®

a publication of UNIVERSITY of the CUMBERLANDSDecember 2012 • Volume 3, Issue 4

Rudolph W. Giuliani is often referred to as “America’s Mayor.” Although he has held many positions in and out of government, he will always be remembered as the man who was mayor of New York City on the day in history when the 9/11 tragedy took place. His courage and leadership displayed on that day and in that time period will live on in American history forever.

The following is an adaptation from a speech delivered at University of the Cumberlands on 3 April 2012 sponsored by the Forcht Group of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Leadership. This speech has been divided into two installments. The final installment will be in the next issue of Morning in America.

Principled Leadership in a Time of Crisis

Rudy Giuliani

People ask me, “Are leaders born or made?” And I always say they are made. Of course, they have to be born first. But after that significant fact occurs, everything these people know about leadership, they learned it. They may not be aware of exactly where they learned it, but they did.

I know that because about 11 years ago, I decided to write a book about leadership. Before September 11, I sat down to figure out what I knew about leadership and how I could explain it to other people. As I was writing the book I realized that almost everything I know about leadership I learned from somebody else. I learned it by working for them. I learned it by reading about them. I learned it by example, going through difficult times with them and seeing how they handled it.

I became convinced that leadership is something we don’t spend enough time teaching to people. We could teach it to young people by focusing on what the principles are, what the examples are, and things they can improve. In any organization, if you can be a leader you are going to succeed, whether it is government or business, athletics or religion. If somebody can lead, they are going to succeed. The principles of leadership are the same principles that get you through difficulties in life—the same principles you use to take an organization, give it morale, get it through difficult

times. Those are the same principles you use to get yourself through the difficult times that all of us have in life. There are a lot of different principles and a lot of different examples. I am going to talk about the six I think are the most relevant, the most important, and the easiest to illustrate.

The most important principle of leadership, the first one that I always talk about, is: To be a leader you have to have a strong set of beliefs. You have to know what you believe. If you run a business you have to have goals for that business. If you run a government agency, you have to have goals for that agency. If you run a city, you have to have ideas. If you run a country you have to have ideas that inspire people, and we don’t focus on that enough. What is the best example you can think of for a leader?

The captain of a ship is a quintessential leader. The captain has to do many things. But what is the primary thing a captain has to decide before anybody else on the ship can do anything? The captain has to decide on the destination. The captain has to decide, “We are going to Bermuda,” or “we are going to the Bahamas,” or “we are going to Los Angeles.” If the captain can’t decide, nobody else can contribute because they don’t know what they are doing.

That is what happens in many organizations, in many businesses, or at times in government when

President Ronald Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall

on June 12, 1987.

we have leaders that can’t decide. When we have leaders that try to be all things to all people, it is like the captain of a ship that can’t decide. The ship ends up any place the winds take it, any place the storms take it. It could end up some place good, some place tragic. Don’t you get the feeling at times that is happening with our government? It is going where the latest poll wants it to go. It is going where the latest media enthusiasm wants it to go. It is not going someplace that is predetermined.

If you feel that way, that largely means that we don’t have leadership. Leadership, first and foremost, sets a goal. It says “this is where we are going.” It says “this year we are going to expand our business, take on new areas of sales, or new areas of production.” If it is a government agency, “this year we reduce crime, this year we reduce unemployment.” You set goals when you lead.

I learned that from Ronald Reagan when I had the great fortune to work for him for two-and-a-half years in Washington and then all the time I was United States Attorney. The thing about Ronald Reagan that has always stuck with me and has been such a great influence on my life: Reagan really had only a few beliefs, but what he believed he believed very strongly, and he wasn’t swayed about his core beliefs by what was popular or unpopular.

Ronald Reagan’s main belief was that communism was evil, not just another economic system, not just another social system, not just another government. And why was it evil? Because it took away people’s rights that were given to them, according to our belief, by God. The right to vote; the right to practice your religion or not; and the right to determine who represents you. Communism takes that all away from you. You don’t have that anymore. Your human rights, your God-given rights are taken away from you.

To Ronald Reagan that isn’t just an alternative economic system; it’s about human rights, and communism was an evil form of government. So Reagan decided to confront communism, not negotiate with it. You can’t negotiate with evil. If you do, they take advantage of you. Reagan thought that détente, negotiating with the communists, had led us to a very bad and dangerous position, so instead he confronted them. He built up our military to its greatest strength since World War II, he took all these missiles and deployed them to Europe and pointed them at Russian cities.

