- It might be radically simple to say that character is a choice, but today's guest, in reflecting on a career of service, demonstrates it with simple meditations on the choices that define all our lives.

He's retired General Stanley McChrystal, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(thoughtful music) (thoughtful music continues) (music fades) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Stanley McChrystal, a retired US Army general who recently published a new book, "On Character: Choices That Define a Life."

He's joined us today from the Washington D.C.

area.

General, thank you so much for being with us.

- Well, it's a pleasure to be here, and I'm hurt that you didn't mention my Salve Regina graduate degree.

- I was hoping you were gonna do that, so thank you very much!

It's always good to have a Seahawk on the show.

Sir, I read "On Character" with a really profound interest, and I found myself channeling some of my undergraduate education and Marcus Aurelius, and then you mentioned him.

And so I'm curious if there's some inspiration in that classic text in your authorship of this, and why don't you just tell us about the book and its origins in the first place.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me, and I enjoy talking about this because it's what I think about a lot now.

I'm 71 years old.

I'm at a point in life where I've got more behind me than in front of me, and what I find is the most important things when I look back have always been character, and the most important things when I look forward I think are character.

I'd written several books before this, to include my memoirs, and I wasn't intending to write another book.

And then I would have these discussions with my wife, as we both like to sit and read, and I would give her my ideas on things, and she finally said, "Shut up and write them down."

(Jim and G. Wayne laughing) So I did, and I wrote them in a series of essays not knowing that they would all intersect on the question of character in some form or fashion.

And I found that what I was thinking about at this point in my life came around the concept of character.

And not just the lofty ideas that we learned from philosophers, although some of them, and I find myself going back and rereading things I'd been assigned when I was young but not paid that much attention to and suddenly finding that they had a lot to say.

And if I had paid more attention to them during the practical parts of my life, I think that would've been helpful.

And so as I went to people like Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations" is a very practical book.

You know, you can really kind of pick it up on any page and you can find something in there where you go, "Wow, that really resonates with me."

And so what I tried to do with the book "On Character" is not write a prescription for anyone on what their character should be, but instead to describe how I think about character, how I'm exploring my character even at this age, and the conclusions that I'm reaching in that process, and it's not done.

And what I want people to do, not to accept anything I've given.

Don't say that, "Stan McChrystal, you got it right," but think about it yourself.

Think for yourself.

Don't listen to a pundit, don't let some influencer tell you this is what you ought to believe about something.

Think about it and come to your own conclusions and then form your character.

And then one of the most important conclusions that I draw in the book is that character isn't just your convictions.

It's not just the things you believe in.

The other part of it, the essential, is the discipline to live to those convictions.

Because if we have tremendous number of good concepts and good intentions but we lack the personal discipline to reflect them in our behavior, then, in fact, our character is the lesser.

It's the things we don't do sometimes that really define us.

- Yeah, I was thinking as I was driving into the studio today that the number of times in life where an adult says to somebody, a child or an adolescent, you know, "You need to do this, you might not wanna do it, but it'll build character," right?

And there's a sense almost that having character or being of good character means doing the hard stuff.

It seems to me that the point you're making about character is much bigger, much broader than just sort of eat your spinach.

- I think it is.

If I think about what character is, character is our behavior.

That's how we see character.

It's not what we say or write, it's what we actually do.

And I think that you get your character from examples in life.

You get some instructions.

I don't think you're born with character.

I think you adopt and evolve your character through your life.

But if you have a set of values, if you have some norms in the society that you are a part of, either your family or your church or your organizations, things which encourage you to a higher plane of behavior, then I think what happens is it becomes habit-forming and it starts to become the default way that you act.

And partially that's because you think it's the right thing to do, partially because you don't want to let other people down.

And then at a certain point in life, you don't want to let yourself down.

You want to live to a standard that you've decided defines you.

And when you reach that point, I think it becomes very powerful, because you've got an identity that is less malleable by outside forces.

Now, hopefully it's a good one, but the reality is I think you can build that and reinforce it, and we can help the people we love reinforce theirs as well.

- So, General, can you expand a little bit on how people, how we can build character in ourselves?

- Yeah.

I think that if we want to build character, we have to start with a bit of reflection.

We have to decide, okay, what person do I really want to be?

