Denouement

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November 22, 1963

In the morning, LBJ tried to talk JFK into having Ralph Yarborough, his political adversary, in the Presidential car on the motorcade, rather than John Connolly,  his political ally.  JFK said no.  Jackie heard their heated exchange.

Later in the morning, Richard Nixon boarded a plane, in Dallas, to fly home.  As he embarked, he told reporters of rumors that JFK would remove LBJ from the upcoming re-election ticket.

In Washington, D.C., Dan Reynolds, who sold a life insurance policy to LBJ, began testifying to Congress about LBJ’s demands for kickback payments – purchasing advertisements on LBJ’s radio station and a stereo set for Lady Bird.

Carlos Marcello, New Orleans mafia boss, was in district court in New Orleans, fighting deportation by Attorney General RFK for falsifying his passport.

At 12:35 PM, shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.

As Mr. Reynolds was about to present incriminating documents, it was announced that JFK had been killed.  “I guess you won’t need these.  Giving testimony involving the Vice President is one thing, but when it involves the President, that is something else.”

While the Judge in the Marcello trial was instructing the jury, he was interrupted by news of JFK’s death.  The verdict later that day was NOT GUILTY.

In Cuba, a French journalist, Jean Daniels, sat with Fidel Castro in a seaside villa at Varadero, Cuba.  Some weeks prior,  JFK learned of Daniel’s planned visit to see Castro, and asked Daniels to give Castro a message: “If you want peace, you must break with Moscow”.  Daniels was to made to wait to see Castro . . .for 3 weeks.  Then, on 11/21/63, they finally met.  They talked until 4AM.  Castro invited him to lunch the next day.  During lunch, Castro received a call, and was told of JFK’s murder.  “This is very bad news”.  His fear was that he would be blamed.

In Paris, Rolando Cubela, a Cuban physician and leader in Fidel’s government, and a neighbor of Castro in Varadero, met with a CIA representative.  He had secretly met with the CIA, before, stating that he wanted to defect.  In Brazil, in September 1963, he had met with Desmond Fitzgerald of the CIA, who asked him to assassinate Castro.  Rubella had conditions.  He wanted a high powered rifle, and he wanted personal orders, directly from RFK.  Many in the CIA suspected ‘a set up’. Fitzgerald gave RFK’s go-ahead anyway.

As Cubela was given a poison pen to use on Castro, news of JFK’s assassination arrived.  He didn’t take the pen.

Two years later, in Cuba, Cubela was found guilty of espionage and was given a death sentence.  Castro commuted the sentence, and sent him books while he was in prison.  Cubela was released in 1979 and moved to Spain, where lives to this day.

Desmond Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, playing tennis, in 1967, as doubts of the Warren Report were in the news.

In Los Angeles, Aldous Huxley died of laryngeal cancer.

In Oxford, England, twelve minutes later, C. S. Lewis died of kidney failure. He spoke his last words:  “We have no right to happiness”

 

Bottom Up

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Sir John Cowperthwaite was financial secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 – 1971.

“His administration did not collect any economic data during his tenure.”  Jairaj Devadiga

“if I let them compute theses statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”

During Cowperthwaite’s administration, Hong Kong grew “ from being only one fourth as rich as the United Kingdom in 1961, to being 40% richer by 1996′.

What should poor countries do?  His advice:  “Abolish their office of natural statistics”.

When management is driven by statistics. it leads to what is called. . . Surrogation.  Metrics get misinterpreted as goals.

Measurement, contrary to all conventional wisdom, leads to mismanagement.  

Case in point:  Soviet Russia

“Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans”.  Charles Homans.

This was due to Soviet fishing. “In one season alone, from 1950 to 1951, Soviet ships killed nearly 13,000 hump back whales.”

But Russia didn’t need whale fishing product.

“The Soviet whalers . . . were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five year plans that drove the Soviet economy.  In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy – the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministeries – whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry”

Gross fish tonnage was the metric goal.  Harvesting whales was the easiest way to tonnage.

“No matter what, the plan must be met.”

