumstance he dispatched with the casual blitheness that drove his opponents insane. They claimed his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in new revenue over the next decade and a half. But at that, he also stated that the plan’s intention was to give the state less money to spend.

Did you catch it? The great lie? It’s this: Tax cuts create more tax revenue to the government because of the stimulus effect they have on the economy. Reagan would play that phony card again and again during his political career, and because he did, now there are legions who believe it as gospel.

Want another? How about this classic chestnut?

“The proposition had the surface appeal of the politicians’ favorite, but false homily,” the [Milwaukee] Journal patiently explained, “that says government should ‘live within its income’ like everyone else.”

I mean, my household has a checkbook, right? I can’t very well spend money unless there’s money in my checking account. Right?

Wrong.

“Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic. To say the resources of a sovereign government shall be chained forever after to whatever the tax laws happen to yield at a given moment in the past is dangerous nonsense.” A government, they said, was a vehicle for sorting out human priorities. “Reagan’s demagogic ploy would have gone at them all backward, by starting with an arbitrary, pre-fixed revenue ceiling regardless of what had to be done and who would get hurt. And it’s always the poor who get stuck worst under that kind of tax philosophy.”

Exactly.

And in a broad sense, it is important to note that, while these lies were first being told, there were many who saw the truth of what was happening. Let’s go back, for a moment, to the Republican veneration of the POWs and those “MIA.”

That same day, the Yale psychology professor Robert J. Lifton, who a decade and a half earlier had helped explain how Communist captors had “brainwashed” American POWs during the Korea War, argued in the New York Times that it was the American people who now were being brainwashed -- in the very act of sanctifying men whose job was “saturation bombing of civilian areas with minimal military targets,” but who were now held up as vessels of “pure virtue,” propaganda tools for the “official mythology of peace with honor,” in order to prevent the possibility of “extracting from this war its one potential benefit: political and ethical illumination arising from hard appraisals of what we did and why we did it.”

And there it is again -- that desire to make the conflict mean something, to finally pass through it and into something more noble and life-affirming. To avoid the simpler retreat into the illusionary grandeur of what once was.

Ronald Wilson Reagan

Into this breach steps Ronald Wilson Reagan. A man Perlstein aptly describes as…

...an athlete of the imagination, a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Transforming his life, first in his own and then in others’ eyes, into a model of frictionless ease -- and fashioning the world outside him into a stage on which to display it -- was how he managed to fly.

It is Reagan’s drive towards simplicity and stout-hearted certainty, not just in rhetorical framing, but in how he interpreted reality, that has had such dangerous consequences for our republic. Living today, almost forty years after Reagan’s first election as president, we still see these consequences on display, enshrined in the Republican party and the minds of those who support it. Not everyone sees the danger today, but then, in the 1970s, even then there were those who were able to see it for what it was.

During the beginnings of the Watergate scandal, for example, Reagan had a hard time understanding what it was that the burglars had done wrong.

The marquee editorialists granted Nixon the benefit of the doubt. … [J]ust about every commentator and official of any significance united in a new consensus: Watergate was something historically awful -- and the men responsible, whoever they turned out to be, were louts.

Everyone, that is, except Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of California.

He offered his thoughts after greeting a group of high school visitors in his Sacramento reception room. … It all was part of the usual “atmosphere of campaigning,” where pranks were just part of the game. “They did something that was stupid and foolish and was criminal” -- then corrected himself: “It was illegal. Illegal is a better word than criminal because I think criminal has a different connotation.” He said, “The tragedy of this is that men who are not criminals at heart” had to suffer. It saddened him “that now there is going to have to be punishment.”

Sorry, can’t resist my own editorial comment here. “Men who are not criminals at heart.” As if such a thing could be honestly said about political hacks of whatever stripe. But, fortunately, for this Reagan was roundly ridiculed in the press.

NBC’s John Chancellor smirked, “Reagan, who talks a lot about ‘law and order,’ described the burglars as ‘well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the president.’” Tom Wicker [of The New York Times] used Reagan, “that exponent of law and order,” as Exhibit A in a sermon about what happens in a world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until “‘we’ crack down on ‘them,’ occasionally adopting their tactics.”

Ronald Reagan divided the world into good guys and bad guys. Richard Nixon and his team were good guys. So they could not have done evil at all.

But like many of his acolytes today, being scolded in the press didn’t seem to affect Reagan’s affection for simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Indeed, any lie told in service of the “good guys” was just one more “truth” that Reagan would be responsible for creating.

Before becoming a politician, of course, Reagan was an actor, famous mostly for the bit parts he played under several studio contracts. His break really came not from the movies (Bedtime for Bonzo be damned), but when he began lending his familiar face to political causes, first on behalf of democratic candidates.

“This is Ronald Reagan speaking to you from Hollywood. You know me as a motion picture actor. But tonight I’m just a citizen, pretty concerned about the election next month, and more than a little impatient about those promises the Republicans made before they got control of Congress a couple of years ago.”

He went on to flog the Standard Oil Company for reporting a “net profit of $210 million, after taxes, for the first half of ‘48 -- an increase of seventy percent in one year”: proof, he said, that Republicans were lying in their central election claim: the claim that the postwar epidemic of inflation had been caused by higher wages -- not “bigger and bigger profits.”

This was boilerplate liberalism, circa 1948. What was extraordinary was the way he found to illustrate the argument. Noting “an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day,” he introduced America to one Smith L. Carpenter, who “retired some years ago thinking he had enough money saved so that he could live out his last years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation which ate up all his savings. So he’s gone back to work.” He paused for ironic effect: “The reason this is news is Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old.”

Here was that soon-to-become trademark skill: illustrating abstract questions of public policy with true heart-tugging stories from genuine folks. Or rather, apparently true. Generations later, when a wondrous technology would let the complete contents of dozens of newspapers be searched in less than a second, the fact could be told. And that fact is that none of these dozens of newspapers ran any Associated Press dispatch about someone named “Smith L. Carpenter,” nor anyone else who went to work when he was ninety-one years old because inflation ate up his savings.

What troubles me most about this strategy, I think, is not so much that it is a lie. Lies are pretty common in politics. This lie, however, is a lie in service of an ideology -- one that, evidently, can’t be effectively communicated without lies. Framing stories are one things. But making up facts like this has created a slippery slope that our politics today is still trying to fight its way back up.

But that’s only the first step -- making up facts that support your ideological position. The next step, and the more insidious one, also mastered by Ronald Reagan, is framing your made-up facts not in the complex reality that surrounds us, but on an overly-simplified moral foundation.

He framed economy measures, where he achieved them, not just as cost savings, but as shimmering moral advances -- for instance his success paring the budget of the state’s mental health system. It was, his budget aides suggested, one area where a 10 percent reduction could easily be realized -- given that the number of mental patients was already plummeting due to new medical advances like tranquilizing drugs. First in 1967, and then again in 1972, thousands of positions were eliminated from the state’s Department of Mental Hygiene. He called that in a 1972 speech a “new approach to the treatment of the mentally ill that has reduced the number of patients sentenced to a hopeless life in our asylums from 16,500 to 7,000”; and who could object to that? Harried, baffled psychiatrists, it turned out, one of whom later recollected how “Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California,” and hospital staffs were required to turn away the most broken people imaginable: “Back to violent alcoholic families. Back to angry spouses … to rag-filled grocery carts … to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-crazed friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates.” The apparent earlier, salutary decline in mental patients requiring hospitalization, it turned out, had been a mirage -- because the ones who were left were the ones unresponsive to the new procedures, and had always required by far the most care. The hospitals themselves had always been understaffed in the first place. The reductions were a plain and simple nightmare. And yet Reagan proved able to blithely deny a problem existed. When a visiting expert from Sweden called a ward in Sonoma County the worst he had seen in several countries, the governor accused the staff there of having “rigged” the poor conditions to sabotage his planned cutbacks. “We lead the nation in the quality of our mental patient care,” he simply said, “and we will keep that lead.”

