by John Kasich
And, always, I look at my hero. Ronald Reagan. He was unbelievable, and one of a kind. Character. Principle. Walked the lonely road. Challenged Americans to make their own difference. Recall that when he first came into office he was succeeding a president who told Americans to beat the gas crisis by riding their bicycles to work, to beat the oil shortage by wearing a sweater. Reagan took one look around and essentially said, “What are you guys, nuts?” Interest rates were out of control. Inflation was out of control. The Cold War against the Russians was at its zenith. So what did he do? He sent Jeane Kirkpatrick to the United Nations and delivered a powerful message that the rest of the world was not going to kick America around anymore. He cut marginal rates. And he took on the Soviet Union. He called them the “Evil Empire.” His advisors said, “Mr. President, that’s not good politics. That’s not good diplomacy.” And Reagan just chuckled and said it anyway.
Once, on his way to the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan’s advisors were pleading with him to temper his comments. (Reagan’s secretary of the treasury, James Baker, told me this story.) “When you get to the Berlin Wall,” the advisors told their president, “please, remember we’re in the middle of sensitive negotiations. Be careful what you say.” So what did Reagan do? He strode to that gate and he took the lectern and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Ronald Reagan didn’t listen to his advisors. He didn’t listen to his pollsters. He trusted his gut. And he united the whole world. Mothers and fathers who had locked themselves in their homes in fear showed up in town squares in Poland and Czechoslovakia and in the Baltic states. They stood, and lit candles. “We’re not going back,” they said. “We want our freedom.” Reagan’s words echoed through Eastern Europe, and soon enough the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and millions of people were returned to their rightful way of life, to freedom.
LIFTING FROM THE BOTTOM
That, friends, is true leadership. But we can’t all be Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King and Franklin Roosevelt. They’re big shots, but it’s not about the big shots; they can never be our country’s heart and soul. Their actions are critical, but I think it’s clear that America is moved from the bottom up. I know a guy named Albert Lexie, and for my money Albert is the heart and soul of America. He dropped out of school when he was fifteen and took up shoeshining for a living. That was his calling. Albert’s a little different from the rest of us. He actually listens when he asks you how you’re doing. You give him an answer. He listens. So, right there, he’s different.
One Sunday afternoon, Albert was at home watching a KDKA telethon on Pittsburgh television, to benefit the children’s hospital there. And, watching, he fell in love with a little girl he saw on the telethon and with the thought of how he might help her, so on Monday morning he went to his bank and withdrew every penny he had in savings. Eight hundred bucks, give or take a couple pennies. Albert Lexie took that money and went down to the hospital and gave them every last cent. Hospital administrators found out about this, and a little bit about Albert Lexie, and they reached out to him and asked him to come shine shoes at their hospital. To which Albert responded, “Look, I’m pretty busy. I can give you two days a week.” Which is just what he’s done—for the last twenty years. He hops a bus for the half-hour trip to the hospital, straps on his tool box, which weighs about thirty pounds. He’s got all his stuff in there. His brushes, his polish, and his special “magic” sauce that gives his customers that extra shine. He goes from doctor’s office to doctor’s office, nurse’s station to nurse’s station. Spend any kind of time in that hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Albert’s working and you’ll see doctors and nurses traipsing around without their shoes on. He’s become a fixture—an oasis for folks desperate to talk, to get their minds off whatever else it is that brought them to the hospital in the first place.
He charges three bucks for a pair of shoes, and he slips that money into his right-hand pocket because that’s what he lives on, but he takes his tip money and slips that into his left-hand pocket, because that’s what he means to donate back to the hospital. Over the years, he’s collected more than $100,000 in tip money, and he’s used that money to help parents cover their bills and other attendant costs associated with their children’s long-term care. He was voted Pittsburgh’s “Philanthropist of the Year” in 2000, and it was about time. And, it was about leadership.
Guys like Albert Lexie are the heart and soul of this nation. They move America every bit as meaningfully as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. And it doesn’t end there. In our communities—big and small, rich and poor—we struggle with education. The knee-jerk response is that we’re not giving our public school children what it takes to meet the challenges of today, and in many schools that’s unfortunately the case. Not so at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a small public school in Harlem. The school was shut down in the late 1980s due to excessive violence, but it reopened in the middle 1990s with renewed promise. It was still located across the street from a burned-out crack house, but it was now being run by folks with the vision to look past their surroundings. Now, the kids don’t go to school in their Britney Spears T-shirts, or in baggy pants “sacked” halfway down to their knees. There’s a dress code, and there’s no wising off to the teacher. Students say, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir.” There are no study halls or free periods or gut classes that encourage students to skate by on little effort. If you do well in trigonometry, you get kicked up to advanced trigonometry. They’ve got rules, and expectations, and if you mean to stay there you’ve got to meet them all.