It is common to think of society as a unitary whole with unitary motivations, something which requires central control, top-down, to achieve focused goals, driven by the statistics of outcomes.  “Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Thomas Friedman:

“. . .when [one party autocracy] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as china is today, it can also have great advantages.  That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”   

And yet societies in history that have flourished, and have been more adaptive and thus more stable,  have been more biologic – bottom-up, ecological networks of distributed motivations, interests, and initiatives, with freedom of action and opportunity to learn from experience.

Margaret Thatcher:

”. . .  they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is NO SUCH THING as Society.   There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except thru people and people look to themselves first.”

Milton Friedman:

”Voluntary exchange is a way to get cooperation among individuals without coercion.  The reliance on voluntary exchange, which means on a free market mechanism, is thus central to the liberal creed.”

”Both sides to an economic transaction can benefit from it, if the transaction is voluntary and informed”.

  Matthew Ridley:

“Innovative societies are free societies where people are free to express their wishes, and where creative minds are free to experiment to find ways to supply those requests . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

General Lee

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General Robert E. Lee married Mary Custis, grand step-daughter of George Washington.  Thru this marriage he acquired slaves.  He freed them by 1862, following the instructions of his father-in-law’s will.

Lee did not find slavery completely without justification.  [it was] “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.  The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things.”

Loyal to Virginia, he sided with the Confederates.  “How can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

He fought for the confederate cause. . . relentlessly. . . and. . . with relish . . .to the very end.

At Mule Shoe,  when all was nearly hopeless, he tried to break out of Grant’s encirclement, to try to hold out in the hills of Tennessee or Georgia.  In these last days of the war, he sacrificed many thousands of his men.  Few of those men  owned slaves.

“. . he rode Traveller hastily toward the fighting.  He encountered terrified soldiers, streaking back in chaotic flight [from counterattacking union forces], “Hold on!” Lee shouted, seeking to stem the rout,  “Your comrades need your services,” The terrified men refused to heed his admonition, “Shame on you men, shame on you!”  Ron Chernow.

He would not negotiate release of captured Negro Union soldiers who had been southern slaves.

Lee was West Point and studied Napoleon. He was successful on defense, on his home turf – at Bull Run, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville – but not so effective on offense, on unfamiliar ground, outside of Virginia, such as at Antietam or Gettysburg.

Strong on tactics, not so much on strategy.

“While Lee attacked the front porch, Grant would attack the kitchen and bedroom“.  William T. Sherman.

He had Grant’s respect, but not his awe.  “After I crossed the James, the holding of Richmond was a mistake. . if he left Richmond when Sherman invaded Georgia, it would have given us another year of war“.

At Appomattox, Lee dressed. . .  like a victor . . . in his very finest silver grey.

“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”  Ulysses S. Grant

Following Lincoln, and ‘malice toward none‘, Grant refused Lee’s sword, and sent him freely off .  Only five days later, Lincoln was assassinated.

Lee’s stature in the South has been mythic, both then and. . . to this day.  His equestrian statue in Lee Park, Charlottesville, is . . .26 feet . . .high.  For Robert E. Lee, and for most southerners. . . to this day, something northerners don’t understand. . . to this day . . .is that homeland freedom, not slavery, was the great issue of the Civil War.  As in all eons past, when your land is all you have, you defend it with your life.

The best Union General, General Lee?  ” McClellan, by all odds“. . .!!

 

Thinker Speaker

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“All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language, provided they start at a young age.  After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that.  After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the pronunciation of a second language.” Gene, Peoples, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Do we speak because we think, or do we think because we speak?  How does our thinking depend on our language?  Did we become smart because we can talk, or can we talk because we are smart?

To Noam Chomsky, we speak because we think, and we think . . . linguistically . . .not because it helps us speak, but because it helps us think.  Life is about characters and  events, situated in the past, present, and future, and so is our thinking.  We function in social groups, with goals of survival, children, cooperation, and deception.  We live stories, and so we think stories.  Our minds are literary.  We are playwrights, and we are one of our characters.  Language is always and everywhere structured for stories.

For Chomsky, speech came later, an output of thinking, like a printer is to a computer.  Unlike for thinking, there are physical constraints on  speech delivery, so speech is less than thinking.  By speaking our minds with others, we expand our knowledge.  Speaking empowered thinking. Thinking and speaking feedback to enlarge our intelligence and our scope of  collective action.  The rest is history.  We vanquished the bigger and stronger Neanderthal, and everything else.  We have taken over the planet.

