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Tom was always a great part of the team, and he would often run with us in the morning, even when he had been up half the night, if not all of it, recutting sails or redirecting our entire computer-analysis programs. His arsenal was huge. He estimated very early on that we would be taking to Newport 40 genoas, 10 mainsails, and 50 spinnakers, with probably 20 sails on the boat for anyone race. Each sail’s shape, configuration, and driving power were Tom’s responsibility. And he attended to every single detail throughout the campaign. He was not interested in extravagance, only in scientific conclusions. For instance, in the American camp, if a sail is not doing its job, Dennis Conner will just whistle up a half-dozen new sails. In earlier campaigns, we had a tendency to do the same thing. Tom detested this approach. He thought it was crazy because he did not think sail manufacturing was sufficiently accurate. He thought recutting was more progressive, correctly working to a scientific conclusion. Once we had a sail that was good, we just kept recutting it, sometimes to a fraction of an inch, keeping it good, dealing with the stretch instead of starting again with a new one. In that way he was extremely conservative, but he was at the same time extremely potent, because he made sure we always had our fingers on every pulse with great accuracy. Amusingly, after all this heavy concentration on his job, Tom’s hobby is sailboarding. He is, I suppose, totally consumed with the effect of the wind in the intricate science of driving a boat, of whatever weight, forward. Money does not do it for him—nor, apparently, does recognition, for in his own country he is just about unknown, despite his international reputation. Tom’s raison d’être is, I suppose, the pursuit of excellence for the sake of pure excellence. That is an ennobling way of living your life and one of which I very much approve.
Born to Win
John Bertrand
3/26: The incumbents have been among the most profitable companies in the world and almost every sub-vertical within #fintech was in dire need of modernization. We believe this is still true which is why we’re comfortable with the pond we’ll be fishing in over the next decade.
1/26: It’s Hard to Produ...
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national ambitions stirred him, he became a man who spanned regions. He was not of the South but of the West, he could pilot civil rights legislation through the Congress, he could heal, he could understand the heartache of both sides, and also he had genuine ability. In discussing his own presidential race, Jack Kennedy had said that he had a right to run for it; no one else had more ability except Lyndon, and Lyndon could never make it because he was a Southerner. The prejudice against him never disappeared, and the sense of prejudice, the hurt always remained in Johnson, made him more interesting and, curiously, more sensitive. Even when he was placed on the ticket in 1960 he was put there to help Easterners, first Jack, who would hold office for eight years, and then perhaps Bobby. And he felt the pain of those three years of the Vice-Presidency; President Kennedy had been particularly aware of his sensibilities, but not everyone else was so sensitive (except for Rusk, who shared the same origins, humiliations and enemies). Johnson, who had always known about one thing, power, who held it and who did not, knew that as Vice-President he was a living lie, that his title was bigger than his role, that he did not have power, that younger, faster men with no titles held and exercised more power. And then suddenly, shockingly, he was President, the awkward easy-to-caricature Southerner replacing the beloved handsome slain Eastern President, shot down in Dallas, a hated city in Johnson’s own Texas. That did not ease his own sense of the prejudice against him as he acceded. So the perfectly prepared and trained and tuned parliamentary leader moved into the most public office in the world, an entirely different office for which all his previous training was in some ways meaningless, indeed the wrong training; he had learned many of the wrong things. The Presidency is a very different power center; it is not a particularly good place from which to perform private manipulation and to do good things for the folks in spite of themselves. It is at its best when a President identifies what he is and what he seeks as openly as possible, and then slowly bends public opinion toward it. If the President is found manipulating or pressuring a lower figure, putting too much pressure on a congressman, it can easily, and rather damagingly, backfire. Harry Truman was a success in the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they being in general the inadequacies of most normal mortal men, and he made his limitations his assets; the American people had a sense of identification with him and what he was trying to do. Franklin Roosevelt was a fine back-room manipulator, but he always had a sense of the public part of his office, of it as a pulpit, and he used the rhythms of radio expertly in seeming to bring the public into his confidence. Lyndon Johnson never could.…
The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam
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