Don't just think about how you act right now.

Think about how you would like to be.

Sometimes we say, what would you like your obituary to read?

What would the theme be about how people describe you?

And then you say, all right, I would like to have that kind of persona to others and I would like to have this level of confidence in myself that that is genuine.

And then you say, what would it take to get me to that?

How would I modify my behavior?

What study, what do I maybe have to believe in, have to develop strong beliefs in certain things?

And I start my own self-development, and it's not cracking a bunch of books.

In my case, I've gone back and I've spent some time reading philosophers again, but in reality what I found is they were a lot smarter than I gave them credit for 40 years ago.

In reality, most of the things that the philosophers tell me about I have run into in some form or fashion.

I just hadn't thought enough about them in advance, and I wish I'd been better prepared.

So I think as we go through that, it becomes a question of intentionality.

If I want to have a good character, I have to decide I want to have a good character.

And then everything I do has to be based, is that going to support or in fact weaken the character that I seek for myself?

And we do worry about what our peers think and what our families think, we can't deny that, but the reality is the person who matters most is the person in the mirror.

And we know that even if we did something that's acceptable, if we did it for the wrong reason, we know what our character is.

- So one of the themes that weaves its way through your book is a belief in the power of the team, the power of community, the value of cohesion.

Can you elaborate on that for us please, General?

- All right.

Please call me Stan, y'all.

- Okay.

- Yeah, and team is your family, team is your church, team is the team you're on, the organization.

So I use that definition.

It's the people around you that you have some relationship with of responsibility, shared responsibility to each other.

And I think the great things about teams is you establish a set of expectations or standards to be on that team.

The best units I was ever in, the most elite units I was in had a set of standards that every person worked very hard to meet to join the organization, but then they had to live up to those standards all the time, and there was this idea that we were holding each other to account.

We were looking at each other and saying, not reporting on them, but the idea is I want to be around people I respect, and to earn the right to do that, I have to live to the standards that they respect, and I'd do the same for them.

And if somebody starts to have issues or veer off, then we as individuals in the organization can look them in the eye and say, "You're not doing what you said you would do to be part of this organization."

And when organizations cease to provide that kind of pressure, corseting of people, then they get weakened, and then suddenly the organization's moral standing or its character has eroded.

And we all know organizations like that where they may have a set of written values, but we know in fact what is practiced by most of the members doesn't reflect that, and then they lose the credibility.

But there are others where if somebody is part of that, you say, "I have a very strong confidence that they have a set of beliefs and personal discipline that reflect that."

And so I think teams are the ultimate strength of character, because none of us has the personal will, at least I don't think many of us do, to do it by ourselves.

We're too buffeted by outside pressures.

You need things that support you.

You read accounts of Admiral James Stockdale in his seven years as a POW in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

He was ultimately awarded the Medal of Honor for his courage.

But what he talks about repeatedly is his inner strength from the values that he had that he wanted to live up to, but also the support of other prisoners.

Because even when they were tortured and broken, and everyone was, others would come in and say, "That's okay, keep the faith," and they would rebuild the person's idea of self-esteem and dignity.

And that becomes the thing that allows us to, when we fail, and we all do, to not abandon our character, but in fact, to renew our commitment to trying to live up to it.

- Yeah, so, General, so far, or Stan, so far we've talked about individual character, we've talked about the character of teams.

Is there a public character?

When we think about sort of the challenges facing the United States, whether historically or today, is there a public character that can be cultivated?

- I think there is, and I'll use the United States as an example, but it applies to other nations as well.

We take great pride in the formation of our nation.

We're near the 250th anniversary of the Constitution.

We take pride in the Founding Fathers, what they created.

And so they provide an example, they provide a beacon for us, a guide, but the reality is they're all dead and it is now up to us.

And so what the United States of America is as a society is defined by what we do each day.

Not by what's written on a piece of paper, not by what's recorded in history and the great accomplishments of the past, but it's how we are right now, how we treat each other, the integrity that we demand of ourselves, that we demand of each other, the idea of fairness, the idea of responsibility to more than just ourselves.

I think we're in a crisis in the United States.

I think we've allowed the sense of citizenship to erode.

We think that if we pay our taxes and vote, then we've sort of met the minimum threshold, but in reality, only 65% of Americans voted last presidential election anyway.

