by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note.
I want you to know how jubilant I am, at 70, to have yet another chance to determine the fate of the greatest nation on Earth. I have followed, since 1956, every triumph, every embarrassment, every great step, and every one best left forgotten.
I have enjoyed and exercised every American citizen’s right to criticize, excoriate, ridicule, belittle, and mock the great affairs of the greatest nation.
I have seen the littlest and most contemptible of my neighbors say things which in ancient days would have caused a duel to the death. And yet here, on hearing such matters derided and held up for public censure, no one has shrugged a shoulder, much less batted an eye.
We are the country which is a sewer for every contemptible, banal, dangerous, and downright stupid notion that has ever existed in the annals of our species.
Now, I invite you to my little history involving as it does one native son’s involvement with the process that still remains the last best hope for humankind, and the opportunity for what we can never forget, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Ideas as pristine and relevant today as the day Thomas Jefferson held his glorious composition to the light to say “Nice, very nice indeed.”
The great state of Alabama…
I come from a voting family. Its members would no more miss an election than they would spit in Church. Next to baseball, elections were the affairs most discussed, harangued, examined. Every election produced opinions by the bushel, discussions that could quickly turn rancorous, or worse.
People were held contemptible if they did not exercise their constitutional privilege, and each time someone said “No, no I’m not voting”, they were reminded, and often too, how men and women just like them had died so that some bozo could say “No, no I’m not voting”. Contempt was heavy in the air, and was called upon whenever necessary to remind people who were citizens that that citizenship entitled them to exercise the suffrage, that is to say, vote.
Some tried to evade their responsibility by holding their manicured fingers to their exquisite noses and saying “These are not proper candidates, for this is not the best the nation can do. These are a black eye to our fine system.”
I have always found this jejune opinion particularly useless. A system of governance like ours, with thousands of electoral posts to fill, will not always, or perhaps even ever, rise to greatness, perhaps not even one person of consequence, ideas, stature, and the capacity to cover his errors better than others.
This is a system of the people, by the people, for the people, and if these particular people do not rise to the high standards of brilliance, why then, sir or madam, neither would you.
Democracy, voting, gives us the opportunity yet again to prove that we can be better than we are, to prove that our system will continue even when so many of its members do nothing but censure, denounce, disparage, denigrate, and attack it.
I have paid close attention to this system since 1956, when aged 8, such names as Estes Kefauver, John Sparkman, and J. Lister Hill crackled the radio, and there was a magic, even a grandeur about how the people and their government came together.
It was a very hot summer in Illinois that year, but when isn’t it? My father had decreed that we should landscape our backyard in suburban Chicago. It was hot work, tedious work, hard work, and never ending work. B
ut the burden was lightened by these great words booming across the convention, the nation, and the world: “The great state of Alabama casts...”, for these were the salad days of a system that told the world how united we are in our processes, even if we disdain (some of) the candidates who represent them. Thus, the summer passed one wheelbarrow load after another, good soil of the great state of Illinois.
We were especially proud that our state was frequently cited on the radio because our former governor, Adlai E. Stevenson, was in nomination again, after having won the nomination in 1952, and then was crushed by America’s hero, Dwight David Eisenhower.
Estes Kefauver, the Senator from Tennessee who wore a coonskin cap without (I think) too much derision, told the world that Adlai Stevenson was weak, soft on Communism, and the most terrible insult imaginable, an egghead, a designation which Governor Stevenson wore like a red badge of courage.
Kefauver was crushed, but was given the Vice Presidential nomination by Stevenson. Young Senator John F. Kennedy lost by a hair, that Vice Presidential slot. Winning it would have been a disaster so early in his career.
This Tennessean who could never by any stretch of the imagination have been called an Intellectual, was proud of his mangled grammar, and wanted the world to see that we were not only a nation disdaining intellectuals, and with Estes Kefauver, never would be.
And thus the state banner of Tennessee, which represented both John Scopes, accused of teaching evolution in the notorious Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) forbidding the teaching of evolution, and the majority of Tennesseans, who believed in the Good Book, and nothing else, was released into the aisles of the convention.
It was thrilling. It was the people in action. These people were working for us. We were not like the people of Hungary, or the great land we called Red China, or all the barbarians of Uganda, and so on through the catalog of horrors called nations.
I was a boy who could spend his summer helping my father (however reluctantly), pestering his brother, and tormenting his cat, without a commissar calling to pressure us, or a fascist dictating our thoughts, or the military forces of any country intervening in our most trivial and intimate affairs.
I was a citizen of the Great Republic, and I listened accordingly, for though Governor Stevenson may not be my candidate, or even Dwight David Eisenhower for that matter, I had the ability and the great honor and privilege to help build a nation as I wanted to, as all my fellow citizens wanted to do. This was the greatest honor of all.
