Looking the Other Way
The Burning of Sodom by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1844 and 1857 (public domain - The Met)
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
I’m a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin. She’s a historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Wait Till Next Year, Team of Rivals, and Leadership in Turbulent Times, among others.
I’ve been seeing and hearing her make the rounds on various podcasts and news shows as she talks about her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, which is a skillful combination of biography, memoir, and history, and I think it provides some lessons for anyone interested in the present and future.
Why would reflecting on what happened some six decades ago matter to anyone today?
Aside from the lessons or parallels we might draw from that turbulent time, the journey itself fascinates me.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband Dick was dying. He had just turned 80 and was circumspect about his life, measuring it as one-third of the length of the history of the United States.
He had an impressive history himself: president of the Harvard Law Review and first in his class, Congressional lawyer who investigated the quiz show scandals in the 1950s (he was played by Rob Morrow in Quiz Show), advisor and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy.
Such impressive experiences came with lots of documentation, as you might imagine. Letters, speeches, ephemera, and other mementos that bore witness to the mundane and the consequential — breadcrumbs that marked a trail of a full and fascinating life.
Kearns Goodwin tells the story in a recent piece in The Atlantic:
“For years, however, Dick had resisted opening these boxes. They were from a time he recalled with both elation and a crushing sense of loss. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the war in Vietnam; the riots in the cities; the violence on college campuses—all the turmoil had drawn a dark curtain on the entire decade. He had wanted only to look ahead.”
“Now he had resolved to go back in time. ‘I’m an old guy,’ he said. ‘If I have any wisdom to dispense, I’d better start dispensing.’”
For a time, Dick was a wunderkind: he was only 28 when he joined JFK’s campaign in 1960. Kennedy himself was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency.
The world (and certainly America) treasures youth. The vigor, excitement, and energy of people in the early stages of their careers are welcomed as new paths are forged and the torch is passed to a new generation.
That sentiment is partly what gives oxygen to the insidiousness of ageism — the belief that ideas to propel us into the future only come from youth.
The truth is every generation has something to teach us, if we pay attention.
As an executive coach and business advisor, I have the privilege to work with up-and-coming leaders of all kinds to share insights distilled from my experiences.
My job isn’t to tell them the future, but to prepare them for it. To give them a sense of what they might expect in any given situation, because business is still about people — and human nature remains constant.
So many leaders are looking to divine the future, when what they need is to understand our past.
A sense of history is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance. It is an essential ingredient in crafting strategy and leading people.
To know history is to be prepared for the future.
Just as Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us.
There’s so much to learn,