The day after he did that, ABC did a two day

docudrama about how this was going to end the world. They thought that Ronald Reagan was a war monger, and he was bringing us as close to nuclear war as we had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then he decided to develop a nuclear shield to defend Europe and the West. Again this was going to lead to a war. Well, what did it lead to? Within one year of Reagan leaving office, the Soviet Union was gone. The Berlin Wall was down. Poland and the Czech Republic were free.

Ronald Reagan liberated more people than any American president in the twentieth century, save maybe Franklin Roosevelt. That is a great achievement, and he did it because he had strong beliefs. The thought that communism was evil was not the accepted thinking in America when he said it. Reagan didn’t say this because it was popular. He didn’t say it because he conducted five public opinion polls and a focus group. He said it because he believed it. He said it because it was a sum total of his study, his thinking, his praying. It came from him and it wasn’t going to be changed because it made him more or less popular. That is a leader. That is how you define leadership.

The second thing Ronald Reagan believed was that the New Deal had good intentions, but like many things it had gone too far. Rather than moving people out of poverty, it was locking them into dependency on government. Government had become too big and was keeping people down rather than giving them a chance to get up. He was

“Every morning my faith is restored when I see the clean cut, mannerly, hard working,

mountain students walk with purpose, with head held high, body erect and with

pleasant smiles on their faces.” President Jim Taylor

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considered mean, he was considered dumb, he was considered backward, but he stuck with it because he really believed it. That eventually led to welfare reform, a complete change in our entitlement system. It led to tax reductions for the first time in twenty or thirty years to lower rates than we even have today. It led to an economic boom that lasted for about ten years.

So, the first thing you have to do if you want to be a leader is to figure out what you believe. You have to figure out what you want to accomplish. You can’t lead someone else unless you know where you want to go. If you don’t know where you want to go, how are you going to tell them where to go? So, the first thing I tell young people is spend a great deal of time reading, thinking, praying, and talking to other people and figure out what is really important to you and what you want to accomplish. That is the first principle of leadership.

The second principle is: If you want to be a leader you have to be an optimist. Now I know that sounds frivolous to some people; it sounds like you should go around telling jokes all the time. I don’t mean that. What I mean by that is you have to be a problem solver, you have to be an optimist. Suppose when I came out here, I started my speech this way: “[Sigh] Things are bad, things are really bad. The price of gasoline, it is going to get higher. Iran is going to become nuclear. You think our economy is getting better, but wait and see. You know things are really bad and there is no hope. None. Follow me.” Now I didn’t notice anybody getting up and following me. Nobody ever does, except in one place: New York.

There is always a little group, usually on the far left. New York gets really far left. They always get up and they just sort of follow me when I say that. And there is a reason for that: they follow the person who is offering the solution to the

problems that they are facing. So if you want to be a leader, you have to turn yourself into a problem solver. You have got to turn yourself into somebody who thinks solution, not just problem.

There is a tendency that people have when they are first doing something, and they face the problem for the first time. Let’s say we have a big case and the other side files its brief. We are going to argue the case in the Court of Appeals and their brief is really good. The young lawyer kind of panics and wails “we can’t win this case!” Or when I was mayor, somebody would come running in a panic to announce that something we had predicted didn’t happen and our budget was going to be in trouble. I would always say to them, for their good, not just mine, “Whenever a problem is presented to you, don’t come and tell me about it unless it is an emergency and we don’t have any time.” Those

are rare but they happen.But if we do have time, if we

have an hour, a couple of days, or a week, before you come into my office I want you to sit down, calm down, take a deep breath and figure out how you would solve it. I want you to walk into my office and tell me, “We just had a big budget shortfall because Wall Street had a big decline and all of our pension funds are in trouble,” and then I want you to tell me what you would do about it. Don’t just give me the problem, give me the suggested solution. I want you to train yourself to do that every time that happens because if you do that I am going to turn you into a problem solver from a person that just absorbs and repeats problems.

You know people who do that, right? People who just absorb and repeat problems. They can sit there for hours and hours and tell you how bad things are, how terrible things are, how awful they are. And by the time they have finished, things are ten times worse than they really are. But they can’t

EditorEric L. Wake, Ph.D.

Contributing EditorM.C. Smith, Ph.D.

Advisory CommittEEChristopher Leskiw, Ph.D.

