Enemies: Feeding Them, Loving Them, Working with Them

I have spent much of my life living in the land of enemies, working with enemies (who turn out to be friends), and learning the languages of enemies. I have been reminded of this quite vividly during the month of June and especially this past month.

Our deck is quiet now. A week ago Saturday, however, it was home to running children and feasting parents. Visiting from one of our out-of-town branches was a colleague who is moving on to a new job and with whom I have had a wonderful working relationship these past two years. It wasn't always that way, though. My relationship with Walsh began in a very adversarial way. We served on the same committee related to providing a specific service to a group of clients. The clients were mine; the service was his division's. Unfortunately, I disagreed with some aspects of the way in which the service was provided and conducted some research on the effectiveness of the service. That research showed that the service was ineffective, but Walsh did not want to accept that and kept pushing his personal experience as the deciding factor in how things were to be done. I actually had greater experience than he did, but he did not know it, and I felt awkward about pointing that out either publicly or personally. I thought that the research results should speak for themselves. Ultimately, I talked to Walsh's supervisor and got the changes made that I felt were needed. Two years later, new research showed that the changes had produced much better results than had the initial service. Obviously, this was not the best way to win friends and influence people, as the saying goes.

Walsh ultimately moved on from that division, and life became calmer. Then, I learned we were being assigned a new project and, surprise!, the contact person with whom we had to work was in our Washington office, with the program being headed by Walsh, who had transferred there recently. Ulp! This was a very visible project and it had to go well. I decided to approach Walsh from the view that the old position and work was in the past and not related to the current work so we were "new" colleagues in this new endeavor. It worked. He had responsibility for weekly reports, and, while I initially had been reporting directly to the CEO on this project, once Walsh became the nominal head, I began filtering all my reports directly to him, and he would combine them with his own input. It was easier for the CEO that way. Everything worked smoothly. He let bygones remain in the past, as did I, and, perhaps not surprisingly, over time, we became very supportive colleagues, especially after we had taken a few trips together associated with this project to a few troubled areas of the world (e.g., the Middle East).

Walsh retired at the end of June and came back to his earlier haunts to say good-bye to old friends. I invited him to a BBQ at our house. At the end of the BBQ, he told me, with some barely restrained emotion, that he had truly enjoyed working with me on this project and was hoping our paths would cross again. Who says enemies cannot become friends?

This scene reminded me of a similar one two decades ago. Right after the fall of the Soviet Union, I traveled to the Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus to work with the academicians from the Belarus Academy of Sciences. While there, the president and vice president of the university took me to dinner. The VP, it turns out, was an officer in the Red Army, a specialist in American order of battle, at the same time that I was an officer in the US army, a specialist in Soviet order of battle. Counterparts! It left him speechless and attentive. At the farewell party thrown in my honor, he was unusually attentive, complimentary, and social, in contradiction to his typical introversion. Someone asked me what I had done to him. I said, "I did nothing to him, but he took an enemy to dinner." (The whole story, along with some other "enemy" stories, can be found here: Three Vignettes and One Thought about Enemies.

When I defended my dissertation years ago in Moscow, I ended the defense, as expected, with personal words. The words I used, though, were not expected, and I have heard that people who were there still cite them today. This was just weeks after the fall of the Soviet Union; most of my time in the USSR was spent there during the Cold War. (I can truly say that I am a veteran of the Cold War.) What I said was: "Twenty years ago, I came to this country to look upon the face on the enemy. However, in twenty years, I have found only friends."

My favorite movie of all time is probably not nearly as well known as many other sci-fi movies, but it is indeed a good one. The name is Enemy Mine. In it, Dennis Quaid plays an Earther in a dogfight with a Drak who crashes together with his enemy on a remote, inhospitable, marginally inhabited planet. They learn each other's language, work together to survive, and when the Drak, a hermaphrodite, dies in childbirth, Quaid raises the child. It is a very touching movie. If you have not seen it, I recommend renting it.

When Someone Kicks You, Still Your Leg

I thought I might share, this sleepy Saturday, a vignette I just posted on Mahlou Musings. Here it is:

When someone kicks you, kicking back is not always the answer. Sometimes it seems that a nice swift kick, especially in a vulnerable spot, would garner a wonderful feeling. However, holding one's leg back from doing what it wants to do sometimes ends with even better results than any amount of revenge would have brought. In short, don't get mad, and don't get even: get what you want.

In my own life, I have written three doctoral dissertations in order to finally finish one doctoral degree. For one fabricated reason after another, my department chair did not accept the first two. (Rumor told me that he blamed me for his not being hired at the institute where I worked and had told one of the other graduate students that I would finish my degree only over his dead body -- a rumor that appeared to be true at face value although he would not state something like this publicly and I never cared enough to expend the effort to confirm the details. Since I was a slow learner, apparently, it took two dissertations for me to realize that perhaps the rumor was true and at the very least something was wrong.) I could have sued the university, had I had the inclination, money, and energy, and I might have won. I could have taken on the chair in other ways, but I did not. I chose to move on from a painful situation, still the leg that wanted to kick back, make my career through competent work and publication, and wait for serendipity to help with the dissertation and degree issue.

Many people along the way offered to help, and that made me feel validated. The department chair of another department at the same university wrote me a note of encouragement, suggesting that I complete the degree elsewhere and let her know when I could put the initials behind my name; that comment kept me going for years, and I was able eventually to let her know that she could, indeed, use those initials.

Colleagues treated me as if I had "punched" the dissertation ticket, and I have not been held back in my career. In fact, I would not trade my career for any other. For that reason, too, I have not felt the need for revenge. As for the dissertations I wrote, they proved useful in other ways -- another reason for not taking revenge.

The first dissertation topic was quite esoteric. I received a couple of fellowships to conduct the research for it in Siberia during the height of the Cold War, a time when Americans did not go to Siberia, least of all for research. I not only went there, but also I took my oldest daughter, Lizzie, with me. Through the years, the Siberian connection has been of professional and personal value. I have many friends there, have provided much consultation there, and was able to bring a child artist from there to the United States for medical treatment. If I had not worked on that dissertation, none of those connections would have been made. Besides, I made a conference presentation and published an article on the dissertation.

The second dissertation topic was less exciting, but it helped me land a dream job in my specialty, a job that most people get only at the end of their careers but which I got at the beginning of mine. Although my advisor never read the dissertation, it has been published piecemeal as several articles, presented at numerous conferences, and cited in the works of others. That is better than revenge.

The best outcome was that the trajectory of the kick landed me in an extraordinary position much later. I have now completed a third dissertation, this in in Russia, at a university that is better respected than my original university. Had either of the other two dissertations been read and processed, I would not have been eligible to do the later degree. Perhaps thanks to my earlier negative experience, I appreciated all the more the comment that was made by the department chair in Russia at the end of my dissertation pre-defense: "We don't know why you need us, but we feel fortunate that you came to us."

----

Excerpted and adapted from a collection of vignettes I published, copyright 2003.