38

Assume Someone’s Always Watching

Teaching the principles of life begins early, as I saw firsthand while walking through the corridors of an elementary school in Fabius, New York, not long ago. Above the hallway was a large sign that simply said, “Character: what you say or do when no one else is looking.”

Simple words but so important for young ones to know. As we grow older, there are more people in our lives who watch our every move. A corollary of that definition of character is that “someone is always watching what you say or do.” That implies that you should be the best you can be at everything you do.

That is particularly important for all of us who take pride in any group of which we are a part: a corporation, an institution, a nonprofit organization. Our actions should reflect that pride. We should believe in it, what it stands for, and what it can accomplish. If we don’t, we’re probably in the wrong place in life.

Having been in military service for 20 years in 1983, I had come to love my army. I was fiercely defensive of it, full of pride in it. Peril can accompany either of these positions, as I discovered.

Such was the case in the aftermath of the October 25, 1983, U.S.-led invasion of Grenada. A Caribbean island nation with a population at the time of about 100,000 situated 100 miles north of Venezuela, it had both a Cuban and a Soviet presence ashore.

Code-named Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion was triggered by a bloody military coup conducted by a party faction. The uprising was led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, who seized power and murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. The Organization of American States appealed to the United States for assistance in response to the political instability.

In light of the island’s proximity to the United States as well as a presence on the island at the time of U.S. medical students at St. George’s University, President Reagan chose to take military action. He called on the U.S. Army’s Rapid Deployment Force, consisting of two Ranger battalions and 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers, along with Marines, Army Delta Force personnel, and Navy SEALs. In all, 7,600 troops from the United States, Jamaica, and the Regional Security System quickly defeated the Grenadian resistance forces and rescued the students.

All’s well that ends well. Or so it seemed until a year later, when Bill Keller, an up-and-coming reporter for the New York Times and later its managing editor, wrote a special story in the Sunday, October 6, edition of that paper. It was critical of the various U.S. military services for being quarrelsome factions competing for money while “tripping over one another in battle.” Two extremely powerful senators, Barry Goldwater, Republican of Arizona, and Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, leveled assaults on the U.S. military for the way the services were run.

Citing speeches both of these members of the Senate Armed Services Committee had given, Keller referred specifically to the Grenada invasion a year earlier as an example of quarrels and miscommunication among the military services. In one speech, Keller cited Senator Nunn as having described how an army officer in the Grenada invasion was forced to use his American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) credit card from a phone booth on the beach where he had landed to call his office in North Carolina. “The officer,” said Nunn, “was seeking to coordinate navy air support for his troops because army units on the ground and the navy’s shipboard command post had incompatible radios.”

When I read the story the next day, it just didn’t sound right. As the chief of media relations for the U.S. Army at the time and always interested in the facts of this or any army matter, I put one of my assistants on the case. He returned from the bowels of the Pentagon later that day with zero evidence that the story was true.

A few days went by during which the AT&T credit card story gained traction. Print and broadcast reports about the incident appeared in numerous places. My boss, the chief of army public affairs, asked what I knew about those stories. I assured him we had run them to ground. Yes, it was good theater in written form, but in actuality it had not happened.

Keller came wandering into my office later in the week asking if I’d comment on the reports of the army having to resort to a personal AT&T credit card because radios between services were incompatible. Not true, I told him; simply didn’t happen.

By then the story had become a factoid, told so many times by so many people that it became fact in the minds of most. Keller couldn’t wait to report to Sam Nunn that an army colonel in the Pentagon—that would be me—had questioned the senator’s story.

A reaction came quickly. Two senior officers from the army’s Legislative Liaison Office appeared in my office the next day. “You are in deep trouble,” one of them said. “Senator Nunn does not appreciate being called a liar,” the other said. He wanted an apology and a retraction of my position that the incident hadn’t occurred, they breathlessly told me.

The furor drifted up to the secretary of the army’s office. Secretary Marsh, a former member of Congress, calmly asked me what I knew about the Grenada telephone credit card call story. Checked and double-checked, I assured him. He asked the army staff to verify my side of the story, and they did. Word got back to Senator Nunn that the army stood by its position.

Two days later, I learned that several special operations officers involved in the invasion were summoned to Washington to personally meet with Senator Nunn to recount what had actually happened. It did not involve an AT&T credit card, they told him.

Apparently, my career was salvaged and my hide was safe. Never heard another word. Yet the story lives on in military circles to this day. It’s simply too dramatic, juicy, and controversial to die.

However, the fact that somebody’s always watching will never die, at least in my mind. Everything you say, everything you do, whether personally or professionally, is subject to scrutiny. That goes for your boss, too. Keep a watch out for the boss. In this age of transparency, every word or action needs to stand the accountability test.

Don’t shy away from whatever it takes to get the job done for your boss or the company for which you work. Be willing to push the envelope as long as you know you’re right and can stand behind what you say or do. If I had not done that in the case of the AT&T credit card story, it probably would have made it to movie theaters somewhere along the way. Sorry, Hollywood.