Interview - Josiah Bunting III

Josiah Bunting III served as superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute from 1995 to 2002. Mr. Bunting previously served as headmaster of the Lawrenceville School, an independent boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. He also served for ten years as president of Hampden-Sydney College and four years as president of Briarcliff College, a women’s college in Briarcliff, New York. He spent a year at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and three years teaching in the history department at Columbia University.

After receiving a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, he entered the United States Army in 1966. During six years of service, he reached the rank of major, with duty stations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Vietnam (Ninth Infantry Division); and West Point, New York, where he was an assistant professor of history and social sciences at the United States Military Academy. His military citations include the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters, the Army Commendation Medal, the Vietnam Honor Medal - 2nd class, the Presidential Unit Citation, Parachute Badge, Combat Infantry Badge, and Ranger Tab.

Mr. Bunting has published several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Lionheads, which was chosen as one of the Ten Best Novels of 1973 by Time magazine. He has published a biography of Ulysses S. Grant and is at work on a biography of George Marshall. We asked Mr. Bunting to share some thoughts with us about loyalty.

.....

In Character: How would you define loyalty? When somebody says that word to you, what do you think of?

Josiah Bunting lll: I think of allegiance to principle, first of all, and then I think of allegiance to people to whom I have either implicitly or explicitly pledged my word.

The first answer that you gave is interesting. A lot of people think of loyalty not necessarily to principle, but to people or to an institution. Why do you say principle?

The friendships one forms, the attachments one makes, the obligations that one normally incurs – I’m speaking ideally and idealistically – are manifestations of allegiance to principle.

There’s a line in a poem called “Rugby Chapel” by Matthew Arnold, who remembers his boyhood in this English boarding school of which his father was the head: “Through thee I believe in the noble and great who are gone.” So, for me, loyalty is something which I bestow upon or owe to individuals, or national institutions, but it is based on their embodiment of certain principles which I find compelling. But I think you have to start there – allegiance to principle. That is the ultimate loyalty that it seems to me all of us should have.

What were some of the experiences that have shaped your sense of loyalty?

I think watching adults when I was a child, and seeing in them the kinds of qualities that I now recognize are important. The most potent agent in any education, any scheme of education – whether it is a school or a community, whether you live on a farm or in a city – is the person who embodies a virtue. What you are is a much more potent, lifelong elixir than what you have written or what you have said.

Particularly in a school setting, so many of us have had the experience of having watched one adult, particularly someone who has been at a school for a long time. I think we see this allegiance to principle in the way they live their own lives. They come to embody loyalty and populate our memories with active examples of loyalty, and they influence what we become.

Is there one person that you’re thinking of?

The headmaster of the Salisbury School in northwestern Connecticut, a little Episcopal boarding school, was one. I had a professor in college who was just an extraordinarily great teacher and a great man. They both embodied an allegiance to an idea that transcended all of the other superficial blandishments life throws at us. Imagine somebody who’s taught for a pittance in a single boarding school for fifty years and has never married and does nothing but teach Greek and Latin and act as a mentor to the boys and girls of the school and maybe coach and live in a dormitory. That kind of allegiance is very, very powerful.

There’s a great biblical text all schoolmasters know from the Old Testament in the book of Kings – the visitation of the Lord to the young Solomon in a dream, and the Lord says, “What shall I give thee?” and Solomon immediately says, “Give me a wise and a discerning heart that I may judge thy people.” The Lord is greatly pleased by this answer, as you might expect, and basically he says, “I am so pleased that you did not ask for those things, namely, the heads of your enemies, palaces, et cetera, that I’m going to throw them in.” That’s a great text for young people to listen to.

Having been the head of a couple of schools yourself, do you think that image of the teacher who devotes fifty years of his life to one school, doesn’t marry, doesn’t have all the other blandishments of life, is an outdated view of what a teacher is? Do you think that it’s becoming harder for young people to find those role models? And how do you think we can instill that same sense of loyalty – loyalty to principle – in young people?

The answer to the first part of your question is, undoubtedly, yes, for many reasons. There was a tradition for people to go and make their lives in one place for a long time. And the culture that he lived in, and the culture that the school subsisted in was much less apt to measure its worth in terms of things like celebrity, riches, flashy public reputation, and rapid promotion. Nowadays we live in a culture that puts enormous stock in the achievement of flashy early success.

In studying George Marshall’s decision to become a soldier, I encountered even then something you encounter now all the time, that is the invariably puzzled response of parents, or parents’ friends, to the announcement that their child wants to get a commission and be a Marine officer. Or to be a teacher in a New York public school. Or go to divinity school and be a minister and live on the Great Plains. We live in a culture now which communicates a real, I won’t say hostility, but I will say a real sort of puzzled disappointment toward people who elect to follow those kinds of vocational professions.

