Surrounded On All Sides – Five Lessons In Leadership From History

The 2013 Sydney Institute Dinner lecture was given by Dr Amanda Foreman, award-winning historian and international best-selling author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1998 Whitbread Prize for Biography) and A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire has been developed into a television documentary, a radio play starring Dame Judi Dench, and the Oscar-winning film The Duchess starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes. A World on Fire has also been optioned by BBC Worldwide. Dr Foreman was introduced by NSW Premier The Hon Barry O’Farrell and the vote of thanks was given by Dr Tony Warren, Group Managing Director, Strategy & Corporate Services, Telstra. The 2013 Sydney Institute Annual Dinner was sponsored by Telstra.

SURROUNDED ON ALL SIDES – FIVE LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP FROM HISTORY

 AMANDA FOREMAN

 Thank you Premier O’Farrell for that introduction, and thank you, too, Mr Chairman, Members of the Board, and Gerard and Anne Henderson for inviting me to address you tonight.

Last week we celebrated Anzac Day – so it feels appropriate to reflect on some of the ideals that Anzac Day represents. Leadership – whether it’s the military kind, political or moral – is the scaffolding that makes and unmakes a country. It is often in short supply – which makes it all the more important that we revere it – we study it, and we seek to understand the characteristics that define it.

Now I believe that no single quality can or should define a leader. But in times of absolute crisis, when every reasonable course of action appears to be blocked, the psychological bedrock of a great leader becomes exposed. Tonight we are going to take a brief look at five leaders, and examine how each one reacted when he found himself surrounded on every side.

I am going to begin, however, with Spencer Cavendish, the 8^th Duke of Devonshire, who is the great-nephew of one of my personal heroines, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Spencer was a man who exemplifies Shakespeare’s well-known adage about greatness. In the eyes of society, Spencer was born great by virtue of bearing the Devonshire title. He then had greatness thrust upon him because the Devonshire wealth made him de facto leader of the Liberal Party. And finally, he achieved greatness late in life after realising the truth of the first two. He then wisely turned down the opportunity to become Prime Minister a record-breaking three times.

Spencer, who was born in 1833 and died in 1908 – is a fascinating case because he allows us to turn the mirror sideways, and see the character deformations that operate when leadership is achieved in a vacuum. Spencer entered Parliament in 1857, knowing absolutely nothing about the craft of leadership. It meant that he equated disagreement with confrontation, and therefore something to be avoided at all costs. And, even more important, never having had to go out and inspire people, he didn’t understand the nature of idealism or the difference between a noble cause and a golden calf.

The catalyst that began Spencer’s long metamorphosis from empty figurehead to genuine leader was a woman named Skittles. Her real name was Catherine Walters – but no one ever called her that. Skittles was famous for two things – she was an expert horsewoman and drove two perfectly matched bay horses. They were exquisite. And the second thing she was famous for – which was not unconnected with the first – was that she was extremely expensive to maintain – and Spencer was finding it hard to keep up with all the bills.

Now – as her principal lover he could have chosen several routes – he could have suggested that they sell the horses or take a long vacation to some of the remoter parts of the British Empire – Australia perhaps – but, instead, he quietly bought a first class ticket to New York and one November’s day in 1862 and he just slipped out of the country without leaving a forwarding address.

Once in New York he booked himself into the 5th Avenue Hotel – which, in those days, was considered the most modern hotel in the World, complete with ensuite bathrooms and room service. Spencer loved it. He particularly loved the thing he called “a vertical railway” which took him from the ground floor to his room on the 12th.  He availed himself of all the hotel’s amenities, especially room service. So, after three weeks in New York, he wasn’t especially surprised when there was a knock on his door at 11 at night. He had been in the habit of calling down for a night cap and assumed that it was the hotel’s hyper-efficient service anticipating his wants.

