Page 60 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS KNOW THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN WORK

leading the nation through World War II by hosting a cocktail hour every
evening in the White House. “The rule was that you couldn’t talk about
the war. You could only gossip about people or discuss the books you’d read
or the movies you’d seen, so for a few precious hours he could forget that
the war was raging,” Goodwin said. “And then when Churchill would
come, the two of them would stay up talking, smoking, and drinking until
2 a.m., and at one point Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, came in to see them and
said, ‘Isn’t it time for you two little boys to go to bed?’ Roosevelt also
relaxed by playing poker. John F. Kennedy would go to Hyannis Port and
sail and play touch football. All those men knew that there was more to
life beyond the pressures they were under, and it made them more effective
leaders.”
One Fellow who nearly learned that lesson too late was my White
House Fellows classmate John Shephard, Jr. (WHF 88–89). It was
September 2003, and Shephard was senior vice president of operations of
Northrop Grumman Newport News, a 550-acre shipyard full of nuclear-
powered aircraft carriers and submarines. The Virginia coast was in the
path of Hurricane Isabel, the Atlantic’s most deadly and destructive storm
that year, and Shephard was responsible for securing the shipyard and its
several billion dollars’ worth of naval vessels, buildings, cranes, docks, and
equipment. The hurricane was churning just offshore and heading straight
for Newport News, but the storm preparations were coming together nicely
at the shipyard, and so Shephard left for a brief time to help his wife secure
their home. He was carrying a potted tree into his garage when he sud-
denly felt a sharp pain in his head. “It felt like a knife through the top of
my head, the worst headache I’d ever had or could imagine. I got nauseous
and went in the bathroom to vomit. I thought maybe it was some kind of
migraine,” Shephard recalled. “My wife insisted I go to the emergency
room at the hospital, but I shrugged it off, saying I had to go run the ship-
yard and guide our emergency crews through the storm. No way was I
going to be a wimp and bail out on my people over a bad headache.”
Shephard returned to the shipyard and for the next thirty hours steered
his team through the storm, whose eye passed directly over the huge com-
plex of ships and facilities. The crushing pain in his head had not subsided,
but he kept his agony to himself. Once the storm had passed, he supervised
the effort to restore the shipyard’s operating capacity. Although the hurri-
cane inflicted serious damage to the area, the shipyard came out well.

45