Mentors
In the Gospel of Getting Ahead, the shortest distance between two points (the bottom and the top) isn’t always a straight line. And if you pursue the labyrinthine path to success, it helps to have the ear of somebody who’s been there before — or, better yet, a guiding hand on your shoulder to breathe a little self-confidence into your soul and to warn you of possible wrong turns along the way. In other words, a mentor.
In Greek mythology, as the story goes, Odysseus entrusted his friend Mentor with the education of his son, Telemachus. Every now and then, the goddess Athena would assume Mentor’s form to give advice to Telemachus or Odysseus. These days, the mentor concept is back in vogue, even spawning a verb of questionable legitimacy, “to mentor,” and a word for the whole process, “mentoring.” Given its mythological origins, the word mentor simply means a faithful and wise adviser. But there’s some confusion over exactly what a mentor is. Is it someone who pegs a rising star within the corporate hierarchy and takes him or her under the wing? Is it someone who merely gives the right advice in the right place at the right time? Or is it someone who sparks that new financial or creative impulse leading to a sharp change in career direction?
As eight of Washington’s leading executives tell it, a mentor can fit into any of those niches. The business world has become increasingly less Horatio Algeresque, and there aren’t really too many self-made men and women. Hard work and ambition are important, but so is luck — good, bad, dumb, and otherwise — and the other forms of coincidence that help people reach the top of their professions. Often, these forces are mentors of one sort or another — teachers, friends, business partners, bosses.
Here, then, are the stories of eight Washingon executives and their mentors. And may the force be with you.
James W. Todd
“They were my graduate education in real estate.”
If it hadn’t been for Steve and Gus Yeonas, it’s likely Jim Todd wouldn’t be in the real estate business today. The Yeonas brothers, whose company became one of the largest residential homebuilders in the Washingon metropolitan area, lured Todd away from a promising management career at C&P Telephone in 1968. After two years with the Yeonas Company, Todd joined Gulf Reston, Inc., developers of the 7,400-acre “new town” in Fairfax County, where he eventually was named president. He’s now president of the Eastern division of Mobil Land Development Corporation (which acquired Gulf Reston’s properties in 1978), responsible for Reston, Arlington’s Colonial Village, and three real estate developments in suburban Atlanta.
When I first came into the real estate business in 1968, the Yeonas Company was growing to be the number-one homebuilding firm in the Washington area. Steve was the president, and his brother Gus was the executive vice president and general manager. I first met them when I was recruited by an executive-search firm to go to work for the Yeonas Company.
“When I went to talk to Steve about the job and to meet his brothers, I initially rejected the job. I was very happy with my job at the telephone company, and during the interview process I had been promoted.
But the Yeonas Company asked me to come back and talk again. I went back probably because of the stature of the company more than anything else. At that point Steve wouldn’t take no for an answer. He continued to impress me with what he wanted to do with the Yeonas Company, that it was fast approaching number one, and he wanted to lay out for me the opportunity to be part of that. He made it a very exciting prospect.
Between the two of them, Steve and Gus were my graduate education in real estate. That’s why I kind of view them as my mentors. Steve is a very exciting person, a cheerleader, and I learned from him the ideas of always moving forward, charging forward, new things, new ideas, new breakthroughs. He believed in creating a sense of urgency about everything we did. I try to do that in my business today, and I even find myself feeling guilty when I can’t keep a sense of urgency going. Every once in a while, when things are going smoothly, I feel like I need to go out and stir things up, just so we don’t get complacent.
I also learned from Steve that when a real estate market is going downhill, don’t just watch it — take some action. You have to take some very specific actions in terms of the product you already have and the product you hope to build in the future. When I got to the point where I was president of Gulf Reston, and I was the one who had to provide the pressure to take some action in a down real estate market, I recalled Steve pushing us into action in a similar situation in 1968-69.
The most important things I learned from Gus were a teamwork approach to business and an emphasis on getting out in the field, to make sure that the things happening out there are things you want to happen, that they’re not just happening by accident — that the houses look good, that the projects look good, that you’re doing the right things to meet the market. It was important to Gus to have a team out in the dirt knowing exactly what was going on. And he kind of led that team, making sure people weren’t back in their offices.
