what is an Heroic Gentleman?
“I’m not a hero,” said Special Forces Sergeant 1st Class Greg Stube just before he carefully sipped from the first beer he’d tasted since being admitted to a hospital a year before. After a long pull, he added, “No … I’m just a patriot.” I wasn’t so sure. Stube had been blown apart while attempting to save a man he didn’t know, a man fighting for another country’s army. He’d volunteered to risk his life to free a nation and to destroy a terrorist movement, the great evil that crashed planes loaded with Americans into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and, while American heroes struggled to take the cockpit, a farm field in Pennsylvania. I’d been in audiences where Stube gave speeches that pragmatically outlined the noble traits a man should struggle to embody—showing he philosophically understands why he chose to fight. I’ve heard him declare his wife is the “real hero” for sticking by his side even when, as pain exploded through his guts and bones, he said things a hero wouldn’t. I knew he volunteers a considerable amount of time helping wounded veterans readjust to American civilian life. So I vexed, If not this man, then can anyone be a living hero in this cynical, realist age? Today we think of a hero as someone who selflessly risks their life to save another, but we don’t see the person as being heroic outside of their selfless act or role. We don’t think of heroism as being premeditated, or as a complex figure struggling for justice, or even as a noble characteristic exposed by tragedy. Today heroism is more often viewed as just a mad moment when someone forgot their own mortality long enough to save someone’s life; today we refuse to intertwine a heroic act with a fallible individual; as a result, today’s men can’t be heroes, but can only briefly do heroic things. Once was, our heroes were men of action and piety. Their entire lives were heroic and not merely isolated to a single battle or a catastrophe. The heroes of history subscribed to a code of honor, and they strove to uphold that code in every thought, action, and deed. That’s why Cincinnatus is still a hero while living quietly on his farm, long after he saved Rome from destruction. That’s why Sir Galahad is remembered for his enduring purity and faith rather than the number of rival knights he defeated. But the image of the hero has shifted in our modern age to a man who is flawed, dark, and mysterious. We are reluctant to accept a heroic calling. These days purity and virtue is, to say the least, questionable. Cincinnatus, Galahad, and Roland have been replaced by anti-heroes such as Dirty Harry, Jason Bourne, and Rambo. As I listened to Stube’s infectious small-town sincerity, I began to wonder: Why can’t a man still be heroic? Are we so disillusioned that we can’t revere heroism when we see it? Isn’t it a good thing for boys and men to look up to someone who manifests the heroic ideal, even if such heroes err as mortals? Are we so lost in relativism that we can no longer clearly believe in role models? Then Stube broke my cynical train of thought by conceding, “Well, perhaps a hero did save my life.” He next told me the epic story of his last day of battle and I began to find answers from his experience to those troubling questions. Stube told me about Staff Sergeant Jude Voss, a Special Forces team member who drove Major Jared Hill’s vehicle at the center of an attacking convoy Stube was with in September 2006. They were fighting in the battle of Sperwan Ghar, just one part of what the coalition forces called “Operation Medusa.” An estimated 2,000 Taliban fighters had gathered to retake Kandahar, and Special Forces teams, Canadian soldiers, and Afghan fighters mobilized to stop them. Suprisingly, the Taliban didn’t run to bomb another day, but dug into strategically strong ground. On the fifth day of the battle—the allied forces had to pull out several times after running out of ammo—Stube and the other Special Forces soldiers were making good progress up the hill despite intense