Eric L. Wake, Ph.D.

grAphiCs EditorMeghann Holmes

produCtion mAnAgErJennifer Wake-Floyd

stAff AssistAntFay Partin

Copyright ©2012UNIVERSITY of the CUMBERLANDS

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Permission to reprint in whole orin part is hereby granted, provided

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spend any time on figuring out “What the heck can we do about it?” There is always something you can do about it. The power of optimism is overwhelming if you want to be a leader. My father taught me a very long time ago: if you are ever in a fire, he used to say, become calm. If you are not calm, pretend you are. Because you will think better if you are calm than if you get nervous and really upset. I can’t tell you how much that helped me on September 11. The emotion of seeing so many people die, the emotion of losing so many friends, the emotion of being trapped in a building for 15 or 20 minutes and really not knowing whether we would get out.

But every time that happened, I would say to myself, “I am going to do what my dad said. I am going to pretend I am calm. If I pretend I am calm, I can think better for everyone else and also that will give everyone else an example to remain calm.” The best thing you can do in an emergency is just remain calm or pretend you are. You are going to be able to think much better, you are going to be able to think, “How do I make this better?”

The third principle of leadership is: To be a leader you have to have courage. Many people are in awe of the principal quality of courage because they think it is only for people who have no fear. They think of it as the person who wins the Medal of Honor, or the firefighter who runs into a building to save someone, or the police officer who goes into gunfire to pull someone out. They look at these heroes and they think “I am not like that; I would be afraid.” But courage is much more common than you think. Most people have it. We just don’t understand it.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Any firefighter who is not afraid to run into a burning building is not courageous—he’s crazy, right? Of course he is afraid. Of course a soldier is afraid to go to battle. We are all afraid. Anyone who is not afraid in this room, raise your hand and go to the psychology department, because you need help. You should be afraid. Life is risky. When dangerous

things happen, they are dangerous. If you are not afraid, you become reckless. Fear is an enormously valuable emotion because it warns you of danger.

What defines courage is what you do with that fear, not whether you have it. If you let fear immobilize you, then you are not going to accomplish anything. But if you let fear motivate you to work harder to reduce the risk, then it makes you a courageous person. If you are able to overcome it so that you can do what you have to do, then you will be a successful person.

When I was the mayor of New York, whenever one of our uniformed services did something particularly heroic I would bring them to City Hall that day or as soon as they were capable, and I would hold a press conference and explain what they did. I wanted people to see what these people who risked their lives to protect others are really like. Because if sometimes something goes wrong, or even when sometimes they do something wrong, that becomes the big headline. What happens daily is they save people.

So I thought I could balance that by having these press conferences. I’ll never forget the first time this happened. It was a police officer who had jumped into the East River in January or February to rescue a person who had fallen into the river. He

saved the person’s life. It was a tremendous thing to do, to take the risk of dying from hypothermia himself.

It led me to the principle about how courage and fear can work for you—If you are afraid of failing in business, or you are a firefighter and you are afraid to go into fire, or you are a soldier and you are afraid to go into battle—how do you deal with that fear? I think here is the way we deal with that fear. “Be prepared,” it is called. Anticipating fear and understanding fear allows you to show courage when it is needed to lead.

[We hope you have enjoyed the first installment of Mayor Giuliani’s presentation. Be sure to watch for the conclusion in the next edition of Morning in America. —eds.]

A New York City firefighter purveys the remains of the

World Trade Center on 9/11.

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This account was written by Dr. Melvin “Chuck” Smith, an associate professor of history at University of the Cumberlands.

Sergeant David K. Cooper was mortally wounded by small arms fire while on dismounted patrol in Qadasiyah, Iraq. He died of these wounds in Baghdad on 27 August, 2008.

On Sunday, 7 September 2008, Sergeant Cooper was laid to rest in Jellico, Tennessee, fol-lowing funeral services in nearby Williamsburg, Kentucky. The Patriot Guard attended the services and provided escort from the funeral home to the cemetery at the family’s request. The Patriot Guard are motorcycle riders who, at a family’s re-quest, attend the funeral of a fallen service mem-ber or civilian police or firemen. They will serve as a flag line to honor the fallen and ride as escort to the graveside, and sometimes stand as a barrier between the funeral party and protest groups.

I am not a regular member of the Patriot Guard. I am a resident of Williamsburg, howev-er, and asked permission from the Ride Captain to stand with the Guard and to ride escort, both of which were granted. We arrived at the funeral home shortly after noon and established a flag line (riders holding 3 x 5 American flags on staves) on the perimeter of the funeral home parking lot, fac-ing the area reserved for the threatened protest by the Westboro Church cultists. I wasn’t at the air-port when Sergeant Cooper’s casket arrived on Thursday, but I am told that four of these people did show up there.