Both Steve and Gus had intense pride in our product, in the fact that their name was on that product. It wasn’t the X-Y-Z Company, it was the Yeonas Company. If they brought someone into the company in a management position, they wanted that person to perform and to become a successful part of the team. I always felt that they wanted me to succeed, and they wanted to give me the environment and the support you need to succeed.
It was very difficult to leave, because of those two persons more than anything else. It was very difficult to tell the two of them I had found something I wanted to do instead — there were a lot of sleepless nights.
I think Steve and Gus Yeonas have been mentors to a lot of people. You’ll find successful people all over the Washington area who are alumni of Yeonas.
Diane S. Dym
“You have a special chemistry — it’s like falling in love.”
When Alan Weitzman asked Diane Dym to join his fledgling advertising agency 11 years ago — and she accepted — the firm had two employees (Weitzman and Dym) and no billings; today it has 35 employees, a branch office in Annapolis, more than $11 million in billings, and wall upon wall of awards. The firm’s name was changed to Weitzman, Dym & Associates three years ago, and this year Diane Dym became its chief executive officer. Dym says she has had two mentors in her professional career: one, not surpisingly, is Weitzman; the other goes back to her first job out of college.
When I first graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, which is part of the state university system, I won a $1,000 award from Bergdorf Goodman to go to Europe and study the fashion business. [Dym graduated first in a class of 3,000.] After I returned, I was offered a job at Bergdorf Goodman, and it was very glamorous: I pasted up the scrapbooks in the publicity department, and I ran the errands, and I did all the typing. It was very exciting.
I was in the fashion PR department there, and everything was going along fine for a couple of months, until it came to be near Christmas and they wanted to make me a “Christmas Angel.” A “Christmas Angel” at Bergdorf Goodman was a personal shopper — all the gentlemen came in and you had to keep one list for their wives and one list for their mistresses and make sure the bills and sizes didn’t get mixed up.
I was very distraught at that prospect, but fortunately Edith Kingston rescued me. She was the PR director, and she asked me to be her assistant. Not only was she very brilliant in her job, but she gave me complete freedom and opportunity to learn. She let me handle things I didn’t think I was prepared to handle — like, “Okay, you go interview these designers and you write the press releases and you write the script for the fashion show.” I’d never done that before, and I thought I’d get broken in a little more easily. It wasn’t a gentle, “Now let’s teach you how to do this” — it was “Go do it.” But I respond better to challenges that scare me into thinking I can’t do something, and she gave me a completely free hand.
So for two years, I was not only able to learn because she had the ability to teach and to edit, but also because she had the confidence to let me go out and do it. Edith Kingston definitely was a mentor in my career and still is a best friend to this day.
Of course, there’s no question that Alan Weitzman has been very, very important to me as a mentor, too. When I met Alan, I was going to do some freelance work for him. We got along well and he had started this advertising agency and he needed somebody. But if you had asked me then if I would ever be president of the company, there’s no way my mind was working along that way.
I took a risk because I was a copywriter at a decent agency in Washington at the time, and those jobs were not a dime a dozen. Alan’s agency was very brand new — no one had heard of it. Matter of fact, when I quit that agency, the president said to me, “Obviously, you’re going with another one of those fly-by-night shops.” And a woman there who was my supervisor said this town would never see a woman as an account executive. So those two remarks gave me an “I’m-going-to-go-out-and- show-them” type of an attitude.
Alan could have very easily molded me into a secretarial or an assistant type of role — although I was trained and had more talent than that, he could have kept me within that role. Especially ten years ago, when women were not as prevalent in business and executive positions as they are today. And I was 23 years old, which is pretty young for that type of role as well.
