Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Sol H. Pelavin, President and CEO of the American Institutes for Research, to the National Academy for Superintendents on July 26, 2006 at Ohio State University.

 

Instilling Trust and Confidence:

Lessons From Research Literature and Real Life

 

Thank you, Bob, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Bob?s invitation to join you this morning at the National Academy for Superintendents provides an opportunity for me to share some lessons about trust and confidence I?ve learned from the research literature ? as well as lessons from my own life.

 

I come here today as president of American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit leader in the field of behavioral and social science research. Before running a large research enterprise, I had other jobs, including that of high school mathematics teacher and mathematics curriculum writer back in the 1960s. After studying statistics and mathematical research models at Stanford, I did education research for several companies ? including the RAND Corporation and SRI International. That led to my opening my own research shop, Pelavin Associates, in 1982 with my wife and colleague Diane Pelavin. A dozen years ago we merged our company with AIR ? and it has been a magic carpet ride ever since. Like President Bush, former President Clinton and 3 million other baby boomers, AIR turns a robust 60 this year.

 

Our company is growing as never before and tackling enormous challenges ? especially in addressing the country?s education deficits. AIR was founded after the Second World War by a psychologist, John Flanagan, who came up with the pencil-and-paper tests that the Army Air Corp used during the war to determine which candidates for pilot training were most likely to win their wings. Today AIR?s educators, researchers, psychologists, public health specialists, behavioral experts and other scientists are engaged in projects that span this continent and take us to 26 other nations as well. The volume of our work has increased 20-fold since 1994 ? our annual budget now exceeds a quarter billion dollars.  We are headquartered in Washington ? we can see the Potomac from our office windows ? and we have other facilities around the world, but our real capital is the brainpower of our thirteen hundred staff members. More than half the staff holds advanced degrees and 250 are PhD?s. We work with Ohio and numerous other states on the implementation of No Child Left Behind and with a myriad of federal agencies on issues from school reform and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, to fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. We even rewrote the book of occupational job listings for the U.S. Department of Labor.

 

I?m telling you this because I attribute much of AIR?s success to learning and applying lessons about trust and confidence that are the focus of my talk today.

 

Trust has been a main theme of literature from Shakespeare to today?s most popular novels, which often focus on trust and betrayal. Academic studies of trust began relatively recently, with early organizational researchers hypothesizing in the 1960s about the importance of trust in building effective organizations. More recently the study of trust ?has been fueled, at least in part, by the accumulating evidence that trust has a number of important benefits for organizations and their members.?  (Kramer, 1999, p. 569). Particularly relevant to us today is an emerging literature that points out the importance of trust in schools, for example, the trust of principals by teachers and vice versa.

 

Now, much as the box office success of Al Gore?s ?An Inconvenient Truth? tempts me to dazzle you with slides, I?m going to stick with PowerPoint basics this morning. Here?s the outline of my message about how to instill trust and confidence in your organization, in your personal leadership and in the people you lead and work with.

 

There are four points to my message:

 

1. Why trust and confidence are so important to the work all of us do. This will be the motivational part of my talk ? I hope.
2. What key researchers and thinkers tell us about credibility and trust. This is a topic of vital importance to the success of any major endeavor, from politics to business to ? naturally ? public education.
3. How building trust and confidence were central to my career and to the success of AIR. Here I learned from masters ? dreadful bosses who showed me what NOT to do. Out of those negative experiences came positive principles that I was able to apply in building my own organization.
4. How superintendents can apply these same principles to your demanding, difficult jobs.

 

Being a superintendent means being in a pressure-cooker. It was never an easy job and it is even harder today with all the legal and regulatory obligations that rest on the shoulders of the nation?s 13,000 superintendents ? along with the hopes of thousands of parents for their children.

 

It is harder to build trust today than ever before. Why?  Because we live in an era of diminished public trust and confidence in leaders and  institutions at every level, from Congress to the state house to the local school board. The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press recently released a poll that found public disillusionment with Congress at record levels. It said ? and I quote ? ?For the first time since 1994, a majority of voters (53 percent) say that they would not like to see most members of Congress reelected. ? Unquote.  The image of Congress has been besmirched by the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal and the notoriety of a Louisiana congressman who accepted marked bills from the FBI in a sting operation, wrapped them in foil and deposited them in his freezer. We went to war against Iraq to eliminate Saddam Hussein?s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Now, with the war in its fourth year, President Bush?s approval rating has dropped dramatically.  It fell to 33 percent this spring.

 

To Ohio Governor Bob Taft, a 33 percent approval rating probably sounds pretty good. After the ?Coingate? scandal rocked the state house and Taft pleaded guilty to ethics violations, Taft?s approval rating sank to 18 percent  -- well below Richard Nixon?s numbers during the Watergate scandal, or Jimmy Carter?s when inflation was roaring at double-digits and, as Ted Koppel reminded us nightly, ?America (was) held hostage? in Iran.

 

Politicians hold no monopoly on graft, misdeeds or diminished stature in our society. The mightiest newspapers in the land have been tarnished by journalists? fabricating sources and stories. A major network kicked the most famous anchor of his day to the curb after he and they were gulled by someone who claimed to have unearthed documents about the president?s service in the National Guard. Enron, WorldCom and Fannie Mae have given corporate America a succession of black eyes. Several Roman Catholic dioceses are paying a steep price for failing to protect children from pedophiles in the priesthood. And even baseball, the national pastime, operates under the cloud of a steroids scandal that has tarnished Barry Bond?s career as well as his attempt to break Hank Aaron?s home run record.

 

By any number of measures, public trust and confidence in our leaders is significantly less than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Moreover, this diminished trust and confidence spill over into our everyday lives.  For example, two-thirds of employees don?t trust their boss. 

 

We will never reduce the public?s cynicism about our leaders and about public institutions ? including the schools ? unless we find ways to rebuild trust and confidence in our core institutions. And that means restoring trust and confidence in our school systems and in the people who direct them.

 

Let me start by asking some simple questions:

• Who do you trust?
• Who do you have confidence in?
• How is trust gained?
• How is it lost?

 

We grapple with these questions as citizens whenever we exercise our franchise to vote, whether voting for a seat on the local school board or determining who should be the next President. We also face these same questions everyday in the work place and our professional lives, as well as in our family life and friendships.

 

Let me pose some additional questions that cut even closer to home:

 

• Do we trust our doctor?
• Do we trust the plumber who comes to fix the leaky toilet in the upstairs bathroom?
• Do we trust our car repairman?
• Do we trust our colleagues to do what they say they will do?
• Do you trust your senior team?  Do they trust you?

 

Superintendents hold positions of enormous public trust. It is to you that parents entrust their children to be educated. You operate in the public eye, not to mention the school board?s eye and the eye of the teacher union. Superintendents do not have tenure. It is not unreasonable to expect that if you lose the trust and confidence of your community or its elected (or appointed) representatives, very soon you will be looking for a new leadership opportunity! Superintendents may have more job security than baseball managers, but they are in a more volatile sector of the education profession than, say, your average professor ? or education researcher. A study by the National School Boards Association three years ago concluded that the average length of service for superintendents in urban districts was about five years (The NSBA surveyed more than 100 of the nation?s largest districts, including eight Ohio districts: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron, Dayton, Springfield, Toledo and Youngstown).

 

The dictionary defines trust as ?firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person.?  Let me ask again: who do you trust?  Do you trust the weatherman? Weather forecasts are right roughly 60 to 70 percent of the time. Odds like that explain why most of us keep an umbrella in our car or briefcase, even when the forecast is for sunny skies.

 

Now, when you think of the benign image of Willard Scott and Al Roker, it?s clear that the public is more forgiving of flubs by television weather forecasters than it is of misstatements by politicians. We forgive the forecasters because we know how fallible they are, even with their Doppler radar. We hold public leaders to higher standards of performance. We expect the truth from Presidents, Congressmen, Governors, and, of course, superintendents.

 

The forecasts, by the way, before Hurricane Katrina were quite accurate. But no one was prepared for the ineptitude of the relief effort at the city, state or federal levels. A hurricane is going to be a tough test of mettle for anybody. Fortunately, most of the cataclysms we face at work are not of hurricane strength. Few of us actually face a Katrina. Instead our reputations are built ? or destroyed ? by a succession of much smaller events. For every leader who loses credibility in some grand way ? like the first President Bush raising taxes after telling us to read his lips ? there are more of us whose credibility dies from a thousand small cuts.

 

The most interesting and useful work that I have found on today?s topic is a book by James Kouzes  and Barry Posner called Credibility ? How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It. Kouzes is the chairman emeritus of the Tom Peters Company and Posner is dean of the business school at Santa Clara University. Over the years they have surveyed 75,000 people around the world on the topic of credibility and here is what they found. I quote:

 

The dimension of honesty accounts for more of the variance in believability than all of the other factors combined.  Being seen as someone who can be trusted, who has high integrity, and who is honest and truthful is essential.  You may know someone who is clearly competent, dynamic, and inspirational.  But if you have a sense that that person is not being honest, you will not accept the message, and you will not willingly follow.  So the credibility check can reliably be simplified to just one question:  ?Do I trust this person??

 

This survey was conducted in large and small companies, in public and private sector organizations, in schools, hospitals and government agencies. The findings are strikingly consistent. People say they want leaders who are honest, forward-looking, competent and inspiring.

 

Leadership, the authors tell us, ?is a dialogue, not a monologue.? Leadership is not about the force or personality of one strong individual, but about the culture of organizations that strong-minded individuals create. Or, as that other well-known management expert, Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski likes to say, ?Leadership is plural.?

 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a Harvard Business School professor and management expert whose book Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin and End (Random House, 2004) examines how certain well-known companies and organizations achieve superior results years after year. She has looked beyond the corporate suites for examples of how certain celebrated sports teams vie for titles year after year, and what that teaches us about confidence. She has studied the New York Yankees, of course, but also the University of Connecticut women?s basketball team, the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, and even the Chicago Cubs, still painfully groping for that first World Series championship after 98 years.

 

Kanter tells us that an essential ingredient of leadership is confidence in other people. She writes:

 

Leadership involves motivating others to their finest efforts and channeling those efforts in a coherent direction?.Winning teams and successful organizations become increasingly less dependent on the person called the commander-in-chief.

 

Which brings me to the issue of confidence in public education. My stock in trade as a researcher is empirical evidence. The empirical evidence on confidence in public education is mixed. We have the annual Gallup Polls for Phi Delta Kappan in which Americans grade the public schools. These Gallup Polls going back to 1969 tell us that people regard the public schools in their home community as quite good (48 percent As and Bs) and schools elsewhere as mediocre (only 24 percent As and Bs).[1] These attitudes are a mixed blessing for those who believe our schools are nowhere near as rigorous as they need to be if our children and grandchildren are to enjoy in the 21^st century the freedom and prosperity that was our legacy in the 20th.

 

Now, if you?ll grant me license, let me digress for one moment from the empirical evidence to express what I confess is a personal opinion. It is my sense that the real crisis of confidence in public education is not among the public but among professional educators who too often are willing to accept or even make excuses for mediocrity in our schools.

 

You would never know this from our rhetoric. From Sputnik to A Nation At Risk to No Child Left Behind, we have been engaged in a march of 40 years? duration to make schools better. However, it often seems that for every two steps forward we take one back, and occasionally one forward and two back. We dismantled separate, racially segregated public school systems, but have not significantly changed systems that almost everywhere produce markedly different outcomes for children of wealth and children of poverty as well as better outcomes for white and Asian kids than for black and brown kids.

 

Perhaps you came here this morning most interested in hearing about how to win the confidence and respect of your public constituency ? an important objective. But my remarks today are directed at what you can do to win the confidence and respect of your employees, especially those who face the children every day and who deliver the instruction for which you bear responsibility.  Without their confidence and respect, we cannot begin to talk about winning the battle of public opinion.

 

I do not pretend to have all the answers to the shortcomings and challenges of public education. But I have gained some insights into what it takes to create organizations that achieve their goals. I know ? and here the empirical evidence is squarely on my side ? I know that it starts with asking the right questions and being open to the full range of possible answers.

 

My first theme today is about being honest and truthful.  Without these critical qualities, no one can engender trust or confidence.

 

People will not follow someone they do not trust.  It is important again to note that only a third of office workers consider the suits in the front office to be honest. The success of Ricky Gervais?s BBC show The Office, as well as the spin-off on this side of the Atlantic with Steve Carrell, attest to the endearing popularity of depicting bosses as insufferable morons. Few of us are in Ricky Gervais?s league when it comes to depicting life?s follies, but I bet many could write a script about bosses we have dealt with.

 

How many teachers trust their principals or the central administrative structure? In studying an ambitious reform effort in the Chicago schools, we found that a key variable was whether teachers trusted their principal.

 

I mentioned my first job after college was teaching mathematics to high school students and then writing curriculum in a regional education lab. Later I supervised graduate students who were doing their student teaching. In those jobs and later, I seldom had a boss whom I trusted and respected. I was always part of the two-thirds of the work force who did not trust the boss ? and, I felt, with good reason.

 

When Diane Pelavin and I started our own company, we were determined to avoid the problems that we had encountered time after time in our own work lives.

What did that mean operationally?

 

For me, it meant always keeping my word, whether speaking with a current or potential client, or a current or potential employee. I established a track record, and I?m proud to say that in the last 24 years I?ve made good on every pledge made to a staff member or client. And we kept our corporate commitments.

 

It is reasonable to ask: Was being honest and keeping my word, whether personally or corporately, enough?

 

No, it was not. Being honest was the right first step. But it wasn?t sufficient. Not by a long shot.

 

What else is needed to engender trust? Let?s revisit the research literature.

 

When Kouzes and Posner asked people to define credibility in behavioral terms, the most frequent answer was leaders who ?do what they say they will do.? These same authors tell us that ?credibility, like reputation, is something that is earned over time. It does not come automatically with the office or the title.?

 

Now we?ve talked about the bad boss. Good bosses are also the stuff of legends. Pat Carrigan was the first woman to manage a General Motors auto assembly plant. Her story is told in the book Credibility and she was once featured in a public television special on managing for excellence.  Carrigan started out teaching elementary school in Michigan, then became a college professor after getting a doctorate in psychology. She left academe for the business world, starting in human resources, but then moved up through GM?s management track. As a plant manager, she achieved remarkable success in improving quality and reducing grievances. At the Bay City plant, she turned the executive dining room into a work area and converted the separate dining room for white-collar workers into an aerobics classroom. She was said to know the name of everybody who worked in the plant. A UAW local president praised her once with these words: ?Pat Carrigan ain?t got a phony bone in her body.?

 

How can you become trustworthy as a leader? Kouzes and Posner suggest examining your daily actions with four questions in mind.

 

1. Is my behavior predictable or erratic? Some degree of predictability or consistency is required for people to believe in you. Otherwise your behavior will be viewed by your staff as inconsistent and confusing.
2. Do I communicate clearly or carelessly? Sometimes we say something about our intentions that we intend to be tentative, not conclusive, without realizing that others may view them as promises. If you are clear about what you mean, there is less chance that others will find your statements misleading ? and less chance that they will be disappointed or angry when you don?t do what they mistakenly thought you said you were going to do.
3. Do I treat promises seriously or lightly? Workers and colleagues take promises seriously, even if you said them with a smile or thought you were just joking around the water cooler. There are no asides if you are the boss. As President Bush found out when he spoke to Tony Blair during dinner in Russia, the microphone is always open. Anything you say, can and will be held against you. Every promise, pledge, or casual remark counts.  You cannot take it back without losing credibility.

4.   Am I forthright or dishonest? Just as there is no being a little bit pregnant, there is no being a little bit dishonest. Your word is your bond, for better or worse. If someone discovers you?ve been deceitful on even a small matter, it casts doubt on the veracity of everything you?ve said and done.

 

A few weeks ago, GolinHarris, an international communications firm, released a survey of white- and blue-collar workers in the United States and the United Kingdom. It found that ?employees are more likely to trust employers that communicate well.? Nine out of 10 people said the key to earning trust was how their employers communicated with them. Among those who were most likely to quit, only half said they trusted their employer. The message is clear:  Building trust is key to retaining staff and to build that trust, clear and honest communications are required.

 

I still shudder to think back to some of the bosses I endured 20, 25 and even 30 years ago.  By and large, these weren?t evil or wicked people ? but lies were standard practice in their management manuals. I suffered under several masters of deceit, including:

 

The supervisor of that mathematics curriculum development project in a regional lab. This guy made capricious decisions, never talked to his staff, promoted favorites for unknown or unstated reasons, and provided no leadership, none. His communications to me and my colleagues were always ambiguous. Nobody trusted him.

 

But my education in the work world was just beginning. After a second stint in graduate school, I joined a large not-for-profit corporation. My boss was an excellent tennis player who admitted to not being well versed in research methodology. He was running a well known policy research center and after 18 months I became his deputy, basically responsible for the center?s operations.  Everything ran smoothly for a year, during which I never could determine what my boss was doing on any given day. But that was okay ? our work was proceeding, the client was happy and I was learning a lot about how to supervise research. If I was doing some of my boss?s work, I viewed it as a learning opportunity. My responsibilities included making a quarterly trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the center?s main clients. Prior to these visits, each project leader briefed me about the status of his or her projects, their findings, and what issues should be discussed. My boss, for the first time in several years, had taken on a significant project himself. The gist of his briefing was that everything was going well, that this project was on schedule, within budget, and that the client was likely to give us follow-on work.

