Seas of Glory:
Former Secretary of Navy Reflects on ISI’s Influence

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of The Canon. See the full issue here.

Probably not many people know that ISI helped to win the Cold War. Maybe that is because, “As Ronald Reagan said, there is no limit to accomplishments if you don’t worry who gets the credit,” said John F. Lehman.

Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, Lehman was a recipient of ISI’s Richard M. Weaver Fellowship and credits ISI as being “invaluable intellectually in raising the right questions” during his college years.

Lehman first encountered ISI as a freshman at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he was studying two of his passions: international affairs and political philosophy. He found ISI to be an attractive organization because it “provided a source of genuine intellectual support to students and faculty who were really interested in conservative issues, in debating, and in pursuing the policy aspects of the social, international, and political issues that were swirling at the time.”

On his first visit to ISI’s headquarters in the early 1960s, Lehman met then-president Vic Milione (now president emeritus of ISI), who instantly became an intellectual mentor. “The first time I met Vic, we ended up in a two-hour philosophical discussion,” he recalled.

While at Saint Joseph’s, Lehman carried his interest in politics beyond his coursework: he was active in debate, wrote political columns for the college paper, and founded the Edmund Burke Society, all in addition to being an active member of ISI. He wanted something more than “pep-rally conservatism,” and he found it. “ISI was the only group that was really supportive of a truly intellectual approach to the analysis and the advocacy of the value-based kinds of policy issues and debates that were of so much interest to me at the time,” he said.

After college, practical concerns almost led Lehman to business school, but he applied for and was awarded ISI’s Weaver Fellowship, which gave him the funding he needed to pursue his political dreams. He first studied at Cambridge Univer“There were dozens of high officals throughout the Reagan years—and also the Bush senior years—who were ISI alums... It is fair to say there could not have been a Reagan administration without ISI.”sity, where he earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in international law and diplomacy, and then he earned a second master’s degree as well as a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. “Graduate study gave me the credentials that helped me get a career that allowed me to change things,” said a retrospective Lehman.

Vic Milione and ISI were not the only influences on Lehman. His family had a long history of service in the Navy. He loved to fly, so he served in the Air Force Reserve until the Naval Reserve integrated a flight program, with which he flew three missions in Lebanon and four in Vietnam. His passion for flying kept him serving for twenty-five years.

When starting his career, Lehman went straight to Washington, D.C. Direct government work was not the goal of ISI’s academia-oriented Weaver Fellowship, and Lehman admits to being a bit of a “wayward son.” “Vic would shake his head. He wanted me to write, to teach.” But the Federal City proved to be a place in which Lehman could be influential in other ways. Dick Allen, now an ISI board member, hired him as a research assistant on the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. “I was indeed hired [by Allen] because of the views and the intellectual background that I had with ISI.” He went on to work as deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, went in to business during the first four years of the Carter era, and returned to government work as the secretary of the Navy for six years under Ronald Reagan.

“I found in the Reagan Administration a very congenial group of colleagues, many of whom had gotten into public policy because of their involvement, support, and encouragement from ISI during their student years,” said Lehman. “There were dozens of high officials throughout the Reagan years—and also the Bush senior years—who were ISI alums.... It is fair to say there could not have been a Reagan administration without ISI.” The key ingredient to ISI’s success, said Lehman, is that it is “below the radar. ISI should never become a Heritage Foundation, because its very power is that it deals at a different level.”

In thinking about his career, Lehman said, “I felt slightly guilty defecting from the ISI path,” but thinks he can justify it by what he has accomplished, a special integration of all of his passions: being a Navy pilot, serving a president, reforming the Navy, and fighting the Cold War. Recently, he has been on the 9/11 Commission. “I think donors got their money’s worth,” he said of his Weaver Fellowship.

And now many years since graduate school, he finally gets to fulfill the primary mission of the Weaver Fellowship—teaching seminars at Yale, serving on the board of overseers of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and as a trustee of LaSalle College High School, and writing several books. And he still has his political editorials published—but now they are in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. “I like to point things out to people. That’s part of ISI’s mission: not knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge to reform the world.”

Read more ISI alumni and donor profiles here.