 Welcome back to the LBJ Library. Yay. Yay. Happy 2019. First, just a little housekeeping. First of all, sales of the book that we'll be talking about tonight, Forge in Crisis, will continue after the program if you weren't able to buy one tonight, or before the program. If you're not a member of the Friends of the LBJ Library, as always, I encourage you to consider becoming a member. We have some wonderful programs coming up, including a screening and discussion of Ray's Hell, The Life and Times of Molly Ivins. I thought you'd like that. And a panel discussion afterward with Dr. Don Carlton, our friend at the Dolph Brisco Center for American History across the Plaza, which produced the film. The film's director, Janice Ingle, and the legendary Dan Rather, who also appears in the film. I love it when you guys do the ooze and ahs. It makes us feel like we're doing our jobs. We'll have a preview of a new PBS documentary on the space race coming here on May 1st. We'll show you that film, have a panel discussion after that one as well. There is one event that I would love to talk to you about that we think we are very close to inking for April 15th. And I just don't have it confirmed yet, but boy, when we do, you're going to be in for a big surprise. And I guarantee there would be a whole lot of oozing and ahhing around that. It's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's honored guest. Nancy Keane is a historian at the Harvard Business School, who focuses on effective leadership and how leaders past, present, and future can craft their lives with purpose, worth, and impact. She's the author of numerous books, including the book that we'll talk about tonight, Forge in a Crisis, The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, which spotlights how five of history's greatest leaders manage crises and what we can learn from their experiences. Howard Schultz, the Executive Chairman of Starbucks Coffee, or former Executive Chairman of Starbucks, said that this book moved me deeply and will stay with me. Forged in Crisis is a compelling historical work and a vital analysis of the skills required to lead in the most important and often dire situations. And Michael Bloomberg said simply, it's as important and inspiring as it is urgent. Nancy has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the World Business Forum, and she writes regularly for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the Harvard Business Review online, and is a regular commentator for the BBC. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, she's already come to the stage, she's that efficient. Nancy Keane. As usual, Nancy's way ahead of me. So we are going to talk about your wonderful book, Forged in Crisis, Nancy, and I want to, before we talk about it, let me read a passage from the book's introduction. This book is about the making of five unforgettable leaders who lived, worked, and struggled, and triumphed in different circumstances toward different ends. But none knew the full power of their influence, influence that continues to reverberate. What each person could see was that he or she was in the midst of a profound personal crisis. It was not of his or her making. And none of the five had seen such turbulence coming. But once they were in the middle of the calamity, they recognized that they couldn't falter and then failed to recover. They couldn't give up. Rather, each resolutely navigated through the storm and was transformed. Each of these leaders was thus forged in crisis. The audience was treated to some wonderful images of the subjects that you covered, but Nancy, talk about this wonderful work and how it came to be. So it came to be through happenstance. I was in the midst of my own profound crisis. My father had dropped dead very suddenly at 72. Just a few months later, my husband, who I'd been married to for 15 years, walked out without warning. And I, like lots of people in the audience like all of us who have navigated through crisis, was not sleeping. You know, those hours from 2 a.m. to 6 when it's too late to clean, there's nothing on television, and it's just you're in an existential, you know, in the wilderness moment. And one night, I remember very clearly, not long after Colin had walked out, I picked up a book of Lincoln's writings. Collected book, one volume. And I started at the back with like the second inaugural. And I didn't know anything about Lincoln. I was trained as a European historian. And I started reading and it wasn't long. A few nights of, you know, 2 to 6, when I said, girl, you think you have problems? Mr. Lincoln had it much, much worse. And you know, it sounds funny, but it became his struggles, personal and as present, as a leader, became like a lighthouse for him. And I started reading, way late, that was 42, I started reading about Lincoln. And I didn't stop. And then 5 years into reading about Lincoln, I had a very welcome moment of humility when I realized the world does not need another book about Abraham Lincoln. I'll write about some other people who also found themselves down on their knees and screaming at the heavens. And so over the next 5 years, I bumped into Rachel Carson. I met Dietrich Bonhoeffer when Peter Gomes, a minister at Harvard, quoted him. I knew a little bit about Frederick Douglass, but you can't read about the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's ultimate commitment to unconditional surrender, to change the American polity, to end the cancer of slavery, without running into Frederick Douglass, because he's as critical to the Emancipation Proclamation and to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments as Abraham Lincoln. They are really booking. They're tethered together. They are. And they are the transformation of America. So I had to write about Douglass, and then I just stumbled into Rachel Carson, whom I love. I love all of them. I spent 15 years with all of them. And it was a long pregnancy. And you had quintuplets out of it. I did. I did. It was long and too long. And they, particularly Lincoln, but all of them in different ways inspired me, taught me. I was teaching leadership at Harvard, the history of leadership at the Harvard Business School. And so I married my practical inclinations with my historical commitment and all this archival research to produce a storybook that's also a primer. There's all these lessons that they stumbled on that are so relevant for our own age of nonstop crises. Well, we have five unbelievably good stories in this. I want to talk about each of them. And we'll start with Ernest Shackleton. You write that Shackleton understood that in moments of great turbulence, when the stakes are high, the fate of a particular enterprise comes down briefly and critically to the energy and actions of the individual leader. His leadership during the crisis that he faces is out of a textbook. There have been many books written about Ernest Shackleton as a beacon of leadership. So talk about the turbulence that he faced in his most critical trial. Sure. So many of you know the outlines or know the story well. He's stranded on the ice. He finds himself stranded on the ice with 27 men. In an arctic. Off the coast of Antarctica, the icebergs have locked the ship. And they are originally about 80 miles offshore. When the ship gets locked in the ice like a vice, they end up just following the currents because they are held hostage to the flows of the ice and the water underneath it. And eventually, the ice will cross the ship nine months later. This is the fall of 1915. The ice will crush the ship. And Shackleton knows by the summer of 1915 that the ship is starting to be destroyed by the ice. And that he'll have to have, shall we say, a plan B. Now remember, he doesn't have ways. He doesn't have Instagram, right? There's no text