Frank Shakespeare was a man of several parts.
The constant challenge for journalism is to distinguish between the anecdote, which is illustrative, and the datum, which is indicative.
- Over the past 60 days, I have been invited to advise in the selection of new leadership for seven right-leaning organizations — two academic outposts, three media companies, and two narrow-gauged nonprofits. What are we to make of this bit of institutional congestion? Does it represent a tectonic shift in movement leadership, with the torch being passed from the second generation to the third, or in the case of the older organizations, from the third to the fourth? Or is it merely a random case of overlapping coincidence?
- We will know the answer only in hindsight. What we can know now is that those positions will be filled in the wrong way.
- Executive-search firms tend to carry out their assignments in only one way. They look first to technocratic or professional skills, then to character, and finally to a guiding philosophy or morality.
- Allow me to introduce you to Frank Shakespeare. (And if I need to do so to readers of these pages, shame on me and my cohort. Frank was a longtime, and important, director of National Review, Inc.) Frank Shakespeare was a man of several parts. He was a boy wonder of the broadcasting business, rising from nowhere to C-suite roles at CBS, Westinghouse, and RKO General. Despite his polished corporate manner, he was at the same time an old-school patriot who rode to the sound of the guns. I worked with him on two of those sorties, the first time when he accepted an appointment from Richard Nixon to head the U.S. Information Agency. The USIA, charged with the Orwellian responsibility to conduct “public diplomacy,” became a global bullhorn for American views and values: For Frank Shakespeare, there would be no apology tours. The second time was when he served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican at a pivotal moment in the Cold War.
- This will be an anecdote and most definitely not a datum. After finishing a long business trip across Europe, I invited my bride Jane to join me for a weekend in Rome. My next call was to Frank. Might we take him to his favorite restaurant? No, no, no, he insisted. We must join him for dinner at the residence. Miss Jane and I arrived at the appointed hour, admired the ambassador’s stylish contemporary perched atop one of the hills of Rome — and were immediately accosted by security men in full SWAT gear. After some murmurings up shirtsleeves, we were hustled into the residence.
- Frank was in great humor. He had spent the previous days at the Vatican, leading an American delegation in long-form meetings with the pope and his top advisers. At one end of the table sat Giovanni Paolo Secondo, as the Italians called him, flanked by a half dozen red hats. At the other — Frank, a few foreign-service officers, and Reagan’s personal representative Zbigniew Brzezinski. To the growing consternation of both red hats and FSOs, the substantive parts of the conversation were conducted entirely in . . . Polish. As he told the story, Frank couldn’t stop chortling. His would be one of the few world-changing conclaves in history that would spring no press leaks.
- Frank was pleased for three reasons. He had long believed that the Roman church should be esteemed highly among the intelligence services of the Western world, right up there with MI6, the Mossad, and CIA. (The pope did not disappoint. He had “agents” in places the professionals could only dream of covering.) Second, Frank thought that Zbig, who had been national-security adviser to Jimmy Carter, could add an essential ingredient of bipartisanship: Zbig was short-listed in Frank’s file of hard-line foreign-affairs experts prominently affiliated with the Democratic Party who spoke Polish. And, most importantly, Frank was proud to have played a part in cementing the grand alliance between the two giants of the anti-Communist cause — Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.
- A footnote. That was a wonderful evening for Miss Jane and me. Warm, congenial, celebratory. But we couldn’t help but wonder why, as the sun set over the great city below, Frank never instructed the stewards to turn on a few lights. Our long and memorable evening ended in pitch blackness. Only weeks later did I learn that the Red Brigades, a violent leftist group then hyperactive in Italy, had installed Ambassador Shakespeare at the top of their hit list. Frank had then been placed by his security detail under virtual house arrest.
- Among Frank’s many skills, some of which I hope to have suggested here, one was almost singular. Personnel. Frank Shakespeare could pick people.
- On the corporate side of his life, Frank accepted the criteria honed and adopted by the established headhunting firms — skills, character, life philosophy, and in that order. Following that formula, Frank had built widely admired executive teams in competitive businesses, one after another. But on the cause side — on the side where government, education, religion, philanthropy, and other forms of ideological business are done — he both preached and practiced the exact reverse. In the values business, as distinguished from the business business, Frank argued that your colleagues’ governing philosophy will be the single most important factor in your success. If your teammates don’t believe in the mission — if they don’t make it their own — they will not succeed, no matter how technically proficient they may be at their assigned task. Character counts. Skills can enhance productivity. But under high stress, and in the absence of deep philosophical commitment, a mission-driven organization will slide inevitably, first to mission diluted, then to mission deflected, and finally to mission aborted. My late friend, the historian Robert Conquest, once put it this way: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
- In the present urgency, when conservative organizations are managing generational change — or simply filling a lot of jobs — I will be advising them to pick people who have demonstrated a commitment to coalitional conservatism. To Buckley–Meyer conservatism.