August 2010

by Kasey S. Pipes

September 17, 2004, marked one of the most important days in the life of Texas Christian University head coach Gary Patterson. On that dusty, windswept afternoon on the Lubbock plains, he experienced the most humiliating defeat of his career. The Horned Frogs had entered the 2004 season filled with promise and purpose. The year before, only a late season loss at Southern Mississippi had kept them from a likely BCS bowl game. As 2004 began, the Frogs were once again heading down the road to their BCS destination.

But they smashed into a dead-end in Lubbock. After TCU opened the game with a 21-0 lead, Texas Tech stormed back and embarrassed the Horned Frogs 70-35. Patterson’s defense convulsed and collapsed under the surge of Mike Leach’s spread offense. The game marked the first time in fifty years a Red Raider team had scored seventy points.

After the game, the coach sat alone on the bus as it meandered through the Lubbock streets toward the airport. “It was a like a funeral on that bus,” recalled a staff member. Shocked and saddened, the players said nothing. But the silence was soon pierced by the sound of the coach opening his bag, logging onto his computer, and watching film for next week.

***

Six years later, Patterson is sitting in an overstuffed leather chair in the John Justin Athletic Center at TCU. His office is adorned with gridiron décor—signed photos of fellow coaches adorn the walls while coaching awards and bowl game trophies are perched on a table. Curiously, he gets most animated when pointing to a photo book on African wildlife. “This year was my first safari,” he says. “I want to go back. I love adventure. I love new things.”

The coach is dressed simply: a white golf shirt, khaki shorts, and brown Cole Haan shoes with no socks. He looks more prepared for the golf course than the football field. But looks deceive. In conversation, an intensity creases his face. He nervously takes his glasses on and off. And his raspy voice squeaks more than talks.

Patterson doesn’t seem like a man who has lived half a century. His face is bordered on top by youthful blond hair and accented by blue eyes. He shows every indication of still being the fiery, stocky, 5’10” player who walked on at Kansas State. At any moment, he seems ready to burst across his desk and make a tackle.

“I’ve always had to work harder and smarter,” he says. Growing up in Rozell, Kansas, Patterson spent his summers helping his dad grapple with uncooperative farmland. Starting before dawn, he would flatten soil and level bumps. He made smooth the rugged earth so that crops could bloom and be harvested. In some ways, he continues to level the field today, turning adversity into advantage.

“That game in Lubbock changed everything,” Patterson says, remembering his humiliation from six years ago. “That game told me that people had caught up with me. I had to change.”

Patterson first arrived at TCU in 1998 as the defensive coordinator on coach Dennis Franchione’s staff. After leading TCU to three bowl games in as many years, Fran left for greener gridirons at Alabama. His defensive coordinator was promoted to head coach at TCU.  No one knew it at the time but the Crimson Tide had hired the wrong man.

For years, Franchione’s programs had been known for recruiting and defense. Unfortunately for Alabama, those were two areas where Fran had leaned on Patterson. Without his best assistant on staff, Fran floundered at Alabama and was later fired at Texas A&M.

As a head coach, Patterson is nothing if not a paradox—an old school coach who is looking constantly for new ideas and innovative strategies, a hard-nosed disciplinarian who still finds time to invite players to his home once a week for pizza.

This fusion of fire and ice is displayed every day at practice. Dressed in a sweat-stained black shirt and shorts, with a tweed safari hat sitting uneasily on his head, he relentlessly drives his players. Yelling. Clapping. Gesturing. Always moving.

“I would love to see you finish a practice as hard as you start one!” he needles freshman safety Antonio Graves. But in the next instant, he is calmly teaching the same player how to keep his feet moving and backpedal. He scolds, but he molds too.

More than anything else, Patterson’s success at TCU has been defined by his ability to recruit talent and coach defense.

As a recruiter, he employs a unique method to mine for players in Texas, a state that represents perhaps the richest quarry of high school talent in the country. To compete against recruiting gurus like Mack Brown and Bob Stoops, he has developed a penchant for taking fast offensive players and transforming them into fast but muscular defensive players. Jerry Hughes serves as the most prominent example. A quick running back at Fort Bend High School, he muscled up and developed into an All-America defensive lineman at TCU and the Indianapolis Colts’ first round draft pick.

“It’s not rocket science what we’ve done on recruiting,” Patterson says. “In Texas, high school coaches play their best athletes at two positions: quarterback and running back. So we look there first. If we see some talent, we look for ways to get the kid on the field, and that often means defense.”