Many boarding schools have trouble once they have hired people, particularly young women. Almost all of them are coed now. The best teachers at Lawrenceville were generally young women between the ages of about twenty-five and thirty-five. They were extraordinarily good. They were ardent. They flung themselves into the work in an uncalculating way. However, invariably they would break my heart and come in and say, “Ned is being transferred to Simpson, Thatcher’s office in Chicago and I’ve got to leave.” And I wanted to say, “No, you are not going to leave. That’s too bad for Ned. You are a Master in the Lawrenceville School and Ned’s going to stay here. Get him a job digging a ditch.” And maybe Ned’s not going to have a 700 series BMW and a house in Greenwich and a cottage in Newport. That’s too bad.

What about the gender factor in producing loyalty? The image that you have of so many of these organizations, whether it’s the old military or the old prep schools, is that they were single-sex, and that one of the ways that this kind of loyalty was bred was that everyone had this common bond, and that atmosphere fostered a certain kind of allegiance which some people think is not possible in a coed setting.

I suspect that may have elements of truth in it but I am not certain it’s true. It is hard for me to talk about the military at large but the schools where I have worked, two of them almost by accident happened to have gone coed while I was there, and I’m not certain that the coeducationalization of Lawrenceville or of the Virginia Military Institute did anything in particular to threaten the education. I mean it obviously complicated things because kids are thrown together with their hormones raging, but I wouldn’t say that by itself that constituted any particular threat.

So how do we get kids more interested in what you call vocations?

There are no ways that I know of that are reliable suppliers of the current deficiency. But I can think of a few things that might help. Prominent Americans who have earned their prominence not through momentary celebrity, but through a long lifetime of disinterested public service need to talk publicly about their lives. I also think that people in military positions, in religious vocations, and in teaching need to be compensated according to the old Aristotelian notion of competence, and many of them really aren’t. Aristotle talked about the amount of compensation necessary to sustain a comfortable life. In many of our public school systems and many of our private schools, teachers are miserably and terribly underpaid. But I think above all the country has to be reminded that people in these professions are extraordinarily valuable to the culture that we live in.

One of the things that you notice about older generations, like Marshall’s generation, people born between 1870 and 1890, for example, is that their lives tended to be more spacious. They were not overwhelmed by daily small demands on their time. You probably have a Blackberry. You have a computer, a fax machine, a cell phone. It’s very difficult for us in an orderly fashion to give extended periods of thought and attention to those things which are really quite paramount.

In addition to your current project on George Marshall, you’ve also written a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Are there any instances of the kinds of friendships you were talking about before – loyalty to another person in the service of a greater principle?

Oh sure. In the case of Grant, he had what we would call today a role model, a real hero, and that was Zachary Taylor. Taylor was the American commander in Mexico and later on became president of the United States. He was a man completely devoted to the mission that he was given but he was without pretension and with no sense at all of the unfavorable consequences that might result from his actions. In other words, “I’m ordered to command this small army in Mexico. I will faithfully execute this mission. It’s not a big deal. I don’t expect to be decorated. I don’t really care if I am promoted, but this is what we have to do now.”

Grant was a young captain and Taylor was his commanding general, but they were quite close. And I think it is by watching someone like that, a mentor who embodies what it is you find valuable that you grow. Grant saw that commitment in Taylor and internalized that and Grant went on to embody an idea of service that was uncalculating and selfless.

Do you think they embodied the Aristotelian notion of friendship – that they made each other morally better?

Yes. In the case of Grant, he also had a friendship with William T. Sherman and they had that effect on one another. They made each other better. You know the famous lines in Hamlet in which Hamlet in a quiet moment in the play asks for some advice from Horatio. Horatio is always the voice of reason and intellectual moderation. Horatio answers and Hamlet looks at him and responds, “Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him/In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of hearts.” In the case of Grant and Sherman, you have on the one side someone who is rather cool, calculating, self-possessed, very much in control of his emotions, forming a friendship with somebody fiery, who tended to be very emotional. The Aristotelian idea is profound and I think it works in the case of Grant and Sherman.

Marshall’s great friend and mentor was John Pershing. Pershing was, next to Woodrow Wilson, probably the most famous and important American from 1916 to 1925. He was the commander of the American army in Europe during the Great War. Marshall served as Pershing’s aide between 1919 and 1924 when Pershing was the General of the Army. He was a five-star general; Marshall was a colonel. They had an extraordinarily strong friendship. It was a senior’s relationship with a subordinate but their friendship transcended that and became something better.

One of the important things it seems to me about friendship of the kind we are talking about and its relationship to loyalty is its easy embrace of the Quaker notion of speaking truth to power. The friend does not hesitate to speak up, knowing that his friend will accept what he has to say. Marshall says several times in his memoirs that one of the things he most admired about Pershing was the general’s willingness to entertain criticism, however blunt, however forceful, and he always learned from it and moved on. For his part, Marshall, whenever he was around Pershing, always spoke up with an almost blazing, although respectfully couched, directness.