message alerts. They have no communication. They have canned goods. They have warm clothes. And they have Shackleton's will to get them home safely. And three lifeboats. And that's what they got. So what's so interesting to me about this story is how it begins, as each of these stories ultimately do, the impact, positive, serious, moral impact that each of these people had and continue to have today. I mean, this book is testimony to their impact today and what we can learn from and be inspired by in their stories. What is so critical is that the impact they can exert begins first within the leader, within him or herself. So here's the example I want to offer you of that. So the night that the ship goes down, the ship starts getting crushed in September of 1915. He moves all the men onto the ice, paying very careful attention to who's going to be in which tent. He doesn't want his doubting Thomas's, his naysayers, all the harrumpfers spreading the contagion of negativity among his men because he recognizes that morale is critical here. So he's got them all in tents. They're killing seals to eat fresh meat, prevents scurvy. And pretty quickly the ship starts to literally be crushed. And one day, about six weeks later, Shackleton sees and yells to the men, boys, she's going down and they watch in about eight hours the ship sink through the ice and the ice close over. And with it goes their morale, right? Well, yeah, these are all sailors. They're not supposed to be stranded on floating ice with no ship. I mean, Shackleton that night in the next day in his diary writes, the endurance sank yesterday. I cannot write about it. And all the, we have the diaries of most of these men and they're all just despondent. And that night the ship's gone down, the ice close over, the men have sculpted back to their tents. And Shackleton is pacing the ice. And later on he records in his diary the conversation he's having with himself. So much of this book is about the conversations that we each as leaders have to have with ourselves and what results from that. And he says, a man must shape himself to a new mark the moment the old one goes aground. And so what's he saying there? He's really building up his own muscles of moral courage to say, you know, I'm gonna, I gotta figure out, even though I don't know exactly how, I gotta get him home alive. And so he's talking to himself first. And the next morning he and his first mate go round to the tents with hot milk and tea and he says, lads, gather round. Kind of like Henry V in Shakespeare's play, you know, before the St. Crispin's Day speech. Gather round. And they gather round and he says this and they all, to a one, to a man, talk about this later. Well, ship and store's gone, we'll go home now. And so imagine, this is a man who's pacing the ice uncertain what to do, but he can't let his men, except for his confident Frank Wilde, the first mate, he can't let them see his doubt because that will spread the worst kind of contagion. He has to appear kind of in his stronger self. And they all later talked about the optimism and conviction he displayed and how critical that was to him. And so from the very beginning of the worst part of the beginning of the terrible crisis, because it just gets worse and worse and worse. You think it can't get worse. You keep turning the pages and it keeps getting worse. He is leading from within and then using his own access to his stronger self and his determination to work from that place to help his men believe that they can do it. In the 1930s, the BBC went around and interviewed everyone that was still alive from the endurance. In the end, they all get home alive. Against every odd. Spoiler alert. And they all said to a one, the boss, which was their nickname for him, made us believe we could do it. But they take us through the milestones toward their rescue. So the ship goes down. They're stranded on the ice. Shackleton pays great attention to, again, who's doing what. He changes the duty roster every week. So we always got something to do every day because he thought that inertia meant a quick slip into ennui, which could slip into doubt and then despair and the lord of the flies moment. So he has all these different tools for maintaining morale. He made sure that all the men socialized across the tents every evening. He made sure there was plenty of food. So they killed seals and penguin when they could get access to them. They couldn't always. But there's a moment after the ship's gone down. It's early 1916. He's tried two different ways to march across the ice with the dog sleds and the lifeboats to no avail. They can't get anywhere in the jagged ice. And the morale is sliding. And he does something very, this is a very interesting little vignette about his leadership. Morale is sliding. He's worried. They're slipping into depression. He's worried that will mean a lack of cohesion and the death of them all. And he says to Ord Lee's, Thomas Ord Lee's the supply master, double rations for the next three days. Now they're running out of food. And Ord Lee says we can't do that. He said we must do it. And so everyone gets double rations. And immediately the diary entries all tick up. One of the sailors writes, full as a tick tonight, we're feeling good. So all these small junctures, he does all these, he makes all these calculated bets to try and keep Morale high. So they eventually, four months after the ship goes down, the ice flows start to break. They take the lifeboats 22 feet long each. And sail northwest up the western archipelago that lines the western side of the Antarctic continent. And eventually after a harrowing eight day boat journey in which Shackleton spends the last 48 hours standing in the front boat, like Washington crossing the Delaware to help his men believe that they will get to land. They land a little island with nothing on it called Elephant Island. First dry land they've been on in almost 18 months. And the men are ecstatic. But he realizes no one will find them there. He's got to somehow make the next big move. And he decides right away to outfit one of the boats with sails, the lifeboats, and try and sail 800 miles northeast now to a whaling station on an island called South Georgia. He can't sail west because of the westerly winds. He has to sail with the west winds at his back. And so he and five men, two of whom he considers doubting Thomas's and spreading contagion spreaders. But he doesn't want to leave them with the other men. They sail for help. And in 20 amazing days accomplish a navigational feat that literally no one has been able, with one exception in the last 100 years, has been able to reenact. And they get to South Georgia. And then another harrowing almost two days over the mountain range because they land on the side opposite of civilization because they've lost the rudder to the lifeboat. Are you interested? Is it stimulating? It's unbelievable. And Shackleton leaves the doubting Thomas with the boat and walks over the mountain range. Just one tiny story there. He and two men, the two men that are traveling with him, get very tired. And he says to Thomas Kreen and Frank Worsley, the men with him, let's take a nap. And he realizes really quickly that if they fall asleep, they'll die. It's that cold. And so he lets each of them sleep for five minutes. He wakes them up and said, you're well rested. You have a 30-minute kip. Let's go on. So he's not above employing the virtuous lie. Anyway, eventually they get to the whaling station. They haven't bathed. No one recognizes them. In two years, no one recognizes them. Everyone thought Shackleton was dead. And then they have to try and get a boat that can rescue the men on the other side of the island. That's easily accomplished. And then get back to the men that are 800 miles southeast at