But the turning point with AIan was the fact that he didn’t. He had this incredible confidence in my talent and my ability — more than I had in myself —and he would just send me out. And he was never hung up about the fact that I was young or that I was a woman. I was more uptight about it that he was. I’d say, “Do you think they’re going to listen to me and believe me? I’m too young,” or “I’m a woman,” and “You would have more clout with them.” But he just wouldn’t hear of that, he wouldn’t stand for that type of thinking. And I went out and did it because I was too afraid to go back and to have to admit that I couldn’t do it.
I think a mentor is somebody that you have a special chemistry with. It’s just like falling in love with somebody. That chemistry must exist both ways — it can’t be one-way. The mentors in my life have taught me that if there’s something I want to do or want to achieve that I really have it within me. And they gave me self-confidence by teaching me to trust my own judgment.”
Milton L. Drewer, Jr.
“He’d go to bat for you all the way.”
At just about the time Ronald Reagan was making a radical switch in politics — Milt Drewer left his chosen field (the football field, in fact) for an entirely new line. He quit his job at head football coach at The College of William and Mary, and, in just under three years, completed a remarkable — and perhaps singular — transition from football coach to bank president. As president and chief executive officer of the First American Bank of Virginia, Drewer has guided it to an enviable position at the largest bank in Northern Virginia and the fifth largest in the Washington metropolitan area.
When I got out of coaching in 1963, some friends of mine suggested that I ought to become interested in banking. This position opened up at the Clarendon Bank & Trust Company, and I guess they decided that a football coach was used to meeting people and working with people. I guess I sold myself when we talked, and I came to work at the bank about 17 years ago, as vice president for public relations.
Shortly after I got here, the president of the bank resigned to go with a bank in Alexandria. And so the bank was left without an heir apparent to the throne, if you will.
There were only four vice presidents in the bank at the time, and we were called to Washington in early June of 1964 by General [George] Olmstead, who was the head of Financial General, and whose company owned the majority of Clarendon Trust Company. And we were told, “One of the four of you is going to be the next president of the bank.” It was quite a shock to me, because I’d only been with the bank three months. General Olmstead didn’t know who I was. If he had, he couldn’t possibly have asked me to come over.
I can’t tell you just how much real controversy and tension and back-stabbing went on during that period. It was really rough. Can you imagine telling people, “One of the four of you is going to be the next president?” Can you think of a greater reason to cause people to fight each other? And so there was a lot of it. Being the outsider, it was not that easy. There were some very trying times, and an awful lot of hustling. I used to work at the bank until 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night.
Bill Schuiling, the man who was sent over by Financial General to sort of honcho us and to see which one of us should really be the one to take over, was my first mentor in banking. He was a real banking professional, and he’s the one who really taught me the banking business. He is the one who believed in me first, who thought that I could do it.
Mr. Schuiling was a person who liked to make up his mind about people very quickly, and make darn sure that they became the kind of person he had said they were in the first place. He was trying to sell a brand of banking, a philosophy of banking, that he believed in. The other three had been in banking for a number of years, they had their own ideas, and they didn’t always want to do it his way. I didn’t have that problem. He was very instrumental in teaching me and in backing me and — well, without him I’m sure that I would never have been made president at that time.
John DeLashmutt, who was the chairman of the board of the bank when I became president, influenced me more and gave me greater opportunity than anyone else. The relationship we had was a very strong one and a very close one. I’d go over to his house and sit down in the kitchen or the living room with him, and we would talk for hours. I had responsibility for the credit department during part of that time, and the night before a loan meeting or a board meeting we would go over the loans or over the agenda we had. And it just sort of carried on. We started doing that one night a week, and pretty soon we were doing it two or three nights a week. There were many things I didn’t know at the outset, so it was comforting for me to talk with him — and I think it was comforting to him, too. When we would go to the board, Mr. DeLashmutt’s influence on what was decided was very great, very strong. People respected his judgment, and those meetings made it easier for me to have him understand and be in favor of what I wanted to do when it came time to go to the board.
Mr. DeLashmutt was a builder, and through working with him I was able to look at banking as businessmen do, and that way understand the businessman’s position. I also learned from him the value of being straightforward and frank about things. He was a very honest person, and believed as strongly in loyalty as anybody I’ve ever known. He was the kind of man who, if he liked you and believed in you — and you did right by him — gee, he’d go to bat for you all the way. But if you ever turned on him, or if you ever lied to him or said something two-faced where he knew he couldn’t trust you, he was through with you. And I mean through.
I guess that’s one of the reasons he and I got along so well together. We pretty much said what we thought and we stood by our word and we believed in loyalty. If Mr. DeLashmutt felt that you were trying, that you were honest, that you were sincere, he didn’t care if you disagreed with him —he just stayed with you, he believed in you. He’d argue with you, but he was always there.
I can go back to the exact play when I decided to get out of coaching. It was just a simple little handoff, but it happened to be run on the wrong place on the football field, and we fumbled, and the other team picked it up and scored a touchdown. That play said to me, “We’re going to lose this ball game and we can’t have the kind of season I want and I’m going to get out of football.” It really got so frustrating that I just became convinced we were not going to win. And regardless of what I did, it just wasn’t enough. And so I changed careers, and I guess I think I’ve exonerated myself, too.”
Robert Gladstone
“He made economics so exciting.”
If it hadn’t been for economist Paul Samuelson. it’s conceivable that Bob Gladstone today might be designing buildings instead of directing one of Washington’s and the nation’s leading economic consulting firms. As a third-year student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gladstone signed up for Samuelson’s introductory economics course, soon discovered that the “dismal science” could be downright exciting, and decided to pursue a career in economics — not architecture. Thirty years later, Gladstone is chairman and chief executive officer of Gladstone Associates, economic consultants, and president of Quadrangle Development Corporation, which recently topped the $300 million mark in residential and commercial construction.
I was at M.I.T., and I was more or less in an engineering track, architectural engineering specifically. But I had this vague feeling of dissatisfaction — something was missing. I enjoyed it, but it was just not quite what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
One of the items required at M.I.T. was an economics course, and about that time, Paul Samuelson was beginning to emerge as an important figure in education. He wrote the textbook that was being used for all of the introductory economics courses. He was very dedicated to teaching, and was very popular as a teacher. He was so coherent, and made the work so exciting, that I became very much more interested in economics than I had previously been, and more interested in economics than in engineering.
Paul Samuelson gave economics a relevance to current affairs and everyday life. I remember him telling us that the whole purpose of the course was to teach us to read the pages in the business news. Samuelson’s idea was to not have the subject developed as an abstraction — it had to have relevance to an understanding of the contemporary world and its economic dimensions. If that didn’t work, then the course wasn’t successful. And conversely, it was successful to the degree that it helped you deal with the world around you.
If a teacher can give you a sense that his subject is real, that it’s tangible, that it’s going to be helpful, it can play an important role in your being successful. All of those things evoke a much deeper and more committed response. And I’m sure I reacted that way.
Most of the other kinds of experiences that I’ve had with people, in an influence or mentor context, didn’t represent as sharp a turn in my life. They were more like a sailboat tacking: you just go off in a slight direction — you’re still on the same basic course, but you move around a particular bearing in response to wind and current.
The benchmark in the Samuelson course was very clear. It was a career direction, a very fundamental career direction. Just for the orderliness of finishing up something you’ve started, I went through with engineering. In fact, I’m still now a registered architect — but I don’t practice.
I was very excited about the kind of work that was being taught in Samuelson’s economics courses at M.I.T., and that’s when I decided to go on to graduate school and courses in planning and economics. His impact was powerful, even though not of extended duration, and it really was very fundamental in my career choice.
Richard C. Vierbuchen
“I could have ended up as a mechanic in a garage.”
Fresh out of college, Dick Vierbuchen joined the Washington Gas Light Company in 1950 as executive trainee. Ten years later, when he was only 32, Vierbuchen was appointed sales director of the utility; by 1977, he was executive vice president of the parent company and president of seven subsidiaries and affiliates, positions he holds today. Two of the three mentors in Vierbuchen’s life also worked for Washington Gas Light: Don Bittinger, retired chairman of the board, who first promoted him; and the late Otis Ritenour, former chief financial officer, who first hired him. But Vierbuchen retains a special fondness for his first mentor, a journalism and history teacher at Fairfax High School.
My first mentor was a high school teacher, Ruth Royston. There was no way I could have gone to college without a scholarship. I had quite a number of athletic scholarships offered to me, and she didn’t like that at all. She kept telling me, “If you go to college on an athletic scholarship they expect you to play ball and that’s all they expect from you.”
On her own time, she coerced the principal of Fairfax High School to go down with her to Washington and Lee University one weekend. The two of them took my records and everything else with them and talked to the dean of admissions, and they got me a full scholastic scholarship to Washington and Lee. They paid absolutely everything, the only way I could have gone to college as a student rather than an athlete.
Ruth Royston was a very strong adviser. She saw to it that I was suspended from school for three days when she thought I was being too smart-alecky. She really cracked down on me. Then, when I was down in the dumps, she really built me up, too.
She just went way above and beyond the call of duty of a high-school teacher, and she took particular interest in me. She spent many, many hours just talking to me and giving me advice. And she used to write to me, keeping a continuing interest beyond high school. Her brother was a professor of mathematics down at Washington and Lee. I never took a course from her brother, but she continually had him checking up on me to make sure I was studying and behaving myself.
I had a lot of personal problems growing up. My dad was an alcoholic, a brilliant man who just wasted himself. My parents were extremely poor, by reason of his inability to hold a job, and my mother was a clerk in the government. She had five children, so it was kind of hard for her to advance very rapidly when she was out so much with the kids. I’m sure I would have felt obligated not even to go to college on an athletic scholarship, but to go to work right away and try to help my mother. At one point, Ruth Royston had my mother come in and she talked to the two of us jointly. My mother joined with my high-school teacher to convince me that I should definitely go to college, that in the long term I would never have the chance to really get ahead without doing that. And that it was far more important with the scholastic scholarship, as opposed to taking one of those athletic scholarships.
Ruth Royston instilled a hell of a lot of self-confidence in me. And she did an awful lot in my rather young, formative age to instill a sense of values and ambition in me.
There’s absolutely no doubt if it hadn’t been for Ruth Royston, my life would have been entirely different. You know, I could have ended up as a mechanic in a garage or a clerk in a grocery store or something. I probably never would have gone to college if it hadn’t been for her. As much as anyone in my entire life — you know, if anybody deserves any credit for what little I have done, it’s Ruth Royston. She’s a magnificent woman.
Susan A. Davis
“He had the access to power I didn’t have.”
Not only does Susan Davis recognize the importance of mentors in her own career, she preaches their virtues to hundreds of other women interested in climbing the corporate ladder of success. As founder and president of Successful Woman, Inc., a management consulting firm, Davis crisscrosses the nation conducting professional development seminars and workshops, in which mentors are a frequent theme. Her company also specializes in recruiting women and minority candidates for top executive jobs. In 1972, Davis became the first woman to join the advance team of a Republican presidential campaign.
After I came to Washingon, I worked in several different capacities within the federal government. When a situation arose where I really needed a mentor, I turned to my boss, Don Rumsfeld. [Rumsfeld, a high-ranking official in the Nixon and Ford administrations, now is chief executive officer of the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical corporation.] He actively helped me get a position that would have been impossible for me to get without his help. I was hired as the first and only female advance person for a Republican president.
Not only had there never been a female in that position before, the powers that be in the White House really were not interested in having a woman, and didn’t think a woman could do the job. I’ll never forget the looks of horror on the faces of the men who were interviewing me when I said I wanted to be an advance man. One of them said to me, “My dear child, girls cannot be advance men.”
It was impossible for me to get that job on my own before Rumsfeld got involved. I thought I could do it on my own, and I couldn’t. But I was determined I’d have that position. I went back and started talking to people I thought could help me, the typical thing people do. But I needed an all-out campaign, and I needed someone to really go to the mat for me.
It was then that Don Rumsfeld actually stepped in and took the risk himself to say, “This person can do the job. It doesn’t make a difference if she’s a male or a female, and I think she should be given a try.” At that time he was director of the Cost of Living Council, and he would have looked terrible if I had not succeeded. But I would not have gotten it without his help. He had the power, the credibility, and the access to power that I just didn’t have.
And I still have a mentor — Tom Burke, who’s vice president for personnel for Entex [a Houston energy conglomerate] and past chairman of the American Society of Personnel Administration. He is very visible in his field, very credible, very knowledgeable. He has a lot of wisdom, and he’s helped guide me in this new business and avoid some mistakes I might have made.
Tom is extremely helpful in terms of helping me get credibility and entree to a world that’s really been dominated by men. Before I went to Houston recently, I said to him, “Tom, I really need your help. It’s tough for me to crack the old boy network down there.” But this good ol’ boy — he’s my mentor — called several good ol’ boys, and those good ol’ boys called others, and I just went from one company to another, getting access to people that I would never have had an opportunity to see otherwise. But beyond that, I had credibility the minute I set foot in the door because Tom Burke said that I was okay. He spent years and years developing his relationships with those people, and he was willing to let me trade on it.
One part of our company deals with management training, particularly for women professionals, and it’s in that area that the subject of mentoring comes up a great deal — it’s something everybody wants to talk about. My theme is that it’s important to have a mentor if you are ambitious and determined to move up fast in your chosen career, and I talk about different kinds of mentors. The majority of people in these sessions want to know how to get a mentor, what it really is all about. But interestingly enough, in every single situation over the last six months where I’ve spoken about this, I’m always asked, “How do you get rid of a mentor?” So I’d say we’ve come a long way.
Luther H. Hodges, Jr.
“He believed in giving responsibility to anyone willing to take it.”
One year after graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1961, Luther Hodges ioined the North Carolina National Bank; by 1974, at the age af 37, he had become the chairman of its board. After serving as deputy secretary of commerce in the Carter administration, Hodges returned to the banking business last November as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the then-troubled National Bank of Washington. In a sense, he leads the rescue mission at the beleaguered financial institution: 1980 was marked, in the words of the bank’s own annual report, by “questionable loans to some who held leadership positions,” “much negative publicity,” and “extraordinary legal fees.”
I had gone to Harvard Business School, and once I decided to go back to North Carolina, I knew that banking was the only business for me. If your family didn’t own a textile mill or you didn’t work for the tobacco company, then there weren’t organizations of size or scope to challenge a Harvard graduate, so to speak. But banking in North Carolina has always been very progressive, so I taught school for one year [at the University of North Carolina’s School of Business Administration in Chapel Hill], really trying to sort out which of the North Carolina banks I wanted to work for.
I met Addison H. Reese, who was the chairman of the board of the North Carolina National Bank, in the selection process. It was a big bank, but he was always very interested in management development and in new blood, and so he paid some attention to whether or not I came to work there.
Addison Reese was the leading force in bringing about all the mergers that created the North Carolina National Bank. He brought it to regional and national prominence. Once I decided to move back to North Carolina and go into banking, the reason I went to his bank was that he had the planning and the vision. He knew more about the industry and trends, where the business was going, what the future was, and how things were unfolding. He paid less attention to the day-to-day details, and was more concerned with the broad philosophical questions — and that’s what’s needed in a rapidly changing situation. He had more vision than most, and I think that’s where his greatness came from.
He was a firm, pleasant, gentlemanly person who always got his way. He was a leader, and there was never any doubt that what he said was what we were going to do. But he had the ability to make you want to do it without being told to do it. He was a fine leader, not a power boss.
I think I have a similar type of personality and am a similar type of leader. He was just a role model — whether it was reinforcing, or whether I copied it, I don’t know. I’d like to think it was reinforcing. So to that extent, he had a great influence, and I thought he ran a damn good bank. He greatly believed in young people. He believed in giving responsibility to anyone who was willing to take it. Age had absolutely nothing to do with it, witness the fact that I was a senior vice president at 30 and chairman of the board at 37. That wouldn’t happen in just any organization.