So the reality is we are letting those essential responsibilities that bind us together as a society become frayed, and then add on that the effects of media and social media and we've got misinformation, disinformation, very extreme politics from every angle and we get people emotional and charged and suddenly we forget that we are all part of the same team ultimately.

We are all going to sink or swim together.

We can disagree on this range of things, but our national character must have a level of shared values that we can all agree on.

Now, they won't be exactly the same on many specific issues, and they shouldn't be, but there should be things about how we are going to think about the whole of our nation, how we're gonna think about fellow citizens, what our responsibility to them is, what our personal responsibilities are.

We've got to have a shared agreement on those, and then we've got to have pressure on any of us when we stray from those.

- You know, Stan, one of the passages in "On Character" that resonated with me was the idea of you out in the back alley talking to your neighbors, enjoying a beverage, being of that community.

And one of the questions that, at Salve just last year, we had Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone," a classic scholar of sort of community and what the loss of community has meant for the country.

Do you have any thoughts in particular on that issue about the role of community and how we can foster it in our own lives?

You know, the temptation I think now is to disengage from people that we disagree with.

How do we continue to engage with people who maybe think differently about politics than we do?

- Yeah.

I think this is very important and I think it's best solved at the very local level, because at the local level, problems become very practical.

They're not theoretically political, they are much more practical; the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, all the things that decide the quality of life in the here and now.

I think the sense of community has been weakened by a number of things.

One is the fact that we tend to grow up in one area, then move to somewhere else during our work years, and then we go to somewhere else to retire.

And so in many cases, we don't have multiple generations in the same neighborhoods.

So I'm a grandparent now.

I might not care about the schools in my area if my granddaughters didn't live next door to me, and so I care very much about them.

And so the idea is those shared interests that we have have got to be brought to the forefront, and many of those, again, are very local because we'll disagree on some of the national issues, and again, that's probably fine.

In my particular case, I also think that we're in an era where we don't have as many shared requirements for responsibilities, meaning most of our fire stations are now professional fire people, our police are professional police.

Those services we get are not provided by the people who live next door to us.

They're provided by this sort of nameless government we pay taxes to and then it happens.

I think there was an era in which you couldn't raise a barn without getting your neighbors to come help you, and it was difficult to raise kids if everybody wasn't keeping an eye out for the kids in the neighborhood.

And we've let that become atomized and we've let everybody live anonymous in a very small neighborhood, literally not even knowing their neighbors except occasionally by sight.

What we're so fortunate in this small neighborhood I live in in Alexandria is we all know each other.

We've got several personalities who bring people together.

It's their nature to convene us.

But for example, a couple years back, we all went, well, not all of us, but a number of us went to Southern France to watch the wedding of two of our neighbors.

You know, going to a wedding down the street to me is a big task, but to go to Southern France because we want to show our neighbors we care about them, and it helps cement relationships that have just become almost sacred.

And now people in the neighborhood feel like they should be part of the neighborhood.

They feel a responsibility, and that's moving us along a spectrum that I think is really, really important.

- So, Stan, throughout the book there emerges an appreciation for the complexity of some issues, whether they are hot-button social issues or the rituals and practices of diplomacy.

Did you always appreciate this kind of complexity?

And if not, what brought you to that appreciation?

- I'm sure I didn't.

There was a time in life when I thought that the right answer was the right answer and whoever had the right answer would prevail.

In reality, I was taught by a person before I was assigned to Washington D.C.

on my first assignment, and he goes, "You need to understand that in Washington D.C.

two plus two does not equal four.

It equals what the people in the room decide it equals."

And you know, that's illustrative of so many environments, because people come with different perspectives, they come with different equities, different requirements, all of these things, life journeys.

And you get in the room and you say, "Now this is the right answer!"

And you think if you talk louder, everybody will at some point go, "Oh, yeah, Stan, that's the right answer," 'cause you talk more loudly.

But in reality, from their perspective, it's not the right answer.

And so you understand the complexity of trying to reach any kind of accommodation for people to work together to do things requires understanding the complexity of all the people's different viewpoints, equities that are involved in that.

And then the issues themselves, because we always tend to look at an issue and we go, "Well, this is pretty straightforward.