And guess what? The students are thriving. They’ve gone from wondering where they’re going to get their next meal to wondering where they’re going to go to college. The first graduating class in 2001, there were 105 graduates. Out of that group, 104 went on to college. The one student who didn’t go to college became a Navy SEAL. In 2002, there were 120 graduates and each and every one of them went to college. And in 2003, they were 115 for 115—netting over $5 million in scholarships. Not bad for a bunch of administrators and teachers dedicated to old-fashioned values like hard work and teamwork and discipline. Once again, for good measure, that’s leadership.
Okay, so what does all of this have to do with the rest of us? We’re not Jesse Owens or Davis Love III. We’re not Albert Lexie or the administrators at the Frederick Douglass Academy. So what about us? Where is our shared ability to recognize and harness this type of leadership in our own communities, in ourselves? Where is our responsibility to stand tall in the face of all these low expectations? For me, the answer comes in a book written almost two thousand years ago: St. Augustine’s Confessions. It’s a tough little book, written in the fifth century, but I take it with me wherever I go. It’s got a powerful message that I believe resonates here. St. Augustine maintains that each and every one of us has a special gift, and that it falls to each and every one of us to unwrap those gifts and share them with the rest of the world. I like that image a whole lot, because I look at gifts like I look at stars. Have you ever seen an ugly star? I never have. They’re all just magnificent. You look through the telescope and see that some of them are red and some of them are blue. Some of them flame brightly in the night sky and some are so far off as to be nearly unrecognizable. And every last one seems just about as special and magnificent as a thing can be, but none of them are quite the same. That, to me, is a true gift. We find them in the heavens, and we find them here on earth. We find them in our friends and family, and we find them in ourselves. And, significantly, we find them in our leaders.
Now, here’s what I know, as sure as I set my pen to paper: Discover your own gifts and you will give your life new meaning. Find the courage to share those gifts with the rest of us and you will give all our lives new meaning. I can’t tell you what your gifts are, just as you can’t pinpoint mine, but I can tell you they lie in wait. Oh, they’re out there, waiting for you to come upon them and put them to good use, and it is in the putting to good
use of our unique gifts that we will rediscover our health and strength as a nation. After all, we are all stars, in our own way. We all shine uniquely. We all share the power to grow and change and reimagine the world around. Find your gift and you will find your way. Join a team. Become a part of something bigger than yourself. Throw in with all of the other stars in your community and help to form a giant constellation, built together on the back of courage and faith and determination. And, above all, leadership. Take charge. If you see something happening that sets you off, rise up and do something about it.
Stand for something.
Right now, in our post-9/11 world, Americans are standing tall in the face of people who want to destroy us. They want to destroy us just because of our way of life, and yet here at home that very way of life is threatened because we’ve taken it for granted. And so, yes, let’s keep fighting the good fight. Let’s stand brave and proud. But while we’re at it let’s also rediscover the moral compass we seem to have misplaced. Let’s reclaim the roots and values that shaped us as children and that will someday protect our grandchildren. And let’s reboot our free enterprise system, to where our thirst for success is no longer just about making money but also about the good we can do in the course of turning that profit. I’ll give an example: I’m on the board of a company that makes wheelchairs. Inevitably, the profit motive drives us to be successful. It drives us so hard that our engineers have now perfected our wheelchairs so that people can do just about anything in them. Imagine that. There are thousands of wheelchair-bound people who couldn’t get out of their homes who can now move about town on their own steam, thanks to this wonderful development. People are playing tennis in these wheelchairs, conducting orchestras, competing in the Boston Marathon, and performing in the Cleveland Ballet’s Dancing Wheels dance troupe . . . and I look on and think this is not only a tribute to the good works of this one company but to the society in which we live.
Indeed, the American free enterprise system takes ideas and translates them into innovations that can change the whole wide world, and it falls to our leaders to keep the regulators and the lawyers and the politicians from muddying up the works. And yet underneath all of this enterprise and courage and leadership is that core set of values I wrote about earlier, values that give conscience to us all, and underneath these values is an undying faith. I listen to all of these extremists and activists who appear determined to beat religion from our lives, and I think to myself, These people are nuts! An America without religion, without our core set of Judeo-Christian values, is an America in chaos. We’d be lost without those values. We might lose sight of some of them, from time to time. We might rethink some of them, from time to time. We might even reject or suppress some of them, but there’s no erasing them. They’re a constant, and they will remain a constant. Without them, we’ve lost America, and so we sit tight and hold fast and wait for our friends and neighbors to grab on to what we already know.
