Cecily Zander

He doesn't understand tactics.

He doesn't understand how battlefield kind of events play out.

He was a great administrator.

He was a real aid to the Continental War effort, but on the battlefield, just a disaster.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the ability, I think, which is almost sort of beyond most humans to take responsibility for failures that aren't necessarily your fault.

Something that Grant and Washington and Eisenhower could do because they were the man at the top is say, if my men failed, I failed and I'm not going to blame them.

What we find with a lot of the guys we're talking about is they sought to place blame on others as often as possible.

That is not the mark of a great leader.

I think he just sort of... For me, the story of William Hull is a guy who really understood what was going on, and he had urged the American government to do more to protect the Great Lakes, and especially Michigan Territory, prior to the War of 1812.

And he had written about how important these places were going to be, how they needed to be fortified and defended, and nobody listened to him.

And I think when he wasn't heard, that's when he kind of gave up.

And I think that was his failure.

He had the right ideas...

But he realized that all of his sort of commentary was falling on deaf ears.

And he was unwilling to fight for a government that he didn't feel was going to back him up.

I don't mean he was a coward.

I don't mean he was a traitor.

But I think it just ruined his enthusiasm, his willingness to fight when he had all these really good ideas and they simply weren't supported.

So he sort of demonstrates a stunning inability to learn from the failure of a tactical choice about seven times over.