 

You can probably guess what happened when I met with the client. All the projects were well received except the one my boss was shepherding.  It was behind schedule, overbudget, and its first report was deemed of unacceptable quality ? a phrase I had never heard associated with any of the Center?s work. Moreover, the client was annoyed with me because I was not on top of the problem ? because I didn?t come with a proposed solution. I spent 16 hours a day for the next four days digging us out of this hole. I felt totally mislead and abused ? and of course had completely lost confidence in my boss?s honesty and integrity. I could no longer trust him. It will surprise none of you that I tendered my resignation a few weeks later ? and the Center was lost within a year.

 

What could that boss have done differently?  He could have been honest with me. Sure I would have been chagrined that there was a problem, but fixing problems was my job. We could have worked together and avoided the embarrassment I experienced in Washington. I probably would have chalked that up as another valuable learning experience and working with my boss might have been a ?bonding? activity. By sharing his problem, my boss would have been demonstrating confidence in me and I certainly would have reciprocated. I might even have felt honored that he had confided in me. I certainly would not have resigned, and the organization might not have lost an important contract.

 

Honesty and teamwork instill confidence, the kind of confidence that underlies a winning team. That brings us back to Professor Kanter who says:

 

Through their confidence in the team, leaders can set an emotional tone and shape expectations that produce initial wins [successes]?Winning  puts people in a good mood, and being in a good mood makes it easier to win.

 

It only takes a couple of bad bosses to convince you that if you ever get to run your own business, you are not going to operate their way. I suspect that many in this room had that exact same feeling when they got their first superintendency. You knew the cardinal rule ? honesty is the best policy ? and you were determined, as I was, to make it part of your standard operating procedure.

 

But again, the process of building trust and confidence involves more than simply being honest. What did I do in addition to always being honest to turn my good managerial intentions into a consistent and effective style of leadership?

 

First, I listened. Whenever there was an important decision to be made, I solicited the advice of others, and heard them out. I did not always agree with what they said, but I always gave their advice careful, thorough consideration. I also was honest and direct about where I stood on the issue at hand. If I was unconvinced after hearing their views, I always took the time to explain why. That is a time-consuming and thankless task. Often it seems there are barely enough hours in the day to get the job done, much less to explain in detail why you acted the way you did.

 

But in the long run, it was worth the extra time invested. It gained buy-in for every major decision I made. Whether or not they agreed with the decision, folks felt that they had had their day in court; they had had the chance to influence a decision to advance the common enterprise.

 

Be honest. Communicate clearly and truthfully. Listen carefully. And remember, that if you want to build a strong, cohesive team of senior managers to help you carry out your job, you need to put team-building near the top of your to-do list.

 

Build a strong senior management team. When we started Pelavin Associates, I knew how not to run a business. At first I thought that the best way to grow the business would be to hire talented people with expertise in different sectors and then let them alone to manage their piece of the enterprise. We quickly realized that business model was flawed. We needed a shared vision. It was not enough to have five or six separate lines of business, each functioning fairly well, but not in concert. They had to pull together or each was weaker than a cohesive whole. So how do you get these strong-minded people to come together and to act as a team?

 

I assembled my senior managers for lunch once a week off the premises. A local restaurant gave us a room to ourselves. We?d always started with small talk, shooting the breeze as we hit the buffet and ate lunch. We talked about everything under the sun, including movies we had seen and our kids? latest adventures in life. Eventually I?d start the group on an agenda of topics to discuss ? where things stood on our major contracts, where we were on the bidding process for new work, and how many new people had to be hired. These lunches became an essential part of our business week. Breaking bread really is an important element of team building. One of the most successful meetings we ever had was in the early years when two senior managers in a fit of laughter threw rolls at each other. Now, tolerating food fights might be a sure way to get fired if you?re a superintendent. But for us, it meant the team was coming together as a family. And yes, even as we?ve grown into a quarter-billion-dollar organization, I still make time for regular lunches with the senior managers ? although now it?s every other week. No one throws rolls.

 

After AIR and Pelavin Associates became one, my first job was that of COO and CFO. For months the president and I had lunch together every day, and soon invited others to join us. A new senior management team and approach took shape over those lunches.

 

A winning team was being built.  Breaking bread together helped.  But again, that was not sufficient.  The management team needed all employees to share our vision.

