Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Gray and strategy (V): A rare lapse in his understanding of the American psyche

Colin Gray concludes his 30th maxim, about the persistence of thuggishness in world politics, with this quotation: “Nice guys finish last.” He attributes this to “Popular American saying.” This is one of the rare lapses in his book, and a bit ironic given his emphasis on the need for cultural sensitivity in making and implementing ...

Colin Gray concludes his 30th maxim, about the persistence of thuggishness in world politics, with this quotation: "Nice guys finish last." He attributes this to "Popular American saying."

Colin Gray concludes his 30th maxim, about the persistence of thuggishness in world politics, with this quotation: “Nice guys finish last.” He attributes this to “Popular American saying.”

This is one of the rare lapses in his book, and a bit ironic given his emphasis on the need for cultural sensitivity in making and implementing strategy. In this case, he gets the words right but the attribution wrong, and if you know your baseball history, that’s significant. The crack about “nice guys finishing last” is not a folk saying broadly popular with Americans, it was an riposte made by Leo Durocher, a brawling baseball manager with a distinctly dark view of the world — and of how to play baseball: “Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it.” So I would say that the comment isn’t so much reflective of American views — which tend to be more optimistic, law-abiding and meliorist — as of the hard-bitten minority that believes that to get along in the world, you have to kick, bite and gouge every inch of the way. Or, as Durocher once confessed, “If I were playing third base and my mother was rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I would trip her.”

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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