And what we know is this: We answer to a higher power. We’re accountable for our actions. And we can’t change the world by relying on anybody else. It’s on the Tom Lehmans and the aunt who stands in protest over conditions at her place of work. It’s on us. Remember, everyone is a shepherd to someone else, whether it’s your kids or your grandkids or your neighbor’s kids or their grandkids. They are watching you. Life is short. Play hard and play fair. And always remember those values your parents taught you. Follow the rules, respect authority, treat people fairly and decently, take care of business. Do the right thing. Leave this place a little bit better because you were here. That’s the way we want to be remembered. Put it all together and let it stand as three-quarters (at least!) of the sum total of what people say about you after you’ve gone.
SHINE A LIGHT
The book you now hold in your hands, through which you’ve read to these introductory remarks, is intended as a kind of beacon. A lighthouse. The values we’ve learned from our parents, they’re like a lighthouse as well. They don’t move, or change. They’ve been around forever and they will last forevermore. They’re built on a bedrock underpinning that remains constant in a sea of change. They remind us daily that truths are intuitive, and that it’s the popular culture that confuses us. If lighthouses moved with those shifting seas, think of the trouble they would cause for sailors navigating their ships in the middle of a foggy night. If we tweak our values to justify our societal drift, we’re lost. If we move with the tide, we’re lost. If we rethink the lessons of our lifetime on the fool notion that doing so might keep us relevant or plugged in to our popular culture, we’re lost.
No question, we live in challenging times—and our ability to meet its challenges runs alongside our ability to lead. To once again embrace the simple truths that defined our growing up. To hold fast to our faith. To make a difference. To matter. To stand for something.
Let’s get about it.
2
TAKING MEASURE
“The family is the first essential cell of human society.”
Pope John XXIII
I grew up in a small Pennsylvania town outside Pittsburgh called McKees Rocks, the kind of place where hard work was often its own reward, and where everyone knew most everyone else.
My father was a mail carrier. My mother also worked for the post office, sorting mail. Between the two of them, and the connections they established, it sometimes seemed I couldn’t cross the street without being spotted as their son. I supposed then, and know for certain now, that these points of connection were a great, good thing. If Hillary Clinton is correct to assert that it takes a village to raise a child, then McKees Rocks was certainly up to the task. God knows, it took a village to raise me. Whether they meant to or not, the good people of McKees Rocks helped to shape and define the person I would become. They encouraged me and set examples that continue to inspire me. It was an ethnic, blue-collar community, long in moral fiber and short on excuses. Regrettably, the moral fiber didn’t reach to a great many of our elected and civic leaders, because as I recall the McKees Rocks of the late 1950s and early 1960s was marked by a whole lot of graft and corruption and questionable decision making, but the tone and tenor of the town was very much opposed to the pacts and tactics of politics and government.
What we lacked in creature comforts, we more than made up for in values and ethics and perseverance and doing the right thing—and on this score at least, we Kasichs were pretty darn wealthy. Indeed, we had everything we needed, and a little bit more besides. We were a churchgoing family, to the point where I used to think I’d grow up to be a priest. At ten, when I was in fourth grade, I wanted to become an altar boy, so I applied and was accepted in record time. I committed all these difficult Latin phrases to memory, and learned the services, and devoted myself fully to the task, to where the assistant pastor at one point commented that I knew the services better than he did.
One Sunday, after I’d been at it for a few years, our priest asked me to lead the church as a commentator. The commentator leads the congregation in readings and song, and folks were genuinely surprised to see such a young kid assume the role. It was my first public speaking appearance, and I haven’t stopped since, although I was nearly derailed in this regard early on. I mistakenly instructed parishioners to turn to the wrong page in their hymnals, and when they didn’t appear to be singing along with enough conviction I instructed the organist to stop playing so I could have a word with them from the pulpit. Naturally, I couldn’t expect them to sing with conviction after I had directed them to the wrong page in their hymnals, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that folks weren’t singing with their customary enthusiasm, and that I had been charged to lead them.
“Sing it like you mean it,” I implored.
To their great credit, the parishioners gave it their best shot, considering the circumstances, and it wasn’t until the service was over that an elderly parishioner came over to tell me of my mistake. I was red in the face with embarrassment, but I sh
are the story here for the way it illustrates how our townsfolk nurtured and even indulged their own. Of course, my critics might suggest that it also illustrates my overzealousness, and in this instance they might have a point, but I share it anyway because I’ve never shied from telling a good story on myself.
HOME
The McKees Rocks of my growing up was a Democratic stronghold, and my parents were committed Democrats, although my mother became a Republican later on in life. We didn’t carve up our national map in red states and blue states back in those days, but if we did my hometown would have checked in looking about as blue as a high, cloudless sky. John F. Kennedy was a great big deal in our neighborhood, as I recall, and so, too, were the liberal ideals of the times. But these ideals were rooted very much in faith and family, community and common sense, and even as I grew to disagree with my parents and our friends on certain fundamental points I recognized that at bottom we were coming from the same place—and, for the most part, headed in the same direction.