I have been similarly struck by the relationship between Winston Churchill and his senior civilian and military advisers, and Franklin Roosevelt and his senior civilian and military advisers during World War II. All of these people were easy and comfortable in saying what it was they thought needed to be done. You did have this wonderful synergy in which a high-ranking officer like Marshall never went into a discussion with Franklin Roosevelt thinking, “I’d better watch my mouth. I might get penalized for what I tell him.” I think that’s very important. I’m not so certain that we have that in our institutions today the way we once did.

Has there been a shift at all in what our sense of loyalty is? These men that you have been talking about could feel comfortable speaking that truth to others since their first loyalty was to principle.

Yes. I think, again, because of the way American culture has evolved it is very difficult to sustain over a long lifetime an allegiance to principle that manifests itself in the building of one’s career according to distant and idealistic goals.

Do you think the recent accusation that a chaplain at the Air Force Academy engaged in proselytizing had anything to do with loyalty? Was the goal to get these young men to be as loyal as possible to a set of core principles? Do you think it’s easier to foster loyalty if you can agree on religious principles as well?

All I know about this current religious controversy at the Air Force Academy is what I have read in the papers. To me religion is a private matter, and if the stories we are hearing are accurate they are very troubling. I mean whether one is a Jew, a Catholic, a member of a Protestant denomination, or an evangelical person, respect for the sanctity of the other person’s religious beliefs should make one wary about going to that person and trying to convert or change him.

The first document that we have in American history is the Mayflower Compact. “In the name of God. Amen.” That’s the first sentence. The second important document that we think of is Winthrop’s speech in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. “That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation.” These are principles that are intended for all people. They are not Catholic or Jewish or Protestant. This was the early notion of Providence having a special solicitude for this experiment in North America which would result in the creation of the United States. That’s the commonality of our religious heritage, which I hope still forms some of the glue that binds us together .

So you can be loyal to the more general religious principle there?

Certainly. I got into a lot of trouble over this. VMI was sued while I was at the helm because the school had required, since time immemorial, the recitation of what we consider to be a nonsectarian blessing before dinner in the mess hall. I mean this is a blessing which essentially called on Providence, to use an eighteenth-century word, to look after the school and keep these people out of harm’s way. Amen. And the federal district judge found against us. The appellate court upheld the federal district judge and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. That struck me as almost bizarre.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about the military experience of forming loyalties in intense, pressurized situations. Could you describe that a little bit? How is it different from friendship in a civilian setting?

Sharing prolonged hardship in situations of physical danger creates a bond among men which is transcendent and which lasts a lifetime. In other words, enduring hardship, enduring danger, and surviving successfully brings you closer to people who have had the same experience, closer than can be imagined by people in other walks of life. And it creates a form of loyalty which I guess you might
say is supra-rational – even supra-emotional – because you are around people who may have saved your life or whose lives you may have saved.

Do you think loyalty has gotten kind of a bad name in recent years, whether it is to the Catholic Church despite the sexual abuse scandals, or the chain of command at the Abu Ghraib prison?

Loyalty is a virtue that’s gotten kind of a bad name through the excesses of some politicians and also through the excesses of the media in talking about the excesses of politicians. They have created in the public mind an idea that loyalty is a secondary virtue, and a dangerous one, and you have to beware of people who are loyal because it implies some kind of blind obedience. This was particularly true in the aftermath of Vietnam in the 1970s.

I know you are serving as chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board. I wonder whether there has been any sort of decline in this loyalty to principle or even perhaps loyalty to other people in the service of principle – perhaps as a result of young people not having to generally go through that kind of hardship with another person, not having to serve in that way.

I think the answer is yes, and I would extend what we were talking about before – about the hardships endured in the military – to the hardships that ordinary civilians in previous generations went through as part of growing up.

Let me give you an off-the-wall example. The average winning time for the high school mile up until two or three years ago was somewhat slower than it had been in the 1960s and 70s. Jim Ryan, who was a great American miler from Kansas, walked to school in January, or ran to school, or however he got back and forth. Nowadays, his children or his grandchildren, if he has any, are taken there in an SUV. It’s kind of a homely example. But those experiences that young people had in their lives in earlier generations – I’m thinking particularly of the generation that was born between say 1920 and 1930 – those are an array of experiences all of which helped the formation of character.

When I say character, I mean resolution. The habit of sticking to things, the habit of tenacity, the habit of hanging in there until the thing is done, whether anybody rewards you, or praises you, or tells you you’re special. I think it is those kinds of experiences (and many of them are quotidian experiences, like getting up at 5:10 in the morning and delivering newspapers) that have been removed from kids’ lives nowadays. It’s obvious by the time they are in high school and college that they have developed according to a different set of principles and a different set of expectations from earlier generations.