A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

My effort at life-plagiarism has been imperfect, but the lessons were priceless.

Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta.

“Jesus, Jimmy, you’re makin’ me look like a fuckin’ schoolgirl.”

Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaptation.

But the judge did it to rattle us and her. He didn’t know Helen Fahey. The day of her contempt hearing, the courtroom, courthouse hallways, and street outside were packed with dozens of police officers and federal agents, including police horses and motorcycles on the street. Fahey walked calmly to the “defendant’s” table in the courtroom and waited.

There is meaning and purpose in not surrendering in the face of loss, but instead working to bind up wounds, ease pain, and spare others what you have seen.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

To paraphrase the memorable words of Warren Buffett, when the market crashed, the tide had gone out quickly and exposed a lot of naked bathers.

There on the beach were the fraudsters of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and so many more—those who had bankrupted companies, destroyed countless jobs, and defrauded billions from investors.

But, as I was quickly learning, Washington was a city where everyone seemed to question other people’s loyalties and motivations, most often when they weren’t in the room.

In that moment, something hit me: It’s just us. I always thought that in this place there would be somebody better, but it’s just this group of people—including me—trying to figure stuff out. I didn’t mean that as an insult to any of the participants, who were talented people. But we were just people, ordinary people in extraordinary roles in challenging times. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I met the top of the pyramid and it was just us, which was both comforting and a bit frightening. Suddenly Bob Dylan was in my head, singing, “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.”

In 1994, Congress had decided, as a legal matter, to define “torture” differently from how most of us understand the term. In ratifying the United Nations Convention Against Torture, Congress defined “torture” for American law as the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering.

There is a whole lot that most of us would call torture that falls short of “severe pain” or “severe suffering.” Most of us would think that confining someone in a dark, coffinlike box or chaining them naked to the ceiling for days without sleep is torture.

They were driven by one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe.

I added something I learned from Stellar Wind and the torture struggle. When someone is tired, their judgment can be impaired. When they are dragging, it is hard for them to float above a problem and picture themselves and the problem in another place and time, so I gave them another directive: sleep. When you sleep, your brain is actually engaged in the neurochemical process of judgment. It is mapping connections and finding meaning among all the data you took in during the day.

“Dude,” I said, “I’m the director of the FBI. You work for me.”

No, he works for the United States.

A leader who screams at his employees or belittles them will not attract and retain great talent over the long term.

Jack Butler, the nightmare of Skadden, Arps Chicago.

I have no doubt that Hoover and Kennedy thought they were doing the right thing. What they lacked was meaningful testing of their assumptions.

Let me not seek as much … to be understood as to understand. —PEACE PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS

Those are the names of some of the black civilians who died during encounters with the police in 2014 and 2015. Those encounters were captured on video, and those videos went viral, igniting communities that had been soaked in the flammable liquid of discrimination and mistreatment.

In the time it took for the truth to get its boots on, false information had circled the earth many times.

What they appeared to have in common were large and concentrated poor black neighborhoods where more young black men were being shot and killed by other young black men.

White police reluctant to intervene?

The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.

knowing people aren’t always focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspective of another “me.”

I’m almost certain the president is unfamiliar with the proverb “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” because he just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong.