“Like many Americans, I understand the urgency that drove the decision to resort to so-called enhanced interrogation methods after our country was attacked,” McCain wrote. “I know that those who used enhanced interrogation methods and those who approved them wanted to protect Americans from harm. I appreciate their dilemma and the strain of their duty. But as I have argued many times, the methods we employ to keep our nation safe must be as right and just as the values we aspire to live up to and promote in the world.
“I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense,” he continued. “However, Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying. I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advice and consent and reject this nomination.”
We live in an uncertain world, one filled with complexity and danger. The challenges we face in the future will be new and nuanced, and they will require us to mobilize based on being smart, not on being afraid. There will be hard decisions to make, to be sure, of the kind that no previous generation has had to consider. And yet it will serve us well to remember what it was that helped us protect the American people and secure the peace in the generations leading up to this moment. We must remember that we are a nation of laws, that we stand for the rule of law. We must remember what we have worked and in some cases bled for: an international order that promotes peace and cooperation; a commitment to democracy, here and around the world; a rejection of despots and tyrants and dictators who rule their countries based on their self-interest alone, not the interests of the people they are meant to serve. Imperfect though we have been, ours is a history in pursuit of a better, safer, freer world. In the years to come, with all the challenges to come, we cannot lose sight of who we are and who we can be.
Ten
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
Early in my career, one of the first cases I tried was a hit-and-run case in Judge Jeffrey Horner’s Oakland courtroom. To illustrate my argument, I had printed out a map on a large sheet of paper, which I pinned to an easel with butterfly clips. I needed the map so that I could show the jury the driver’s path.
I don’t remember all the details of the case, but I do remember this map, because I kept stumbling over north, south, east, and west. To acknowledge my own gaffes, at some point in the proceedings I cracked a self-deprecating joke before the jury. Not long after, during a break, Judge Horner called me into his chamber. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said. “You figure it out. Figure it out.”
His words stuck with me, along with so many lessons I’ve absorbed along the way—foundational wisdom from my mother; encouragement and guidance from family members, friends, and trusted mentors; and the powerful examples I’ve witnessed, both good and bad, that have shaped my understanding of what it takes to lead effectively, what it takes to achieve one’s objectives, and what we owe to one another in the process.
These lessons have been informed by my own life experience and leavened by their application over the course of my career. Today they find expression in a series of brief phrases, ones my team members hear so often they’ll probably laugh when they read this chapter. One year, my team even had blue stress balls made, with NO FALSE CHOICES emblazoned in white letters.
Of course, it isn’t possible to reduce the complexity of leadership to simple slogans. But my team and I rely on these mantras as touchstones and guideposts—as starting points for policy conversations and as ways to determine whether we’re on the right track. I’m sharing them here because they say a lot about my personal philosophy and style. And maybe they will help to shape your thinking in some way, as the wisdom earned by other people has helped shape mine.
TEST THE HYPOTHESIS
When I was a kid, I used to accompany my mother to the lab, where she’d give me jobs to do. Cleaning test tubes, mainly. I think she probably knew early on that I wasn’t going to follow her into the sciences. It was the humanities and the arts that spoke to me, even as I was in awe of my mother and her colleagues and their work.
But when you’re the daughter of a scientist, science has a way of shaping how you think. Our mother used to talk to Maya and me about the scientific method as if it were a way of life. When I’d ask her why something was the way it was, she wasn’t content to just give me the answer. She wanted me to formulate my own hypothesis, to use that as a starting point for further investigation, and to challenge my assumptions. This was how she did her work in the lab. The experiments she ran each day were aimed at figuring out whether her ideas would stand after being tested. It was about kicking the tires. She would collect and analyze the data, and draw conclusions from that evidence. If the results didn’t support the hypothesis, she would reevaluate.
Innovation is the pursuit of what can be, unburdened by what has been. And we pursue innovation not because we’re bored but because we want to make things faster, more efficient, more effective, more accurate. In science, in medicine, in technology, we embrace the culture of innovation—hypotheses, experiments, and all. We expect mistakes; we just don’t want to make the same mistake twice. We expect imperfections; it’s basic for us. We’ve gotten used to the idea that software will need to be tweaked and updated. We don’t have any problem with the concept of “bug fixes” and upgrades. We know that the more we test something, the clearer we’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, and the better the final product or process will be.
But in the realm of public policy, we seem to have trouble embracing innovation. That’s in part because when you’re running for public office and you stand before the voters, you aren’t expected to have a hypothesis; you’re expected to have “the Plan.” The problem is, when you roll out any innovation, new policy, or plan for the first time, there are likely to be glitches, and because you’re in the public eye, those glitches are likely to end up on the front page in bold lettering. When the HealthCare.gov website crashed two hours after it launched in 2013, the problem, though temporary, became a stand-in for describing the entire pursuit of affordable health care coverage as folly.