Elephant Island. And it takes him four attempts. It's harder than converting to Judaism. Four astounding attempts. They get within sight of the island on two occasions and then pack ice threatens to lock the boat again. And eventually on the 4th try, August 30th, 1916, he gets to Elephant Island. The men come pouring out when they see the ship in the distance. He's on a little tugboat from the Chilean government. He counts all of them, all 21 are there. And he says to the people with him, oh my god, they're all alive. And they sail back to England where the war's still raging, World War I. And they're met with cosmic indifference. Last point. Cosmic indifference. They all immediately enlist. Two men are immediately killed in Flanders of machine gun fire and astounding Shakespearean irony. And then here's the last point. In 1920, Shackleton decides it's time to go again. It was such a great trip. Let's go again. And he puts the call out to all his men and 13 of them from the original expedition come back to London to go with the boss. It's remarkable. What's amazing is the English are fascinated by explorers. And yet this ultimate of expeditions is completely ignored because the war is eclipsed. It's an amazing thing. It disappears for 50 years. So the leadership, his remarkable leadership begins even before the journey in selecting his crew. And what you write here is really interesting. It was really interesting to me. Here's another key insight for modern leaders. Hire for attitude, train for skill. Shackleton understood that the more volatile and uncertain the environment, the more important it is to have individuals who can and want to embrace the disruption, who understand how to thrive in ambiguity and respond quickly to unforeseen challenges. That's remarkable given what they end up experiencing. So how did he conduct his interviews and select his men? So, and just one tiny side note. I know this story very well. I know as well as the age spots on my hands. And I never fail to be amazed by how he did this. And I think a huge amount is owed now after 10 years of piecing this story together, is owed to the selection of the people. I mean, he selected people by basically having them do auditions. He was like an actor or producer creating a, or director creating an acting troupe. So he looked for people. He would ask people to sing. Can you sing? You know, I don't mean a little bit. You know, I don't need Vincenzo. I don't need an opera aria. I just need a little, you know, a little jazz tune. And he would get people to, a little bit like Southwest Airlines. This is how they used to select their flight attendants. Talking about hiring for attitude, right? And he would get them to do something publicly so he would get a sense of how optimistic they were, how comfortable they were, kind of putting on their best selves. And then he would try and figure out how do you put different people together of different personalities so that you get one plus one plus one equals five. And, but literally they were auditions and it was an ensemble he was creating rather than a collection of resumes. So one of the great gifts of Shackle, he had plenty of narcissistic stuff, baggage. But one of the great gifts he had was to be able to say, I don't need people to be like me. So, you know, we all look at resumes. Oh, I did that. You did that. Oh, you must be great. And he didn't do that. He said, how's this person going to fit with this person and what are we going to have when we get the whole kind of mix together? And that was absolutely essential to the success of this. So it takes history a long time to get things right. And that's certainly the case for Ernest Shackleton. When did history realize his stalwart leadership in the face of this? It's a great question. So he disappears into the midst of history from the time they get back until about the early 1980s. And it really began with some really fondness and some really fine historical work by a guy named Roland Huntford who's written some real page turning books about the race for the South Pole and Shackleton. He's an Oxford, a grand old man of Antarctic history. And he started saying, women, we're missing Shackleton. And he sort of kind of started digging deep into the story and starting to tell it at the same time he was dethroning another great hero of English and British exploration, Robert Falcon Scott. And so Shackleton begins with Huntford's help and then a lot of grapevine interest to kind of percolate up. And today there are societies all over the world dedicated to his ideals, his leadership, the character traits he developed in himself. I mentored a student from Harvard Business School who founded a Shackleton School, a private school to send your kids to, because you wanted them to develop the values and resilience and integrity that Shackleton displayed on this voyage. So he's really been a sleeper hit. And I think now to us in this turbulent moment when we're so hungry for moral leadership and servant leadership, he is just a great example of how you can make yourself capable of how ordinary people can make themselves capable of extraordinary things. I know you do an entire program under Shackleton and I will move on to the other front, but we all learn from our mistakes. But it's interesting, he learns lessons in leadership from a failed leader. Talk about that, just briefly. So Shackleton had in a sense apprentice with Robert Falcon Scott. He was a naval commander from a much, much better family and lineage and social circle than Shackleton who was from the middling gentry in Ireland. And he is on Robert Falcon Scott's first expedition in 1904, 1905 to discover the South Pole. And Scott was a very insecure person. I think lots of leaders are. It's a question of what you do with those insecurities as you have responsibility for others in a big mission. But Scott isn't capable of transcending that. And Shackleton sees that his indecisiveness, his need to be so well liked all the time, his lack of resilience is just, in a sense, really, really handicapping and in some cases jeopardizing the safety of the mission. And he learns from that. And a lot of what, we don't think about this, but a lot of what we become in terms of living up to our potential and living into our, growing into our stronger selves can be by virtue of what we don't want to be. And I think Shackleton gets in these very straightened circumstances in 1915 and says, I am not going to do a Robert Falcon Scott. I'm going to put my men before myself. We're going to figure out how to do this. We're going to show them that we believe. And I don't care whether they like me or not. I'm going to get them home alive. And so I think Scott, ironically, cast a very big, very important good shadow by virtue of what he didn't want to be on Shackleton. The story of Ernest Shackleton in this book is worth the price of the book alone. So I urge you, if you haven't bought the book, again, it's available outside after the program. I want to go on to Abraham Lincoln. But before I do, you establish a concept in this book, which I've talked about frequently ever since reading it. And that is years of gathering. Talk about what that means and just generally, and in relation to the leaders that you draw in your book. So this, again, these people taught me much more than I could. I could ever, in justice, bring them to light. They were such good teachers for me. But each of them ended up in what I call the gathering years. Period Lincoln, very pointedly or very obviously when you start to look at his life. Years when, as I say in the book, using modern parlance, they're not checking anything off their bucket list. They're not really, you know, burnishing their resume to a high gloss. They're not necessarily accomplishing a great deal externally, even though