Noam Chomsky started linguistics in the 1950’s, when the human mind was considered a blank slate, to be filled up with culture and learning.  He noted, however, how easily and fast children acquire language without specific instruction.  They acquire the skills of language fare faster than it can be taught.  He wrote a ground-breaking work, Syntactic Structures, in 1957, in which he posited an innate language ability with  a ‘language acquisition device’ in the human mind – a universal, innate and hard-wired brain system that unfolds a language ability – in a child, as it is activated, not learned,  by  exposure to speech in the early years of childhood.

This was at last a theory of nature and nurture in human development, not one or the other.  Chomsky’s theory up-ended the blank slate foundational theory of social science, and launched the field of modern brain science.  He is, today, the sixth most cited person in scientific literature . . . of all time . . . just behind William Shakespeare.

People vary in their ability to convert thought into speech.  Chomsky, himself, is master thinker/speaker.  No one can speak more clearly, more comprehensively, or more spontaneously,    or enunciate streams of information as they support reasoned conclusions and opinions about very complex ideas, than Noam Chomsky.  He can drive people crazy.

Politics is a different matter.

This great linguist theorist of biological human language is a . . .  radical socialist anarchist. Famous for repudiating behaviorism, the blank slate theory of social science, he strangely applies behaviorist rationality to human political nature.  Seemingly blind to the biology of tribalism and political behavior of non-linguistic human nature,  he forever condemns illogical politics as immoral. . . .

The Texas School Book Depository

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“The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. . . . leaves him looking guilty of something.  The evidence does not, on the other hand, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window.”   Anthony Summers

At 11:45 am, Oswald’s co-workers on the sixth floor took the elevator down for lunch and to see the motorcade, leaving Lee without an elevator. His last words to them are: “Guys how about an elevator?  Send one of them back up.”

At 11:45-11:50 am, Book Depository foreman Bill Shelley sees Oswald near a phone on the first floor.

At 11:50 am Charles Givens sees Oswald reading a newspaper in the first floor lunch room.

At 12:00 noon, Bonnie Ray Williams goes up to the sixth floor to eat his lunch, he stays there until 12:15 pm.  He sees no one else while he is there. The remains of his lunch – chicken bones and lunch bag – are found  after the assassination.

Between 12:00 and 12:15 pm, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman walk thru the second floor lunch room, and remember that there was “someone else in there”. During interrogation, in police custody, Oswald remembers two Negro employees walking thru the lunch room while he is there.

At 12:15 m, Arnold Rowland, standing outside across from the School Book Depository,  sees two men in the sixth floor windows, one holding a rifle across his chest.  Rowland points them out to his wife.

At 12:35 pm, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated. His motorcade is five minutes late.

“I asked him what part of the building he was in at the time the President was shot, and he said he was having lunch about that time on the second floor”.

At 12:37 pm, Marion Baker, a motorcycle policeman riding just behind the President’s car, thinks the shots came from the roof of School Book Depository.  He races over and into the front door of the building, less than one and a half minutes after the shots are fired.  He tries to use the elevators, but they are both stopped on the fifth floor. he races up the stairs.  On the second floor, he encounters a man with a coke walking away from him.  He calls him to stop.  Mr. Truly, the building supervisor, catches up just then, he has been racing ahead of Baker to the top floors.  “That’s Lee Harvey Oswald, he works here”.  Oswald is calm, no sweat on his brow,  not short of breath.

At 12:40 pm, right away after watching the motorcade, and the shooting, Victoria Adams rushes down the back stairway of the Texas Book Depository,  “to see what was happening”.  She has been working that day on the fourth floor of the School Book Depository.  She does not see or hear anyone on those stairs, the stairs a sixth floor gunman would have had to use to escape.

Just at the time of the assassination shootings,  Photojournalist James Altgen takes a photograph of the motorcade, with the front door of the School Book Depository, in view, behind the oncoming motorcade.  There is a small man in the doorway, shirt half open, leaning to look out.

Is… that …man . . . Lee Harvey Oswald?

 

 

The first and last speech

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On December 13, 1963, Corliss Lamont hosted the 172nd anniversary of the Bill of Rights in Washington D. C., and presented the Thomas Pain Award to . . . Bob Dylan.

Mr. Lamont was the son of a wealthy banker, a graduate of Phillips Academy, Harvard, Oxford, and Columbia.  He had a PhD in Philosophy. He celebrated atheism.  In 1932, he visited the Soviet Union and found a very promising, enlightened society.  The secret police were “courteous and efficient and good natured“.  There were hungry people begging for food, but “most of these beggars are people who are too lazy to work, since every Russian can get a job if he wants to“.  He found “charming” the sight of head shaven, marching youth, “freed from their mothers and the bourgeoise ‘trip’ “.  He led the Friends of the Soviet Union, to “Hail the glorious achievements of the workers and peasants of the USSR – where starvation and unemployment have been abolished.” He sided with North Korea, the Soviet denial of the Katyn Massacre, and with Fidel Castro. He was a personal friend of the father of Kathy Boudin, the Weatherman underground radical.

In New Orleans, in the Summer of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was passing “Hands off Cuba” leaflets, with copy written by . . . Corliss Lamont.

Bob Dylan, awkward, new on the national stage, ambivalent about the self-celebrating, moral preening of Important People, not wanting to offend and yet not wanting to embrace, gave a disjointed, rambling speech. “It’s took me a long time to get young“.   He  spoke of their  “bald heads“, and remarked that “I’ve never seen one history book that tells how anybody feels”. He then went on to say:  “I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where – what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too – I saw some of myself in him.”  This did not go over well.

Remember that many people, already, were not thinking that Oswald was guilty.  Framed perhaps, and young, and awkward, and arrogantly bold, and perilously sincere, and perhaps doomed to be forever misunderstood.  Not unlike  Mr. Dylan, . . .no?

Dylan wrote to “explain/not explain”:

“when I spoke of Lee Oswald, I was speakin of the times

I am not speaking of his deed if it was his deed

the deed speaks for itself

but I am sick

so sick

at hearin “we all share the blame”. . it is so easy t say ‘we’ an bow our heads together

I must say “I” alone an bow my head alone

when I speak of bald heads, I mean bald minds

for it is I alone who is living my life. . .nobody tells me how any of ‘m cries or laughs or kisses, I’m fed up with  newspapers, radios, tv, an movies an the like t tell me. I want now t see an know for myself an I accepted the award for all others like me who want t see for themselves an who don’t want that God-given right taken away

out! out! brief candle life’s but an open window an I must jump back thru it now

respectfully and unrespectfully, Bob Dylan”.

American Hamlet

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“He was just a sickly kid who loved heroes” –  Jackie Kennedy, with Theodore White, 1964.

He had a “rigid and physically distant mother”, and a domineering and demanding father – “We want winners, we don’t want losers around here.”  Jack Kennedy, Barabara Leaming, pg. 61, 2006.

Joseph P. Kennedy, in 1962, was worth of $500,000,000.  The Kennedy’s were not just rich . . . they were super-rich.

It is so natural for the wealthy to be self-centered.  They are more valuable. They do have more to lose.

John F. Kennedy was witty, engaging, charming, a war veteran, and hero.  He was famous from the start, his entire life stage-managed by his father. And he was haunted by losses – his older brother, his favorite sister, war comrades, and his own health.  He was very uncomfortable with emotional intimacy.

“I once asked him why he was doing it, why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off.  “I don’t know, really.  I guess I just can’t help it”.  He had this sad expression on his face.  He looked like a little boy about to cry.”  Dallek,  An Unfinished Life, pg. 152.

“Kennedy had a sense of history, but he also had an administrative technique that made the gathering of history extremely difficult.  He hated organized meetings of the Cabinet or the National Security Council, and therefore he chose to decide policy after private meetings, usually with a single person.”  James Reston, November 22, 1963.

That single person was almost always his brother.  In the Berlin crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and Vietnam, he was a tentative, secretive, reluctant leader.

“During his meetings with Kennedy he [Eisenhower] took pains to urge the President-elect to keep the structure [a fail-safe, layered group of informed advisors] in place. . . Kennedy nodded and smiled, but it wasn’t his way and he had no intention of doing it.”  Bret Baier, Three days in January

And the stakes were getting very high. The window of ‘opportunity’ for a ‘successful’ nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union would close. . . in November of 1963.

