Preface

W
hen I wrote a book called Sea Power: The History and
Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans, I hoped to bring a
mariner’s eye to the vast world of the sea. While look-
ing at each of the major global bodies of water, I tried to combine
three things: the fascinating history of the various maritime re-
gions; the current geopolitical challenges linked to them, both lo-
cally and globally; and my own four decades of seagoing experience.
All of this was intended to make a coherent case for the impor-
tance of the oceans. It was a book about a long, complicated, and
ultimately rewarding voyage around the oceans of the world. When
people asked me how long it took to write Sea Power, I would truth-
fully say “about forty years.” It was the culmination of my profes-
sional life, much of which was spent at sea.
In Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character,
I have turned the lens of the work away from the physical universe
of the oceans and into the realm of the biographical, personal,

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behavioral, and psychological characteristics of ten admirals whose

careers stretch across 2,500 years of history. By using the “sea sto-
ries” of this colorful group of historical maritime leaders as a kind
of canvas, I hope to illuminate for the reader the most essential
qualities of character, demonstrate how they contribute to effec-
tive leadership, and make the case that by using this information,
each of us can chart a course toward becoming the best we can
possibly be within our own lives. In the end, a physical voyage at
sea is a demanding undertaking, requiring intensity, energy, fore-
handedness, and intelligence, among many other qualities; but it is
vastly easier than the inner voyage we all must sail every day of our
lives. That voyage of character is the most important journey each
of us ever makes.
I am also motivated by a growing sense in this postmodern era
that we are witnessing the slow death of character, driven by a
global popular culture that has turned increasingly away from
classic values—­
­ honesty, commitment, resilience, accountability,
­moderation—­to a world that moves at breakneck speed and re-
fuses to slow down and consider what is right and just. Attention
spans have spiraled resolutely downward. Take reading as an example:
we were once ready to willingly read a multivolume work; many
(including, according to many reports, our president) now balk at
reading a single long book. Some readers avoid long journal pieces
and demand briefer and briefer articles in slimmer and slimmer
magazines. There is online impatience with long blog posts and we
seem to have finally arrived at our current state: a Twitter world
where many observers recently opined that they regretted the
lengthening of a tweet from 140 characters to 280 because “read-

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ing the long tweets is taking up too much time.” One abiding char-
acteristic of most of the ten admirals in this book is that they were
thoughtful, intellectually grounded individuals. Perhaps the long
periods at sea that almost all of them experienced have something
to do with that. Naturally, they manifested a wide variety of dif-
fering traits, and some were better and more admirable than oth-
ers. I’ve selected them to help show the richness of the human
character across both time and personality types. And above all,
we learn from these admirals that the quality of finding sufficient
time to think and reflect is a crucial part of building character. In
our frenzied world today, we should learn from their collective
example.
Alongside the cultural demands for short, ironic, value-­neutral
“thinking” comes the utter transparency of our times. As I will say
again in this work, character is what you do when you think no one
is looking—­and in today’s world, someone is always looking. We
have lost the ability to hone our character in private, and our lives
are on display seemingly from the moment we are born. Our in-
tense self-­obsession is reflected in the desire to constantly burnish
our images on the endless social networks, something none of these
admirals remotely encountered, and we are poorer for this charac-
teristic. We overshare publicly and under-­reflect privately on what
our individual voyages mean. Do they add up to a journey that
matters? Is the destination important? In the small hours of the
morning, as we think about our lives, can we honestly say our voy-
age matters? Or do we drift endlessly on an uncaring sea? The an-
swer to these questions is bound up inextricably in the heart of our
character.

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Finally, we are much diminished in our ability to learn and tell

stories in order to advance our intellectual pursuits. In so many
ways, the story of our lives is little more than a collection of the
stories we have heard, inculcated, and then created and told about
ourselves. Most of us want to be part of a society that is dep­
endable, predictable, and stable—­but this turbulent twenty-­fi rst
­century, both at home and abroad in an interconnected world—­
resembles that less and less. The stories we hear seem chaotic, dis-
connected, and thematically barren: school shootings of children
by other children; wars without end in the Middle East; biological
“advances” that presage a godlike power uncoupled from a human-
istic, ethical perspective; leaders who routinely lie, cheat, and
steal; followers who act out in spasms of anger, fulfilling Tocque­
ville’s dire nineteenth-­century prediction that the tragedy of de-
mocracy will be that in the end we elect the government we
deserve. Self-­talk matters deeply, and we must learn to tell our-
selves, our peers, and above all our children the stories that inspire
a better world.
In that regard, as I set out on this book, I wanted to tell a differ-
ent set of stories from those that we see repeated again and again
on cable news. I believe there is much to learn about character and
what exists at the heart of every woman and man from hearing the
stories of those who sailed before us. Because I am a sailor myself,
I turned to ten illustrious, interesting, and highly varied naval lead-
ers. Each of them led across decades and in different centuries and
locales; their stories are different, and their characters were shaped
in dramatically varied circumstances. Therefore, the lessons to be
drawn—­both about their leadership styles but more important