College football experts have taken notice. “You can’t say enough about the job Gary’s done at TCU,” says CBS Sports college football analyst Archie Manning. “To have to recruit against Texas and OU and yet your school isn’t even in a BCS conference? That’s a huge disadvantage. Yet great players still come to TCU.”

And once they come, they begin to learn about Patterson’s zealous devotion to defense. Like an evangelical pastor, the coach can quote chapter and verse of his defensive gospel. He runs a unique defensive scheme called the 4-2-5, which only a handful of other college teams run. The novelty of his system allows TCU to confuse other teams and achieve more with less. It helps the Frogs compete with bigger, more talented offenses.

“The basic idea of the 4-2-5 defense is speed,” he preaches. “We want to keep the ball inside of and in front of our defenders at all times.” To do this, Patterson deploys three safeties and often leaves the two cornerbacks in man-to-man coverage. By moving around the safeties, he can disguise when and where he will bring pressure. And he also can create an eight-man front, making it difficult for the opposing team to run the ball—always a defense’s primary goal.

But in 2004 in Lubbock, Patterson realized that stopping the run wouldn’t work if the other team was spreading out his secondary and torching it. And so he did what he so often does—he returned to the lab and began experimenting. In time, he found new ways to cover more receivers in open space.

“That next year, the defensive scheme looked the same but operated differently,” says TCU radio announcer and former player John Denton. “Once the ball was snapped, Gary found ways to drop more players into coverage. I remember defensive linemen dropping into coverage and intercepting passes. It was wild. But it worked.”

By 2009, his experimentation had paid off and the 4-2-5 defense was stopping both the run and the pass. That year, TCU ranked first in the nation in total defense, third in run defense, and sixth in pass defense.

Even now, Patterson continues to tweak his defense. “He is always experimenting,” says his wife, Kelsey. “He’ll come home at 9:30 at night and then go into our office. He lies down on the floor, opens up the laptop and starts watching film while our two Golden Retrievers lay next to him. He’ll stay in there for hours. He never stops working.”

Many nights Kelsey has been awakened by the sound of a raspy shrill.

“I’ve got it!” her husband yells as he bursts into their bedroom. “I figured out how to cover their slot receiver when he’s in motion!”

“That’s great, Gary,” she responds. “Can we talk about it in the morning?”

***

On September 17, 2006, Texas Tech played TCU in Fort Worth. The memories of the 70-35 thrashing from two years before were fresh on the minds of the Frog players. Many even watched the video of that nightmare as motivation. They didn’t need it. The revised 4-2-5 defense shut down the vaunted Mike Leach offense and held Tech to 242 yards total offense—one of the worst offensive performances of Leach’s tenure at Tech.

Since avenging Tech, Patterson has taken TCU to the precipice of a national championship and come to embody his program—the overachieving coach of the overlooked school, the little guy going up against the big boys.

As the 2010 season begins, the Horned Frogs are ranked in the preseason Top Ten. Can they win a national title? In large part, it depends on the coach, who will be up every night, typing on his laptop, looking for a new way to tweak his defense and level the field.

Kasey S. Pipes wrote speeches for President George W. Bush and authored Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality. A native Texan, he lives in Fort Worth.

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12:00 AM CST on Sunday, November 29, 2009

By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community.

Bernard Montgomery, George S. Patton and Erwin Rommel fought epic battles in North Africa and Europe in World War II. Entire libraries of books have been written about each commander. But now, these leaders are presented in a book the way they fought in the war: against each other.

Author Terry Brighton, curator of the Queen’s Royal Lancers Museum, follows the familiar terrain of scholarship on each man. He also digs deeper to show how the men thought and fought.

He invokes Clausewitz’s principle that battles are won by the ration of “means” and “will to fight.” Thus, though the Allies had an advantage in number of troops and weapons, the Germans won battles early in the war due to willpower. Hitler factored this in as part of his strategy: “It would not be the first time in history that willpower has triumphed over the stronger battalions.”

This Nietzschen on view was personified by Rommel. The Desert Fox used willpower and strategy to overcome the Allies’ numerical advantages. Brighton quotes English scholar and soldier Liddell Hart as saying of Rommel: “His successes were achieved with inferiority of resources and without any command of the air. No other generals on either side won battles under these handicaps.”

Indeed, Hitler’s strategy may have succeeded had it not been for the arrival of Monty and Patton.