This year, I shall go to the Baldwin School on Sacramento Street to continue my partnership with the Great Republic. I am not as spry this year as before. I may even use my walker, since an article in the Boston Globe suggested people with walkers go to the head of the line.
However, I have no desire to expedite the process. I cherish its every arcane and esoteric aspect. There is no one else in my house to say “Don’t forget, today is voting day!” All those who used to say this to me have gone before. I shall be asked my name at the polling booth even though the lady behind the counter knows who it is. And I approve her unwillingness to fail to follow even one direction.
She’ll hand me my ballot; we still use paper ballots in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I shall take up the pencil, look over the names, including the ones at the bottom of the ballot, which no one ever knows. I am happy, proud, tenacious, and curious.
And as I go out into the chilled air of a Massachusetts Fall, I mentally tip my hat to the great founders of the Great Republic, for we have been in partnership this long while, and I salute you, though I be from time to time censorious, angry, petulant, and dismissive.
I’m allowed to so feel and so act. I have voted, and thereby continued my essential relationship with my government, and my nation. God bless America, and may her staunch citizens live on whether they criticize or whether they do not, for this is the legacy and the reason for our greatness, and why the vote you cast is a measure of honor and hope.
About the author
Dr. Jeffrey Lant is well known worldwide for his insight into corporate events, leadership, personnel, etc. He is the author of over 60 books, and over 1,000 articles on a wide variety of topics. He is known for telling it like it is.
To get access to all of Dr. Lant’s many ideas, projects, programs, books, and materials, go to www.drjeffreylant.com. Don’t try to do all of this alone when you have such superior assistance available right now.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note.
You know why there are so many people not getting ahead in the world? Oh, there are plenty of “reasons” that the non upwardly mobile give, like...
The boss doesn’t like you.
You are a corporate blabbermouth.
You are always pestering the boss for a raise.
You come and go like the wind to suit yourself, never being able to make the deadlines required.
You’re inclined to mouth off, when “mouth in” would make a hell of a lot more sense.
Your cubicle in the office is so dirty, rats exclaim “Eureka!” when they arrive after you’ve gone home.
Oh yeah, there are plenty of excuses that are holding you back. But one, if you absorb, will move you ahead like a space rocket. That is… take the hit.
The first rule of life within a corporation or other business entity is that the leadership must be allowed to lead. And as sure as God made little green apples, when they lead they are going to make mistakes. I want to tell you a whopper mistake that almost blew up the nuclear bomb. That was the run up to the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1972.
It has been my horror to review the private records of President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. These boys were scared. Let me give a for instance. The archival papers are filled with one ongoing theme: the demand of the Kennedy brothers to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Cuban revolutionaries that none of them tripwire the operation and let the genie out of the bottle, rather making sure that no one in and around the White House could possibly be blamed should anything go wrong. But of course, nothing ever would, right?
Mama mia! Now think for a second about what was going on. You had military personnel being told they’d blow the whole operation should any part of it become public. Well let me ask you something. Mr. Reader. If someone asked you whether a bunch of warriors could get from the Caribbean or Florida to Cuba and keep it all quiet, this is what you’d say… “Orville, that is downright the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t keep these people under wraps with duct tape on their mouths.” In other words, plausible deniability was the stupidest assumption the President of these United States ever made.
But Kennedy knew one thing… something you learn when you grow up in a family as big as his. There must always be a Plan B, which is Alfred E. Newman’s well known line… “What, me worry?”
And so, when the Bay of Pigs fiasco blew up with everyone and their brother predicting the end of the world through just one tidy A-Bomb or two, Kennedy acted. Not to clear the decks, not to tell the truth, not to make up with Khrushchev (kiss kiss), but CYA.
And the poor schlepper he dumped on was Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965), Ambassador to the United Nations.
Stevenson was in a bad place. The President was telling him the United States was not involved in this Bayside fiasco, but Stevenson was hearing from everyone and their brother that not only were we involved, we were leading the parade. What’s a body to do?
Find a dodo, and drop the hit right square on his head, just the way Kennedy did with Stevenson, and the way Bush ‘41 did with General Colin Powell (maybe there’s something in the water down there at the United Nations; it certainly is unpleasant enough).
I can very well imagine Stevenson’s plight in those days approaching Armageddon. On the one hand, he is told from the White House, “Don’t worry, we didn’t do anything”. And on the other hand, every information source that made itself available to him (he didn’t have to go far) told him that he was being lied to by his President, the President of the United States, liar.
Kennedy and Stevenson didn’t get along as it was. Kennedy despised Stevenson, after all, he had been crushed in the 1952 presidental election by everybody’s favorite boy scout, Dwight David Eisenhower.
