Leaders: Myth and Reality - Hardcover

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STANLEY McCHRYSTAL retired from the US Army as a four-star general after thirty-four years of service. His previous books, My Share of the Task and Team of Teams, were both New York Times bestsellers. He is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a partner at the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm based in Virginia.
 
JEFF EGGERS served for twenty years as a US Navy SEAL and also in government as a special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He is now executive director of the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute.
 
JASON MANGONE served for four years in the US Marine Corps, followed by positions at the Aspen Institute, the Service Year Alliance, and the New York City Department of Veterans’ Services. 

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One

The Mythology

Things are not always as they seem;

the first appearance deceives many.

-phaedrus, roman poet, ca. 15 bce-50 ce

In 49 BCE, with the dramatic proclamation "The die is cast," Julius Caesar made the fateful decision to cross the Rubicon River at the head of his 13th Legion. The crossing of the Rubicon was momentous because the river demarcated the boundary between Italy and the province of Gaul to the north, where Caesar was serving as governor. Suspicious of his growing power, the Senate had ordered him to disband his army and return to Rome. But Caesar, defying the Senate, decided to return not in submission but in rebellion, marching on Rome with his legion. By crossing into Italian territory with an army, Caesar had irrevocably made himself a traitor.

For all it's, Caesar's river crossing was a relatively modest affair in which the future ruler and his legionnaires merely waded across a shin-deep stream. Nonetheless, this act put him in irreconcilable opposition to Rome's Senate, making the expression "crossing the Rubicon" forever synonymous with passing a point of no return.

The story about how Caesar and his legion marched on Rome survived on the parchment of the Lives, a series of profiles of famous men recorded by the Greek biographer Plutarch. Plutarch also recorded that the Senate-five years later-"in the hope that the government of a single person would give them time to breathe after so many civil wars and calamities," made Caesar "dictator for life." And yet within two months he was assassinated, the knives wielded by many of those same senators. As Plutarch explains, Caesar's "pretension" and the "extravagance" of his new title had motivated the group, including Caesar's close friend Marcus Junius Brutus, to conspire against him.

Today, those of us who know Julius Caesar's story most likely learned it not from reading Plutarch, but from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In the bard's telling of the assassination, Caesar struggles until he sees Brutus among the attackers and realizes the depth of his betrayal. Famously, his dying utterance is the poignant "Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!"

Almost two millennia later, another General would become famous by crossing a river. Unlike the modest Rubicon, the Delaware could not be crossed by wading, so George Washington had no choice but to cross by boat, a scene memorialized in Washington Crossing the Delaware, one of AmericaÕs most recognizable paintings. On a canvas measuring over twenty-one feet wide, Emanuel Leutze captured the daring of AmericaÕs founding father and first president.

The parallels between Caesar and Washington go beyond the rivers they crossed as generals. Just as Caesar's final phase of leadership was reenacted by Shakespeare through the rhythm of iambic pentameter, the final act of Washington's leadership was depicted by the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who four centuries later chose hip-hop as the rhythm to dramatize Washington's retirement in his theatrical story of Alexander Hamilton. And where Shakespeare had turned to Plutarch's Lives, Miranda found his inspiration within the pages of Ron Chernow's biography Alexander Hamilton.

The musical closes with the rap song "One Last Time," in which George Washington's 1796 decision to step down after his second term is met by a disbelieving Hamilton:

Hamilton: Why do you have to say goodbye?

Washington: If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on.

It outlives me when I'm gone.

Miranda said later that he sought to celebrate Washington's "humanity" and "frailty," lifting up the rare example of a leader who voluntarily relinquishes power. In the playwright's drama, Washington selflessly prioritizes the fledgling nation's democracy over the pursuit of power, consistent with the founding father's legacy of leadership.

For would-be leaders, the oft-told stories of audacious river crossings and of the dramatic finales of Julius Caesar and George Washington are both inspiring and intimidating. The stories would be more helpful, though, if leadership actually worked the way the legends imply. In fact, for both Caesar and Washington, leadership was hardly so simple.

History codified Caesar's "The die is cast" as a declaration of courage and decisiveness, but the proclamation also marked a moment of profound doubt. Plutarch tells us, but popular history forgets, that Caesar "ordered a halt" when he approached the river, and that he "wavered much in his mind . . . and often changed his opinion one way and the other." Before pressing on, he sought counsel when "his purposes fluctuated most." And yet "halting," "wavering," and "fluctuating" are not how we tend to view leaders, nor how leaders seek to be remembered. Truly effective leaders, we like to believe, are not susceptible to the fog of doubt-they act decisively and face the consequences. But few real leaders have actually operated this way.

So, too, Caesar's dying words, "Et tu, Brute?" were likely dramatic license taken by Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights. Plutarch's version of the assassination itself was the stuff of a very different drama.

When he is first attacked, rather than make an exclamation that might endear him to history, Caesar, more naturally, grabbed the offending dagger and tried to stop himself from being stabbed. Instead of calling to Brutus, he exclaims, "Vile Casca, what does this mean?" The rest of the struggle is an awkward affair, the great Caesar writhing to avoid the blows of his attackers, who in their own bungling efforts end up stabbing one another: "Some say that he fought and resisted all the rest, shifting his body to avoid the blows, and calling out for help, but that when he saw Brutus's sword drawn, he covered his face with his robe and submitted. . . . And the conspirators themselves were many of them wounded by each other, whilst they all levelled their blows at the same person."

Where Shakespeare's play focuses on the tension and conflict between two of his play's main characters, Plutarch's account zeroes in on Caesar's behavior in the course of dying a violent death.

In truth, neither Plutarch nor Shakespeare knew exactly what happened, and neither do we. We have no choice but to interpret events through the words they've given us. Both the biographer and the playwright do their best to capture the complexity in their own way. Alas, what we remember selectively is that Caesar crossed the Rubicon boldly and then died while uttering the three famous words that he probably never said.

Looking at the biographerÕs and playwrightÕs versions of history side by side, we see that CaesarÕs leadership was not as heroic as itÕs often remembered. So too was the case with Washington.

Inside the West Wing lobby of the White House hangs a reproduction of Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting is a favorite stop for White House staffers giving tours to guests, who are entertained with a catalog of the painting's historical flaws: the Delaware River never froze in this way, the river is far too wide, the boat is heading the wrong way, the flag is wrong for the period, and so on. But the most interesting factual flaw is the boat itself. Rather than the rickety whaling rowboat depicted by Leutze, Washington is believed to have used a sixty-foot flat-bottom barge complete with artillery, a far better option for an army conducting a winter's night river crossing.

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