Ethical Leadership Libguide
'Libguide' is library speak. It's a guide for library resources on a particular topic. This libguide is about ethical, principled, and virtuous leadership.
A warning for the reader: this is a long article! Whether I should apologize, or say “you’re welcome,” I’ll let you decide. I feel strongly in favor of all of these books. This ‘libguide’ (guide for library resources) is intended as a summary of the books I think are essential reading for the choice we American citizens have to make this November. These are the books I like, books that spoke to me and have made a great impression on me, books about characters I believe to be noble because, when tested, they acted from the better parts of themselves to find courage they did not even know they had.
Here, Right Matters: An American Story by , Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired
Lieutenant Colonel Vindman’s story grabbed me from the first word. I listened to the audiobook, which is mostly read by someone called Jacques Roy. Vindman comes on for the epilogue. I only mention who did the narration because the whole audio performance is remarkably well executed. The writing is well enough, the story is compelling enough, to make it worth reading, but as far as audiobooks go, this one is exceptional. I borrowed it from the library to listen in the Libby app; there are 12 chapters, plus the epilogue. I probably listened to a chapter a day, and I’m sure I listened more than once to a few chapters. I savored the parts where he talked about his Brooklyn childhood, as an immigrant—his father and brothers had come from the Soviet Union, Ukrainians whose father had married a Russian and found work in Moscow. Alexander and his brothers were half-Russian on their mother’s side and, after their mother’s death, their father worked for the Soviet state as an engineer until pushed by conscience to get himself and the boys to a place where…well…where right matters. From a material point of view, the Vindmans gave up a relatively comfortable existence in Moscow compared to the poverty they had to endure in Brooklyn. And yet somehow, in Alexander’s narrative, and Jacques Roy’s voice, one hears…not bitterness over what was lost, but rather…amazingly…gratitude. Mr. Vindman (the father) was an engineer in Russia; in America, the language barrier forced him into odd jobs like delivering furniture. It is the kind of tradeoff many of us can hardly imagine, as we, especially Americans, take freedom for granted. For the most part, we are left alone to pursue ambitions and even wealth, fame, and glory. American citizens have recourse to fundamental, inalienable rights enshrined in a constitution, no matter who we are, what religion we practice, and regardless of what political ideology we endorse. Here, as Alexander so succinctly puts it, right does matter—even in the Trump era—indeed, in spite of the Trump era. Yes, in spite of widespread foolishness that led to Trump’s election as president, we are still a nation where right matters. Another striking facet of Vindman’s story (besides the steady moral fiber and the courage of his convictions that he carries from the example his father set) is perhaps not so unique, but still striking, and reassuring: Vindman was one of many career government advisors who had to make a conscious choice everyday that Trump was president. These are the men and women whom Trump and his supporters disdainfully call “the swamp.” And yet swamps are healthy. They are called wetlands and they are vital to the ecosystem. No less vital to the democratic ecosystem of the United States, Vindman and others (like his twin brother, Eugene, also a now-retired career Army officer who is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 7th district) help to maintain a balance that the rest of us take for granted. It is because of “the swamp” that the government was able to still function with a corrupt president at the helm. Trump did have means to undermine the system, and he undermined as much as he could, but because we have such a strong foundation (thanks to the “swamp” of dedicated public servants like the Vindman twins) we have not descended quite so far as we might have. The so-called “deep state” is made up of human beings, mostly invisible, who hold the system up with the work they do everyday. Alexander was trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins in international policy with emphasis on Eastern European and Central Asian studies. That’s how Alexander ended up working at the National Security Council. He begins his tale at the point of crisis—the fateful phone call between President Donald J. Trump and then-newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky, a phone call that Alexander attended in his role with the NSC. What happened on that phone call proves the backward mentality of Trump’s mission to “drain the swamp.” Here was Vindman and the NSC working to maintain an ecosystem, with a commander-in-chief in direct opposition to that, motivated by his schemes to keep himself in power. Above everything else that made an impression on me in Vindman’s story, there is a through line in his philosophy that we have to change and keep changing. If I remember correctly, that’s how he puts it: change, and keep changing. Assess, and assess again. Every situation requires a new assessment, for every turn of the path, make a new map. Vindman is, indeed, drawing his own map as he raises his public profile to advocate for law and justice, democracy and freedom. You can see him (playing himself, of course) on the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which he catches Larry David in a hilarious scheme of city council corruption! Below: an episode of The Daily Beans in which Vindman’s wife,
, was interviewed. As Vindman says in his book, “Rachel is badass.” Vindman does get quite personal in writing about his and Rachel’s life together; their story, full of ups and downs that many couples who have and have lost children can relate to, is inspirational for its own merits, quite apart from the heroism Vindman achieved as a whistleblower.Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade
Barbara McQuade is a lawyer and cohost of the #SistersInLaw podcast. She outlines the all-the-human ways that we humans fall for tricks and deceptions by nefarious actors. McQuade’s thesis centers on how we fall for misinformation online. She looks at universal human psychology, in particular the biases we harbor and our most natural inclinations, to explain how malevolent actors manipulate us. McQuade is a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and a law professor at the University of Michigan’s Law School. She is a legal analyst for MSNBC and a recurring guest on the MSNBC show of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. McQuade’s fellow #SistersInLaw include,
, writer of an excellent substack providing thorough legal analysis for the many court cases now involving the former president.Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning by Liz Cheney
I still shake my head in wonder over the fact that I actually purchased a book by Dick Cheney’s daughter.1 If you’d have told me ten years ago that I would have done that, I’d have outright said, “You are bonkers.” Oh the days of innocence! Fast forward beyond the Trump presidency and the Attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Liz Cheney did what so few people muster the courage to do: she looked at the demons on her own side of the aisle. That’s the equivalent of looking at the corruption in your own house, a real “Michael Jackson-Man in the Mirror” experience. No one wants to have to do this. It takes courage. It involves risk that is abhorrent to our sensibilities. And yet, sometimes, it is exactly what we are called to do if we are to remain tethered to fundamental decency. Cheney tells the story of the perils in her path as she continues to stand up for democracy against the clear and present threat posed by the GOP.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by
This is Mary Trump’s first book. She has a new one out, and I read that one recently too.2 For the first book, she donned her psychologist hat (well-earned, as a doctor of psychology) in unpacking the dysfunctional saga of her own family. Largely reliant on stories from her aunt, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, and her mother, Linda Clapp Trump, she also incorporates her own memories to weave a very convincing narrative about something epidemic in American families—an overvaluation for self-aggrandizement and material wealth at the expense of more meaningful things, like compassion and understanding. She looks specifically at the question we all have—what went so badly wrong in her notorious uncle, the 45th president of the United States? Mary roots her uncle’s outrageous behavior to his early childhood, when his parents allowed, and in the case of the father even encouraged him to do whatever he wanted—regardless of others. The mother’s appeasement (because she could not control him) and the father’s indulgence (because he wanted a rich and famous and all-powerful son) created a monster who just kept getting whatever he wanted and never had to face consequences. Donald, in Mary’s analysis, is a tragic figure, as monsters tend to be, because people who “get whatever they want” never really get what they need. Totally enabled by his father from boyhood and then by investors in his adulthood—investors eager to use the Trump brand for their own gains—Donald Trump wielded a great deal of harm first in his own family, then the business world, and finally as the leader of the free world. What struck me almost above all was the contrast between Donald and Mary’s father, Freddy Trump Jr. While Donald was indulged, Freddy was dismissed, thrown aside, and finally cast in the shadows as the irrelevant son. While Donald was rewarded for bad behavior, Freddy was held in contempt for behaving in ways that many of us would think highly commendable—for, in general, kindness and friendliness toward others, and he had a sense of personal responsibility and he felt remorse when he did wrong. While Donald judges people as “winners and losers” based on what they’ve been able to achieve and get in life, Freddy, the kind of person Donald Trump’s followers view as a loser, seemed to have acquired a deeper sense of meaning in life. For all his troubles, and for all that he did not always defeat his demons, it is nevertheless Freddy whom I’d rather have as a friend (or father, for that matter) than his famous brother. I saw a lot of familiar dynamics in the saga of the Trumps. I think the dysfunction in that family might be more common than we might like to admit.
Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump by Peter Strzok
A lot of people got to know Peter Strzok (sounds like Struck, the z is silent) during the Mueller Investigation, when he was exploited due to some text messages he had exchanged with an attorney who was also working for Special Counsel Mueller and with whom Peter was having an extramarital affair. Apparently, he was scapegoated as some kind of poster child for inner-deep-state bias toward Hillary Rodham Clinton He had to testify before Congress and it got ugly as Republican inquisitors sought to prove their worth to the MAGA base on TV. (The whole thing was the worst kind of soap opera, where most of the characters were not even remotely likeable.) All of that happened during a time in which I was politically disengaged to focus on my mental health. I became aware of Peter Strzok muck later, after he became cohost of the “Cleanup on Aisle 45” podcast. I think my ignorance of the soap opera actually aided my ability to grasp the warnings in his book without preconceived notions. I took in his story as we do for a person we meet for the first time, about whom we know nothing in advance—or at least without any sort of prejudice that precludes the benefit of the doubt. Not knowing anything about Peter Strzok until I listened to him tell me himself about his own life, all the stuff he had done, and what he had learned from all of it, I just took it all in at face value. I also appreciated his overall narrative strategy—switching between distant past and recent past in alternating chapters. By doing this, he cleverly connected the dots between the Trump presidency and events that were precursory to it, which he had been part of investigating in his long career at the FBI. My most important takeaway from Strzok’s story is that Russian misinformation runs deep in the history of American politics and, sadly, the Cold War never truly ended. Strzok doesn’t “dish” on anyone. He doesn’t go in too much about his private life; he avoids adding to the embarrassment that he acknowledges in the introduction his family has already had to endure. (I thought it was cool the way his wife defended him, not for the affair, but for his integrity as an agent: “You deserve to be divorced, but you don’t deserve to be fired,” he quotes her saying to him. And I also think it’s awesome that, what he deserves aside, she apparently has not divorced him. An affair is a mistake; nevertheless it is absolutely forgivable in a case where there is real love and remorse.) He does talk about his childhood at the beginning of the book, describing formative years in Tehran just prior to the Iranian Revolution, and in West Africa, where his father was an Army Corps of Engineers officer. I don’t have the words for this, but he left no doubt in my mind as to the profound impact these early impressions made on his later-life path.
The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe
Just like with Peter Strzok, my encounter with Andrew McCabe’s story came without preconceived notions. To me at the outset, McCabe was just the cohost of the “Jack” podcast (covering all things special counsel Jack Smith) and the rest was left open to be filled by him. As with Vindman, and Strzok, and Liz Cheney, and James Comey, McCabe was yet another member of the “D.C. swamp”—one of many pejoratives deployed by Trump, like “deep state.” McCabe was the number two under Comey at the FBI, and when Comey was fired, he was left in charge. Although McCabe, Strzok, and Comey all lived through overlapping events, the narratives do not repeat. The fact that “we know what happens” at “the end” doesn’t render tedious any of their accounts because each has such a unique voice, style, and form of expertise to offer. McCabe’s peculiar approach is to emphasize, in a word, procedure. As a retired FBI agent, he does not have access to his FD 302—the form that summarizes his application and interview with the FBI—but given his full career with the Bureau, it is not surprising how well he imagines the form and style of it. Every agent entering the Bureau goes through the same process, he says. His imagined account of his own 302 serves here as his biography; this is how I was introduced to McCabe, by McCabe. He spoon feeds the reader/listener with a requisite dose of the bureaucratic process, meant to show us in literal terms the nature of the system that nurtured him, guided him, and shaped him. McCabe engrosses us in the Bureau, from training at Quantico, to his intense field work, when he was still wet behind the ears at Ground Zero on 9/11, and so on up the chain to Deputy/Acting Director. True to his training, his number-one aim from the top was to keep the FBI on course. He had to just…keep doing his job, and guide the Bureau to do the same. The FBI has a long history of operating independently from the executive branch. Even under the bizarre leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, whose name adorns the FBI headquarters in D.C., this prevailing attitude was sacrosanct. Fast forward to 2017: McCabe, desperate to do his duty and maintain business as usual, had to navigate an oppressive level of interference from the White House. In his telling, Trump was obsessed with being assured of McCabe’s loyalty—and just as he had done with Comey, Trump relentlessly pursued such assurance from McCabe. It is lived history, so of course, as we begin the book, we know what happens. The whole book is eight chapters, and like Strzok, McCabe alternates between pre-Trump career and during-Trump chaos. It’s not how things end up, but rather the lessons in the middle that give the story its juice. McCabe’s story shows us what it is like to be on the receiving end of bully tactics. Even if we’ve been there, so to speak (and, believe me, I have, in my own way) it’s quite another thing to be bullied in the way that McCabe was—to be publicly tormented and harassed by the President of the United States! There are others who can relate to McCabe’s ordeal, that’s for sure, and each has their own story to tell. There is, however, a beautiful innocence underpinning McCabe’s story. He strikes me like a prep school American boy who joined the FBI with a genuine wish to serve a noble cause. His chapter on applying to the Bureau and training at Quantico (chapter two) is mind-blowing in itself: how he and his wife were totally in sync about the decision, how supportive she was, in spite of the pay cut he was taking and the adjustments that she had to make in her own way of life. And on that note, what a fine way to segue into the next, and last, but not least book for this libguide…. (continued, below embedded content)
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey
After I listened to the Mueller Report on Audible, Shona Chambers (@shonasbooks) on Instagram suggested that I also check out James Comey’s book. I was profoundly impressed by James Comey’s deep-riding sense of a higher loyalty to truth, law, and justice. I had already a good impression of him at the outset. He is, after all, a tall and impressive figure of a man. Prior to reading his book, he stood in my imagination as the “tall drink of water” who, in July 2016, smoothly strode up to the podium to break FBI precedent in announcing the closure of their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email system. (I did not even know how unprecedented and extraordinary that move was prior to reading his account of the way FBI investigations are usually finalized.) Of course, I knew the whole “controversy” about him—that unprecedented announcement, for one, and, perhaps even more consequentially, his second scandalous break with precedent in announcing the FBI’s need to reopen the investigation less than two weeks out from the election. Even before reading his memoir, I felt a lot of empathy for Comey’s impossible position: damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, is what I genuinely thought long before I read his story in his own words. At the time of those events in 2016, I really felt that he was in between a rock and a hard place, and his story confirms that for me. It seems to me incredibly unfair that some people still blame him for the genesis of the Trump age. It is tempting, by its ease, I suppose, to judge people in binary terms—good, bad, Democrat, Republican—yet I think by his story, James Comey proves that, indeed, he is a man guided by a deeper integrity. Even though the actor Jeff Daniels does not really look the part, I think it was a good casting decision to have Daniels play him in the Netflix drama, The Comey Rule. Daniels just has a knack for playing the archetypal Eagle Scout—the apparently simple but deeply rooted character who, though shaken and tested to the core, unfailingly remains true to what is right. (And, by the way, the brilliant Brendan Gleeson is chilling to the bone in his portrayal of Donald Trump!) Comey’s book, though, gives you something more than what the Netflix drama inspired by it ever could—he gives you his firsthand account of his life that followed a path of learning his lessons, doing better as he knows better, and, this is key, knowing the differences between good and bad leadership. I love the anecdote about his first job as a teenager. From that first boss, he learned a crucial lesson about leading others by respecting their dignity and giving them a chance to learn without having to be publicly scolded. I also appreciate the contrast he reveals in writing about the different presidents he worked for. There was the comical {George W.} Bush style leadership, the Obama style, and the Trump style—all remarkably different—and Comey expresses a clear preference for Obama’s style. For one thing, Obama, the president who hired Comey to be FBI director in 2013, pointedly kept his distance from Comey, and Comey respected that because interference, or even the appearance of it, from the president at the FBI is, in general, highly inappropriate. Yet when Comey did have to confer with Obama, he noted that Obama always joined meetings as an equal and a keen listener. For meetings, Obama never sat behind the Oval Office desk, but preferred to hold meetings with everyone seated in the sofas and chairs—no one person holding a position of intimidation over the rest. In contrast, Trump never met Comey as an equal, but instead always sat behind the Oval Office desk and constantly interrupted people. (McCabe described it as Trump addressing his audience as if they were supplicant school children.) There were even some terrible moments when Trump put Comey in an absurd position, like the infamously inappropriate dinner for two in the White House. Comey explicitly draws a parallel (of styles) between Trump and the Gambino crime family that he learned much about, up close and personal, when working as a young prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York—obsessions with personal loyalty, the leader’s narcissism and an authoritarian style that callously disregards others, no matter how much “loyalty” is exhibited over time. Loyalty, of course, as the title suggests, is the core theme of the book. “I will always tell you the truth,” Comey said to Trump, or something like that, but this is not what Trump wanted to hear. Comey purports that what Trump lacks is some external reference point that would tether him to a sense of unity or oneness with the world outside of himself and his own point of view. In the amusing interview (below) with Stephen Colbert, he explains that and many other points in his book. I liked when he answered Colbert’s question as to why he wrote the book. He wanted to be useful, he said. Quite simply, he thought that the overarching analysis about ethical leadership would be highly useful to the world, especially in years of a very unethical presidency. I think it behooves us to read Comey’s book now, remember what it was like in those years, and ask ourselves whether the Trump presidency is something we can risk letting happen again, or if the Trump age is better left in the dustbin of history.
Normally, I do use the Libby app for audiobooks, and ebooks; however, one day, looking through my Amazon Audible collection, I happened upon Cheney’s audiobook in the list of suggested audio purchases. Seeing that I had a credit to spend, I went for it—an impulse buy, what can I say? I don’t regret it. Liz Cheney has earned her reputation as a national hero.
Mary’s newest book is The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a New Way to Heal. I borrowed the Libby audiobook and finished it in a couple of days. She takes you through the most traumatic moments in U.S. history since the Civil War and argues that we cannot begin to recover and heal as a nation until we face a total reckoning of the crimes of the past.