“Mr President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” . . . And then the plaza rang with the first gunshot. . . The first bullet tore through Kennedy’s throat, and his arms went up as if to block himself from further injury.  His wife turned to him, and just as she did, another bullet shattered his head. . . .She remembered the strange elegance of his demeanor.  “His expression was so neat: he had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off; it was flesh-colored not white.  He was holding out his hand – and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from this head. . .He had such a wonderful expression on his face.  You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they’d have in a rocket?  Just before he’d answer, he’d look puzzled; . . .and then he slumped forward.”  Jackie Kennedy, Four days in Dallas, Bugliosis, 2009.

 

Natural Civilization

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Fourteen thousand years ago, Siberian and Mongolian people crossed the Bering land bridge into North America. Following the ice-free coastline, they eventually found the Andes mountains, the longest linear stretch of mountains in the world.  There, unaffected by Rome or Greece, or Moses, or Plato, or Aristotle, or by any of the rest of world history, they . . . naturally . . . became the Inca civilization, the largest, most sophisticated civilization of the New World.   One hundred thousand elites controlled 10 million peasants, unified by a religion of sun worship, ruled by an emperor who was “the king, the pope, and Jesus Christ all rolled into one.” All land was state owned, peasants were granted rights to till communal lands. Taxes were paid with labor, which created surpluses of food, tools, and weapons, which were stored along the Inca road network, and which were used for times of want, for war, and for patronage.  The few ruled the many.  Natural civilization.

In 1528, Francisco Pizarro found a Bronze Age society, 2,500 years back in time. The Incas did not have writing, or money, but they had deadly slingshots, and clubs, and vast armies. The Spaniards, though, had steel swords, armor, and horses, and like tank warfare against foot soldiers, 168 Spanish horsemen conquered 10 million Incan foot soldiers.

History has been the story of men killing other men, and so also in the New World.  The Incas had been fighting a gruesome civil war for many years, ever since their great Inca chief was killed by another old world weapon – small pox.  His sons fought to the death for the throne. Atahualpa had just conquered brother Huascar and executed his entire family, and was on his victory trip to Cuzco, to be crowned Sun King, when strange boats appeared off the coast. At Cajamarca, Atahualpa crossed Pizarro’s path. He promptly executed any of his men that showed any fear of the strange horse beasts.

The Incas, it seems, did not know the plight of Montezuma and the Aztecs. They were self-sufficient mountain people, not traders with the larger world. Pizarro had been with Cortes. He enticed Atahualpa into a courtyard, and in a bloody ambush, captured him.

For ransom, Atahualpa filled the Cajamarca courtyard with gold.  Pizarro executed him anyway.  His wife became Pizarro’s mistress, and bore him two sons.

To subdue a civilization, dethrone its religion.

The last Inca Emperor, Tupac Amaru, in Cuzco before his execution, tells his people that their religion has been false.

“Lords, . . . Let it be known that I am a Christian, and they have baptized me and I wish to die under the law of God – and I have to die.  And that everything that my ancestors, the Incas, and I have told you up until now – that you should worship the sun god, Punchao, the shrines, idols, stones, rivers, mountains, and sacred things – is a lie and completely false.  When we used to tell you that we were entering [a temple] to speak to the sun, when we told you what it said and that it spoke – this was a lie.”

The Last Days of the Incas,  Kim MacQuarrie, 2007.

Patsy

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In the early 1960’s, gun running was a profitable business.  From Miami to Mexico, this involved organized crime, latin-american revolutionaries, a man in Dallas named Jack Ruby, and a New Orleans man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

In records released in 1989 by the Dallas police department, Mary Le Fontaine, a local reporter, discovered that a man had been jailed next to Oswald on November 22, 1963.  He was picked up in a sweep following the shootings, was released after Oswald was murdered, and then disappeared. In 1964, he surfaced at an FBI office in Tennesee to give “information about the murder of JFK”.  He told that while jailed near Oswald, he witnessed the police bring before Oswald a badly injured man and ask Oswald if this was the man he had seen at a recent motel meeting. At this meeting, money had changed hands, and one Jack Ruby also present. Oswald said ‘yes’.