None of it is true -- but because the narrative it supports is a moral one, then all of it must be true, and any evidence to the contrary is part of a subversive plot to undermine our moral advances. See how wonderfully circular that is?

And the glimpses inside the Reagan family life are just as twisted and phony. Throughout Perlstein’s narrative, occasionally one of the Reagan children will speak up, revealing with a transcendent knowing what it must have been like growing up in that house. Here, for example, is something from Patti Davis.

“I had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world,” she wrote in a memoir. “Under our family’s definition of ‘loyalty,’ the public should never see that under a carefully preserved surface was a group of people who knew how to inflict wounds, and then convincingly say those wounds never existed.”

So there are lies of political calculation. But then there are also the lies that make you think that Reagan really did live in a reality that he was unaware was of his own making.

“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting major-league baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, [who] began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”

And indeed, he had called attention to that, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy, when he told the same story about baseball. In the interim, if anyone had bothered to point out to him that there was no line in the official baseball guide asserting that “baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” or had pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 and the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947, the intervention clearly didn’t take. He was still telling the story in the White House nine years later.

Blithe Optimism in the Face of Chaos

It’s important to remember that Perlstein’s book largely details Reagan’s primary fight against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, not Reagan’s eventual election fight against Democrat Jimmy Carter for the 1980 presidential election. This means that many of these lies of political calculation and moral certainty were told to better position Reagan not against the Democrats, but against his fellow Republicans. No matter. After all, they are all just demagogic tools to help acquire and concentrate political power. In that world, everyone that is not the candidate is at least one kind of enemy.

Here’s a quick excerpt from when both Reagan and Ford sparred on the campaign trail in the Lone Star State.

Privation, though, and the president’s insults -- and receptive foot-stomping Texan audiences -- turned out to concentrate Reagan’s mind beautifully. Ford hadn’t even opened his campaign at the Alamo when Reagan claimed he’d seen a transcript of some obscure testimony from the State Department’s negotiator in Panama, Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker, to the Panama Canal Subcommittee of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which Reagan said laid out the administration’s intention to “give away” the canal. He would say that the Panama Canal Zone was “sovereign U.S. territory, every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase.”

He would say it, and the Texas foot-stomping would commence; it was something to behold.

Even though it was not true.

The 1904 treaty granted the United States not sovereignty but “right, power, and authority” there “as if it were the sovereign of the territory,” a crucial distinction: if a baby was born to a foreigner in Alaska or Louisiana, that child would be an American citizen, certainly not the case for Panamanians who gave birth in the Zone.

Tell that, though, to a foot-stomping Texan. You might get stomped upon yourself.

It’s clear from Perlstein’s pacing that he believes all this lying -- against political ally and opponent alike -- is leading to something critical. It isn’t the 1976 presidential election, because in The Invisible Bridge, that rather anticlimactically ends after Reagan’s eventual loss to Ford and Ford’s eventual loss to Carter. Reagan’s brand of facetious optimism would not rule the day in 1976 -- but, of course, if would four years later in 1980. Everyone in the media and in the political establishment would see its transparently false foundation, both in 1976 and in 1980, but the America that Reagan was talking to would change almost irrevocably in those four years. As Perlstein summarizes near the end of his work, in 1976…

America had not yet become Reagan’s America. Not yet. Reagan’s America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism -- the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.

Certainly they had been there in the Bicentennial celebration, when Americans surprised themselves in their simple patriotic joy -- as if Watergate, as if Vietnam, had never even happened; as if the nation’s economy had never in fact been held hostage by Arab oil sheikhs; as if the Church and Pike committees had never revealed the nation’s security agencies as cold-blooded outlaws.