But, when he opened the door, it wasn’t a maid with his hot toddy, it was Skittles looking rather tired and cross. The Duke was obviously delighted to see her – delighted – and shocked – that none of his letters had reached her back home. So he promised to see her first thing in the morning for breakfast, in order to explain how it was that he had neglected to let he know of his travel plans to America. So off Skittles went – expecting to receive some Ducal groveling in the morning.

In the meantime, Spencer packed his bags and took the first train out of New York to Washington. There he booked himself into Willards Hotel – which was the epicenter of political life in the Capital – and proceeded to have a high old time making new friends and discovering this brand new drink that had been invented in San Francisco, called a Martini.

He had been ensconced in Willards for about two weeks, when there was a knock on his door at about two in the afternoon – which surprised him, because it wasn’t cocktail hour, even in Washington. Nevertheless, he opened the door and there he found, not a Martini but an extremely cross, if not enraged, Skittles. Of course, he was delighted – delighted – to see her. But, since she was still in her travelling clothes and somewhat emotional from her journey, he suggested that she retire to her room to change while he ordered them a pot of tea. So off she went, expecting tea and apologies. In the meantime, Spencer ran down to the boat house on the Potomac River and rented a canoe. He then proceeded to paddle across the river to the relative safety of Virginia. Because, it was 1862 and America was in the middle of a war between the North and the South. And although Skittles appeared to have him – if not surrounded – then certainly cornered, Spencer reckoned that even she would not be able to wrangle her way past two sets of sentries, one Federal, one Confederate, to pursue him into Virginia.

So Spencer left her on the banks of the Potomac, weeping like Dido for Aenaes.

But once he arrived in Richmond, Spencer fell into the clutches of people far more ruthless than Skittles. These were Confederate operatives whose mission was to find gullible foreigners like Spencer, and turn them into propaganda tools for the South.  They succeeded in convincing Spencer that the wicked North was fighting for Empire, while the brave South was fighting for freedom.

Hooking Spencer was one of the Confederacy’s greatest coups, because on his return to England he was promoted to Under Secretary of War – thus giving the South an extremely valuable supporter at the heart of the British government.

Spencer duly proceeded to give speeches in Parliament in support of the South until his brother Lord Frederick pointed out – during a furious row – that he was betraying the fundamental ideals of the Liberal Party by promoting the right to national self-determination at the expense of the basic human right to be free. It took a couple of years, but to his credit Spencer did eventually realise that he had made a colossal error by supporting slave owners against real freedom fighters.

He was mortified and decided that he had to rethink his entire approach to political life. Now – in Spencer’s case – his mistake wasn’t disastrous, and he was able to live it down and move on to greater things.

But going forward I want to take Spencer’s inability to understand what idealism is or means and examine it in the context of a war.

If we turn to the life of Spartacus, not the Hollywood image of Spartacus but the real man, we are left with a great but flawed leader whose fatal lack of idealism ultimately caused his downfall.

To give you some background on Spartacus – he was born a generation before Julius Caesar around 110 BC, in the Roman province of Thrace or what is now south-eastern Bulgaria. He probably had red hair – a characteristic of Thracians – and had learned how to fight from a very young age.  He joined the Roman Army, and then deserted, only to be captured and sold into slavery at a gladiator school.

In 73 BC Spartacus organised a mass break-out of about 75 gladiators. From this nucleus of highly-trained killers grew an army several thousand outlaws and escaped slaves.

Not surprisingly, Rome soon dispatched a militia to hunt down and destroy Spartacus’ revolt. They found the rebels camping out at the base of Mt Vesuvius. But Spartacus cleverly led his men into the crater before a battle could take place. The Romans planned to starve Spartacus into submission and settled in for a long wait. Instead, in a display of true military genius, Spartacus and his men abseiled down the sheer side of the mountain using vines as ropes and attacked the unsuspecting Romans from behind, wiping them out.

From then on – in the words of Plutarch: “Spartacus began to be great and terrible. No General could withstand the might of his slave army.”

With each military success came new followers, until Spartacus was the leader of more than 120,000 men. But now he had a problem. What could he achieve with such an army? It was too small to take on Rome itself. And, yet, too large to settle anywhere without attracting attention. Spartacus’ solution was to lead his army to the north – towards home – at least towards his home in Thrace. This produced the first serious split among his followers. Thrace meant nothing to the majority of his army – and Spartacus had no alternative vision to offer the men. A third left and headed south to begin a violent rampage across the Italian countryside.

Soon, the rest of Spartacus’ army was agitating to go south and Spartacus gave in. The road to freedom was wide open but, instead of taking it, he went back down to Campagna. The decision made him a sitting duck for the large Roman force gathering under General Marcus Licinius Crassus. By the middle of 71 BC Spartacus was surrounded on all sides and had just one way out – by sea. But to get his army to Sicily he needed a flotilla of boats. Again, without an ideal or cause to inspire allies to join him, his only recourse was to attempt to bribe Cilician pirates to ferry his army across the Tyrrhenian Sea. The plan was foiled by Crassus, who paid the pirates a counter-bribe to stay away.

In late 71 BC, Spartacus led his dwindling army in a final confrontation against Crassus and was roundly defeated. His body was never found, and 6000 of his followers were crucified along the Apian Way from Capua to Rome. Spartacus’ spectacular rise and heroic death against an invincible army has made him the stuff of legend and blinded many people to the fatal flaws in his leadership.

He had charisma, he had integrity, and he was resourceful – but he failed to turn his rebellion into a movement – in contrast to previous slave uprisings, no Italian city rose up in sympathy, nor were there any attempts by slaves elsewhere to emulate Spartacus.

Each man was fighting for his personal freedom, or out of loyalty to Spartacus – but not for freedom itself. The want of a connection between action and cause ultimately led to his downfall.

Now I am not saying that a leader just needs a cause to succeed and nothing else. The life of Vladimir Lenin is the perfect example of a leader who was all cause.  In his 1902 manifesto, “What is to be Done?” Lenin declared that the Party, the movement, and the socialist workers’ revolution were one and the same.  “We are surrounded on all sides by enemies,” he wrote, “and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire…we have therefore separated ourselves into an exclusive group, having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.”

What this meant in practice was the complete subordination of the individual to the ideal of central organisation. I personally believe, that the history of the Soviet Union could have taken quite another turn if the Russian exiles who travelled with Lenin on the famous sealed train from Switzerland to Russia in 1917, had taken five minutes to reflect on the implications of his manifesto. After all, the warning signs were all there in his handling of that famous incident on the train now known as the “Toilet Crisis”.

Trouble on the train began when Lenin discovered that there were long queues to use the only toilet. An investigation revealed that his fellow exiles were obeying his no-smoking directive by using the loo for a discreet puff. Lenin thought for a moment and then announced that this was a problem of scarce resources. And he would solve the problem in true Soviet style by assessing the needs of the passengers – i.e. the smokers and the flushers. And, then, once assessed, the Party, meaning, at this point in the game, himself, would allocate the goods and services of said loo according to revolutionary principles.

Lenin then cut up a newspaper into short and long strips and doled them out as tickets: short for a flush, long for a smoke. The flushers were allowed two quick visits, the smokers one long visit.

Satisfied by his handiwork, Lenin went back to his revolutionary studies. But behind his back there developed a cut-throat, black-market, with tickets being exchanged for window seats, extra-legroom and even swigs of vodka. There was also dissatisfaction among the smokers and the flushers over the length of time allowed – with some saying that Lenin should have switched the allocations. A deputation from the two sides tried to reason with him, which led to their banishment to the unheated luggage compartment. At this point, two smokers made a bid for freedom and disappeared on to the roof, never to be seen again.

However, by the time the train pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station, Lenin’s plan appeared to have worked. Peace and brotherly love reigned throughout the carriage. No one dared to point out the truth that the need for tickets had become redundant since there was a tobacco famine among the smokers, while over-use had broken the toilet. Lenin pronounced himself fully satisfied and proceeded to run all of Russia along the same lines.

