Page 225 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

Just as Mike Ullman has become an old hand at resuscitating troubled
companies, so has Thomas Shull (WHF 81–82). Shull considers himself
“an emergency room doctor” of sorts whose job is to stop the bleeding and
guide distressed companies toward a complete and lasting recovery. Perhaps
Shull was led to a career as a turnaround specialist after seeing his family
suffer the loss of its fifty-year-old canning and lumber business, or perhaps
it was the focus on problem solving and discipline he was exposed to at
West Point and Harvard Business School. Or maybe it was the influence
of his White House Fellows principal, Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Darman,
who told Shull, “He who controls the process controls the outcome.”
Whatever the contributing factors may have been, Shull made the best
use of all of them, beginning most notably during his Fellowship year
when he was selected to help create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
Many in Washington wanted to steer clear of working on the memorial
because there were controversies over nearly every aspect of it. Some, such
as Texas billionaire Ross Perot and Senator John McCain, then a private
citizen and a Vietnam veteran, were adamantly opposed to its construction
and criticized the design as not being heroic or tasteful; others, including
Virginia Senator John Warner, were fiercely determined to see it built in
honor of the war’s fallen heroes. The Memorial Fund had sponsored a
national design competition, and an eight-member jury chose a solemn
V-shaped black wall created by an unknown Yale architecture student
named Maya Lin. Some veterans saw the design of the stark wall engraved
with the names of fallen soldiers as an insult. Proponents said the memo-
rial would present a fitting and elegant tribute to those killed in the
Vietnam era. Chief of Staff James Baker assigned Shull to represent
the White House in meetings with Perot, McCain, Senator Warner, and
others, and Shull was instrumental in helping put together the compromise
solutions that allowed the memorial to be built.
“No one at the White House wanted to take on the memorial because
it was extremely controversial,” Shull explained. “Ross Perot was opposed
to the original design and did everything he could to try to derail it. Actually,
many people were against the memorial, and it sometimes felt as if it were
going to die of its own weight. But I shared the vision of the Vietnam
Memorial Fund founders that it should move forward, and it did. We kept
it afloat while all the necessary compromises were hammered out.”

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