There was little traffic in downtown Williams-burg on a Sunday afternoon; the churchgoers had already headed home by the time we deployed, and most folks were about getting their Sunday dinners. We stood vigil until the funeral party arrived and the service got under way, shortly after 2:00 p.m. It was very hot and muggy, very uncomfortable.

Once the service finished and we paid our respects to Sergeant Cooper and his family, we formed another flag line around the rear of the funeral home and the hearse. This is done in case there are any protestors who want to disrupt the ceremony or hurl curses at the family of the de-ceased. It is the Patriot Guards’ desire to interpose themselves between the family and those who have no respect for the dead, that instead of seeing ha-tred and vitriol, they will see respectful flag-bear-

ers. We were fortunate that no incidents occurred during the service. With this complete, we stowed flags and mounted up to escort Sergeant Cooper to the cemetery in Jellico, some fifteen miles away, right about 3:30 p.m.

We couldn’t see Williamsburg’s Main Street from where we staged the bikes or from either of the flag lines. As we turned on to Main I felt a surge of anger.

Williamsburg, like a lot of small towns, holds a Fall Festival—here it is called “Old Fashioned Trade Days.” They close off Main Street, put up a lot of canopied booths and display their quilts and pickles, raffle off a shotgun or two, and fill up on carnival food. Trade Days began on 4 September and ran through Sunday. When we turned on to Main, there were the canopies, there were the peo-ple. I thought to myself, “Can’t these people show some respect?”

And then I saw that they weren’t looking at quilts or buying Polish sausages. They lined the streets four and five deep, almost all of them hold-ing American flags or signs expressing their grati-tude to Sergeant Cooper or their condolences for his family. There was no festival atmosphere in the crowd, no jaunty waving of flags, no rah-rah mo-mentary patriotism.

This was a community bidding farewell to one of their own sons.

We rode on through downtown and crossed the tracks and climbed the hill that runs parallel to the University of the Cumberlands campus. The crowd had grown thinner as we got close to the

Rest in Peace

The Patriot Guard stands along a funeral route to honor a fallen soldier.

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tracks, but only because there aren’t many good places to stand right there. As we approached cam-pus the numbers picked back up again, students and townies standing together to honor a fallen soldier.

There were no protestors. We rode between packed sidewalks up to the

traffic light by the high school, turned left and pro-ceeded to link up to Kentucky Highway 92.The crowd thinned out at this point; only the occasion-al house owner stood in his yard or on his porch as we passed. We turned on to Highway 92, then on to US Highway 25W, the old main road from Wil-liamsburg to Jellico.

Another huge crowd of mourners greeted us as we reached this corner, packed into the parking lot of the Dollar General Store and the Save-a-Lot grocery and the car dealership. A ladder truck was parked there, ladder extended and flying a flag the size of a pickup truck. We rode between packed crowds for the better part of a mile before getting out of Williamsburg.

But at each little community between Wil-liamsburg and Jellico there was another solemn crowd. Each volunteer fire department we passed had their engine run out, their flag at half mast, and their volunteers turned out and rendering honors as we passed. Every little crossroads had a knot of mourners standing vigil. In some places it was a single individual or single family, solemnly hold-ing a flag and standing to honor Sergeant Cooper.

As we crossed into Tennessee we ran into packed sidewalks again, thousands of people lined up to pay their respects as the hearse passed. We escorted the graveside party through town and up to the high and lonesome cemetery where, with a guard of honor from the Whitley County Junior ROTC program, a funeral detail of Army Regu-lars, and full military ceremony, Sergeant David K. Cooper was returned to the native soil from which he had sprung 25 years earlier.

I was honored to be allowed to pay my re-spects and stand vigil over this young man. I was touched by the quiet dignity with which his family endured the services and laid their son and brother to rest. But my heart was both broken and mended by the public display of respect and shared grief that attended Sergeant Cooper’s funeral.

It was a hot Sunday. It was muggy in the way that only the American Southeast can produce. The service itself ran long at the funeral home. These people who lined the streets and the highway stood

in that heat for a couple of hours, all for the brief moment in which they could pay their respect to the family as the funeral procession passed by.