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about their character—­are richly distributed. And not all are en-
tirely heroic. But I offer their stories, which I believe, if taken in
the aggregate, provide a more reassuring narrative than that un-
spooling before us on 24/7 news channels.
Let’s begin with the difference between two terms that are
often confused: leadership and character.
Leadership is broadly understood to be the ability to influence
others, generally in order to accomplish a specific purpose. It is a
tool, not a quality, and thus can be applied for both good and ill. We
think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a good leader, and he was—­
Roosevelt had the ability to influence people to undertake huge,
difficult tasks, from overcoming the Great Depression to winning
the Second World War. But evil men can be very good leaders as
well, using the tools of leadership to accomplish amoral and cruel
purposes. Pol Pot, who conducted a horrific genocide in Cambodia
as the leader of the Khmer Rouge in the late twentieth century, was
a highly capable leader as well, in that he was able to marshal an
enormous national effort to drive home a Communist ideology and
ruthlessly massacre all dissidents and many innocents—­k illing per-
haps three million people out of a population of eight million.
Shocking? Horrific? Criminal? Absolutely. But Pol Pot’s story is also
a demonstration of strong leadership, albeit in the service of ex-
treme evil. Leadership is all about the external effect and the abil-
ity to influence others.
Character, on the other hand, is about internal effect and the
ability to influence oneself. John Wooden, the famous UCLA bas-
ketball coach and a fine leader, summed it up well: “Be more con-
cerned with your character than your reputation, because your

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character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely

what others think you are.” It was from Coach Wooden that I first
heard the idea that the true test of our character is what we do
when no one is watching. Character is at its heart the ability to
lead the inner self toward what is just and right. It proceeds from
overcoming the strong amoral impulses—­what Freud described as
the id—­and sailing toward the metaphorical light of moral choice.
Character, unlike leadership, has both moral and ethical weight
and can be more correctly described as either good or bad.
Sailors often have a unique opportunity to chart a course to-
ward a good character. The sea is an unforgiving environment
which daily poses hard challenges that depend on deep reserves of
character to overcome. Sailing is hard and dangerous work, and the
sea itself poses a constant threat, to say nothing of additional man-­
made dangers, from pirates to enemy aircraft to lurking subma-
rines. It is also a contemplative world, where any sailor can walk
out on a rolling deck at night and stare at the distant point where
the sky meets the sea and recognize that we are merely the small-
est part of a huge and diverse universe that stretches forever unto
the mind of God, and which will last far beyond the age of human
beings. This combination of attributes—­the constant physical and
moral challenge in daily life and the endless vision of eternity dan-
gling before our eyes—­creates a deepening of character in the best
of sailors. And my thesis is that by learning about the lives of these
ten admirals, each of us—­sailor or not—­can improve and deepen
our own characters.
While clearly two different attributes, leadership and charac-
ter often merge in a given individual, and certainly in the case of

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a number of senior maritime leaders like the admirals in this

book. While it’s not always the case, a man or woman of strong
and positive character is often a highly effective leader. This is
be­­cause most other people recognize and are attracted to a high
level of moral strength. In many seagoing leaders in particular—­
where the oceans create such a distinctive backdrop—­character
becomes a vital part of the leadership skills they can deploy. It
is therefore highly instructive to examine a handful of admirals,
under­stand their in­dividual “sea stories,” and plumb the depths of
their character—­all with the idea of helping each of us navigate
more effectively across the inner sea we all must sail.
In this volume we will begin our voyage more than 2,500 years
ago with the admiral Themistocles, an ancient Greek facing an
existential threat to his city-­state, Athens; and conclude our long
sail across history in the late twentieth century with a woman ad-
miral, Grace Hopper, who helps bring the Navy into the cyber age.
We will then look at resilience and briefly meet two living and re-
cently retired admirals, Michelle Howard and Bill McRaven. All
are different sailors, but the inner voyage of character that each
sailed offers lessons we can study and apply. As with all ten of
these admirals, the basic rocks and shoals of their voyages are
roughly similar: the need for truth, justice, empathy, creativity,
humility, humor, resilience, and balance, contrasted with avoiding
arrogance, anger, pettiness, cruelty, desire, betrayal, jealousy, and
hatred. We will see that none of these admirals was perfect—­
indeed, far from it in several cases. But we can sometimes learn as
much from failures of character as we can from triumphs, and the
nature of any human is not what they do when the choices are easy,

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