We do this and this will happen."

And of course, particularly in a complex society like that, that's never the case.

And so you've got to respect problems.

I remember when we were doing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, I had this ridiculously complicated depiction schematic that showed all the feedback loops and pressure points of trying to do counterinsurgency on a national scale.

And people would laugh at it and they'd go, "That's so ridiculously complicated," and I said, "That's the point."

You have to understand that's what it is, and you can't pull this lever and expect a predictable outcome every time.

- Yeah, Stan, you praise the power of reading at a couple different points in "On Character," and I wonder if you could tell us what reading does for you and what you think it can do for the rest of us.

- Yeah, I think reading is critical and I just don't think watching video does quite the same, although it brings some additional ideas to it.

When I find that I read, it forces me to think.

I literally read the person's paragraph and I think about, what are they trying to say?

And then I think about how they said it.

In some cases, I would just admire how well someone records what they're writing.

And they make me reflect on life, and in some ways that's frustrating, because you get to this point in life and I'm reading a book right now and it just makes me wish I had read the same book and thought about it deeply 50 years ago.

And I say, well, you know, that's when I should have done it, but I didn't, so this is the next best time.

But reading makes me think about other people's stories, and if the author can bring me along, not just tell me what happened, but try to make me think about why it happened or why they did what they did, then I'm hooked.

- You know, is there a book early in your life, the first moment that you thought, "Oh wow, that's a life-changing book"?

- Yeah, I like to read biographies and I read mostly nonfiction.

So I remember when I was young reading books about John Paul Jones, for example, and other heroes.

'Cause my father was a soldier and so I sort of had a bent toward that, and that was the early '60s, so that was the idea.

But the book I mentioned most to people was written in 1968 and it was a book called "Once An Eagle," and it's the story of two soldiers through a long career lifetime, and it parallels these two people.

But it captures so perfectly the idea of maturation through life, plus life in a military that was changing from the First World War up through World War II and Korea, and then the complexities of individual lives, 'cause there are two very different characters.

One's a Nebraska farm boy who enters the military, is an enlisted man, wins the Medal of Honor, and he's thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, almost too much so.

And then there's an Ivy Leaguer who comes in who's sort of a conniver, but he's very smart and very competent.

And as I read this same book several times through my career, my military career, it struck me differently based upon where I was in life.

Because when I was young, there was a good officer and a bad officer and that's the way it was.

And then when I got further in life, it suddenly got gray.

And suddenly the guy who was so simple but so good was good and admirable, but he wasn't enough.

There were things he couldn't do that the more complicated, less admirable character could do, and there were things that needed to be done.

And so you suddenly realized life is not black and white.

And that particular book I recommend to military officers and to anybody who wants to understand leadership.

- So, Stan, what is the link between character and patriotism?

You've hit on this a bit in our previous discussion, but maybe you can elaborate a bit more.

- Yeah, it's not clear cut.

I think that in my definition, if I have good character then I am likely to be loyal to United States and therefore patriotic in nature.

And so I think it's a good thing.

But I think patriotism doesn't mean you have good character.

Patriotism, you know, they talk about nationalism, the last refuge of a scoundrel, is we can grab any idea and we can make it into a negative.

We can get hyper-patriotic, and what that means in some people's definition is that we are the best and therefore everybody else is not good, and everybody else is less than us and everybody else is unworthy.

I remember Abraham Lincoln wrote this extraordinary argument to himself, and he was arguing about slavery, and he said, "If the idea that someone should be a slave to someone else because their skin is darker than that other person's, if the lighter skin gives them the right to own and the other person the obligation to be a slave, what happens if someone shows up that has lighter skin than you?

Are you therefore obligated to be their slave?"

It turns on its head the idea, the simplicity of anything like patriotism.

And so to be honest, I'm uncomfortable when anyone hijacks the flag or hijacks the idea of loving America, and if you don't do certain things, then you are not a loyal American and therefore not patriotic.

I am concerned about those, because I think in that case, patriotism has gotten hijacked and it's become a two-dimensional measurement that can't be measured in just two dimensions.

- Stan, the book is "On Character," it's a remarkable read, and we could talk to you all day, but we are out of time.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us.

But that is all the time we have this week.

If you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can also catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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