make no mistake about it, folks. These people did not begin their lives as noble saints. They are just, they have lots of wards. They all are narcissistically driven at the beginning and very self-involved. So let's just start with the God's truth here. That's not what they grow into, but that's where they start. And so each of them finds themselves in situations, Douglas, all of them, when they're not, when their ambition, which is an engine that knew no rest, as William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, once said about him. And their ambition isn't getting, and making, covering many miles. And so what is so interesting about them is that they decide in some unconscious and then conscious level, well, I'm just gonna soak it in. I'm gonna gather. I'm gonna learn from this. I'm gonna learn from that person, even though I'm not getting promoted. Or I'm gonna learn from this person. Or I'm gonna tone up my muscles of conviction or my muscles of public speaking or Lincoln, my muscles of grammar or my ability to move in higher social circles than I was raised to on the frontier. And they do that as a project, as a way of working on themselves. And it turns out in each case to be profoundly important to who they become as leaders, they go back and draw on this. I use this term with my Harvard Business School and my Kennedy School students. And you can see that. Like they're so in a hurry to get so much done right now and they offer them the possibility that you can gather very consciously as an act of self-making and then draw on that investment is I think useful for them. I've spoken to students about this. And if you're ambitious, I think you have to achieve, achieve, achieve. Now. Right. But you realize in reading this book that these gathering years can be a time of investment. You're investing yourself and you can use what you've learned during that ostensibly idle time for the crises that are ahead in your life. You write of Lincoln during this, one of his years of gathering as a lawyer. He was a very good trial lawyer. And you write that Lincoln always tried to settle disputes without going to trial. To scourge litigation, he advised and a note composed for a law lecture. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them that the nominal winner is often the real loser in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will be, there will still be business enough ahead. I mean, that line, as a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. That describes Abraham Lincoln, the president, to a T. And he has no idea at that moment that he will ascend to become the 16th president of the United States. So talk about that journey from being a prairie lawyer to being president of the United States. So a couple of things. First, Lincoln actually starts out as a really lousy lawyer. He's one of these people who doesn't, who crams everything in the last moment. So he's not, he wasn't methodical. Until he gets to be president, he's one of the most disorganized people you ever met. There was a big pile of papers in his office with a stone on top of it that said, and we'll note that said, if you can't find it anywhere else, look for it here. I mean, his bills fell out of his hat. I mean, this is not Mr. Lean mean legal machine. But he learns, he has some good mentors early on. He learns from them that it's not, it's going to be more about compromise and as he used to say, giving stuff away to your opponent. In that same law lecture he says, I learned that if I only needed to bring the jury along to one or two or the most three points on which the case hinged. And if I could win the jury on those three, I could just give everything else away and thus disarm my opponent and still win the case. So he comes to learn this, again, very psychological deafness about how to bring people together, how to find your way through conflicting ideas and lots and lots of cacophony. But the most important thing about Lincoln's career between, say, the time he gets to Springfield in the early 1840s and the time he's elected president in a four-way race, remember it was a four-way race because the Democratic Party splintered in several directions over slavery. But in those intervening 16, say, 17 years, you've got to remember he fails a lot. So Lincoln's life has a lot, and he says this on Newark, has a lot more political and some legal failure and some real serious personal heartache and his wife will lose not just Willie, the death so poignantly described in the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie, but also their second son Eddie Baker, Lincoln will die in the early 1850s. And so he says I am compounded, enveloped, environed by failure. He fails at a bunch of political races that he very much wants to win. He suffers a number of financial setbacks because he's so busy campaigning for races he doesn't win that he says at one point, I just got to go home and make some money and pay my bills. And he and his wife are really, really crushed by the death of their son. They were very doting, very untypical Victorian helicopter parents in an age when there were no tiger moms and dads. And so I think failure is enormously important. I think it teaches him all kinds of humility. I think it teaches him a lot of resilience. A guy named Joshua Shankrow wrote a book about Lincoln's melancholy about 10 years ago and he argues, it's not really a biography, it's a rumination and it's interesting. And he argues at the end that each bout of Lincoln's very serious depression, which today we would have medicated him for, he called it the hypo, strengthened him and helped him kind of keep defining, honing his purpose. And I think it made him, he was a very sensitive person, I think it made him more empathic. So Lincoln's rise is messy. It's just, it's all so human. But it's very political and one of the last things to say about the rise, which is again this checkered set of circumstances and failures and achievements, the most important of which is the race with Stephen Douglas in 1858 for the Senate seat from Illinois, which makes him into a national figure, in which he displays all kinds of very political inclinations, speaking strongly against slavery in Northern Illinois, which was much more abolitionist-oriented and much less negatively about slavery in Southern Illinois, which was close to Kentucky in slave states and in a very different political place. So he displays all the facets of a seasoned and learned politician who is ultimately at a very successful and electoral level, and yet at the time that he's absorbing and learning and growing, because Lincoln, like Shackleton, kept working on himself, the cauldron of slavery is reaching a rolling boil. And so you marry his keen intelligence, his political ambition, this growing sense of moral seriousness, which will go on steroids in the White House, and this great empathy for what he's learning and seeing and experiencing around him. And you have the recipe for something really interesting, thoughtful person who's going to discover the courage to lead the country in himself, brick by bit, to lead the nation through civil war. Is that empathy instinctive or is it cultivated? It's both. It's both. You know, many years ago, A.G. Lafley, who's an CEO twice of Procter & Gamble and who's the alumnus of the school, and so someone we want to keep on the love train at Harvard Business School, sat down for me for an interview I was making on what American executives had learned from Lincoln. Because it turns out everyone has a relation with Lincoln. You just have to ask them whether you've read anything about him or not. Including every American person. Exactly. And so Lafley said this. This is the answer to your question. He said, look, leaders are not born, they're made. They're made of these