The point is, when you are in public office, there really is a lot of risk associated with pursuing bold actions. Even so, I believe it is our obligation to do so. It is inherent in the oaths we take.
The point of being a public official is to find solutions to problems, especially the most intractable, and to have a vision for the future. I’ve always said that political capital doesn’t gain interest. You have to spend it, and be willing to take the hit. You have to be willing to test your hypothesis and find out if your solution works, based on metrics and data. Blind adherence to tradition should not be the measure of success.
Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California, understands this idea better than just about anyone I know. He became mayor, at twenty-six, of a city that had been hammered by the foreclosure crisis and forced into bankruptcy. His city still contends with high poverty and crime and, now, rising rents. Tubbs asked a team of researchers to identify novel ways he could fight poverty, and one of the ideas they came back with was a guaranteed income program. The concept is that giving people direct cash payments can help them make ends meet while giving the economy a boost. And that was a hypothesis he was willing to test. The city is putting together a pilot program, beginning in February 2019, in which it will give a random group of a hundred residents $500 a month for eighteen months to spend however they want. Researchers will check in with the participants regularly during the program. At the end of that time, the city will have a trove of data that will help the mayor—and countless political leaders—determine the effectiveness of such a model.
Another much discussed idea for helping the American workforce is to create a jobs guarantee program. Rather than guarantee a base cash payment, a federal jobs guarantee could ensure that anyone who wants to work will have a goo
d-paying job with dignity. It’s an idea straight out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. Is it possible? Would it work? If it’s part of “the Plan” you’re running on, you’re compelled to say yes. But the better answer is “Let’s find out.” I signed on to legislation in the Senate to create a model program that will help us do just that. One way or the other, I am confident that the data that comes from such a program will inform our approach.
GO TO THE SCENE
There’s a small community in Southern California called Mira Loma that sits just north of the Santa Ana River, at the western edge of Riverside County. It was, for a long time, a rural community, a place of grape vineyards and dairy farms, a place where people loved to ride horses and to raise their children away from the smog of industrial Los Angeles. But in the late 1980s, things started to change.
The rise of globalization meant that the United States would start importing a lot more goods from around the world, and many of those shipping containers from Asia were ending up at Southern California harbors. So nearby Riverside County started approving huge warehouse projects and distribution centers into which trucks would drop off the cargo they picked up at the docks. By the time I was attorney general, there were approximately ninety such mega-complexes in Mira Loma.
Life was transformed for the 4,500 families living in Mira Loma. Farms were dug up and paved over. Traffic became unbearable. The quiet rural community was swallowed up by an industrial warehousing district. And the air turned toxic. Every day, trucks made more than 15,000 trips on Mira Loma’s main roads, bringing with them soot and other particulate matter. Soon Mira Loma had one of the highest rates of diesel pollution in the state—well beyond state and federal air quality standards.
Researchers at the University of Southern California conducted a study that found that pollution was linked to poor lung development and other serious illnesses in Mira Loma children. The federal Environmental Protection Agency had already expressed its own concerns about health dangers associated with such filthy air. But things were only getting worse.
The circumstances of Mira Loma were brought to my attention when I learned that the county had approved another complex of warehouses, which would facilitate another 1,500 truck trips through Mira Loma every day. Residents sued to stop it, arguing that the county had failed to take the health concerns seriously and hadn’t done the work to mitigate the harm this would cause to a population already experiencing dangerous health impacts. They argued that the county had failed to follow state standards meant to protect communities like theirs. After reviewing the documents, I agreed.
“I want to join the lawsuit,” I told my team. “Let’s show those families the state has their back.”
That could have been the end of it. I was confident that, with state resources behind them, the community would have what it needed to prevail. But taking action wasn’t enough. Understanding the circumstances strictly through the lens of briefing documents and discussions with lawyers wasn’t enough. I wanted to go to the scene.
As we approached Mira Loma, I could see a towering mass of haze and smog enveloping the community and the surrounding areas. The sun shone through, but with a gray, refracted tint as the toxic cloud settled in. When I got out of the car, the pollution stung my eyes. I could taste it in the air. I could wipe the dust and soot off surfaces with my fingers.
I went into a small meeting room where members of the community had gathered to tell me their stories. One person told me that every day, when the wind changes, he started breathing the fumes. Another told me that it’s not safe for children to play outside. More than half the households had children under eighteen, and they were stuck indoors. A soft-spoken woman told me that she was glad I was there, because they had been fighting for a long time and no one ever seemed to listen.
One man told me that they have to wash the soot off their driveways, and clean their clotheslines before they hang any clothes. He worried about the trees in his backyard, which had stopped bearing fruit and were dying. And he expressed his concern for people in the community who were suffering from higher rates of cancer, asthma, and heart disease.
At first, that was all he said. But when the microphone came back to him, the group encouraged him to tell the more personal story that had brought him to the meeting.
“It’s hard for me to talk about it. . . . But, I mean, I’ll do it to help this community.”
Through tears, he began. “I had a daughter . . . and she died before she was fifteen years old. And instead of planning for her fifteenth birthday . . . I was planning for her funeral. . . . She died of lung cancer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk about it. But if this can help, I’m just telling my story.”
It did help. The fight against the county would take place in courtrooms and conference rooms, and we would be not just the voice but the vessel through which the community’s story would be told. To really understand the pain that a community is coping with, it’s not enough to imagine what it must be like. Smart policies cannot be created in an ivory tower, and arguments aren’t won by facts alone. What matters just as much is being there whenever possible, in person, ears and eyes wide open, talking to the folks living closest to the challenge. It mattered that we were there to hear this anguished father’s story and the stories of other families in Mira Loma.
It mattered when I visited soldiers in Iraq who were waiting for their next mission, and sailors in San Diego, preparing to deploy for months on a nuclear submarine. It is one thing to talk about the needs of the military and intelligence communities in a Senate hearing room. It is another to go to the scene and make real, in-person connections with the men and women who are serving. I spent a good deal of time with the troops, talked about their specialties and their training, about the challenges of their work and how a combination of bravery and duty had led them to this life. But we talked about other things, too: what they missed, what they feared, what they had left behind, the sacrifice their families had to make while they were gone. It was personal, and that mattered.
It mattered when I visited a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan so that I could get an up-close view of what life was like for the people trapped there—70 percent of them women and children. We drove around the encampment, which seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions, each makeshift dwelling representing a family that had fled war and slaughter. I insisted that we get out of the cars. We walked down a street they had nicknamed the Champs-Élysées, after the famous shopping street in Paris, and we admired the stalls of clothes and food.
At one point, three kids ran up and started talking to me. One of them, a ten-year-old in a blue soccer shirt, took a real liking to me. We took a selfie together and then he asked, through interpreters, if I would come meet his family. I said of course, and I followed him through the camp to where they were living.
When I got there, a large extended family was there to greet me. They had two small dwellings between them and had created a little courtyard between the two, with a board as an overhang. His grandparents were there—the matriarch and patriarch of the family—and they were incredibly welcoming when I arrived.
“Will you stay for tea?” the grandfather asked me. “I’d be honored,” I replied.
The grandmother went behind the hut, where there was a water spigot and a small gas camp stove. The next thing I knew she was back, bearing a tray with beautiful glasses, a plate of sweets, and a teapot.
We were all sitting there cross-legged, drinking our tea. I was ready to ask all about them—the story of how they got there, the experience of living in the refugee camp—when the grandfather started to speak.
“Okay, I’ve invited you into my home. I’ve given you tea. I’ve fed you. Now tell me, who are you?”
EMBRACE THE MUNDANE
Bill Gates is obsessed with fertilizer. “I go to meetings where it’s a serious topic of conversation,” he writes.
“I read books about its benefits and the problems with overusing it. It’s the kind of topic I have to remind myself not to talk about too much at cocktail parties, since most people don’t find it as interesting as I do.” Why the fascination? He explains that 40 percent of people on earth owe their lives to higher crop outputs that were made possible only because of fertilizer. It was the literal fuel for the Green Revolution, which helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. What Gates understands is that there is a big difference between announcing a plan to end world hunger and actually ending it. And closing the gap depends on seemingly mundane details like fertilizer and weather patterns and the height of wheat.
Politics is a realm where the grand pronouncement often takes the place of the painstaking and detail-oriented work of getting meaningful things done. This isn’t to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with grand pronouncements. Good leadership requires vision and aspiration. It requires the articulation of bold ideas that move people to action. But it is often the mastery of the seemingly unimportant details, the careful execution of the tedious tasks, and the dedicated work done outside of the public eye that make the changes we seek possible.
Embracing the mundane also means making sure that our solutions actually work for the people who need them. When I was attorney general of California, for example, and I went after the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, I was concerned about what would happen to students who’d been defrauded. The students had the right to transfer to another school, get their loan discharged, or get their money back, but the paperwork involved was quite complicated. Most students had no idea how to begin, or even that they had these options in the first place.
We had prevailed in the case, but the students wouldn’t actually receive the benefit of the financial relief unless they could navigate the bureaucracy. So my office created a website that walked students, step by step, through this complex process. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for someone to exercise their rights and get actual relief. As we were developing the website, I’d often have our team show it to me, and I’d literally click through the process myself. More than once, I hit a snag. I’d tell them, “If I don’t understand it, how will the students?” That meant the team had to rework the interface and the text. But as frustrating as the exercise might have been, it resulted in a better product. Taking the time to perfect the details made the tool more relevant for the students who needed it.
The Truths We Hold Page 24