And then if that wasn’t enough, he went and got himself crushed in the 1956 election by that same boy scout, the hero of Europe, and cute to boot.
Stevenson infuriated him further. In 1960, when he allowed his name to go forward for the Democratic nomation for President, Eleanor Roosevelt
kept the waters roiling by pushing for Stevenson – again! Stevenson had no chance in 1960 (frankly, he didn’t have a chance at any time), but his candidacy signalled to the left wing of the Democratic party that they just couldn’t stomach Jack Kennedy on any terms.
Now this is a moment tailor made to make everyone unhappy. Eleanor Roosevelt, the matriarch of the party, couldn’t stand Kennedy. Not only was he too young, but he didn’t revere Mother Roosevelt nearly as much as she thought he should. And as long as she was calling any shots on the left wing, and as long as she kept Adlai in the race, old man Kennedy and his brood lived in a state of barely supressed rage.
Now you can imagine once they screwed up the invasion, how desperately they needed a scapegoat. That scapegoat had Adlai E. Stevenson written all over it.
And now we come to his problem, and yours.
President Kennedy realized that if he accepted responsibility for the Bay of Pigs invasion, his standing in the international community, not to mention rural America, would plummet. But since Adlai E. Stevenson was entirely disposable, the Kennedys kept him dangling on a string until they decided what was the best way of slitting his throat.
What was going on?
Just this: Kennedy couldn’t afford to take the hit, and so he threw Adlai Stevenson to the crocodiles. Now this wouldn’t have been quite as bad as it was if Jack Kennedy had sweetened the pie just a little bit, and given Stevenson what he really wanted – to be Secretary of State.
That would have involved kicking Dean Rusk out of Foggy Bottom, and giving him something like, say, the Ambassadorship to Trinidad. But Rusk was Kennedy’s boy, and Stevenson wasn’t. Therefore, Kennedy just forced him to take the hit, but gave him nothing for it but a Hallmark card that said “happy happy”.
Of course in retrospect, Kennedy should have given Stevenson anything he wanted, as long as it didn’t involve Washington D.C. or Mrs. Roosevelt, for they all cordially hated each other by now.
So what’s the lesson to be learned here, the one that can make or break your corporate career? Whenever possible, and whenever your boss has screwed up, let him know you’ll be glad to take the hit.
I’ve got a friend who needs to learn this lesson yesterday. He thinks nothing of fighting back when the boss says “Do X.” And my friend says, “Wait a minute, we agreed on Y.”
Now maybe the boss and my friend did or didn’t agree, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is to take the hit for the boss, and come back in a reasonable time (like 2-3 days) and claim your goodie, and not do what my friend cannot cease doing – lifting his fist, looking right in the boss’s eye, and saying “This is what we said. Are you saying we didn’t?”
Many corporate careers have been broken (or made) at this moment. Everybody knows the big boss makes mistakes, sometimes it’s some real whoppers like the Bay of Pigs, which almost wiped out the whole planet. But we all know that the big boss cannot take the hit, and so an alternative must be connived.
Most people in most businesses spend a considerable amount of their time yapping about how lame and stupid the big boss really is. They may actually believe it, or they may just be saying so to pass the time of day and indicate that they are just an ordinary guy or gal. But you’re not ordinary. And that’s why at all times, you must be prepared to move with events, not just stand by and look at them happening.
When the boss needs you don’t hide under your desk or stand on the sidelines kibitzing, go and proclaim to him that you are available to help right now… and then do so.
Every leader in the world needs loyal followers. There is nothing more loyal than falling on your sword… so long as you know that you will rise like the phoenix in short order, with your leader’s enthusiastic assistance.
Now, while others scratch their heads about whatever actually happened, you’ll know because you’ve been a part of securing the glorious administration of leadership of the man or woman who calls themselves your boss. As a result, you will move up fast. Oh, even faster if you gather together all documents pertaining to the incident in question.
Sadly, Adlai Stevenson didn’t have it in him to do this. And this clouded his last years on Earth. He must have wondered how different things might have been if he submitted, at a moment of his choosing, all the private documents in question. Why, Mr. Julian Assange, the leader of Wikileaks, could have told him how sweet that is. Just watch your back.
About the author
Dr. Jeffrey Lant is well known worldwide for his insight into corporate events, leadership, personnel, etc. He is the author of over 60 books, and over 1,000 articles on a wide variety of topics. He is known for telling it like it is.
To get access to all of Dr. Lant’s many ideas, projects, programs, books, and materials, go to www.drjeffreylant.com. Don’t try to do all of this alone when you have such superior assistance available right now.