After arrest, a note was found in Oswald’s personal notebook:

Oct Nov 1,1963

FBI agent (R1-11211)

James P. Hosty

MU 8605

1114 commerce St

Note the license number. Oswald was meeting Dallas FBI agent Hosty in his car, in the months preceding the assassination. Hosty was in charge of militant extremist groups, gun running, and domestic counterintelligence.

Following meetings with Hosty, Oswald took significant actions, like in March 1963, when he opened a post office box, and promptly bought, via mail order, the famous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods.  At that very time, the mail order gun business – and specifically Klein’s Sporting Goods – was under investigation by Congress. Hearings were about to begin.

Oswald spent the 1963 summer in New Orleans, working with anti-Castro groups, but also publicly posing as pro-Castro. He was exposed – on TV – as a visitor to the Soviet Union who had renounced his US Citizenship.  This served to help discredit the Castro cause. Oswald seems willing to have helped this happen. Around this time, the FBI successfully raided and confiscated an anti-Castro weapons cache at Pontchartrain.

Early in November, Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office, but Hosty was not there.  Oswald left a note. After the assassination, FBI headquarters in Washington ordered this note destroyed. A few days later, in Dallas, a gun deal was foiled by agents.  A man was badly injured in a getaway car – the man brought before Oswald in his cell?

A sincere Marxist, but an FBI informant?  With his tenuous status, trying to find and keep a job, Oswald may have been willing to help the FBI, and infiltrate anti-Castro groups. He did by all accounts believe in Castro. He may have discovered an assassination plot. He may have warned the FBI.

After the motorcade passed, he calmly left the Texas School Book Depository. He may only  then have learned that the assassination had not been thwarted. He went home and got his gun.

He may have known that decoy policemen would be involved.  He killed the first policeman that tried to stop him, unconcerned about eye witnesses. He may have thought he would be safe in custody.

“I’m a patsy.“

iGenius

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A person who finds that he is just never wrong would perhaps now and then be perplexed.  Steve Jobs would be such a person.

“We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users.  So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world.  What we want to do at Apple is make computers into applicances and get them to millions of people.”  Playboy Interview, February 1985.

While the MBA’s came into Apple to focus on countering IBM, he went off to create the Macintosh. It was an astounding success. But never mind, Mr. Jobs is a difficult perfectionist and doesn’t know how to manage for profit.

“Eventually Dr. [Edwin] Land [founder of Polaroid], one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company – which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. ”  Jobs, 1985 . . .and then . . .Apple lets him go.

Apple’s ten year lead gets ‘managed’ away.

Jobs buys Pixar. He makes Toy Story.  Apple nearly dies. Apple invites him back, as a ‘consultant’.  He brings Next, his from-the-ground-up, unix-based, virus- proof (still) computer software operating system.  After the board turns over – he will not be bit by the same dog twice – Jobs becomes CEO. Never again will he assume he doesn’t know how to manage, and never again will there be naivete’ about the intentions or actions of competitors. He moves quickly to focus Apple, totally, on quality products and the user experience.  Philanthropy is dropped, middle management is cleared, HR is minimized, finance is made secondary, general management is eliminated (managers at Apple are always managers of something), responsibility is clearly defined, (every role has a DRI – directly responsible individual), decisions radiate to and from the top, profit and loss categories are discarded, market research is eliminated.

Attractive products start to sell.

But . . . Disney will bury Pixar!  Sony or Microsoft will crush the iPod! Walmart or Amazon will dwarf iTunes! Nokia and the Blackberry will outdo the iPhone! Expensive laptops won’t compete with Dell!  Apple stores can’t compete with Best Buy! Adobe flash is a must! Google Android will beat iOS!

“The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy – free mechanical energy. . .It changed the texture of society. . . this revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind:  free intellectual energy. . . This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution”. Jobs, 1985

Apple, Inc. is about to overtake Exxon Mobil as the largest valued corporation in the United States.  And on Friday, July 29, 2011, Apple, Inc. had more cash than the United States Treasury.

How has an adopted son of a machinist, who dropped out of college after one year, who never took formal management, or economic, or engineering training, who follows few of the standard or advanced notions of modern corporate management, . . . how has he come to set the standard for leadership of large complex organizations,. . . how has he become the greatest CEO in history?

The iLeader has become the i Master.