Storm-tested leadership

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 22nd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up: When duty calls.

Our colleague, Nick Eicher, introduces us to a man with a round-the-world mission: a veteran who made a harrowing two-week flight to raise awareness for those who didn’t make it back from Vietnam.

NICK EICHER: Steve Pearce, the former congressman, is not a guy who talks about dreams or goals; he talks about assignments.

PEARCE: My worldview tells me that God will put road signs out there to let us know what we're supposed to be seeing and doing.

Pearce is a decorated Air Force C-130 pilot, a businessman, and a seven-term congressman from New Mexico. He’s also a Vietnam vet.

Sixty years after he first left home for combat in Vietnam, he got a new assignment. President Trump had nominated Pearce to lead the Bureau of Land Management, the White House officially sent the nomination over to the Senate January 13th. 

The Bureau of Land Management oversees a lot. It’s responsible for more than 10 percent of the U.S. landmass. It has jurisdiction over vast stretches of the American West. It’s also in the middle of various debates over things like grazing rights, mineral leases, wildfire management, tribal relations. It’s no small assignment. BLM is one of the most consequential in the Interior Department. And environmentalists have been mobilized against Pearce for months.

PEARCE: The storms we're going through today are simply preparation. They're not the end result, they're always preparing you for something else. God is always preparing you for the next step.

Steve Pearce knows a thing or two about preparation. His book titled You Had a Good Home, But You Left... is a gripping tale about his 15-day solo circumnavigation of the globe. He did it in a single-engine aircraft a decade ago to honor fellow airmen who died in Vietnam.

PEARCE: I didn't try this for the thrill of it. I didn't try it because it's part of a bucket list.

Pearce carried the idea of the flight for decades… but it was the men who never returned—and the ones who returned in body only—that motivated him.

He spent three years planning it, almost entirely in secret. He would finish work in Congress late in the evening, sleep a few hours, then get up at 2 or 3 a.m. to pour over routes and fuel strategies, weather charts and contingency plans.

PEARCE: I was not wanting to advertise that I was thinking of going to anybody, not staff, not my wife, nobody.

Yeah, that didn’t last very long. Pearce’s wife, Cynthia, walked in one night and found the floor covered in maps.

PEARCE: She says, What are you doing? I said, Well I'm just looking at places. That was pretty weak. But she said, I know what flight planning looks like. What are you thinking? I said, I'm thinking I might fly around the world. She said, I think that's a bad idea.

Pearce says he and his wife have a two-zero vote system for major decisions. Both of them have to agree. So Pearce folded up the maps, assumed the matter was settled; but two weeks later, she surprised him.

PEARCE: “I’m not going to vote against you, but I’m not going to vote for you.”

Now that's not permission, but it's also not refusal.

Before he left, Pearce and Cynthia Pearce attended a ceremony for circumnavigating pilots supported by seven- and eight-person ground teams. Driving home, she asked who was on his team.

PEARCE: I haven't got a team. She said, Why not?

Pearce explained that as a sitting ­congressman, the State Department had warned him that he's a “high-value target” and needs to keep the flight quiet.

PEARCE: She says, You can't do this by yourself!

Except that he did anyway. 

By the second leg of the flight, he was fighting headwinds over the Pacific and Pearce called home. Cynthia listened—and then, as Pearce explained it to me: Click. She hung up.

PEARCE: About 15 minutes later, she calls, and sure enough, the thing that makes her a treasure in my life is she hates what I'm doing, she doesn't agree with it, and then she piles straight into it, and she had gone online and said, "It looks like a counter cyclonic flow is right on your nose. If you drop 200 miles south of course then you probably will find lesser winds." Without her, I could have never finished the flight.

Pearce says he questioned the wisdom of the trip many times, but never his own commitment.

PEARCE: When I commit to something, I commit all the way, and that's the reason I don't talk about things. I tell people that that's a practice I picked up by reading about Mary when she learned that she's going to be the mother of Jesus. She didn't go out telling people in the town square, she kept the things in her heart and pondered them, and and so a spiritual process I've had through my whole life is pondering.

He says the long preparation for the flight served the same purpose for him: it was a way to burn off second thoughts.

PEARCE: I will not quit because I'm tired or because I lose heart. I won't quit because it's difficult. I will not quit. I may fail, but I will not quit.

The storms taught him something about leadership. What matters, he said, is the leadership that’s revealed when the windows shake and the instruments rattle.

Pearce is no romantic about public service. He doesn't rehearse his legacy. He simply takes up his next assignment.

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