Book Review - The Nightingale's Song

• Author: Major Michael J. Benjamin
• Pages: 04

256 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 157

THE NIGHTINGALE'S SONG1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR MICHAEL J. BENJAMIN2

With a journalist's terse prose and a novelist's sense of intrigue, Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song reveals the stories of five men-all of them graduates of the United States Naval Academy, former military officers, Vietnam War veterans, and American political notables. Timberg, a seasoned newspaper reporter,3 scrutinizes the lives of John Poindexter, John McCain, Robert McFarlane, James Webb, and Oliver North. Thousands of hours of personal interviews allow Timberg, also a Naval Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran, to engage the reader with anecdotes and quotations that capture the essence of each protagonist. Timberg deftly weaves personal psychological portraits with expositions on foreign policy. Blending biography, psychology, history, politics, foreign affairs, and military art, The Nightingale's Song draws the reader into the lives of these five men whose stories "illuminate a generation or a portion of a generation-those who went [to Vietnam]."4 In all, The Nightingale's Song is fast-moving, informative, and incisive.

The Nightingale's Song also provides sharp insights about military leadership in America in the twentieth century. Although Timberg never intended Nightingale to be a management manual, the work has much to offer military officers and other students of leadership. Timberg exposes the personal traits and values that define military leaders. He uncovers common characteristics, documents diversity, and highlights three unambiguously positive traits: competence, caring, and courage. The author also raises leadership issues which bedevil military officers: when to defer to authority and when to refuse, and when to be loyal to a person and when to be loyal to a principle.

From his observations of character traits, Timberg develops a model to explain his subjects' actions and motivations. Ultimately, he tries to

explain how three of these men became involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. He suggests that three interrelated concepts account for Iran-Contra: deference to authority, loyalty to Ronald Reagan, and a Vietnam "filter" through which each character views the world. Timberg's behavior models are thought-provoking but ultimately unpersuasive.

The Nightingale's Song astutely discusses those qualities that make leaders great and those that bring leaders down-and often they are the same qualities. Timberg's biographies chronicle the protagonists' strengths and flaws, their characters and personalities. Each man possesses magnificent qualities and loathsome foibles. The characters gain the reader's sympathy, spark ire, ignite curiosity, and, at times, inspire awe and incredulity.

Timberg looks at leadership traits at several levels, and he masterfully reveals the diverse personality types that succeed in the military. In this regard, no two persons differ more strikingly than Poindexter and McCain, both 1968 Academy graduates.

The two Johns had little in common beyond their first names, McCain rowdy, raunchy, a classic underachiever ambivalent about his presence at Annapolis; Poindexter cool, contained, a young man at the top of his game who knew from the start that he belonged at the Academy . . . . There was one important similarity. Both McCain and Poindexter were leaders in the class, the former in a manic, intuitive highly idiosyncratic way, the latter in a cerebral, understated manner that was no less forceful in its subtlety.5

Timberg fully develops the other subjects as well. McFarlane is "a man of uncommon decency,"6 but profoundly vulnerable and troubled. Webb is principled, if somewhat erratic. North is manipulative and opportunistic, but always gets the mission accomplished. Knowing that all five succeeded in the military demonstrates that officers need not fit into a tr

ditional mold. Timberg helps to dispel any myth of a monolithic "military type."

While Timberg notes personality differences, he also highlights three qualities common to the protagonists that characterize successful military leaders-technical competence, care for troops, and courage.

A prerequisite to effective leadership is technical competence. Timberg captures this in his description of the military prowess of James Webb as a platoon leader in Vietnam:

His military skills resulted from more than books and maps. Like an athlete, he relied on his instincts. He knew the school solution for any situation, and usually he employed it, but he also knew when to throw the book out the window. He came to think of his mind as a computer programmed for war, sorting out the chaos of the battlefield to provide him with a continuously updated readout of rapidly changing combat conditions.7

In a different milieu, Nightingale extols the skillfulness of John Poindexter at sea. "Nothing seemed to catch him by surprise because . . . he had thought through every possible eventuality, worked out the responses, and stored...