I used to be amazed that he would not be able to have strong relations with all of the directors, that there were jealousies and factions and things like that. I remember how frustrated he was with that and how he initially thought it was his personality that kept him from being revered by all. But in an organization in transition and growth and turmoil and merger, you’re going to have factions. He had that problem by virtue of merging different banks and so forth, and tlrere are certain similarities here.
As I think about banking, it’s clear that Addison Reese had more influence on me than anybody else. I sort of tried to follow in his footsteps with that kind of leadership, and I can see it helping here, because the banking environment is changing here not unlike the way it was changing in North Carolina in the ’60s.
Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman
“He taught me that it’s the quality of the mind and heart that counts.”
Rabbi Joshua Haberman of the Washington Hebrew Congregation counts among his influential mentors three family members: his grandmother Deborah, who “showed me how to talk to God”; his father, who had a “fierce sense of independence and taught me self-reliance”: and his mother, who “had tremendous guts and courage.” But, Haberman adds, “I owe much to three great teachers who helped shape attitudes
of decisive importance in my profession.”
Nelson Glueck, the famous biblical archaeologist and adventurer, was a professor of mine at Hebrew Union College. He was a dynamic teacher and extraordinarily striking in physical appearance — an extremely handsome, lean man. He roamed all over the Arabian desert and the Sinai Peninsula as a trusted friend of nomadic Arabs, and he was intimate with Arab sheiks and chieftains.
It was my good fortune to be in class when he came back with this tremendous enthusiasm, after years and years of doing archaeological research, which he loved. He brought to us a very vivid imagination and a vivid description of what the land was like — not only what it was like now, but what the Holy Land was like in the days of its greatest glory, in biblical times.
I think that Nelson Glueck exploded the concept of intellectual arrogance. In the days that Nelson Glueck got to know them, there were just tens and tens of thousands of nomadic Arabs who were illiterates. They couldn’t read a line in writing. But they could recite from memory 50 or 100 pages of poetry of a very sophisticated kind. And it brought home to me the point that intelligence, or learning, is not really the top priority. It’s the character, the moral courage, and the quality of the mind and heart that counts. And very simple people can have that. Nelson Glueck brought that out, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Now Professor Abraham Cronbach, a pacifist rabbi, was the exact opposite. To begin with, he was probably the world’s most impossible preacher. He was the epitome of law-abiding conformity, even with regulations that were senseless. And at the same time, he was daring and innovative and radical in his thinking.
He is the only person I ever met who truly could love his enemies. Because he could not succeed really as a preacher, he became more and more of a pastor — he would go visit the imprisoned, befriend the homeless, the abused. But when that expressed itself in his absolute pacifism during the heyday of Nazism right before the outbreak of war. we were nauseated by that. We would ask, “How could you go out and collect funds for the defense of imprisoned Nazis here?” So he said, “Well, they need defense too. They need to have justice as well. If no one else does it, we have to do it.” So he collected funds for their support. Well, I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but more and more, as I got to know him better — though I would never share his pacifism — I realized that that was a form of saintliness or hohness that some are constituted to develop. I could not. But I could at least appreciate it. I learned from him that in a lot of situations, the way of gentleness is definitely the more effective, the better, way. And that there are limitations to the use of power. Now on that, I think he was right. I think he went wrong when he absolutized this principle.
Rabbi Joseph Fink was a gutsy little guy, and I was his first assistant in Buffalo, New York. I served with him for five years and I think I learned more from him than I learned from any other man about the practicalities of the rabbinate.
He once taught me a most important lesson about spiritual leadership. In those days, Zionism was highly controversial. Many congregations would reject otherwise able rabbis if they were Zionists. Being an ardent Zionist all my life, I was concerned and asked my senior rabbi how to handle an interview in which the officers of a congregation, who had invited me to consider their pulpit, were to ask me point blank, “Are you a Zionist?” I shall never forget Rabbi Fink’s advice: “Tell them the truth. ‘I am a Zionist — but not an obnoxious one.’ “
This article originally appeared in the July/August 1981 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan