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One by one the pins are falling. One by one members of the leadership class are being demeaned and diminished.

High ranking members of the military were among the last to be so leveled. Until recently in fact their stock remained rather high, certainly in comparison with other American leaders, most obviously but by no means exclusively CEOs and members of Congress.

But those days are now over. In the last year multiple members of the military elite have been raked over the coals. It began with David Petraeus, the most admired American general in over a generation. Once he was humbled in consequence of an extra-marital affair, not only was he taken down a peg or two or more, but so was the military more generally. (Petraeus apologized publicly for his transgression, but still he resigned from his post at the time, Director of the CIA.)

Recently have been a slew of other scandals involving U. S. generals and admirals, leading to headlines like this one in the Washington Post: “Military Brass Behaving Badly: Files Detail a Spate of Misconduct Dogging Armed Forces.” (1/26/14) The alleged offenses run along the gamut of wrongdoing, from sexual misconduct to cheating (on tests) to bribery to gambling to drinking. One case involving the Air Force is a cheating probe that already has implicated nearly 100 officers responsible for land-based nuclear missiles ready for short-notice launch. 

But the problems transcend transgressions of individuals. The military has also been under attack for its inability to do what it is expected to do as an institution – fight smart. For example, military historian Max Boot has charged that even as America’s military finds itself increasingly engaged in guerilla wars, its “ignorance” of such struggles “runs deep.” And veteran military reporter Thomas Ricks has similarly concluded that by almost every measure the soldiers and marines who went into Iraq and Afghanistan “were grossly unprepared for their missions, and that the officers who led them were often negligent.” 

There is no satisfaction in any of this – in the drip, drip, drip of information that cumulatively debases America’s military establishment, especially those at the top. But it is worth pointing out that it is part of a piece, in which culture and technology twin to tear down the previously high and mighty. When the Post describes America’s armed forces as “struggling to cope with tawdry disclosures about high-ranking commanders” you know times have changed. 

Glad – no, thrilled! – to report that the book is now done.

The above title will be published by Stanford University Press in September 2014.

Meantime… start watching this space again for regular blogging on leadership and followership  – and context!

Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Can’t close out my book and blog at the same time.

Can’t resist telling title of my forthcoming – in September 2014 – book. It’s Hard Times: Leadership in America – and yes, I’m aware my last book was The End of Leadership, which given this one’s  again all about leadership – and followership and context – makes me a target for teasing.  

Can’t resist sounding off one last time (one last time in in 2013!) about Putin – though this time I’ll let spot-on Bill Keller do it for me. See his column in today’s New York Times, “Russia vs. Europe.” 

Can’t resist pointing out one last time (one last time in 2013!) the world is changing, with leaders everywhere enfeebled by others who lack any compunction about taking them on.

Can’t resist mouthing off one last time (one last time in 2013!) about how anyone with any interest in leadership must take a holistic, systemic approach. A single-minded focus on a single individual is, well, hopelessly dated.

See you next year!!!

I wonder. Could he be shaking in his boots?

Not bloody likely. This is not a man who scares easily. Quite the contrary –   he’s one tough son of a bitch. 

Still, what’s happening in Ukraine is highly atypical. Usually when people take to the streets to launch a massive political protest, they’re protesting their own, their own leadership cadre. But in this case the activists are not so much opposing the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich – though they do want to oust him – as they are opposing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. It’s Putin they’re railing against. It’s Putin who’s been trying to shove his interests down their throats. It’s Putin who’s pushed them – much against their will – away from Europe and toward Russia.

If Putin is dumb or in total denial he’ll delude himself into thinking that what’s happening in Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s happening in Moscow. But if he’s not dumb and not in denial he’ll realize the stakes are high, not only in the former Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukraine, but in Russia itself. Ideas have always been contagious – and they are more so now than ever before. Fighters for freedom in one place can connect in an instant to fighters for freedom in another … and before you know it a fuse is lit.

I’m not saying Putin is sleepless in the Kremlin. But it’s not out of the question he’s taken an Ambien.  

Among students of leadership there is a timeless debate: does man (or woman) make history or does history make the man?

A nineteenth century writer, philosopher and “prophet” by the name of Thomas Carlyle, was, famously, extreme in his position. “Universal History,” he wrote, “the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

Herbert Spencer in contrast, an English philosopher closely associated with Darwin and his theory of evolution, took strong exception to Carlyle’s view. “If dissatisfied with vagueness,” Spencer wrote, “we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypotheses to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great man, we find that the theory breaks down completely.”

It was left to the great American philosopher, William James, to play the part of diplomat, to reconcile the extremity of Carlyle’s view with the extremity of Spencer’s. “Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors – the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infrasocial forces, but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

We have no way of knowing, of course, whether in another set of circumstances Nelson Mandela would have emerged a great man. What we do know is this: that in his particular circumstance, in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, he was among the rarest of men. He was a hero in history whose name now is forever etched in the annals of time.  

Whatever you think of John Kerry’s performance as Secretary of State – for example your view of the controversial interim nuclear agreement with Iran – it’s impossible to deny he’s been fearless as well as tireless. Not every one of his efforts has succeeded, of course. In fact, some would argue that his enormous investment of time and energy in trying to broker an understanding between the Israelis and Palestinians is a fool’s errand. But the agreement with Iran, along with several other done deals (or nearly so) in his first year as Secretary, including interceding to preclude the president from bombing Syria, reaching an agreement to destroy that country’s chemical weapons, and negotiating a (likely) long-term security arrangement with Afghanistan’s impossibly recalcitrant President, Hamid Karzai, is surely the start of what could turn out a remarkable record.

Now for the counterfactual: imagine that the incumbent Secretary of State is not a tall, imposing man by the name of John Kerry, but rather his immediate predecessor, a not so tall though similarly imposing woman by the name of Hillary Clinton. Would the administration’s record over the last year have been the same?

Nearly no one has argued that Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was in any way remarkable. True, she logged countless miles on the nation’s behalf. True she visited no fewer than 95 different countries even before her final year. And true she promoted good causes, especially the welfare of women. But hanging around her neck is the albatross of Benghazi – four men were murdered on her watch, including the U. S ambassador to Libya – and she is unlikely to be remembered either for her strategic brilliance or for any particular program or policy.

So here is my question: Did the fact that Clinton is a woman inhibit her from undertaking the types of bold initiatives with which Kerry is already being associated? Would it be harder for a woman than for a man to negotiate with, for example, the Russians, or the Afghans, or the Iranians? This is not to say that no woman has ever before played poker with the big boys. In fact, a woman participated in the negotiations with the Iranians – Catherine Ashton, representing the European Union.* Rather it is to point out that historically the number of women at the highest levels of foreign policy has been woefully low. And it is to suggest that if only for this reason, being a woman in this role could be internalized as a handicap.

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Ashton herself has not felt immune to gender bias. She once blasted the “latent sexism” in Brussels.

The nation is awash right now in tributes marking the 50th anniversary of the death of John Kennedy. Some are focused on the man himself, others on his presidency, and still others on his assassination. The half century mark marks a moment to dream of the man who would be king, to reassess his short time in the White House, and to revisit yet again the murder of our leader.

In my mind’s eye two things stand out. The first is his sense of style – John Kennedy’s style. He was that handsome, that charming, that rich, that witty, that clever, that famously framed by so fabulous a family. The second is a sense of closure – John Kennedy’s ending forever an imagined ideal. The ideal of a great leader taking the United States of America to heights greater than those scaled by any other nation in the history of the world. Even Ronald Reagan, in these two ways Kennedy’s only conceivable successor, does not qualify. His presidency came too late. By then, by the 1980s, the American people already were jaded.

What’s astonishing is Kennedy’s hold even now. Even 50 years later we remain mesmerized by the man, so much so that the year 1963 is remembered for nothing so much as his death.

But if we step back, shed our fixation on this single individual, there is this: Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Both came out in, yes, 1963. Two of the greatest American documents ever were born in the year that Kennedy died. King’s Letter is one of the seminal pieces of the leadership literature, and Friedan’s book is acknowledged the “bible” of the 20th century women’s movement.

So in commemorating 1963 we might commemorate not only the death of a president, but this in addition:

Martin Luther King, from “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed….For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “’Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘Justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Betty Friedan, from The Feminine Mystique.

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban woman struggled with it alone. As she…lay besides her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”

Note: This blog is posted on my own site (www.barbarakellerman.com), and on the site of the John Adams Institute, in Amsterdam.

I am still not convinced that New Yorkers knew what they were doing when they elected Bill de Blasio mayor of their great city by an overwhelming majority.

I know, I know. Many New Yorkers knew exactly what they were doing. They are excited to have as their incoming mayor a leader who is proudly progressive. But there are many other New Yorkers who voted for de Blasio simply because he is not Michael Bloomberg. In fact, he is the anti-Bloomberg. It’s not that New Yorkers especially disliked Bloomberg, and they certainly did not disrespect him. To the contrary: Bloomberg’s record is in many ways exemplary. He never was touchy-feely, never did care much about being witty or charming or making people love him. But he was by nearly every account an outstanding manager – a leader who knew how to manage a major polity, as well as to lead it.

But, New Yorkers have evidently had enough of independent competence. They want something different – a leader with a vision, even if he lacks executive experience. In fact, one of the casualties of Bloomberg’s unanticipated third term in office is that New Yorkers are so very ready for something different that they went almost willfully in the opposite direction. Whether this change in political positioning will ultimately pay off – in particular whether it will make the city more equitable, close at least some the dispiriting, even dismaying gap between the rich and the poor – remains obviously to be seen. I hasten to add that closing this cap will not be enough. It must be closed without incurring significant other expenses such as, to take one of the most obvious, an increase in crime.

This much though is sure even now. Bill de Blasio’s impulse and instinct is completely in line with that of the Occupy movement. Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everything Else have centered their agendas on improving the lot of the 99 percent at the expense of the one percent. Di Blasio’s “Circle of Power” (to borrow a phrase from the New York Times) attests to the fact that not only he but his closest aides, including notably his wife, Chirlane McCray, nearly all have their roots in organizations and movements identified with politics that we in America consider well to the left. What I am suggesting is that during the next four years New York City will be no less than a testing ground. The city will test the viability of a progressive agenda in the second decade of the 21st century.

Given his own introversion, it’s been President Barack Obama’s good fortune to have as his Vice President, Joe Biden. Biden, full of the charm and good humor that usually eludes Obama, has been his loyal sidekick from day one, drawing on his interpersonal skills and long years of experience in Washington to smooth the president’s path whenever he was freed to do so.

In recent weeks, however, Biden has been as good as invisible. Even during the excruciating government shutdown, when his connections to Congress were so sorely needed, and now during the fiasco that so far is Obamacare, he has been no where in evidence – a Vice President in absentia.

Why might this be? I have a theory. I’m speculating that some time back Obama struck a deal with the Clintons, in which he could count on the support of both Bill and Hillary, in exchange for hiding Biden’s light under a bushel.

The deal paid off for Obama, if only because of Bill’s extraordinary performance at the 2012 Democratic convention, when he sold the incumbent as the incumbent himself was unable to do. The Clintons came out ahead as well. With Joe these days nowhere to be found, Hillary can more easily shine, in the likely event she opts for a presidential run.

So from their point of view, the deal between them was a good one – Obama and the Clintons all came out ahead. But, from our point of view, the deal, if there was one, implicit or explicit, was bad. We, the American people, have been deprived for too long of a first rate public servant, whose political skills would be a blessing under any circumstances, and especially in a time as nasty as this one.

Of course the irony is that in the event Hillary becomes a candidate, she is by no means a shoo-in, even for the presidential nomination, not to speak of the White House. The woman’s got bigger baggage than Biden by far – which means it’s not inconceivable that it’s Joe who some day will have the last laugh.

Impossible for me to resist pointing out that Vladimir Putin has been at it again – squashing the opposition with tactics best described as heavy-handed. To whom is he intent on teaching a lesson this time around? To Greenpeace – a group long and well known for undertaking social action to protest environmental degradation.

At this writing 30 Greenpeace activists are being held behind bars in Russia, each in a separate cell, charged with both piracy and hooliganism, for protesting a Russian oil rig in the fragile Arctic environment. Their boat, a Greenpeace International ship named Arctic Sunrise, was seized by Russian border guards as it sailed in international waters.

For decades Greenpeace has been a nuisance on our collective behalf. It consists of a group of activists (followers) doing everything they reasonably (or unreasonably) can to draw the world’s attention to the price we all pay for “progress.” What they did not count in this particular case was Putin’s readiness, even eagerness to aggressively assert Russian sovereignty in waters potentially rich in natural resources.

I wish I could say we Americans, the American government, is a different animal altogether. But I am beginning to fear it is not. I am beginning to see some unpleasant resemblances between how we respond to so-called enemies of the state, and how do the Russians.

I will not here get into the debate about whether or not the administration of Barack Obama is more aggressive in its prosecution of whistle blowers, or, if you prefer, leakers, than were previous administrations. I will however point out that Bradley Manning was kept in isolation for 9 months; that (now) Chelsea Manning has been sentenced to confinement for 35 years; that Edward Snowden, in fear for his safety and security, has been reduced to hiding in, of all places, Moscow; and that Glenn Greenwald, one of the more courageous and independent journalists of his generation, is reluctant to return home, to the United States of America, because he is afraid of being arrested.

Is this what we have come to? Do Americans really want to smack of Russians? Have we in the wake of 9/11 become so permanently paranoid that speaking truth to power is a punishable offense?