The turning point of the North African campaign – and perhaps the entire war – was the Battle of El Alamein. There, on the Egyptian coast, Montgomery’s superior numbers faced Rommel’s willpower. But unlike his predecessors, Monty was ready to go the distance with the Desert Fox. “Montgomery’s superior will to fight – and it was his alone, all of his commanders being willing to pull back – brought the British a victory that otherwise (despite their numerical and supply superiority) might not have been won.”

And then there is Patton, relentless and ruthless. After Monty helped plan the D-Day invasion, the Englishman watched in horror as Patton’s Third Army swept across Europe ahead of him.

Only with these two leaders, Brighton argues, were the Allies able to defeat Hitler. Montgomery proved more capable of managing resources and more possessing of the perseverance needed in a battle of willpowers. Patton proved more capable of conducting a blitzkrieg campaign and more possessing of the audaciousness needed in a warrior’s will to fight. This combination of perseverance and audaciousness finally destroyed the Nazis.

The book also details the demise of each man. Brighton poignantly re-creates the moment when Hitler’s henchmen came to offer Rommel the choice of a trial or a suicide. Patton, marginalized at war’s end by his remarks about confronting the Soviets, was paralyzed in a freak car accident and died not long after.

Only Monty survived. The postwar years were not kind. The field marshal was enraged by Eisenhower’s memoirs (and perhaps by Eisenhower’s fame) and struck back with his own book, which Ike called “a waste of time to read.” In promoting his book, Monty appeared on American television and suggested President Eisenhower was not well: “Your president has had a heart attack and a stroke.” These episodes only served to diminish Monty.

Still, for a few years in the early 1940s, Patton, Montgomery and Rommel made history together. Terry Brighton’s book provides a brisk, compelling account of that history.

Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community.

books@dallasnews.com

Monty, Patton and Rommel at War

Masters of War

Terry Brighton

(Crown, $24)

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, November 22, 2009

By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.

In 1946, a 17-year-old British student met Winston Churchill and asked the once and future prime minister how he had achieved so much.

“Conservation of energy,” the great man replied. “Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”

That teenager was Paul Johnson, and he later emerged as one of the world’s greatest historians. Now, in his twilight years, Johnson has turned his formidable powers on the 20th-century figure he calls “the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable.”

In Churchill, Johnson chronicles his subject’s life and career, with special attention to how he paced himself through a 90-year journey of soaring vistas and dark valleys.

Johnson begins the book by arguing that Churchill was his mother’s son. His American mother instilled in him American characteristics: emotion, passion, perseverance and, above all, ambition. “She believed the sky was the limit,” the author writes, “that everything was possible … .” This philosophy would guide Churchill throughout his career.

And what a career. From soldier to statesman, Churchill served the British Empire for six decades. Though he often sought to preserve tradition, his unconventional leadership typically led him to promote change. In one striking example that Johnson highlights, Churchill used his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty to preserve the Royal Navy as the greatest sea-fighting force in the world while transforming the way it fought.

“He began the historic shift from coal to oil,” Johnson notes, “and in the process laid down a new class, the Queen Elizabeth, of huge, oil-burning battleship. He created the naval air service, and begged his ship architects to design him aircraft carriers.” Churchill loved history, but he could see the future and spent his career trying to build it.

Johnson’s story arc is written in fluid prose that beautifully reveals the tension and achievement in Churchill’s life. In one paragraph, the historian summarizes the length, width and depth of his subject’s career as a politician, warrior and artist:

“In his ninety years, Churchill had spent fifty-five years as a member of Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He had been present at or fought in fifteen battles, and had been awarded fourteen campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He had been a prominent figure in the First World War, and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over five hundred canvases, more than most professional painters.”

Still, Johnson’s book seems incomplete. Its 168 pages equal not quite two pages for each year of Churchill’s life.

At times, Johnson teases the reader with revealing and penetrating insight into the great man’s career. The author describes his subject’s engaged leadership style as the result of having been a prisoner during the Boer War. “All his life he refused to be confined to a desk,” Johnson writes, and then explains why. “His imprisonment by the Boers had given him a horror of confinement … .”

This type of insight raises the question of what might have been if Johnson had written a full-volume biography. Perhaps the author, like his subject, decided to conserve his energy.

Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.

books@dallasnews.com

Churchill

Paul Johnson

(Viking, $24.95)

By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community. This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse and the beginning of the Cold War’s end. Symbolically, Berlin always represented ground zero in the fight against communism. So when the wall finally came down in 1989, many wondered how it happened and who deserved credit.

In The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Meyer offers an important insider’s account of the wall’s crumbling. Some people write about history; Meyer lived it. He served as Newsweek’s bureau chief for Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989. His first-person narrative takes readers back to his experiences in that historic year.

If storytelling comprises both content and context, Meyer deserves high praise for the former. His on-the-ground reporting of those momentous events is filled with new information and is told with a brisk, smooth style.

What ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Meyer argues, began when Hungarian soldiers cut down part of the electric fence between Hungary and Austria earlier in 1989. This first tear in the Iron Curtain led many East Germans to head south and escape. The hero who put things in motion, Meyer says, was Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, who knew that communism could not work.

But according to Meyer, Nemeth was made possible only by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader is portrayed as something of a patron saint of the revolution. Meyer details a tense Warsaw Pact meeting in July 1989, where other communist leaders pressured Nemeth to repent. But each time Nemeth looked over at the Soviet leader, he noticed that Gorbachev winked at him. Meyer quotes Nemeth’s recollection of that meeting: “It was as if Gorbachev were saying, ‘Don’t worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.’ ”

Later that year at a news conference, an East German government spokesman mistakenly implied that East Germans would be allowed to cross over into West Berlin. This announcement led countless people to flock to the wall, where the guards were so overwhelmed and so unsure what to do that they let the people cross. The Berlin Wall, it seems, came down by almost by accident.

When zooming in with a narrow-lens camera, Meyer creates a fascinating picture filled with vivid images and bold colors. But when he tries his hand at the wider shot, his view is sometimes clouded with ideological revisionism. Meyer goes out of his way to mock American conservatives who revere Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And he points to Reagan’s “political evolution” and argues that the president became a diplomat in his second term and worked with Gorbachev. Thus, Meyer essentially argues, conservatives should be careful to claim America won the Cold War.

At times, this makes Meyer’s book look more like a work of polemics than a work of history. Most conservatives don’t argue that Reagan’s speech won the Cold War, but that his policies played a key role: He deployed Pershing missiles to Western Europe, supported Solidarity in Poland and forced concessions from Gorbachev.

And did Reagan’s negotiating posture change in the second term? Sure it did, after Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s terms at the negotiating table. Most notably, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the treaty eliminating intermediate- range missiles in Europe, they did not ban missile defense, something Gorbachev desired desperately. Reagan changed because he got what he wanted. And this pressure from the American president almost certainly was an important part of the context that led Gorbachev to wink and allow reform to move forward in Eastern Europe.

Still, Meyer’s book represents a major contribution to Cold War history. And his central thesis rings true: The people in Eastern Europe did the most to win the Cold War. Yet it takes nothing away from their victory to acknowledge that they had help from their friends in America.

Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.

books@dallasnews.com

The Year That Changed the World

The Untold Story Behind the Fall

of the Berlin Wall

Michael Meyer

(Scribner, $26)

]]> http://www.kaseyspipes.com/?feed=rss2&p=33 http://www.kaseyspipes.com/?p=32 http://www.kaseyspipes.com/?p=32#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:07:34 +0000 admin http://www.kaseyspipes.com/?p=32 As the president fought for his economic recovery agenda, the Republicans launched a fierce counterattack. The president’s plan, according to Newt Gingrich, would “kill jobs” and “actually increase the deficit.”

This was not Gingrich criticizing the Obama stimulus program in 2009. It was Gingrich attacking then-President Bill Clinton’s economic plan in 1993.

This week, as President Barack Obama promises to spend more of the stimulus money to improve the economy, Republicans — including some of the same spokesmen — are on the attack again. “Bureaucrats managing companies does not work,” Gingrich said recently. “Politicians dominating the economy does not work.”

To be fair, Republicans should fight for free markets and free trade. History shows that the invisible hand of the marketplace works more effectively than the heavy hand of government. And much of Obama’s economic agenda appears to be all motion and little action.

But when Republicans paint a dark picture of economic doom, they also paint themselves into a political corner.

The lessons of the 1990s should give Republicans pause. After Clinton increased both spending and taxes in 1993, the economy began a steady ascent. Sure, when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they reduced taxes and balanced the budget, undoubtedly helping this growth and prosperity. But in 1996, voters instead remembered the overheated GOP rhetoric of the early ’90s, considered the country’s economic strength and voted Clinton into a second term.

Republicans should reflect on this past. As they oppose the Obama agenda, they need to do it the right way, and they need to do it in a way that doesn’t contradict their core economic message.

The American economy is stronger than the policies of any one administration. The creativity of America’s entrepreneurs can overcome any of the federal government’s policies. In fact, throughout American history, economic downturns have often led entrepreneurs to create new products and services that have led to new economic growth. Any Republican message needs to begin by acknowledging that the economy will bounce back. It always has; it always will.

Perhaps no one possessed a better grasp of America’s economic power than Ronald Reagan. Yet when Reagan addressed excessive government, he often spoke in measured, philosophical terms. “They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy,” Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech supporting Barry Goldwater. In other words, big government won’t destroy the economy — it just won’t help it very much. That’s a much firmer terrain from which to fight the Obama administration.

In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan posed a simple question: “But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” These were not the words of an ideologue but, rather, the wisdom of a populist who put his faith in the people — not the government — to restore the economy.

For today’s Republicans, rather than oversimplified characterizations of economic decline, why not bet on the American entrepreneur? Instead of saying Obama will kill jobs or ruin the economy, why not argue the larger principle that businesses can resurrect the economy better and faster than the government can?

We know the economy will recover. We also know that, when it does, it will be in spite of Obama’s spending, not because of it.

But Republicans are setting the stage for an Obama encore by insisting that his policies will fail. When the economy inevitably returns to growth, Obama will be well-positioned for reelection. And if he is, perhaps he’ll quote the governor of Alaska and say, “I told you so.”

Kasey S. Pipes authored “Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality” and wrote speeches for then-President George W. Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23586.html#ixzz0IVmQ54V2&C

‘The First Tycoon’ by T.J. Stiles: a

look at the life of America’s first corporate titan

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 17, 2009

By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is the author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality. On Jan. 27, 1870, the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad convened its first stockholders’ meeting. The merger of the previously separate rail companies marked a watershed moment in American history: the beginning of the giant corporation in American economic life. And it was made possible by one man: Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Long before Gates, Walton or Perot, there was Vanderbilt. The first great corporate titan in American history, the Commodore’s reputation has largely evolved into a caricature. It started with Mark Twain, a contemporary whose satire suggested the Commodore had no soul. But it was sealed by Matthew Josephson, whose 1934 book, The Robber Barons, cast Vanderbilt as a leading villain in a cast of rogues who stormed the economic stage in the late 1800s.

In recent years, Ron Chernow has reassessed J.D. Rockefeller and Jean Strouse has re-examined J.P. Morgan. Now, T.J. Stiles recasts Vanderbilt not as a villain, but as a visionary whose surreal life was matched only by his stunning legacy.

In The First Tycoon Stiles does more than trace the journey of a man; he tracks the evolution of a country. The Commodore’s career began in steamboats when America still operated as a largely agrarian society. Later, as the railroad titan, he literally helped transport America into the industrial age. Above all, the king of the railroads was an agent of change.

First, he changed the way America conducts business by creating the giant corporation. As Stiles writes:

“By consolidating two companies of great size and financial health, it created a single behemoth on an unprecedented scale. This new entity, the giant corporation, would spread into manufacturing, as seen first in Standard Oil and later in other industries, beginning with a great wave of mergers from 1895 to 1904; eventually it would dominate every other sector of the economy as well.”

From that point forward, the American economy would feature economies of scale that helped reduce prices and increase productivity. It also helped create a managerial middle class as more Americans began to work for the new giant corporations.

Vanderbilt also changed American finance. When he first ascended to the presidency of the New York Central, he decided to do more than build railroads, according to Stiles. Instead, “he would be a creator of the invisible world, a conjurer in the financial ether.” In March 1867, his plan to essentially create stock splits (increasing the amount of stock by issuing new shares) was approved to much outrage in the financial world. In the 20th century, it became a common Wall Street practice.

And Vanderbilt changed American law. Earlier in his career, his steamboat operation was so successful that the owners of a rival company sued. In the Supreme Court case, Gibbons vs. Ogden, the court upheld the federal government’s right to regulate commerce and overturned a state law that gave Vanderbilt’s competitors a virtual monopoly.

Stiles writes vividly of the Commodore’s life and times, showing his personal failings but focusing on his professional successes. His book is blessed with timing, as the recent market collapse might create interest in a man who laid the foundation for so much of corporate America. And this thorough and thoughtful book serves as an important corrective that unmasks the Vanderbilt caricature and reveals a more nuanced, complex and interesting portrait.

Kasey S. Pipes, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is the author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality.