The U.S. armed forces might pride themselves on the highest standards of leadership, but Matthews demonstrates in a series of disturbing and forensic case studies how military leaders often fall short. In successive chapters, he explores seven forms of unprofessional behavior, including war crimes, insubordination, moral cowardice, toxic leadership, obstruction of justice, sex crimes, and public corruption. Sometimes these failings are lapses in otherwise exemplary careers, such as Colin Powell's role in obscuring the transfer of arms from the U.S. military to the CIA during the Iran-contra affair in the 1980s. Others show the dark side of driven personalities: how General Douglas MacArthur's preening egotism led to his rank insubordination, for example, or how Admiral Hyman Rickover constantly bullied and humiliated his staff in his single-minded pursuit of nuclear power for the U.S. Navy. Yet the most disturbing cases involve a collective institutional failure of leadership. Matthews recounts the details of the bacchanalian Tailhook conference in 1991, which took a tradition of loutish behavior to alarming levels and led to the alleged sexual abuse of 83 women and seven men, and the ongoing investigation into the "Fat Leonard" scandal, in which many officers of the Seventh Fleet accepted money, luxury items, and the services of prostitutes in return for helping a private company secure lucrative contracts, including by sharing classified material.
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