three ingredients. The first is a combination of nature and nurture. A combination, right? What we're born with and what we accumulate as we chalk up mileage on the odometer of life. The second is that a moment arises that the individual, this is part of Lincoln, looking at the big picture. Now, Lincoln didn't have a phone, so he's not tethered, right, to his lover that he strokes all the time like all of us are, but he's looking up and he's thinking about the big picture. So a moment arises that the individual recognizes demands of leadership. That's Lincoln in 1860, or 1854 perhaps with the Kansas-Nebraska Act passage. And the third ingredient is that the individual has to decide for him or herself to embrace the cause and get in the game. And that's what happens. He's elected president. You know, when God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers, and the world falls apart. Right. And Lincoln is, as many of you know, is very self-doubting at a number of moments in his presidency, particularly at the beginning. So we had Darskirn's Goodwin here in last September, and then we had Michael Beschloss in December. They spoke about Lincoln at length, but I'll ask you what I asked them. What sustains Lincoln during his darkest hours in the White House? I think toward the end of the war, from 1862 on, which is both the nadir and the apogee of the transformation. I talked about this in the book, the journey Lincoln's on. And the Emancipation Proclamation, his decision to issue it and then to live by it, changes the game for him. It changes the game completely for the country, but it changes the game for him. And I think Lincoln is very self-doubting himself, too, when he issues that. And when it's promulgated on January 1st, 1863. So I think the moral clarity that that gives him, he never had moral, espoused moral clarity about, espoused moral clarity about slavery. He has it now. And I think, so the mission itself is part of the sustains. I will not just save the country, which is where he starts the war, I think is important. He is curiously, and I think very poignantly, increasingly, today we'd say spiritual, I'd say increasingly thoughtful about God and his relationship to a higher power. Very seriously. And that's not where he starts his life or his presidency. And I think the third thing that sustained him was the sense, you know, just like that quote you used about Shackleton, that there are moments when it does fall to us a leader. And he really carried the weight of the war. He said in 1860, what we do today, the struggle for today is not altogether for today, but for a vast future as well. So he's carrying the war and looking out to what the country might be in the future. And he's carrying sometimes that responsibility in a very solitary way. Those shots in that movie by Spielberg of Daniel DeGleis shuffling down that hallway of the second floor of the Executive Mansion are so true. There's so much how I know Mr. Lincoln. I know him. He was so lonely and he carried this great personal sense of responsibility. And so when he threatens a couple of occasions to kill himself and Stanton, his secretary of war, sits vigil outside the door, I don't think he was really nearly as depressed as he'd been when he threatened that earlier in his life. I think he thought, I have to carry on. So mission, faith, a grave sense of the forces of history and how they have converged into his work right then and there. So one of the catalysts in Lincoln's journey as a leader that led him to the Emancipation Proclamation and to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution is Frederick Douglass. The next subject. And you write of Frederick Douglass. For Douglass, the way forward was clear. Slavery had to be extinguished by any and all available means. Nothing short of this could restore the country to its original purpose. He understood that the battle to eliminate slavery was absolutely unavoidable and that it would define the nation's future. He's prescient in that regard. How does this journey begin for Frederick Douglass? He begins as a slave. He begins as a slave in this astounding set again. So another common thread, really important. I'm now saying it three times, just independently. As a slave, he decides, I'm going to work on myself. So he realizes, when he's eight years old, that he needs to learn to read, that that is part of a journey to freedom. In this case, intellectual freedom, mental freedom and what might be open to. Now, many of you know it was illegal in many states in anti-Bellum America to teach slaves to read. For reasons we can all begin to appreciate. And so he is basically loaned out as a slave to a Baltimore family. And his mistress initially begins teaching a white woman and teaching him and her son Tommy to read. And then her husband gets wind of it and says, you be teaching that Negro to read. He'll be running away the next thing we know, Sophia. And so she's forbidden from teaching him. And so Douglas is such an entrepreneur. He's so resourceful. He takes bread because he has free access to food. He takes bread into the Baltimore streets and gets the young poor boys that he knows to teach him the alphabet in exchange for bread. And then he goes down to the shipyards and he starts learning what aft and leeward mean and using the letters as he's learning them to learn what the words mean. And then he gets hold. This is all within a year of a very famous kind of school book called The Columbian Orator, which was a book of famous speeches. Everyone from Washington to Cato to Julius Caesar. And he starts, he learns to read it. And he starts practicing speeches, like on, you know, on boxes in the Baltimore streets. And so by the time he's 10, he knows how to read. He knows how destructive slavery is, not only as he'll write in one of his three autobiographies to the slave, but to slave holders, to whites, who are encumbered mentally and morally by what Marx would call the infrastructure of slavery. And he'd seen it in his mistress, Sophia. And so he's in a sense on his, on a way and won't be stopped. And so the next 10 years are about how he's growing into adulthood. There's one very interesting critical moment I have to mention along that journey. He becomes, as an adolescent, so defined and so articulate and so incensed by slavery that his owner, he's passed, been passed along now to several different people, decides to send him to a slave breaker. So in all the talk about slavery in our moment today, we don't ever mention slave breaking. So slave breaking was a cottage industry that existed since slavery first appeared in the colonies in the 17th century in which you send slaves, mostly male slaves, but female slaves too, to be broken with psychological, sexual, and all kinds of physical intimidation, torture, and murder. It was not unheard of for slave breakers to kill a slave in front of lots of other slaves. So word would get out about what was in store for slaves that didn't tow the line of their masters. So he gets sent to a slave breaker and he spends seven months in extreme work and getting beaten every week and he writes in his autobiography about how his spirit is dampened. And one day, it's a long story, I'll cut it very short, uncharacteristically, I get going. And then what did the preacher say? I get going and it's just too much trouble to stop writing my sermons. So let me stop. So one day, he's facing the slave breaker and he decides to fight. And they wrestle, the older man in this 17-year-old, they wrestle for about three hours. And the slave breaker calls in other slaves that are there to help and they just watch. And eventually it's a draw. Neither the slave breaker nor Douglas wins. But for Douglas, a draw was a victory. And he said later that the victory, the standing up, walking, I say, stepping