And here is what [journalists] Evans and Novak [who thought Reagan and the Republicans should distance themselves from Watergate and Nixon] had not understood: that Reagan’s refusal to wax morose about Watergate was not an impediment to his political appeal. It was central to his political appeal.

At the beginning of 1973, the editor of Intellectual Digest explained on the Today show what was different about the time when the POWs went off to war and the time when they returned: “For the first time Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”

We’ve come full circle. Perlstein’s angry friend -- who felt that Reagan and all who followed him avoided a needed catharsis of the American experience -- is grinding her axe in much the same way all of Reagan’s political enemies have, be they Democrats or Republicans.

And here was an answer to the Ford aide who was so frustrated that this campaign even had to be fought, even more frustrated that it had become so close. Every time a major distinction emerged between the two candidates, the nub was what kind of nation America was. The Panama Canal issue, for example. Ford’s argument was, fundamentally, that the world’s rules must apply to America as well, that the way America had all but annexed the sovereignty of another nation was an embarrassing and dangerous relic of another time. Reagan’s riposte: the world’s rules did not apply to America at all -- for into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.

These, then, are the seeds of the new conservative movement -- the one that would begin with Reagan and which is still limping along today. And it’s fundamental ground rule?

Don’t doubt. Blithe optimism is the face of what others call chaos had always marked his uniqueness -- at least since, around the time of his tenth birthday, he began mastering the art of turning the chaotic and confusing doubts of his childhood into a simple and stout-hearted certainty. It marked, too, what made others feel so good in his presence -- and what drove still others, those suspicious circles for whom doubt was the soul of civic wisdom, to annoyed bafflement at his success.

Today, we have a word for this phenomenon. In homage to its prophet, we call this kind of confident conservative gospel (and all the lies, to ourselves and to others, on which it is built) Reaganesque.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 42 (DRAFT)

I didn’t know what to do after Gerald’s drubbing down. I mean, I knew what to do next—go find Mary and tell her what happened. That was so obvious that I wasted no time in excusing myself and leaving the three of them behind in the staff office. But in the bigger picture I really didn’t know what to do.

I did know that Gerald shouldn’t have spoken to me the way that he had—that no one should ever speak to their boss that way, especially in front of other staffers. But everyone was so used to Gerald breaking the rules, and what he had said made so much sense, that I hadn’t the gumption or presence of mind to do anything about it. How could I have legitimately called him out? All he did, in his own colorful way, was remind me of my responsibilities—of the things I should have taken care of without being told. If I had tried to reprimand him, to slap him down for speaking out of turn, I’d have looked like an even bigger fool than I already felt. Especially, I knew, in Bethany and Angie’s eyes.

The plain and simple fact was that I was in over my head. As I rode up the elevator to Eleanor’s suite, after running like a scared fool down the street to her hotel, that reality firmly hit home for the first time. I wasn’t cut out for this. I never asked for any of these supervisory responsibilities. They were simply thrust upon me after demonstrating my competence in managerial positions and my willingness to stay with the company. I hadn’t received any training. There was no management school that the company sent promising candidates to. There wasn’t even an orientation session for new supervisors. Just learn by doing, that was more or less the philosophy, and the learning part was optional. Just do. Just perform. Just do what we expect you to do without us ever even telling you what it is.

When the elevator doors opened and I stepped out onto the colorful carpeting of the VIP floor, I still didn’t know what I was going to say. Despite everything I had just experienced, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing or why. Tell Mary what happened. That directive was still imprinted on my brain, but why and what for wasn’t at all clear. As I moved down the hallway, my eyes focused on the space ahead of my shoes, the patterns of color seemed to twist and swirl as I passed by, combining with the early morning fog to make me slightly dizzy. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of Eleanor’s door, room 2600, the Commodore Suite, a ridiculous name, perhaps, for a woman more interested in fresh flowers than the nautical theme that dominated the decor, but apropos of Eleanor’s unrelenting style of command and control.

I raised my hand to knock, but then remembered the glowing button that served as a doorbell—a doorbell, yes, the suite was so large it needed a doorbell. No guarantee that someone standing in the waterfall shower in the marble-tiled third bathroom would even hear my meek little tap-tap-tapping on the door. I raised a finger but stopped, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. The suite’s service door was open—not fully, just barely ajar because someone had turned the metal bar that served as a chain lock outward, preventing the door from closing completely. Through the crack I could see someone moving, most likely, based on the clothes, a hotel employee.

Deciding slipping in the service entrance made more sense for the task I had come to perform, I did exactly that, finding myself in a small kitchen area, surrounded by granite countertops and trading dance steps in the small space with a hostess from the banquets department, someone I had briefly met at the Board’s reception the night before, a woman named Matilda who was in charge of all services in Eleanor’s suite.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

“No,” I said, looking past her and knowing she was too polite to tell me I had come in the wrong door. “I’m not here for the breakfast. I just need to tell Mary something.”

“Mary?” Matilda said.

Also in the kitchen space stood a chef in a white outfit and a tall hat making crepes to order on a small portable grill. On the opposite side of the serving counter a VIP I didn’t recognize stood, plate in hand, and beyond him, out of the suite’s main parlor about thirty other people stood—most of our Board members and a dozen or so of our organization’s major sponsors—gathered in small groups of three or five, champagne mimosas in most hands.

“Sorry,” I said. “Mrs. Walton,” knowing that was how Matilda had most likely been trained to think of her. “Is she here?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Walton was the first guest to arrive.”

I’m sure she was. I spotted her across the room, deep in discussion with Eleanor and Gino Del Monaco, our primary contact with our foremost sponsor. That’s what this VIP breakfast was all about—part thank you for the support offered by our sponsors throughout the year, part venue for negotiating deals for next year.

Matilda handed me an unasked-for mimosa, its bubbly orange color glowing in a gold-rimmed champagne glass. I took it without thinking and stepped out into the suite. The VIP waiting for his crepe gave me a passing glance, but I blew right by him, leaving the smells of fresh ingredients and propane gas behind. Part of me wanted to charge right up to Mary and get it over with, but I knew that wouldn’t fly. Gerald might have convinced me I had to tell Mary what had happened, but no one could convince me it would be wise to tell anyone else at this breakfast reception. I had to first catch Mary’s attention and then get her alone for a few minutes.

I positioned myself in a place I thought Mary could not miss seeing me and then waited for her head to turn the right way. When it did her eyes passed over me with clinical detachment, observing more than seeing, recognizing my presence and, rather than showing surprise, expertly calculating what my uninvited appearance portended and assigning me a prioritized position in the hierarchy of tasks she needed to accomplish at this function. Appropriately categorized, she turned away from me and back towards Gino.

“Good morning.”

It was Paul Webster, the immediate past chair of the Board and the one who had questioned me at the Board meeting yesterday. He had appeared unexpectedly at my elbow and nearly startled me out of my skin. He was wearing the same blue suit he had had on the day before, but now with a bright red tie.

“Hello,” I said to him, keeping my eye on Mary.

“I didn’t think you were invited to this thing.”

Now I turned more fully towards him. His tone had been playful, and his face equally so. He wasn’t so much the enforcer but a co-conspirator. At least he was trying to be.

“I wasn’t,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, and taking my first sip of my mimosa. “I’m just here to tell Mary something.”

“Everything all right?”

My heart skipped a beat, the champagne bubbles seeming to expand painfully in my chest. The last thing I wanted was to tell Paul what was going on. Cursing myself for not being better at small talk, I did everything I could to turn on the charm.

“It’s nothing,” I said casually. “Just a report from our morning staff meeting. How are things here?”

“Scripted,” Paul said bluntly. “Same as they always are.”

“Is that bad?” I asked, knowing that’s just how Mary liked things.

Paul seemed to think about it for a moment or two, slurping an ice cube from his mimosa and rolling it around on his tongue. “No, I guess not,” he said, crunching his molars down on the cube. “Not if we expect to raise the money we need for next year’s programs.”

I largely agreed with him. Getting the corporations who supported our organization to part with their money was one of Mary’s prime functions—and she set-up functions like this at the Annual Conference to best accomplish it. A whole series of seemingly casual but carefully planned interactions would take place at breakfast this morning, and the balance of the day would be taken up with closed door meetings with Mary, Eleanor, and people like Gino. One by one they would meet and determine how much would be offered in the year ahead—how much, what for, and in return for which favors and what recognition. It was all a kind of game, but one with serious consequences. One less commitment, one reduction in the level of support could mean the abandonment of programs and the layoff of the staff that organized them.

“And it looks like Mary is reeling some in right now.”

I smiled politely, desperately wanting to get out of the conversation but unable to come up with a graceful way of doing it. Luckily, I thought, Mary would come to my rescue. In just a few short seconds, her discussion with Gino appeared to come to a cheerful end, she directed Eleanor towards another potential donor, and she made her way across the shag carpet to where Paul and I were standing.

“Good morning,” she said upon arrival, nodding to Paul, but zeroing in on me. “Alan, is something up?”

“Just my morning report,” I said, trying not to be too obvious about cocking my head in Paul’s direction.

“Yes?” she said, trying to play along but clearly not understanding the game.

I looked at Paul.

He got it. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “I think one of our sponsors left a big pile of money under the piano in the other room. Why don’t I go pick it up while the two of you talk business?”

Mary gave him a smile that expressed neither warmth nor humor, and we both watched him go.

“What are you doing here?” Mary asked in a terse whisper as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

I placed my mostly full mimosa on the tray of a passing hostess. “There was another incident with Wes Howard last night.”

I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I hadn’t even thought about how to begin. The words just came out of my mouth.

“What? Where?”

“At some karaoke bar. He was there with a whole bunch of our staff. And…”

My hesitation must have made Mary look suspiciously around the room. My eyes followed hers. No one seemed to be paying any attention to us.

“And?” she said, stepping even closer to me.

“And, Amy Crawford was with him.”

The look that passed over Mary’s face told me that even she had not foreseen such a circumstance. “What is she doing here?”

She. Bitterness towards a vanquished foe, returned unexpectedly to battle.

I told her I didn’t know, that I hadn’t even seen her, that I had recognized her from the maniacal cackle that had risen up from the bowels of the karaoke subbasement.

“What were you doing there?”

It was only then that I told her about the phone call from Caroline, they way Bethany and I had picked her up from the bar, and the things she had and hadn’t said about Wes Howard.

Mary took the information in silence, her head nodding as her calculating accountant’s brain worked on processing it all.

“So,” she said eventually. “Neither you nor Bethany witnessed any of this alleged behavior.”

“Well, no,” I felt forced to confess, “but there must have been a dozen or more other witnesses. Caroline said that most of the junior staff was down there with them.”

“Have you spoken to any of them?”

It was spoken like an accusation. I could practically feel her rhetorical finger poking me in the chest.

“No,” I said meekly. “I thought I should talk to you first.”

Mary nodded, her eyes starting to scan the room again. “Okay,” she said, her attention still out there among the VIPs. “I need to finish a few conversations up here. But we need to talk.” She brought up a wrist and glanced at her Cartier watch. “Where can I meet you at...oh, at nine-thirty?”

I looked at my own Timex watch. Its was six minutes after seven.

“Ummm,” I said, trying to recall the details of the hectic schedule I had on this, the opening day of our Annual Conference. “The staff office?”

“Where is that again?”

I gave her the room location and she nodded. “Okay. We’ll talk then.”

And then she slipped away, her eyes having never fully reconnected with mine. I watched her move purposefully towards a small circle of other people, interject herself into their conversation, and receive a warm welcome and a round of happy handshakes.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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