 

I talked to AIR staff. I soon learned things that I knew had to be changed. In the old AIR, the folks who paid the bills were not called ?clients? or ?customers,? but ?sponsors? of our research. It was a vestige of the ivory tower. Before the merger with Pelavin Associates, AIR had secured a major contract with a collegiate sporting association to study how much progress athletes were making towards degrees. Well, the project manager called a news conference to announce the findings ? without saying a word to the sporting association. Needless to say, we were fired the next day.

 

It took me and the new senior management team several years to change this corporate culture. At the start, I did not know if it would be possible to change. Nobody trusted me at the outset. They had to see that what I said was going to happen actually did happen.

 

Building trust isn?t easy. It cannot be done in a week or a month; it takes time. And it only takes one lie to sink a president, only one exaggeration for a leader to lose trust.

 

Now, perhaps you are thinking, ?This is fine for him to say. He?s in the private sector, without the red tape, regulations and teacher?s unions fighting to defend incompetence and lack of accountability. How can anyone succeed under these conditions??

 

Let me reiterate the lessons I?ve shared with you this morning ? the lessons from the research literature on trust and confidence, and the lessons from my life ? that may help you in your job.

 

• First, be honest with everyone, at every turn. Remember, it?s the long term that counts ? not where you are today, but where you and your school system will be five years from now.
• Treat everyone who works for you with respect, and insist that every manager and supervisor do the same. It sounds corny, but there is nothing wrong with striving to make niceness part of the culture of your workplace. I hired a manager once who was terrific on projects, but a terror to almost everyone in the office, especially the secretaries. She thundered into my office one afternoon with an ultimatum: Either this underling had to go or she?d quit. I looked at her calmly and said, ?We?ll be happy to arrange your farewell lunch any day next week.?
• Don?t over promise. The biggest problems that leaders face arise from over promising. There is nothing wrong with saying, ?I?m going to see that your kids get a solid education, but they are not all going to score at the 50^th percentile and above. We?re going to raise the test scores across the district ? but not everybody is going to get into Harvard.? Set goals high, but not out of the realm of possibility.
• Invest the time to build teamwork among your senior leaders. If you want to rebuild trust, start with your senior managers. Prove to them that your word ? and your organization?s word -- now is good, and they will spread that message through the ranks.

 

I?d like to share one Washington story with you. The release of tapes from Lyndon Johnson?s White House has given us all an appreciation for LBJ?s formidable powers of persuasion. He came to the White House under tragic circumstances, and divisions over the Vietnam War cost him a second full term. But there?s a new appreciation in Washington today for his legislative achievements, including the Civil Rights Act, Head Start and Medicare. Johnson had a stellar team of speechwriters, including a young former Newsweek reporter named Peter Benchley who went on to fame as the author of Jaws. Now Benchley was said not to be entirely happy with his lot on LBJ?s White House staff and apparently the feelings were mutual, for chief of staff Joe Califano tried to fire him, supposedly for being a slacker. According to Harry Middleton, the former director of the LBJ Library, Benchley told Califano that LBJ had personally hired him and LBJ was the only one who could fire him. Johnson apparently got a perverse delight out of seeing someone stand up to Califano, and Benchley was spared the axe.

 

That?s the true story. But there is another version that has entered Washington lore. In this version, Benchley finally agrees to leave, and on his last day he prepares some informal remarks that Johnson was to deliver that very afternoon in the Rose Garden. Now this was a routine speech, no Teleprompter, not even a full text, and LBJ never even looked at the index cards before he began talking. The president picked up the first index card and dutifully read:

 

It is said that we cannot fight the war in Vietnam and pay for all my Great Society programs. But I say we can ? and today I am going to tell you how.

 

Then he read the next card:

 

They say that we cannot eliminate poverty and provide health insurance to all our elders. But I say we can ? and today I am going to tell you how.

 

Then LBJ picked up the third card and reads:

 

And they say we cannot end decades of racial hatred and discrimination and live in harmony as brothers and sisters, white, black and brown. But I say we can ? and today I am going to tell you how.

 

And then, with the audience hanging on every word, Johnson turned over the fourth card, and all it said was:

 

So long, Lyndon. You?re on your own now.

 

Well, I?ve shared with you this morning what I?ve discovered about building trust and confidence. And now, friends ? as Peter Benchley may or may not have put it ? you?re on your own.

 

I?ll be happy to take your questions.