into his fear and confronting the slave breaker, he said it was an enormously defining moment for him. And he said, you have, Douglas writes, you have seen how a man was made a slave. Now you can see how a slave was made a man. And so this, again, this growing sense of inner possibility and access beneath, as I write in the book, all these layers of varnish, of fear and self-doubt. And that becomes a really important moment. He escapes when he's 20, goes to New York then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, marries a free woman and begins all kinds of day jobs until he meets Wendell Phillips and Henry Lloyd Garrison and starts in as an abolitionist. And eventually on their speaker circuit telling his story, which many white audiences can't believe that someone this well-spoken, this charismatic, this intelligent has been a slave. And yet the Garrisonians are thrilled to have such a spokesperson for their cause of immediate abolition. And where does his journey end, Nancy? Well, his journey through an astounding, really almost 20 years of nonstop work at initially the grassroots level on the speaker circuit on his own, he leaves the Garrisonians in 1846. And then on the grapevine, and then with elite politicians like Charles Sumner and many others, all the way to Lincoln, he becomes the most important gas tank for the abolitionist engine. And so by the time the Civil War is in full throng, Lincoln and he have met twice and they will meet a third time after the second inaugural speech and they will consider each man, they originally looked very warily at the other, as friends when they last meet right before Lincoln's assassin. And he spends the next, that's 1865, almost 20 years of his life fighting for economic and social opportunities for African Americans and he's the first major male figure to join the women's suffrage movement. So he dies of a heart attack after his wife later dies, he marries a white woman younger than he and he dies of a heart attack the day after they have returned from a huge suffrage convention. So he dies agitating, agitating, agitating as he would say. But he goes to London or certainly goes to England where he's revered and he could lead a wonderful celebrated life abroad and he chooses to come back because he knows that's his purpose, right? So in 1845 he publishes the first of three autobiographies, a wonderful book if you haven't read it very short, amazingly moving. And after, he's still a slave when he publishes it and remember that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone kills like his father's killers and the Godfather says, let's get him out of town till he cools off, right? All of the Garrisonians and all of Douglas's friends are, we gotta get him out of town because his master is gonna come claim him now that he's a public figure. So he goes to England where he joins these wealthy circles of progressive thinkers and he is treated as an equal. He writes these letters of amazement back to friends in the United States about what it feels like to be treated like everyone else. And friends, they are urging him to stay and continue the fight for abolition in America from England where there was a very active community of abolitionists working to free slaves in America. And he decides after a great kind of, just a set of intense conversations with himself that he can't do the right work from England. He has to join, as he says, his brethren in the struggle to end slavery. And he comes back and having made that decision, a few of his well-wishers in England buy his manu mission from Thomas Ault, his master, for $738. So I will confess that before I read your book, I didn't know a lot about Dietrich Bono. Talk about why he made the book and what his mission was in life. So he made the book because the more I read about him, it was like pulling a thread from a shirt. You just keep pulling and it just keeps coming out and it doesn't stop. It was just so interesting. I couldn't get over the monumental threat of the monumental force of evil that he faced from the beginning. He was ordained just before the Knot National Socialists and Hitler took power in 1933. And his fight is unrelenting and increasingly radical and increasingly courageous against Hitler throughout the 30s and into the 1940s. And so I just couldn't resist the story. It was so dramatic. It's the only spy story in the book because he eventually becomes a double agent working within military intelligence in the Nazi government as part of a small group of people trying to assassinate Hitler. So the story got told because of his courage. But the most important reason the story got told is that's less important. The second reason is because of his growth as in terms of his spirit and his goodness and his humanity throughout these 14 years which the story, 12 years which the story encompasses. He grows, as John Lewis would say, into a sense of compassion and the beloved community of brethren, of people trying to do the right thing by other people. This is in the face of what's happening in 1941, 42, 43. And he has a family member that's working inside the government as a double agent. So he knows, even before the Vonsi Conference in 1942 about the final solution, he knows what he faces. And so the way that he evidences what we are capable of not only as agents of positive change but as loving and compassionate people towards all of our brothers and sisters, it still leaves me just in awe. And he was kind and he was caring and he was serious. And he was very, very human. And he, like all of the people in the book, so evidences, the crossing of the bridge as Martin Buber, the German theologian once said, from I to thou, the way we can, all the parents in the audience know what I'm talking about and many others as well, find our true self in relation to serving others, in reflection of moving others, in the goodness of being for others, in the beloved community. I couldn't not write about him. You write of him, Bonhoeffer's significance as a leader reaches beyond his work. Of the five people in this book, no one else so clearly exemplifies the power of Mahatma Gandhi's riveting claim, my life is my message. Living thoughtfully, living rightfully are powerful acts of leadership unto themselves. This lesson has never been more important here and now in the early 21st century. He's really a person for our time in terms of how we lead ourselves, and so there he is. So what is his darkest moment in his quest to end Nazism, to resist fascism? His darkest moment is right after he's imprisoned. He's imprisoned in 1943, the Gestapo rounds up. They don't know why they're imprisoning him. He's kind of swooped up in a raid, but he's in an eight by nine cell in this political prison in Berlin called Tegel, and he's just about to give it all up. He just doesn't know how he can go on. You'll read about in the book this descent into the darkness with himself. And then, again, I write in the book, none of these people get out of the canyon of despair in some grand, rocky, I just drank the eggs, I'm running up the Philadelphia Art Museum's steps because I'm going to beat Apollo Creek. It's not like that. It's like they get to the edge of the abyss and then just by the skin of their chin, a hair, you know, just a gnats eyelash, they step back. And that makes all the difference. And he steps back and having stepped back gets a little more distance on the edge. And then he realizes, I have an important work to do in prison. And I'm not going to say anything more because I want you to read the book. But if I say, that's what's interesting about this book. There aren't these cinematic moments of your climax where they change. They're gradual, they're incremental. And all of them come as a result of the character they've built up in previous chapters in