And there were thousands of them. Williams-burg is a town of perhaps 5,000 people. Jellico is about 3,000. Yet there were literally thousands of people turned out to honor this young man.

And they were sincere. David K. Cooper was not a Medal of Honor winner, nor a distinguished general with decades in uniform, nor a veteran who had returned to his home town and spent years in public service. He wasn’t a celebrity. He was just one of us.

Just. One. Of. Us. And so we honored his passing. Even if we

had never met him in life, we wept the tears as if we were laying our own blood and our own bone to rest. We stood in solemn review as he passed by. We felt the grief in a young life ended, but that grief was tempered with the fierce pride in a young life not wasted.

To those who think America has lost its way, you should have been there; you would have seen the soul of a people reaching out to hold those who grieve.

To those who think America has lost its heart, you should have been there; you would have seen the beating heart of the nation pulsing deep and true.

Choose CumberlandsChartered in 1888, University of the Cumberlands is an institution of regional distinction, which currently offers four undergraduate degrees in more than 40 major fields of study; nine pre-professional programs; twelve graduate degrees, including two doctorate, two specialist and eight master’s degrees; certifications in education; and online programs.Listed as a “TopTier” institution by US News and World Report, our graduates enjoy a high accep-tance rate to graduate and professional schools. In fact, within five years of graduation, 66% of our graduates have completed or are pursuing a graduate or professional degree. If you or someone you know might be interest-ed in our programs, please visit our website at www.ucumberlands.edu or contact Erica Harris by email at erica.harris@ucumberlands.edu or by phone at 606.539.4241. She will be happy to provide you with information and an admissions application. We hope to have the opportunity to serve you.

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You can remember Cumberlands in your will or trust, or you might want to create a charitable gift annuity to provide you with a lifetime income as you assist deserving students.

With charitable gift annuities:• The rates are significantly greater than bond rates and certificates of deposits.• Annuity payments are fixed and based on the age(s) of the annuitant(s).• Annuity payments are extremely favorably taxed.• The donor is entitled to an income tax charitable contribution deduction.• Appreciated securities given to Cumberlands for a charitable gift annuity are

valued on the date of the gift; capital gains taxes are not immediately due as they are when securities are sold by the donor.

• A gift annuity is the simplest of all split-interest planned gifts.

A Charitable Gift Annuity will not only provide you a fixed income, guaranteed for life, but also will create a significant legacy here at University of the Cumberlands.

University of the Cumberlands offers numerous planned giving vehicles guaranteeing income for the remainder of life.  Some have established trusts and deferred gift annuities naming a loved one as the income beneficiary.  With the low payout rates currently on certificates of deposit (CDs) and the volatility of the stock market, deferred gift annuities are becoming extremely popular for young adults who will not be retiring any time soon but want to plan and secure a steady, fixed income that will begin when they retire.  For instance, a 45-year-old can defer a gift annuity for 15 years and receive income at a rate of 6.67% percent for life.  The charitable gift tax deduction would be immediate (during working years when your tax bracket is higher) and the income would not begin until you are 60.  As with regular gift annuities, the entire amount of the annuity would be backed by all of the University’s assets.

If you are considering the establishment of a Charitable Gift Annuity to provide life-long income for yourself and vital support for University of the Cumberlands, please contact Jim Taylor at presoff@ucumberlands.edu.

Remember, as a financial supporter of Cumberlands, you are encouraging today’s students as you also demonstrate your continuing commitment to the University’s mission to educate individuals for lives of responsible service and leadership.

Age YearlyRate

Annuity Payment

CharitableDeduction

65 4.7% $470 $2,661.10

70 5.1% 510 3,469.30

75 5.8% 580 4,101.60

80 6.8% 680 4,669.30

85 7.8% 780 5,418.90

*based on minimum age of 65; a gift annuity of $10,000; figures for annual payment & IRS discount rate of 1.2% as of November, 2012.

Remember Cumberlands

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Charles Krauthammer has won a Pulitzer Prize and been named by Financial Times as the most influential commentator in America. He

has been honored for his commentary from every side of the political spectrum. He has been described by MSNBC’s

Joe Scarborough as “without a doubt the most powerful force in American conservatism.”

“Ethical lEadErship”“Ethical lEadErship”with

charles Krauthammer

Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 7:00 p.m.

O.Wayne Rollins Center • Williamsburg, Kentucky

Reserve your free ticket(s) by calling theUniversity of the Cumberland’s ticket line at (606)539-4432.Ticket line opens March 1, 2013