enemy machine fire and constantly falling rocket-propelled grenades. But then a report that an Afghan soldier had stepped on a mine three-quarters of the way up the hill crackled over the radio and Stube and Sgt. 1st Class Sean Mishra were ordered to take a truck up the hill to rescue the wounded Afghan. Stube gave Voss a thumbs up from the truck’s turret, Mishra hit the gas, and they drove over an embankment into the fray. Boom! The truck was rocked by an improvised explosive device (IED). The explosion was so catastrophic that Major Jared Hill, the operational commander positioned with Voss, who was hundreds of feet away, was thrown to the ground. Hill regained his feet just in time to see Voss rushing heedlessly into the smoke and flames. The bomb had detonated under the truck’s right front wheel, setting the gas tank afire and blowing the driver, Mishra, through the door. Stube was trapped in the turret, his legs burning off. Stube tried to climb out, but his barely attached leg caught on something and he collapsed. Voss fought through the smoke and fire and found Stube laying over the roof. Bullets slammed into the vehicle and ricocheted off rocks as Voss pulled Stube to the ground. Stube was on fire, so Voss burned his hands in an attempt to put out the fire, then took handfuls of sand and smothered the flames. Crack, crack … the ammunition in the burning truck began to cook off. Voss started dragging Stube toward a ditch. Stube remembers feeling something peppering his face, and as the shock wore off, he realized sand was being blown into his face from machine gun bullets landing all around him. Voss then yanked Stube into a ditch and began to treat his wounds. Hill found Mishra, the driver of the truck, dazed from the blast and placed him head-to-head with Stube. Mishra, somehow, wasn’t seriously injured. When asked if Stube would make it, Voss shook his head and frowned. Stube had a gaping wound on his side and his right leg was barely connected to his body. But Stube wasn’t ready to die. As he choked on his own blood, he talked Voss through the first aid: “This is leaking,” Stube managed. “Here, check this.” Somehow, perhaps in part because of his unbelievable composure, Stube was still alive when Special Forces medics arrived. “I shouldn’t have lived,” Stube said as we talked at the Washington, D.C. pub, “my wounds were too severe. I should have bled out.” After Stube was evacuated, the battle raged for another eight hours before U.S.-led forces took the hill. In the end the Taliban lost about 900 fighters during the fight for Sperwan Ghar, though the pivotal battle received little attention back in the States. Stube had been through all that and still refused to think of himself as a hero, which is part of what defined Stube as a hero. Fame is not something a modern hero seeks or is even comfortable with. So, despite the contemporary point of view, I could accept Stube’s flaws and view him as a living hero, a shining example of a man. Stube credits his military training and moral background with guiding his actions in battle, which isn’t hard to accept; after all, firemen and police officers also fall back on training and well thought out responses when thrust into violent situations. Training and codes of conduct are the basis of heroism, not just timing or disposition. With this in mind, the modern conception of heroism seems overly simplistic and cynical. Heroism can be premeditated, prepared for both morally and mentally. Men can harbor a heroic value even though they’re human. Heroes can try and fail and try again. Indeed, fostering the heroic aspect within yourself is fundamental to becoming a man, though it’s not necessary to be proven in battle. Men need to develop their skills and fortitude and to look within, as Ray Bradbury wrote, to “find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.”
"Volunteers can't be victims. Therefore all our heroes who served, and possibly were wounded or killed, are not victims. This understanding is critical to healing."
-Sgt. Greg Stube (Ret.)
Profile of an Heroic Gentleman: Frank Sinatra
The late Michael Thomas Kelly, a writer and editor for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, blamed the king of cool, Frank Sinatra himself, for messing up American ideals about manliness. He noted that Sinatra was perhaps America’s first true pop idol of the Entertainment Age. Kelly wrote that “what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool.” Before cool, there “was smart (as in the smart set)…. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca.” The old-school American gentleman might have been more like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. He might appear suavely cynical, but deep down he adhered to the old values of patriotism, honor, and courage, which was why Butler joined the Southern war effort, even as the South was crumbling. But Sinatra’s cool was different. “Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even.” Cool, as Kelly pointed out, is a cad. Cool isn’t pious and certainly isn’t virtuous. Cool is out for himself. Cool can be cynical about women; as Sinatra famously said, the trick to understanding women is “You treat a lady like a dame, and a dame like a lady.” And cool can relish have links with mobsters and the Mafia, as something dangerous and exciting. But there was more to Sinatra than that. He was a man of famously long friendships, especially with his “Rat Pack” buddies. He was loyal. He was hard-working. He was intent on being a good father to his children. He could be compassionate and generous, and stood for racial equality when it took guts to do so and became a Republican in Hollywood, supporting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, when that took guts too. For many men of the greatest generation, he might not have been the moral equal of Philip Marlowe, but there was toughness to admire in the skinny kid from New Jersey who became not just a teen heart throb, but a mature, thoughtful actor and singer who wouldn’t back down from anyone and insisted on doing things his way. Sinatra played himself perfectly in the movie The Tender Trap (1955), as a debonair man-about-town, a sophisticated and wealthy bachelor in New York City who has mobs of attractive women chasing him. But at the end of the film Debbie Reynolds wins him and pulls him back into convention, and he becomes a good husband. Sinatra might have been cool. He might have bucked some conventions, but he upheld others. He was definitely a big-city version of man’s man. But his life, and the movie The Tender Trap, highlight something else: that sometimes a woman of character is required to bring out the true gentleman beneath the man about town. To modify, Sinatra’s line, maybe the trick to getting along in the office is for every man to treat every woman as a lady, and for every woman to demand that every man be a gentleman.
“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”
–Frank Sinatra
G. Gordon Liddy’s Heroic Method
G. Gordon Liddy argued in his autobiography Will that men develop their heroic potential when they face down their fears. Liddy went to jail after the Watergate scandal, but kept his manhood by staying loyal and by accepting accountability for his actions. Because he had mastery of himself, he took the worst the American legal system could give him and walked out of jail clean.Liddy mastered himself, took the worst the American legal system could throw at him, and walked out of jail a better man. He then wrote books, started a radio show, and became iconic.He’s now an iconic author and radio show host. So I asked Liddy to explain how he attained his legendary fortitude. “I thought I had invented facing fear to grow as a man,” Liddy said, “but then I found that psychologists call it the ‘process of desensitization.’ It doesn’t work immediately, but each time you face a fear the fear diminishes. It also isn’t something you only have to do once. A man will have to confront his weaknesses throughout his life to grow as a man, a potential hero. “When I was a boy I learned to face my fears to overcome them and achieve anything; for example, when I was eight there were these freighters along the New Jersey shore that frightened me, so I worked up the courage and slipped by security guards and climbed the monstrous things. I was detected and chased, but got away. Afterward I was proud of myself. I was like a boy who’d faced a dark night and realized he was strong enough inside to overcome such things. “It never ends. You have face your fears all your life to grow. For example, when I first went to prison I knew I’d better stand up and fight at the first opportunity, despite the odds of getting seriously hurt. So I did. I wound up in the hospital along with the inmate I fought, but it was worth it. My fear dissipated and one of the old convicts, a gang leader, said to me, ‘Well, we found out your heart don’t pump no Kool-Aid.’ “I’m 78 years old now and there are a whole new set of things I have to face, as we all do as men,” said Liddy. “Certainly, men need to use good judgment when facing their fears, but to be heroes they must continually master themselves. This is why I still think men should join the armed forces. The military will teach you that it’s not all about you; that we’re in something together. A man needs to learn selflessness or he’ll just become selfish, and there’s nothing manly or heroic about selfishness.”
“It never ends. You have face your fears all your life to grow. For example, when I first went to prison I knew I’d better stand up and fight at the first opportunity, despite the odds of getting seriously hurt. So I did. I wound up in the hospital along with the inmate I fought, but it was worth it. My fear dissipated and one of the old convicts, a gang leader, said to me, ‘Well, we found out your heart don’t pump no Kool-Aid.’"
—G. Gordon Liddy
Profile of an Heroic Gent: Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was a man of strength and bravery who lived by a deeply masculine code that he expressed in his life and in his literary art. He was wounded while serving as an ambulance driver in World War One, and eventually came in Paris, where he lived with his first wife, Hadley. He worked as correspondent for the Toronto Star, but when he found journalism was getting in the way of his desire to write short stories and novels, he dropped journalism. Journalism had shaped his literary style, but so too had the paintings of the French impressionists. He wrote later about how his view of their paintings “sharpened” when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry,” or how, in other words, financial sacrifice had tightened his focus on artistic design and ambition. He noted, in his posthumously published A Moveable Feast, “I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.” Quitting his job was a modest risk—his wife had a small financial trust they could live on—but Hemingway took it to follow the artist’s path. When in Paris he became friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote beautiful, poetic prose. Hemingway studied Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby before beginning his first novel The Sun Also Rises. Though Hemingway thought Gatsby grand, and told Fitzgerald so, he modeled his own simple, direct style on trying to achieve in words what artists like Paul Cezanne achieved with a paint brush. He wanted to redirect American literature into something simpler, yet more profound. He rejected old-world literary romanticism and gave the novel, as a literary form, a cleaner more direct voice with gritty, real characters. His prose reads so simply it can be difficult to untangle why it is so beautiful. Though their styles were very different, Fitzgerald helped Hemingway. He even introduced Hemingway to his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. But Hemingway nevertheless was his own man and could be penetrating in his criticism, even of his friends. Of Fitzgerald, he said, “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” Hemingway certainly had his flaws. He drank, smoke, and swore—and though he tried to do it at the proper times and in the right proportion, he didn’t always succeed. He was arguably an alcoholic for much of his life. He was married four times. He cheated on some of his wives. Occasionally, he lived off their money. But he also tried to compensate for his flaws. After he left his first wife, Hadley, with their young son, he gave her all the royalties from his novel The Sun Also Rises—a tidy sum as it turned out. He converted to Catholicism, because he believed it to be true, but also because he thought it would make him a better man. Hemingway was a man of many parts. He liked guns and hunting and fishing, but he also read prodigiously and wrote elegant prose. He loved a refined drink, collected fine art, and had traveled the world, but he also enjoyed boxing. He mocked the “café trash” in Paris, but he also mingled with them and was drawn to those who were honestly trying to be painters, writers, and not just posing as artists. He lived his life with gusto—at war, on safari, at sea—and bragged of his brushes with death, but killed himself, probably as a result of clinical depression that could be treated today. Hemingway’s code favored those who lived boldly and honestly. In Death in the Afternoon (1932), he asks: “You went to the bullfight? How was it?” One person answers “disgusting” and Hemingway gives him an “honorable discharge.” Another says “terrible” and gets the same pass. But then one says, “I was simply bored to death.” Hemingway says, “All right. You get the hell out of here.” His reaction is simple: If your eyes are open and you are honest, you’re all right, but if you are sleepwalking through life, or hiding behind a false front, or too shallow to appreciate the world in front of you, you’d better get the hell away. He appreciated honesty, he appreciated work, and he appreciated men who lived by a masculine code that governed their behavior—all of which was were reasons that he respected bullfighters, men who polished their craft and lived by strict rules of conduct. There is much more to say about Hemingway, of course, but the point is he wasn’t just a maverick or an artist or an egotist. He was all those things, at least in part, but he also made a lifelong effort to understand himself, his art, and the world around him. Open eyes, an understanding mind, and a strong view of yourself are what it takes to chart your own way in today’s workplace, whether you’re at the bottom rung of a small company, working at a Fortune 500, or embarking on your own start-up. Whatever course you follow should be undertaken as an adventure. And it should be lived like a man, which means being guided by a strict moral code that will give you self-respect and provide the guardrails as you traverse this era.
“When people talk, listen completely.”
—Ernest Hemingway
MAN’S ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHY
1. WISDOM The first Platonic virtue, wisdom, Cicero explained is “the knowledge of truth,” as a man can’t be wise if he is ignorant or thinks he understands what he doesn’t; after all, if a man only knows half the story, he could make a bad decision even though his intentions are good. So, Cicero argues, to make wise decisions throughout life men must strive to learn the truth and to be open-minded. This is why a truth, Cicero advised his son in De Officiis, is the core of a man’s philosophy. Plato, whom Cicero drew so heavily on, quoted Socrates as saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” Socrates felt such wisdom can only be found through truth. The Chinese philosopher Mencius agreed; he explained wisdom this way: “The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom. Men have these four beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these four beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.” What Not to Do It’s all well and good to be told the wise way to do things, but wisdom also comes from knowing what not to do as well. Here are six no-nos from our man Cicero. The Six Mistakes of Man The illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and study. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do. 2. JUSTICE Cicero advised his son that the second Platonic virtue, justice, can be wielded only through wisdom. To make sure you are administering true justice, Cicero cautioned to first follow what we now call the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule The Bible defines the “golden rule” as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In the first century B.C., around the same time Cicero was writing De Officiis, Rabbi Hillel, a renowned Jewish religious leader, said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” Passive Injustice After the Golden Rule, Cicero explains that being a just man is not always doing what is obviously right, because though active injustice—theft, murder, adultery—is clearly wrong, we often rationalize our way into passive injustice; for example, Cicero cautions that it’s no less wrong to stand by and allow someone else to be robbed than it is to rob someone, because if a man does nothing to stop an injustice he could have prevented, then he is a hypocrite. These rules are absolutes, says Cicero, as justice is never relative; after all, even those who have wronged us require justice—everyone deserves a fair trial. So to expunge passive injustice from our actions, Cicero men must constantly evaluate their own thinking and motivations to find the passive injustices hiding within what he thinks is right, but that are actually only decisions rationalized to benefit self-interest. In his book The Second World War, Winston Churchill took up this point and argued that passive injustice led to what he called the “unnecessary war.” Churchill thought World War II wouldn’t have occurred if it weren’t for the excessive, dishonorable reparations that occurred after World War I. Then, Churchill argued, Germany was allowed to regain its power in a series of passive injustices, such as when Britain allowed Adolph Hitler to move into the Rhineland. Churchill thought the British government lacked a sense of true justice because it decided it was in its best interest to do passive injustices, such as allowing countries like Czechoslovakia to be sacrificed, because these passive injustices only emboldened Hitler to continue and gave him time to strengthen for the coming world war. 3. COURAGE Courage is fundamental to mans’ philosophy, says Cicero, as a man must stand bravely up for justice. To do so a man mustn’t sequester himself away from society as a scholar and simply know what it right; instead, he must actively do what is right, which is precisely why Cicero stood up to Antony; in fact, Cicero wrote that fear must never stop a man from standing for justice, because, “No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.” Cicero tempered this point with analogies, making it clear that simply sacrificing yourself for justice isn’t wise, instead your actions must wisely do the greatest good. Cicero lived and died by this code. About a year after writing De Officiis, Antony is thought to have convinced Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus) to agree to send soldiers to slay Cicero. The soldiers catch Cicero at a seaside villa and Cicero says, “Come here, soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” Cicero then stretched his neck out and waited for the end and so died for the very principals he outlined in De Officiis. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), an English political writer, theorist, and activist, showed he approved of Cicero’s stand for freedom when he wrote, “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” Ayn Rand (1905-1982), an Objectivist philosopher and author, outlined mans’ courage this way: “In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is—i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts—i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.” 4. MODERATION Moderation is the last of the four Platonic virtues which form the basis of the ultimate man’s philosophy. Moderation is the process of eliminating extremes, a concept the Greeks espoused; in fact, in ancient Greece, the temple of Apollo at Delphi bore the inscription Meden Agan (“Nothing in Excess”). Here Cicero drew on Aristotle’s Ethics, in which a virtue is defined as the ability to chose the proper mean between two extremes—too much modesty results in over-shyness, too little in arrogance, too much humor leads to foolishness, too little results in drabness, too much courage will cause a foolish death, to little courage will make man a slave. Such is why a man must wisely follow the moderate path, said Aristotle, who thought we must learn through trial and error what the extremes are for ourselves in order to determine what the correct proportion in a given situation is. Further, Cicero used Aristotle’s teachings to argue that good choices create good habits, making the extremes less undesirable, as everything falls into a harmony when a man actively uses wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation to be a philosophically moral man. Thomas More, an English philosopher and lawyer who Erasmus called omnium horarum homo (“a man for all seasons”), adhered to the ultimate man’s philosophy. When, in 1530, Henry VIII proclaimed that he (not the pope) was the Supreme Head of the Catholic Church in England so that he could procure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, More knew he could no longer serve both his king and his conscience, so he honorably resigned. His resignation, however, was not accepted; as a result, More went moderately about his duty to the king insofar as it did not infringe upon his duty to his conscience or his Church. More neither supported nor condemned the king, but rather kept silent on the issue. Finally, in 1532, after unsuccessfully gaining More’s approval, King Henry angrily accepted More’s resignation. Still, More lived on in happiness with his family, even though his wealth had almost completely disappeared after his fall from the king’s graces. However, in 1534, when the Act of Succession was passed requiring all citizens to swear an oath denying “any foreign authority, prince or potentate” More was forced to renounce the Roman Catholic Church or die. More courageously refused the oath. He was then imprisoned in the Tower of London and on July 1, 1535, he was beheaded. Like Cicero, More chose death over giving in to what he deemed an insurmountable injustice; after all, he said, “It profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world.”
“In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is—i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts—i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.”
-Ayn Rand
The Tomb of
Sir John Hotham
In revarance for the four pillars of wisdom, on the tomb of Sir John Hotham, in St Mary’s Church, South Dalton, England, there are four engraved figures: Justice (holding a sword), Temperance (mixing wine and water in two jugs), Fortitude (with a broken column), and Truth (holding a mirror and being attacked by a serpent).
Profile of an Heroic Gent: Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe is a fictional private detective created by the author Raymond Chandler in a series of manly novels set in the environs of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. Arguably the best of the novels are The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. Humphrey Bogart was the classic movie Marlowe in the film adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946). Marlowe is a bachelor who lives by a rigid, incorruptible, self-sacrificing gentleman’s code, like a modern knight, though he keeps his ideals and idealism hidden behind a tough, cynical, hardboiled exterior. He is a man of some culture—a reader and a chess player—though he makes no show of it. He is courageous and can handle himself in a fight. He liked whiskey or brandy and consumed both in quantities that would impress a Hemingway character. In The High Window, he gets out a bottle of Four Roses. At other times he drinks Old Forester, a Kentucky bourbon. In The Little Sister he says (the novels are in first person), “I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor.” In The Long Goodbye he and Terry Lennox drink Gimlets. He dresses well, out of self-respect and respect for others, but he is not a dandy and his office is spartan. Marlowe doesn’t work for the government, as a police officer or a secret agent. He is a resolute individualist, a maverick, a man who can walk away from temptation, and, while created by a British-American writer (Raymond Chandler) is a quintessential American hero. Philip Marlowe is a gentleman who knows how to use the gentleman’s tools—including a gun and a cocktail shaker—but who knows that the gentleman’s greatest tool, what makes him most useful to others and to himself, is having a stainless steel character.
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
–Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Profile of an Heroic Gent: Winston Churchill
Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born into the English upper class at the height of the British Empire, but he still had to earn his reputation as an iconic gentleman. Churchill described himself as having a “speech impediment” when he was a child; it was a defect he overcame so well he is as much known today for his speeches as he is for standing steadfast before Adolph Hitler in World War II. In fact, Churchill cultivated his speaking ability so well some of his comebacks are still repeated. One famous example tells of Churchill entering a men’s room at the House of Commons to find his political rival Clement Attlee standing at the urinal. Churchill took a position as far as he could from Atlee, only to hear Atlee jab, “My dear Winston, I hope that despite being adversaries in the house, we could be friends outside of it.” Churchill answered, “Ah Clement, I have no quarrel with you, but in my experience, when you see something big, you tend to want to nationalize it.” Churchill became so synonymous with the gentlemanly vices that a cigar size is named after him. His dinner parties were don’t-miss, raucous affairs. Legend has it that one evening when Churchill had been drinking heavily at a party, he bumped into Bessie Braddock, a Socialist Member of Parliament. “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk,” Braddock censured. Churchill replied, “Bessie, you are ugly. And I’ll be sober in the morning.” As time buries a man as large as Churchill, his aura, his persona, and his witty lines become his popular definition. We forget about the boy who needed three attempts to pass the admittance exam into Sandhurst (The Royal Military Academy), the man who deserves a share of blame for the disastrous landings at Gallipoli in 1915, and the man who said, “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle-Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace. . .to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” But perhaps Churchill’s now popular reputation is as it should be, after all, Churchill was larger than life. He’d been tested under fire. As prime minister of England he stood down Hitler and was his nation’s spine. He made mistakes, but he changed and grew with the times. From 1895–1899 Churchill served his country as a cavalry officer in India and elsewhere. Then, to garner fame and fortune enough to dress as a gentleman of his time, Churchill worked as a war correspondent. While covering the Second Boer War for the Morning Post he acted so bravely during the ambush of an armored train that some speculated he’d be awarded the Victoria Cross. He wasn’t, but he did become famous when he escaped from a Boer prison camp and traveled almost 300 miles through enemy territory to Portuguese Lourenco Marques in Delagoa Bay. From his first book in 1898 until he became Britain’s prime minister in 1940, Churchill’s income was almost entirely earned via his pen. His most famous newspaper articles appeared in the Evening Standard from 1936 and warned of the rise of Adolph Hitler and the danger of the policy of appeasement. His six-volume memoir The Second World War and his book A History of the English Speaking Peoples are still popularly read. Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. At a speech in Dundee, Scotland, in 1908, Churchill summed up his view of what a gentleman should be this way: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.”
Churchill cultivated his speaking ability so well some of his comebacks are still repeated. One famous example tells of Churchill entering a men’s room at the House of Commons to find his political rival Clement Attlee standing at the urinal. Churchill took a position as far as he could from Atlee, only to hear Atlee jab, “My dear Winston, I hope that despite being adversaries in the house, we could be friends outside of it.” Churchill answered, “Ah Clement, I have no quarrel with you, but in my experience, when you see something big, you tend to want to nationalize it.”
Profile of an Heroic Gent: Floyd Patterson
He had a lip of hair in front he said he wouldn’t recognize himself without. He stood six-feet tall and his fighting weight was a cruiserweight’s 190-200 pounds, yet he fought heavyweight because that’s where the money and fame was. His license plate read “FP1” and he was proud of his world boxing titles, but he’d never say so. He called Don King “a brilliant rogue,” and Mike Tyson a “talented puncher who would be jabbed to death when he slows.” Prophetic words said at Tyson’s peak. But then Floyd knew about slowing down. Born into a poor family in North Carolina, Floyd was the youngest of eleven children. They moved to Brooklyn, New York, and like many poor boys, he skipped school and became a petty thief. He was caught and sent to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school in Upstate New York, when he was just ten. He spent two years there, and for the rest of his life said it taught him he could be anything. At age 14 he started to box. His trainer was Cus D’Amato at the Gramercy Gym. When he was just 17 years old, Floyd won the middleweight boxing gold medal in the 1952 Olympics. At about 190 pounds, he was too small for a heavyweight, but that didn’t stop him. When Rocky Marciano retired undefeated in 1956, Floyd was ranked by Ring magazine as the top light-heavyweight contender. But with D’Amato’s influence, he gained entry into an elimination tournament that would decide heavyweight champ. After beating Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson, Floyd KO’d light heavyweight champion Archie Moore to become the youngest world heavyweight championship at age twenty-one.After defending his belt several times, Floyd squared off with Ingemar Johansson of Sweden. Ingemar knocked Floyd down seven times before a ref stopped the fight. But Floyd refused to accept defeat and won two rematches with Ingemar, both by knockouts, and became the first man to recover the world’s undisputed heavyweight title. After a few more defenses of the title, Floyd lost it to Sonny Liston in 1962. Floyd would stay in boxing for another decade, and though he beat tough fighters like Eddie Machen and George Chuvalo, losses to Jimmy Ellis and twice to Muhammad Ali finally forced him to retire at age 37. After retiring, Floyd and Ingemar became good friends; in fact, in 1982 and 1983 Floyd ran the Stockholm Marathon with Ingemar. Floyd became chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. During this time he ran a gym next his home in New Paltz, New York, because retiring was no better than dying. He eventually adopted a young boy named Tracy Harris, who had been hanging around his gym. In the 1990s, Tracy Harris Patterson became a world champion boxer after training under Floyd’s tutelage. Late in his boxing career, a snide reporter asked him, “So Floyd, what’s it like to be the heavyweight knocked down the most times?” Floyd simply replied, “Pretty good. Because I’m also the heavyweight champion who got up the most times.” That was the hardworking positive nature of the man.
After losing to Sonny Liston in Chicago in 1962, Floyd Patterson drove back to New York wearing a fake beard so he wouldn’t be recognized. When a snide reporter later asked him what it was like to be the heavyweight who'd been knocked down the most times, Floyd said, "Pretty good, because I'm also the fighter who got up the most times."
Profile of a Gentleman: Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston was a man of principle—and though an actor, the image we have of Charlton Heston is the man as he really was. The actor who played heroes, patriots, and individualists was the man who himself marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to support civil rights for all Americans, regardless of color, and later became president of the National Rifle Association to protect every American’s Second Amendment rights to bear arms. Heston was raised in rural Michigan until he was 10 years old. He spent much of his boyhood in the woods, hunting, shooting, practicing self-reliance. When his parents divorced and he moved to the suburbs, he was already a bit of a loner, and lived vividly in his imagination, which led him to acting. In 1944, Heston married the love of his life, Lydia Marie Clarke, and enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, as part of the 77th Bombardment Squadron of the Eleventh Air Force in Alaska. That was not the end of his service. After he gained fame as an actor, he was given the nation’s highest security clearance so he could narrate classified military and Department of Energy films (often about nuclear weapons). During his sixty-year film career, Heston appeared in nearly a hundred movies, and was especially memorable in historical spectaculars like The Ten Commandments (1956), The Buccaneer (1958), Ben Hur (1959), El Cid (1961) 55 Days at Peking (1963), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), The War Lord (1965), and Khartoum (1966), as well as in westerns like The Big Country (1958), Major Dundee (1965), and Will Penny (1967), and in classic science fiction like The Planet of the Apes (1969), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). He was a tremendous reader, famous for his research into his historical roles, and, as a concerned citizen, extremely well-informed on topics of the day. He was a champion of traditional American rights and was an early and vocal opponent of “political correctness.” In an address to students at Harvard Law School in 1999 entitled “Winning the Cultural War,” Heston said, “If Americans believed in political correctness, we’d still be King George’s boys—subjects bound to the British crown.” He told the students, “You are the best and the brightest. You, here in this fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River. You are the cream. But I submit that you and your counterparts across the land are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it, you are, by your grandfathers’ standards, cowards.” Heston was what he seemed: a straightforward, talented man of courage and conviction who brought his passion for truth to his art and to his life.
“I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
–Charlton Heston