their lives. Exactly. It informs what they do at that critical moment. Exactly. So well said. I wish I'd written it that way. Thank you, Mark. Someone will come for my next book. Let's move on to Rachel Carson. So we all know Silent Spring, which in so many ways catalyzes the modern environmental. But I frankly did not know her fascinating personal story. Talk a little bit about Rachel Carson. Just very briefly, she's born to poor kind of what we used to call hard scrabble parents outside of Pittsburgh in 1907. And she's the third of three children. Her mother has a college degree, a highly unusual time for a woman. And homeschools are kids for a while and loves nature. And so from the very early days, Rachel and her sister and brother, particularly Rachel, are with their mother learning about both the wildlife and the plants and just the surrounding environment. She's a valedictorian of the small high school class. And then she wins a scholarship to Chatham College, which was called Pennsylvania College of Women. And she starts off as an English major. She was a very, very articulate writer from an early age and had published stories in a variety of children's magazines growing up. And so she majors in English. And then halfway through college, she has something of a little, like, you know, not quite a sophomore existential crisis, but more of a, oh my God, she takes a science class. I love biology. I love nature. Maybe I should major in science. And eventually she does. She decides to major in biology. And that was just a very iconoclastic, a very sacrilegious thing for a woman to do. First of all, most women didn't have college degrees. Secondly, there weren't any women scientists. And if there were women scientists, there weren't any jobs for women scientists. So everyone tries to talk her out of it. And she does. She goes on with it. And then she gets a scholarship to Johns Hopkins Institute of Physiology where she matriculates. And meanwhile her parents and her birth family collapse. So one of the fascinating things about this story is because Rachel will be responsible for her birth family for the rest of her life. And one of the interesting things she taught me, Rachel's taught me a great deal, was how women, just by virtue of what they, first of all, women are always working, right? People ask, are you working to a woman? Well, duh. So she's working all the time. And she's not just working at her writing or her science. She's putting laundry in the ringer washer. She's putting food on the table for the kids. She's packing lunches, right? She's ironing. She's always working. But one of the things she taught me is how a great deal of, I think, the nurturing stewardship that informs Silent Spring. Reread that book if you haven't. It reads like a beautiful poem. The nurturing stewardship that informs her critical leadership and that we are so in need of today towards the earth and our relationship with it, was born of the nurturing she did taking care of her parents, her sister and brother, eventually her nieces and her nieces' children, and ultimately her grand-nephew, who was five when she adopts him at the age of 50. This is someone who took the responsibilities to other people and very, very seriously as we all do, but who became a great and valiant leader who could translate that nurturing into enormous impact on a large public stage. So we don't talk about nurturing, caretaking as critical stepping stones on the way to great leadership. I tell you they are, and they can be. So she's amazing. In any case, her birth family arrives at her doorstep while she's a graduate student. They're out of money. Her sister and brother don't have jobs. A great depression is beginning. She has to quit graduate school. She gets a master's best to leave the PhD program in order to support the family. And so she spends a number of years doing that. Eventually some of them peel off. Her father has a heart attack in the backyard and dies. And she has her mother, her sister, and her sister's two kids to care for. And she stumbles on a job in the 1930s for what's today called the Fisher in Wildlife Service. It was just beginning to be called that then. Writing radio scripts. So think about it. Here's someone who knows science. Here's someone who's elegant and writes excessively and beautifully. And she marries the scientific rigor with accessible and beautiful prose. And she becomes, today we call content director, but she becomes like this very successful researcher and writer for the Fisher in Wildlife Service. And she decides to dust off some of her early stories for the Saturday evening, which we're all rejected for the Saturday evening post in Harper's and all kinds of magazines, and starts double dipping, as we say in the academic world, taking her notes from FWS and then creating popular articles and stories for national news magazines. She publishes her first book. She hungers narcissistic engine, hungers to be a best-selling author. And publishes her first book the week before Pearl Harbor is invaded. So that book, like lots of books in the age of Donald Trump, are kind of lost in a larger news cycle. And she carries on at the Fisher in Wildlife Service. She will rise to like G-14 until the early 50s when she publishes her second book called The Sea Around Us. If you don't know that book, just Google it. It became an extraordinary best-seller, marrying, again, her extraordinary prose and nurturing, loving, honoring prose about the honoring attitude toward the natural world to all kinds of important storytelling about the sea and its importance. It's 80 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and she leaves her government job and starts casting about for her next book. She will write a second book called The Edge of the Sea pretty quickly afterwards. But in 1956, Marjorie Spock, the daughter of Benjamin Spock, writes her a letter about songbirds that are dropping dead out of the skies in her Long Island home in the wake of DDT spray. And that begins the most extraordinary chapter of Rachel Carson's life. And she doesn't want to do a book on it. She doesn't want to take this up. And it's a kindly kind of Mr. Rogers of the natural world. She's not a muckracker. This is no Ida Tarbell or what will be Bernstein and Woodward. And then eventually she feels she cannot... She wrote to a friend, I realized I could never live with myself if I kept silent about what she learns. And she starts sending out to her circle. There's no emails. There's no fax. His telephone calls and writing. She's typing on carbon paper. People in her network of scientists, agricultural experts, oceanographers, about what they know about DDT, Heptachlor and a whole host of other chemicals that are being sprayed everywhere. You can walk into your hardware store in 1960 and buy wallpaper that's coated with DDT to keep flies off your walls. And so begins the early genesis of what will become silent spray. Now, what you don't know and what you have to know is that she's making slow, very methodical progressors. She's one person and two research assistants. And if any of you have not read the article this week's New Yorker by Robert Kara about working in the LBJ Library and piecing together the story of that man, our 36 presidents life, you must read it because it is an extraordinary story of archival detective work and diligence and sheer raw stubbornness. And Carson's work on Silent Spring is just like that. She's looking for the truth. And the truth is, it's a direct article. It's a definitive article. The truth takes a while sometimes to uncover. So she's hard at work behind deadline writing the story, determined as she says to put the facts on an unshakable foundation. And she finds a lump in her left breast. And it's diagnosed as a condition bordering on malignancy. She has a single mastectomy. And after a fashion, there's no chemotherapy. After a fashion, it gets to working again. Six months later, she finds another lump in the same place. This time, she goes to the Cleveland Clinic and a guy named George Kryl, a well-known oncologist at the time, says, you have malignant cancer. You probably don't have much time left. And so the second half of this story is her race against the clock to finish the book against extraordinary complications, physical and emotional and practical of this disease. The book is eventually published in 1962. It serialized first in New Yorker and creates a huge tempest. That's a con. She is just raked over the coals. The secretary of the Department of Agriculture, which of course is a big user of DDT, says, why did she care about the future generation? She's a spinster. I mean, it gets much, much nastier. She doesn't tell anyone about her illness ever because she doesn't want people to think she's on a vendetta journey. And yet, she's very ill. And the book is published in September of 1962 and immediately becomes an extraordinary bestseller. And you write of her writing the book. Going back to the New Yorker article, one of the things that Robert Caro learns from his editor is you read every, research everything. But what you write is her process of writing the book also illuminates the need for leaders to move beyond data and facts. These matter, as Carson clearly understood, but they're not enough. Leaders are obligated, whether they work on paper in a conference room or in front of a camera, to develop understanding, and if possible, to turn that understanding into wisdom. And that's exactly what she does in Silent Spring. Exactly. So talk about the reception that the book got. So the book gets this very bifurcated reception, right? On the one hand, these extraordinary proponents of industry that just attack her, right? These are Dow and Monsanto and Velcicole and other chemical companies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture aligned with them. On the other hand, a host of environmentalists, Justice Stevens, Justice Supreme Court Justice, all kinds of other folks, Stuart Udall, remember that? Remember him? Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy? He reads the book and he mentions it to Kennedy. So at a press conference that fall, right after the book's published, someone asked him about Silent Spring and he says, oh, we're looking at DDT and of course I'm thinking of Ms. Carson's book. Well, I don't know if JFK was ever thinking of Ms. Carson's book, but his folks in his cabinet were. And so that then launches a host of legislative balls, right? It gets a host of legislative balls in motion, separate subcommittees in the Senate and the House investigating pesticides. Eventually, within two years, DDT will be banned for sale or use and a whole host of other things will begin to happen legislatively. But it is the first huge foray of public servants and the American government into the field of what today we call environmental legislation. She makes appearances at a set of the series of those hearings with a wig, very careful to conserve her strength because no one knows she's ill, and is very, very effective. One other thing to say about her, the controversy that she arose. The headline in the New York Times that summer was after the New Yorker published the serialized version, was Silent Spring, very noisy summer. She elects to do a television appearance with Eric Severide on the predecessor for 16 Minutes, which was called CBS Reports. You can Google it. It's all there. It's 55 minutes, and she's half the show. She's in her Chevy Chase helm. She's wearing a wig. She holds the book. And they do a split screen thing with a chemist, a scientist from one of the chemical companies, and Rachel. And she says things like, we are not called to master nature. In her very soft voice, we are called to master ourselves. Or take this one as well. Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that lets us accept what we know to be detrimental or dangerous to ourselves or our communities? Because we have lost the will to demand what is good. Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that allows us to accept what we know to be detrimental or dangerous? Because we have lost the will to demand what's good. Anyway, it's a five ring fight, and it's a total Carson knockout in her quiet, gentle way. And the point of the book, as she says at many places, and the point in the interview is she says, I didn't write this book for scientists. I wrote this book for the American public. The American public have a right to know. What is in our water? What is in our air? And they have a right to the facts, the truth. And they will act on the truth in a way that I know will be virtuous and courageous. So it's really a valentine for the American citizenry being called to our better selves by this woman who's dying. She dies a year later in April. The CBS reports airs in the spring of 1963. She dies a year later in April of complications of her cancer and Stuart Udall and Justice Stevens, a host of very thoughtful scientists and politicians carry her coffin in the funeral. Nancy, in Washington today we see a dearth of leadership. Moral leadership might as well be oxymoron. Are you seeing moral leadership in other places in America? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's alive and well every day. We're not actually reading about it, and we're not tweeting about it enough, but it's, you know, every day there are people... I mean, let's just take an example. Think about the hurricane in Houston. Think about how it wasn't a red state or a blue state problem. It was an American problem, and the film footage and the descriptions and the tales of Americans rolling up their sleeves to help their neighbors or come down from drier parts to help besiege Houston are just legion. Every day we are surrounded by acts of goodness. Now, and there are people in Washington, John Lewis, someone you've had here as part of one of your many important convocations, there are people every day doing good work as public servants. We need to be emboldened by this. We need to be emboldened as citizens to demand what is good. And not demand what is good in a caustic and, you know, kind of vitriolic way. Demand what is good because we all here. What did Kennedy say? We all are mortal. We all breathe the same air. We all want our kids to have a better life. There is so much more that unites us that divides us. And again, I'm called the Bonhoeffer and John Lewis' beloved community. I hunger for leaders that will speak to us not just about depressing issues, climate change, health care, education, immigration, but speak to us about our cohesion as a people. I pledge allegiance to the United States of America and to the Republic, you know, one nation under God. We want to be called. What did Bobby Kennedy say the night in Indianapolis after King was shot? Remember he makes this impromptu. He's just been like... I know what it feels like to have a member of my family killed. I had my brother killed by a white man. But what we need in this country is not more violence, not more hatred. We need love and the attempt to understand and listen to each other. We need that. We need that. And I long for leaders that will call us to that as well. That's going to be critical to, you know, kind of re-weaving the social and political and moral fabric of our country. I will ask one last question, which I know every member of this audience would also ask you, and that is, will you come back? Any time. Any time. Ladies and gentlemen, please congratulate Nancy King. The book is Forged in Crisis. Nancy, thank you so much. My pleasure. My pleasure. It was a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.