On April 4, 1968, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Scheduled to speak before a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kennedy had learned that civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed, but, despite concerns about riots, Kennedy chose to address the crowd. After being informed that the...

I have never heard such calm, yet resolute wisdom in the words of a sixteen-year-old. “I raise up my voice – not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard.” Nine months after a Taliban terrorist shot her in the head returning home from school, Malala Yousafzai addressed a gathering of students from...

They were also there in Newtown, Oklahoma City and in New York City on 9/11. They’re police, firemen, paramedics, doctors, nurses, friends, neighbors – hundreds of typically anonymous bystanders who happen to be in the area during a tragedy like the one we faced Monday at the end of the Boston Marathon. They’re like Carlos Arredondo who said he acted...

The sequester; Republicans blame the president; the president blames them back; the Catholic sex abuse scandal, same sex marriage, voting rights, gun control, Martha Stewart vs. Macy’s… AND the Pope says, “I’m Outta here!” Obstruction, power, intolerance, hubris – The Four Horsemen ride again. After my commentary on Downton Abbey, one reader wrote, “I am distressed by almost everything going on right now in...

Our greatest influences come from those closest to us. Here is a story that speaks, not only of the influence a parent can have on a child, but to a community as well. “In my thirty-three years of life, I can say that I have always had this one constant in my life leading me in the right direction and...

Of all the films whose central character demonstrates a highly developed moral compass, High Noon tops my list. Why does High Noon still matter? Never has one film captured the essence of an ethical dilemma along with the variety of rationalizations against doing the right thing as this 1952 western does. Written by Carl Foreman (who was facing his own dilemma with McCarthyism...

There was a moment, listening to Dennis Haines’s story, that shook me. It began one life-changing night in December, 1968 in Viet Nam as first told by his buddy John Miller. “Our mission was to encircle a village. We called it a cordon. Our squad, moved farther down the road to a point where there was a pathway that led...

Historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin knows presidents. The Pulitzer Prize winning biographer has written on the Kennedys, Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt and her book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was the source material for Steven Spielberg’s latest film. Washington Post writer Lillian Cunningham recently asked Goodwin for her thoughts on presidential leadership. W.P.: “You’ve done several interviews lately about...

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” – Lincoln, April 1864 What stands out in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is how different this man is from everything we think we know about him. He has doubts. He fights with his oldest son as well as his troubled wife. He battles his own cabinet to get what he wants, and he’s willing to...

James Burke, the Johnson & Johnson CEO whose leadership during the early 80s Tylenol scare elevated ethics over profit, died last week. In giving a talk to a group in Boston, I emphasized his story as an example in ethical leadership that we need to see more of today. In 1982, when several poisonings had been linked to Tylenolcapsules, Johnson &  » Read more about: Integrity Matters...