Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
—Henry Kissinger
Power feeds on itself. You lose sight of reality and believe only what you want to believe and what you think is the truth. If everything you do is right, how can anything you do be wrong? Therefore, power is susceptible to flattery.
If I had one piece of advice, it would be to make a list of the friends or people who flatter you who have not asked you for anything. More than likely it will be a short list. Those are the ones you can trust. Those are the ones who will be with you down the line when pandering and flattery are no longer meaningful, and when just being there counts.
I do not like flattery. It embarrasses me.Although I might make an exception if this book receives a few words of praise.
Power feeds on flattery. It insulates and divorces you from reality. It can lead to self-destruction. People with power become obsessed with it. But it backfires when you go that step too far.
Dictators are overthrown, revolutions materialize, individuals crash. Allow power to consume you, and expect to go from a person revered to a person despised.
Still, the majority worship power, and if they don’t have it for themselves, they worship those they think are powerful. Riding on the coattails of someone they regard as having power, they feel, gives power to them. It is never the case.
Babcock recalls that all the way through my father’s North Carolina association, he was involved in fund-raising. There were individuals on campuses he raised funds for who served him like map-carrying messengers for a military officer. He refers to them as toadies making sure that potential givers were treated well.
But those in power don’t reciprocate. They use power to entice, cajole and promise. In the end, they retain power for themselves. Power gives you control over other people. There is a country saying that sometimes you get and sometimes you get got. My father once told my wife something she never forgot after he fired someone who was supposedly a longtime family friend, “You get them before they get you.” But despite his power base, he allowed himself to be trumped by flattery on occasion.
Anyone who has ever been taken advantage of by someone he trusted would, one assumes, become paranoid or at least skeptical. My father tended to be paranoid ever since he had been burned by his accountant in Ithaca back in their early days. His characteristic wariness should have countered his susceptibility to flattery. He said many times he never cared about the money. But money is power, and power succumbs to flattery from people who use you for their own agenda.
A striking instance of this is what happened when my father received a letter from someone claiming to be a distant relative from North Carolina, who was trying to set up an appointment to see him. The letter was flattering and referred glowingly to Pops’s accomplishments. A meeting was set up, and a young man appeared in my father’s office. I have no idea what he said, but he convinced my father he was distantly related and an avid admirer. He said he was looking for a job, and my father was so taken with his sincerity he hired him.
He had no experience in any area the company operated in, and there were no openings at headquarters. But he claimed to be a skilled photographer and suggested that he become my father’s eyes in the field. He also convinced Pops to do a documentary. He visited every holding my father had, questioned the managers, saying he was my father’s relative and emissary and photographed the buildings for the purported documentary. The managers were told he was my father’s personal representative, and that they were to cooperate fully with him. My father funded his trips all over the country for seven months, accepting the young man’s reports on each company as helpful.
As time went by, my father became somewhat obsessive about the relationship, relying on his reports and taking everything he reported as the truth. When this young “relative” returned several months later, richer by far by pocketing most of the excessive funding for his travels, he presented my father with his massive collection of photographs. He found a place to reside in Ithaca, and it was evident he intended to stay. He had gained my father’s confidence but not my mother’s. She hired a private detective to investigate. The reports that started coming back were suspicious. He was not who he said he was; he had no connection with the Park family.
When police executed a search warrant, they found in his apartment copies of letters he had written to the vast majority of the people listed in the Forbes 400. They were virtually identical, claiming he was a relative. Each letter was tailored to the individual history of the recipient, based on research he had done on that person. Apparently my father was the first, and possibly the only one, who fell for it. The man was finally escorted by police out of Ithaca and out of the State.
At any rate, if you ever wonder who you can trust, check out the movie Screamers as a good example of how difficult it can be to find out who you can’t.
Johnnie Babcock remembers another example of Pops’s susceptibility to flattery, involving someone my father thought could do no wrong.