- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by: Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare.

And by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

Since the library was dedicated over a half a century ago by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Our guest tonight, Stanley McChrystal, served in the U.S.

Army for 34 years, rising to the rank of four-star general and leading U.S.

forces in the war in Afghanistan.

His passion for and expertise on leadership has led him to author a number of books, including his latest: "On Character: "Choices That Define a Life."

Tonight, I talk to him about the importance of character and leadership, the difficult decisions in his career, and how the divisions we see in our nation reflect who we are at this moment in history.

Stan, welcome and congratulations on the publication of "On Character."

- Well, you're kind to have me, Mark, thank you.

- Delighted to have you here.

Why this book and why now?

- I hit a point in my life, I'm 71 now, where there's a lot more behind me than in front.

And hopefully that provided me some perspective.

And as I tell people, there are no answers in the book, but there are questions that I found useful.

And so I wanted to write something that explored what I think about important issues.

And they all intersected on the question of character.

Because, at the end of the day, what I've concluded is: that was always the most important thing.

And I was lucky enough to have great parents who were exemplars of wonderful character.

They never talked about it, but they just lived it.

And then I went to West Point where they made every effort to try to have you take up duty, honor, country.

But you get busy.

You get in your job, you try to learn your craft, you try to get promoted.

Character is there, but you don't think about it very much.

And then you get at a later point in life and you look back, and the one thread that was the most important thing always was character.

And the things that I wish I had remembered in every instance, not always after the fact, was character.

And so it's been helpful for me to explore it at this point in my life, and I hope it's of some value to others as well.

- You define character in the book with an equation.

Character equals convictions times discipline.

What do you mean by that?

- Well, first, that's the extent of my math expertise.

(Mark laughs) But I think it's a product because it takes two factors.

The first are convictions.

And I define those as our deeply held beliefs.

Those are the things that we don't just accept 'cause we read or somebody told us.

They're things we've thought about and we've pressure tested.

We feel strongly enough we're willing to live to those convictions or potentially to die for 'em.

But then the other part of the equation is discipline.

Because I think we can have the most wonderful convictions in the world, but if we lack the discipline to live to them, anything times zero is zero.

And I think how many times in life we either have faith in an institution or in someone because we think we understand their convictions, but in a moment of truth, we find that they lack either the courage or the discipline to live up to them.

And then occasionally we look in the mirror and we see that person is us.

And that's when I am reminded or reinforced the idea that our discipline, at the end of the day, it gives us the ability to be who we hope to be.

- You achieved great things at a young age.

You ascended the ranks rapidly.

So many people do and they don't know themselves, and they feel out of their depth.

How do you find your character in those moments when you feel this what is now called imposter syndrome?

- Yeah.

- Such that you rise to the challenge of leadership without fully knowing who you are.

- You refer to my meteoric rise.

I was a lieutenant for four years and a captain for seven.

It didn't feel meteoric at the time.

It felt like I was plodding my way through a military career.

But relatively speaking, I got to positions that were challenging, and I was still a relatively young age.

And there were moments in which you ascend to be a commander.

And there's a time at which, suddenly in the unit, not to your face, but behind your back, they refer to you as the old man.

Now, the first time I was, I think, referred to that, I was probably mid-30s.

And so you go, "Old man?

Okay."

But you are the most mature person, the oldest and most experienced person in the organization.

So you have to be that beacon of values.

You have to be the exemplar of what it is you want people to be.

And I think the responsibility that comes with that, when you work particularly with really good people in the organization, they reinforce you because they know it's very important that you be that.

And if you're lucky enough to have people like that who move you in that direction, you start to assume the importance of the roles that you're in.

Because you're never really ready for 'em.

And suddenly you're in the room, and people are treating you a certain way, like they treated multi-star generals when you were young, and you're sort of wondering why they're doing it.

And then you are that person.

But then they look to you when it's very difficult.

When there are very difficult or very hard decisions to be made, they look to you.

And there's nowhere to hide.

And, at that point, you have to step up.

And I think it comes naturally for most people, but it's still a learned skill.

You are not born to be a senior leader.

You may have the talent, you may have the ambition and those things, but we learn to be senior leaders.

And if you're lucky, you get to watch some really good senior leaders on the way up.

And you get to choose the behaviors that they have that you want to model later.

And then there are always some cases where you wanna avoid some things that you see.

- You write very candidly about your resignation in 2010.

Talk about that and how that changed you.

- Yeah, for the backstory, for people who don't know, there was an article that came out in Rolling Stone magazine that found my command group in Afghanistan, I was the overall commander, as being immature and locker room antics.

And it said that we were dismissive particularly of Vice President Biden, of whom none of the command team had ever met him, so I was the only person that ever dealt with him.

But, anyway, this story came out.

And I didn't think it was accurate, and I didn't think it was fair, but it didn't matter.

Because I'm responsible for an entire theater of war at that point.

And I'm not supposed to put that kind of problem on my boss, the commander-in-chief's desk.

And so back in Washington, this story becomes, against the backdrop of politics, military not respectful of the new administration of President Barack Obama.

Now, we were.

I had voted for president, I mean, you know, but it doesn't matter.

That story ends up on his desk, and he has a problem that basically emanates from me.

So I flew back from Afghanistan to meet with the president, and I carried my resignation believing that the political firestorm was gonna be significant enough.

And I went in to see him, and he was as professional as always.

We'd always gotten along.

And he asked me what happened.

And I said, "I'm not sure.

"I haven't had time to really investigate.

"But I brought my resignation, "and if you wanna accept it, I'm okay with that.

"And if you want to tell me to go back to Afghanistan "and keep working, I'm okay with that too.

"Whatever's best for the mission."

And he accepted my resignation.

And in an instant, I was 55 years old, just about to be 56.

I'd been born in an Army hospital.

My father was a soldier, my father's father was a soldier.

My four brothers were soldiers.

I'd gone to West Point at 17.

My entire identity in life was being a soldier.

And in that instant, I'm no longer the commander in Afghanistan.

I'm no longer a general, I'm no longer a soldier.

So I walk out disoriented.

You're not quite sure what you're supposed to do.

I mean, you keep a stiff upper lip and you do those things, but, in reality, your legs had been swept out from under you.

And besides, I thought I always could have ended my career by being killed or being fired for incompetence.

But never did I dream I would be accused of lack of judgment or something like disloyalty.

We got in a vehicle and drove across Washington, D.C.

to Fort McNair where my wife Annie was living in quarters.

And I'd been deployed for six of the last seven years in combat.

And so we've been apart an awful lot.

So I come in from the vehicle into the quarters, and she's standing in the entryway.

And I said, "Annie, it's over.

"President accepted my resignation."

And she looked at me and she goes, "Good.

"We've always been happy and we'll always be happy."

And, in an instant, what she did was she set the direction for the rest of our lives.

And what she did was she prevented me from being an embittered fired general who is thinking that I always got a raw deal.

'Cause you can live the rest of your life that way, feeling sorry for yourself.

And she in an instant just said, "Nope, we're not doing that.

"We're going this way."

But it kept getting easier, and it kept getting easier because I realized that I hadn't lost anything in the Oval Off... I hadn't lost who I was.

I lost my position and my profession.

But I'm the same guy.

And if I had the character that I think I walked in with and I walked out with that same character, I was largely intact.

I mean, think of all the service members who lost legs or were killed or that sort of thing.

I didn't have any of that.

I have nothing to feel sorry for myself about.

Now what I've gotta do is decide who I am and find the way to be that as best I can.

- There are a number of wonderful chapters in this book, short essays on different aspects of character that you identify.

One of the pieces of advice that you dispense is: embrace the suck.

What does that mean?

- Yeah, sometimes life's gonna be hard.

In the military, we usually talk about whether it's really cold or it's wet or something physically bad.

Or sometimes you really get a bad deal.

You've gotta do a 30-mile road march.

You gotta do whatever it is that is not pleasant for you.

And there are two ways to look at it.

You can say, "Ah, this is terrible," and you can kind of hang your head.

Or you can kind of say, "Okay, this is, "as Voltaire would say, the best of all possible worlds."

And you just say, "We're gonna do it, "so I might as well enjoy it."

And it's interesting because in the good units I was in, that was the ethos of the unit.

And it was almost irritating because things would be absolutely terrible, and you look at people and they're smiling, and they're forcing themselves to smile.

But that is the norm in the unit so that, if you don't smile, you're viewed as weak.

And I was kneeling in the snow one night.

I was a Ranger regimental commander, and I was out with a lieutenant who was doing a training operation in the snow up near Tacoma, Washington.

So not a nice night.

And I'm kneeling next to him as we're doing some final preparation.

He's doing some final preparations for his attack.

And I said, "Well, tell me, Mike, "what did you do before this?"

He says, "I went to school."

I said, "Where'd you go?"

He said, "MIT."

I said, "What'd you study?"

He said, "Nuclear engineering."

I said, "Well, how far did you go with that?"

He says, "I got my PhD in nuclear engineering."

And I said, "What are you doing here?"

And he looked at me, he says, "Sir, this is great.

"Don't you think this is great?"

I remember thinking, "Yeah, but I don't have a PhD in nuclear engineering."

So when people can understand what's really good about it.

We used to say in the Ranger regiment when I served: life was hard.

It was physically hard, disciplined.

But the only thing worse than being in the Rangers was not being in the Rangers.

- We all stumble in the areas of character.

We all make mistakes, human flaws.

How do you get yourself back on course when you have seen a deficit in character in your life?

- Yeah, in yourself.

I think the first thing you do have to admit it.

Because it's pretty easy to say, "Not my fault."

Or to find some rationalization on factors around and put yourself in denial.

And I think that's not the right thing to do.

I don't think you have to go out and tell everybody, you don't have to bear your breasts and walk around the streets telling everybody you screwed up.

One, they don't care.

And, two, it's just sort of a waste of time.

You just need to stop and say, "I did that wrong.

"I didn't do what I was supposed to do."

Or, "I did something I wasn't.

"I am not going to do that again."

And it helps if you look yoursel in the mirror and do that.

And it even helps more if you have a small group of people around you to whom you really are close.

Usually a spouse, other family members, one or two close friends, not a huge circle.

And you can tell them, you can say, "I did wrong.

"I'm not gonna do that again."

And the reason I think that's good is because, when you've committed to other people, it increases the likelihood that you won't want to disappoint.

If you've just told yourself, "I won't do it again," and no one else knows you've said that, then if you do it again... But if you have a commitment to somebody, look 'em in the eye and say, "I won't do that."

Then the next time you look 'em in the eye, if you've done it again, the average human's gonna feel pretty poorly about it.

- We talk in this country about the values we share as Americans, but you write in the book of the divisions that we're currently seeing in our country.

And I'm quoting you from the book, you say, "We must consider our nation's predicament, "and it is serious.

"There are little shared views of reality "or of right and wrong."

So how did it come to this?

- I think, first off, there is historical precedent in many societies and in America.

If you look at the period before the Civil War, the decades up to the Civil War, there was economic and political argument over slavery and a moral argument behind it.

But about 1850 it changed, and it started to become more emotional.

And when "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came out in 1851, people started to dislike people from the other side simply 'cause they were from the South or from the North.

So people started to identify with certain beliefs and value sets and whatnot that really went into respective corners and didn't want to communicate with the others.

If we step back down, we say, "What are the issues that really divide us?"

And they're not nearly as evident as we think they are.

We can go back to some that are important to people.

It could be abortion, it could be gun control, it could be gay rights.

Those are issues, but they're just issues.

If we really think about it, they are not existential issues in the grand sense.

And so I think in many cases they become excuses to be polarized as opposed to real reasons.

I mean, if we look in the Palestine area, there's two groups that want the same land.

That's a pretty difficult thing to solve.

We don't really have that problem.

We have a series of issues that we ought to be able to solve in the courts and in public opinion.

But we have moved because we are starting to see the other group as different people who don't have the same values that we do, the same overall.

I think the most important thing is to rise up, get to 30,000 feet, and look at the United States and start with what we agree upon.

The first thing is: do we agree that the United States should be a nation?

Because the good Lord didn't create the United States.

A bunch of people did.

They came together, they agreed to a covenant, 13 colonies.

They made some commitments.

"We will do this for which we will get that."

And it was a tough negotiation.

But the basic premise that we will be a united nation, if you start with that and you get everybody just to agree with that.

Okay, we're we there.

Now, what's the next thing?

What kind of nation are we going to be?

And are we gonna be one that is heavily religious, of a single religion?

Are we gonna be pluralistic like we've been?

Are we gonna be a democratic republic?

And as we start to make those things, I think there's an awful lot we agree upon.

And then you get down to these things that says, "If we agree, we're gonna be a country.

"If we're gonna protect our interests, "we agree we're gonna be a democracy that works.

"If we agree, we're gonna give every American equal rights.

"If we agree, we are gonna respect "each person's place in society."

And you kind of work your way down.

"Okay, what do we not agree on?"

This is where I think it has become almost a cottage industry or larger than that, with people who find those issues and they crank 'em up.

And they're able to use information technology now to do that.

- Often for financial gain.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

Do you think we can get to a point where there's consensus in our country on reality and what is right and what is wrong?

- I don't think it's a given that that will happen.

I am hopeful that it will happen, but I don't think that, if it's left untended, it automatically happens.

I have the baggage of being an enthusiast for history, as you are, but also experience in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and whatnot.

And when these intractable issues reach a certain point, then rationality fades away.

A war starts for reasons of usually strategic aims of different societies.

And then you start killing each other, and then the war continues 'cause you're killing each other Someone kills your brother, your mother, your sister.

And so it's like a fire.

It starts to burn hotter.

And pretty soon people are so emotional about that.

If we think back during World War II, Admiral Bull Halsey, American hero, he put up a large billboard outside one of the harbors in the Southwest Pacific, and it said, "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs."

Now, some decades away from that, that looks pretty extreme, pretty racist.

In the moment, I don't think it was viewed that way at all.

I think it was viewed as, "Okay, that's what we gotta do, "roll up our sleeves and kill those people."

That's where the danger occurs.

And I don't criticize Admiral Halsey for doing that in that instant, but I criticize political leaders or others who do the equivalent now and they demonize a group or they demonize an idea because it is in their interest to do that.

And I think if we really looked at the incentive system, for many of the people who have these really extreme, in many cases, violent positions that they take, they're getting something from it.

Even if it's just popularity and, you know, they become a more well-known influencer.

But that's really dangerous.

We all agree in the First Amendment, at least I think we do.

But we all understand that the power to persuade is much greater than we admit.

We are persuaded every day.

We buy products, we do things, we follow people because they're good at persuading us.

And now with algorithms, they're even better at doing that.

And they can be relentless at it.

And I think that we have got, as a society, to recognize that vulnerability, recognize the seductive nature of social media.

There are a number of things that I think are more advanced than we are as people, social media being one.

I think it is something that we are not yet mature enough to actually use safely.

Particularly children, but I say everybody.

And it's not that the people who created it are evil, but they created something that arguably is evil and so has evil potential.

And so we've gotta make some really tough decisions about things like that.

Are we going to allow our society to become dominated by that?

- As we commemorate our nation's 250th birthday, what is your greatest hope for our country?

- I think the first thing we have to do is: 250 was an amazing milestone to make.

260 isn't guaranteed.

251 isn't guaranteed.

As we all know, the Founding Fathers pulled off an extraordinary thing.

And they were just people.

They weren't from Mount Olympus.

They were people, but they had open-eyed clarity on what they were trying to do, and they made compromises.

I think we take it for granted.

I think we think they built this marble edifice that will last forever and we will just inhabit it, and we don't have to do much but sweep it out periodically.

I think that's the opposite.

I think America is only the nation that we want it to be as long as we make it that.

And, on any given day, if we don't live up to those standards, then it's not that nation anymore.

It's whatever we're doing that day.

And that's, if you think about it in those terms, then suddenly you say: we each have a responsibility to decide what our nation's going to be, what our standards are, what our values are, live them, and demand them of others all the time.

And I'm afraid that we've gotten so comfortable and assume that somebody else will pick up the trash, somebody else will defend us, somebody else will do this.

And that's not reality.

It's us, no one else is coming.

- So in November of 2025, we had six Democratic lawmakers who had served in the armed forces record a message to our military and those in the intelligence community reminding them that they have to defy orders if they are illegal.

Is there a reason to worry that our military personnel and members of the intelligence community will not step up in those situations?

- I personally don't think there's a worry if an order is given that's illegal.

The problem is it's possible to give a lot of orders that are bad that are technically legal.

And it's also possible in the heat of the moment to give orders where it's gray.

It's not really clear.

And if you are reflexive to follow your chain of commands, instructions, as a military should be... They're not in the business... Never once in my career did I ever have to stop and think, "Well, we got this order.

"Is that illegal?"

Never even drifted close to that.

And if you're asking, particularly in difficult moment for the military leaders to now put this whole new calculation together, then it's hard.

And this gets back to where we need to look at this.

We need transparency.

This shouldn't be in the shadows.

This should be something Americans should talk and think about.

I think those lawmakers were absolutely well-intentioned, but I think the problem's a little more nuanced than they probably depicted.

- The book is "On Character."

Our guest is General Stanley McChrystal.

Stan, thank you so much for being with us, and thank you for your service to our country.

- Thanks, Mark, you got it.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by: Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's HealthCare.

And by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(gentle flute music) (bright music)