Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday

Author:Ryan Holiday [Holiday, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2024-04-09T20:00:00+00:00

* Other Stoics like Arius Didymus (who tutored Augustus) and Posidonius (who advised Scipio Aemilianus) seemed to do better.

Practice Pragmatism

Jimmy Carter did the right thing on inauguration day in 1971. It didn’t cost him much as a governor because in Georgia at that time it was a single-term job.

Six years after his stunning speech in Georgia, he was elected president of the United States. On his very first day in office, just hours after his inauguration parade, he held a 4:35p.m. meeting— literally his first appointment— with a disabled army veteran named Max Cleland to discuss another stunning announcement. After asking Cleland, who’d lost both legs and an arm in the Battle of Khe Sanh, to head the Veterans Administration, Carter instructed him to begin working on a blanket pardon for everyone who had evaded serving in Vietnam. It would “heal the nation’s wounds,” allow Americans stuck in Canada to come home, allow people to come out of hiding and remove shame and stigma. He believed the time for forgiveness and understanding had come.

Cleland, who supported the idea, warned the president that it would be unpopular in the Senate and might be worth delaying, perhaps until his second term. “I don’t care if all 100 of them are against me,” Carter replied. “It’s the right thing to do.”

And then he did it— second term be damned.

As it happened, despite what was actually a surprisingly effective presidency, Carter would not get a second term, losing in a landslide in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, a defeat some trace to that decision he made on his first day in office.

Carter always said that he never wanted to do anything to hurt his country— that’s why he refused to delay doing the right thing. Still, his wife, Rosalynn, tried to explain that not getting reelected would hurt the country. And it’s a thought that’s haunted his supporters ever since: What could Carter have done with another four years in office, with another four years of power?

Why did he have to tackle giving the Panama Canal back to its rightful owners or peace in the Middle East in his first term? Could he have accomplished more if he’d been a little more pragmatic? A little less idealistic? Could he have played the game a little better?

The reality is that people who get things done have to be both.

People who knew Harvey Milk before and during his first unsuccessful run for office in 1973 were shocked to see him in the next campaign. He had cut off his long hair to appear more respectable. The Harvey Milk who eventually won office in 1977 was even more unrecognizable. He’d stopped smoking pot. He’d cut off his mustache and started wearing dapper business suits.

That’s one of the ways you get allies— by looking like someone they can do business with. You could argue that this is unfair, that appearances shouldn’t matter, that people should be able to dress and behave however they want, that the only thing that should matter is a person’s character and the righteousness of their cause.

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