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Courage Is A Three Letter Word
 About the Book
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Preview
Chapter 1
WHAT WILL I DO
WHEN THEY FIND
OUT I´M ME?
It was Good Friday, April 17, 1981, and I had just asked John Ehrlichman why he had not committed suicide.
He sat across from me at a small table in a rear corner of Danny Stradella´s Restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. We had walked there from my office, which was only a half-block away. Our conversation was polite, correct. As we spoke I wondered whether I had made a mistake by agreeing to meet this former presidential aide, a character I remembered from the Watergate hearings in 1973 as arrogant, contemptuous - frankly, to my mind, a man who had threatened my country.
Yet, there he sat, now bearded and bespectacled, only inches from me.
"My life is different today," he offered. An understatement, I thought, as I noticed that he spoke tentatively and not with the pompous self-assurance that had alienated millions of his fellow Americans who watched him on television defending Richard Nixon. I noticed something else, too. His bearing. No longer the mighty bull, he was more a calf stepping out of the barn into the sunshine for the first time. His steps were hesitant. He spoke softly, leaning away.
I did not order a drink.
He did not order a drink.
I ordered an appetizer.
He ordered an appetizer.
I ordered the special.
He paused. "The special," he told the waiter.
"John," I said, "as editor of Parade magazine, I have a responsibility to readers in more than twenty million homes. . . ." He nodded quickly, assuring me, "I understand."
"Good," I said, "because some of what you will hear from me will be painful. If you are to write for Parade, though, I need to know first who you are, who you really are."
Again he said softly, "I understand."
Released from Swift Trail Federal Prison Camp in Arizona on April 27, 1978, three years to the month before this lunch, John Ehrlichman had already written two successful novels about the presidency, including The Company, which became a popular TV movie, Washington Behind Closed Doors, starring Jason Robards, Jr. His prison time behind him, divorced and remarried, he was trying to expand his range as a writer and, with a young family dependent on him, he needed to earn more money. His indomitable literary agent, Mort Janklow, had arranged our meeting, although I warned Mort, "He will have to answer some tough questions."
"Walter, my friend," Mort replied, "John Ehrlichman has answered tough questions. Please meet with him and let me know what you think."
What I thought was that John Ehrlichman had lived my darkest nightmare; he had been shamed before an entire nation - ridiculed and stripped. How, though, could his experience be my nightmare? We seemed to share so little. He was a convicted criminal, a former high government official who had been ostracized by many of his countrymen; I was the editor of the largest-circulation magazine in America, the chairman of the board of a fine college, a respected citizen in my community. Yet, although I had broken no law, I found myself asking, What if I, like John Ehrlichman, lost everything? My concern, though groundless, was nonetheless real to me. I was groping with an important difference, as you´ll discover later, between fear and anxiety.
"There´s not a city you can enter," I said, eye to eye with the man across the table, neither Ehrlichman nor I eating, "not a cab, a hotel, a school, a theater, a store you can visit in which someone might not hold you in contempt. Your very name can inspire revulsion in almost every nook and cranny from coast to coast. How can you live with this?"
I took a breath. "Why have you not taken your life?"
Deep down I knew I had asked the question not for the readers of Parade, not for journalism, not for history, but for me. I wanted to understand how any person could survive such terrible public shame. John Ehrlichman, after all, had been a trusted aide to the President of the United States. His fall - going from the White House, where he wielded enormous power, to the prison in which he served his time - had been steep, complete and humiliating. What, I wondered, kept him alive?
"I thought about dying," he said. "Actually, I thought about it a lot. My name is John Ehrlichman and I know better than anyone else that what you say is true. I had to decide for myself whether to live or to die. That was the choice. No one else could pull me out of self-pity. If I couldn´t live with the truth that many people will never accept me as a person, if I have to depend on others for my self-esteem, then I must choose death. If I wanted to live, I had to quit my depression. I had to say my life had value, and I had to mean it. I chose life."
John Ehrlichman´s voice had been soft until his last sentence: "I chose life." I´ll never forget those words or the voice in which he spoke them.
"I have one more question."
"Please ask," he said, softly again.
"Would you accept an assignment?"
During the last few years I have had the rare and wonderful opportunity to come to know many extraordinary people, some of whom you´ll find in these pages. I begin this book with John Ehrlichman, a man scorned, because in his ordeal we can see a person grasping for dignity - a struggle each of us lives through in our own way every day even without having committed any crime. In this book you´ll also meet a prince and an astronaut, two men whose challenges are considerably different from John Ehrlichman´s. You´ll be introduced to the presidents of some important corporations and a sculptor, a Nobel Prize winner and an Olympic athlete, a comic genius and a courageous priest, several acclaimed actors and actresses, writers, photographers and artists, people of exceptional power and apparent confidence, people who I once believed were without the fears you and I share. But in this book you´ll find that they often feel insecure, that they have failed, that many of them fear that others will discover their inadequacies. Even more important, though, you´ll see how these successful men and women have learned to do more than simply cope with their most agonizing fears by actually turning those feelings into assets. You´ll learn how they, and you, can summon courage, once you understand what courage really is. But I promise you no easy formulas. This book is about real life, real people, real problems. I´m sure that many names will be familiar to you, but most of the stories, many of which are personal and intimate, will be new. I hope they will touch you as they have touched me. I have published many of these talented people, been their editor and their friend, have been privileged to see their minds at work and, sometimes, the secret places of their hearts revealed.
Hundreds of times I have looked into the eyes of a successful person and asked, "When it is dark and you are alone, do you ever say to yourself. What will I do when they find out I´m me?" I´ve never failed to make a friend with the question. And I´ve never failed to get a nod. It was as if I knew who they were, that I understood and, because I understood, I could be trusted. I´ve seen the cool, disciplined, practiced composure of some of America´s toughest business leaders melt.
What about me? How did I, a boy raised in a tenement on the outskirts of New York, an adolescent who quit high school at sixteen to join the Marines, become editor of America´s most widely read magazine before I was thirty-six? This book, as you´ll soon see, is that journey too. I know now that making the decision to tell my story was as difficult as it was to write it. Why? What was it I had been afraid - and in many ways still am - that others might discover?
That I am inferior.
That I am vulnerable.
That I deserve to be rejected.
How about you? When it´s dark and you´re alone in your most troubled moments, do you worry that someone will find out that you´re not good enough, that you can be hurt, that you don´t belong? If so, read on. Your fears, my fears are shared by millions of sane people. We are not alone. Truth be told, it is we who are the majority, and it is we who are normal. Fear, once you understand it, can be OK. In fact, sometimes it can save your life.
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