Gray and strategy (V): A rare lapse in his understanding of the American psyche

Colin
Gray concludes his 30th maxim, about the persistence of thuggishness in
world politics, with this quotation: "Nice guys finish last." He attributes
this to "Popular American saying."

This is one of the rare lapses in his
book, and a bit ironic given his emphasis on the need for cultural
sensitivity in making and implementing strategy. In this case, he gets the
words right but the attribution wrong, and if you know your baseball history,
that's significant. The crack about "nice guys finishing last" is not a folk
saying broadly popular with Americans, it was an riposte made by Leo Durocher,
a brawling baseball manager with a distinctly dark view of the world -- and of how to play
baseball: "Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it." So I
would say that the comment isn't so much reflective of American views -- which
tend to be more optimistic, law-abiding and meliorist -- as of the hard-bitten
minority that believes that to get along in the world, you have to kick, bite
and gouge every inch of the way. Or, as Durocher once confessed, "If I were
playing third base and my mother was rounding third with the run that was going
to beat us, I would trip her."