Apologists for Lenin have pointed out that his passion for central planning and penchant for micro-management was very much in vogue during the early twentieth century. Yet the greatest military planner of the 20th Century, General Sir John Monash, was the absolute inverse of Lenin.

As everyone in this room knows, Monash’s genius as a military commander came to fruition in the waning months of World War One. His battle plan for the Australian Imperial Forces attack on German-held Hamel was so precise that he calculated a total fighting time of 90 minutes. In the event, the AIF took 93 minutes to capture the area in one of the most complete victories of war. Four weeks later, Monash achieved an even greater success at Amiens – termed by the Germans as “the blackest day of the war’”– and from then on he was on a roll – driving all before him.

What is often overlooked, however, is the crisis that confronted Monash next.

Since entering the war, the Australian forces had liberated 116 towns, and defeated thirty-nine enemy divisions. And, despite making up less than 10 per cent of the army, had captured almost 25 per cent of the prisoners.

But it was now – just as Monash and the AIF were basking in the glow of international glory – that came the shocking orders for a third of the men to be sent home. Regardless of the reasons for the order, the idea of leaving the front just as victory was in sight so enraged the men that seven of the Battalions went on strike. They sacked their officers, and demanded face-to-face negotiations with Monash.

Their actions gave him no room to manoeuvre. On one side he was faced with the strikers and their set of demands; on the other, he had his own senior officers and their demands – namely that the strikers be executed for mutiny. And, meanwhile, the British were demanding a swift resolution to the crisis.

Monash’s response to the crisis demonstrates the vital importance of emotional intelligence, in modern terms, or EQ, for effective leadership.  He realised that none of the parties could afford to lose face. So, first he met with the rebels, he listened to them – and accepted their written demands. He went back to his tent and put the list at the very bottom of the pile of papers on his desk. Next, he met with his senior officers, listened to their demands, and accepted their written orders for the execution of the strikers on the charge of mutiny. Then he went back to his tent and put the order at the bottom of the large pile of papers on his desk – saying that he would get to them all in due course.

Finally, with two days to go before the next offensive began, Monash went to see his British counterparts and pointed out that it would probably better if they started disbanding the AIF after the final offensive rather than just before it. And this seemed eminently sensible to the British and they agreed.

With everything now in hand, Monash went back to planning the final attack. The Australians were allowed to get themselves killed in the normal way – and peace reigned in the barracks. Two weeks later, the German line collapsed and they called for an Armistice.

The essence of Monash’s brilliant leadership during the mutiny crisis was that he understood why men fight. This fundamental understanding is what links Monash to the American Marine General Lewis “Chesty” Puller – who in every other way was completely different to him.

“Chesty” Puller, who died in 1971, was in his early fifties when the Korean War began. He was old-style, the kind of soldier who led his men from the front.

In October 1950, General Douglas MacArthur believed – wrongly as it turned out – that the Korean war would be over by Christmas. Seoul had been recaptured and UN forces were driving the North Koreans back to the 38th Parallel. On 1 October MacArthur broadcast his “surrender now message” to North Korea, which prompted the Chinese to announce it would intervene if any UN troops crossed over the 38th Parallel. MacArthur dismissed the warning as an empty threat and continued with his plan to unite his armies at the Yalu River on the border between North Korea and China.

When the Chinese army did invade, it seemed to retreat almost as soon as it appeared, convincing MacArthur that there were only a few thousand of them – who would be easily defeated. In fact, the Chinese PLA was acting out the famous proverb: “To catch a big fish, you must first let the fish taste your bait.”

In November 1950, Chesty and his marines were dispatched along with the Tenth Army to a remote area in North Korea called the Chosin Reservoir.

They had only been marching for a few days when it became obvious that they were walking into a trap. The Tenth Army had reached a terrifying stretch of road known as the Funchilin Pass. Here the road led to a narrow bridge with a cliff on one side and deep gorge on the other. The fact that the retreating Chinese had not blown the bridge could only mean that they wanted the Americans to go that way.

Once they were over the Pass, Chesty’s marines set up base camp around the Chosin Reservoir, while the rest of the Tenth Army struggled North towards MacArthur’s goal in the middle of nowhere. The Chinese pounced, on 26 November, almost completely obliterating the Tenth.

The following day, a second Chinese army swarmed around Chosin reservoir and attacked Chesty’s marines. Seeing that they were out-numbered by 8 to 1, the newspaper reporters in the camp became rather agitated. Some began demanding an emergency airlift to get them out. Chesty calmed them down saying: “Gentlemen: We’ve been looking for the enemy for several days now. We’ve finally found them. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of finding these people and killing them.”

His bravado was not simply for effect. Over the next few days, Chesty went to wherever the fighting was the hardest. In moments when a breach seemed possible, he ordered everyone to pick up a weapon and fight – including cooks, clerks, truck drivers and radio signalers. A regimental battalion commander later recalled that Chesty’s example saved them from despair: “Puller gave us pride in some way I can’t describe. He kept building up our morale higher and higher, just by being there.”

As survivors of the tenth army straggled in, Chesty was confronted by a new problem – these remnants were wounded, exhausted and utterly demoralised. Unless he acted decisively, their defeatism could infect the entire camp. Matters came to a head during a meeting when one of the Tenth Army colonels demanded to be shown the line of retreat. Chesty turned to the artillery officer next to him and said: “Fire on any soldier who abandons his position.” He then turned back to the Colonel and said, “That answer your question? There will be no withdrawal.”

Finally, on 6 December, Chesty received a radio message to break out of Chosin Reservoir and head south for evacuation. The Chinese forces blocking his retreat were not the only enemy however: the temperature had dropped to minus-40 degrees, causing mass casualties to the men and equipment. Chesty’s hard hit force slowly crawled towards the dreaded Funchillin Pass. Only now the Bridge had indeed been destroyed, and all attempts to rebuild it were halted by a nest of Chinese machine gunners high on the crest of a ridge.

Chesty realised he had to get the men to believe that the impossible was possible, or they were all going to die in the pass. So, in the middle of a fire-fight, he stood up and shouted, “Alright you bastards: try and shoot and me.”  And, sure enough, from behind him surged a marine battalion that climbed the sheer face of a 1000 foot cliff in the midst of a blizzard and stormed the Chinese bunker. Meanwhile, Chesty led his engineers in constructing a make-shift bridge. This became the soldiers’ route to freedom.

After fourteen days of continuous fighting, Chesty led his forces back to the port where they had disembarked. He succeeded in not only bringing out the wounded and the dead, but also every vehicle and piece of equipment worth saving. Behind him, spread out across dozens of barren hilltops and snow filled valleys, lay the broken remains of seven Chinese divisions.

Despite the horrors they had just experienced, Chesty’s men were exhilarated.  During Sunday service, the army chaplain declared, “The last eight weeks have been the happiest and most content of my life.”

In his inimitable style, Chesty refused to call the retreat a defeat, let alone a retreat. As he waited to board his ship, he told reporters:

Remember, whatever you write, this was no retreat. All that happened was we found more Chinese behind us than in front of us. So we about-faced and attacked.

So, what are the leadership lessons provided by the Duke of Devonshire, Spartacus, Lenin, Monash and Chesty Puller?

What we learn from them is that leadership is not obvious. Nor is it simple.  But in the case of our five examples, we see five different reactions to a fundamental truth, which is this. Courage, discipline, resourcefulness – these are all the sine qua non of leadership. But a true leader is more than the sum of his abilities – he is someone who understands why men follow and can give them a reason to do so.

As Chesty Puller himself once remarked: there is no weapon on earth more powerful than leadership.