Leon Jaworski’s Son Looking for Future Leaders

Joe Jaworski doesn’t fit most people’s idea of a thundering revolutionary. His hair is silver and close cropped. His suits are crisply tailored. His Texas-inflected voice flows like a stream without pebbles, quiet, unruffled, suitably understated for the venerable law firm he once was part of.

But the 53-year-old son of Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski is a bomb thrower in the best tradition. Through his efforts and those of his nonprofit organization--American Leadership Forum--he hopes to detonate a shock wave or two.

“America is at the cusp point,” he said. “In the next generation, we could see a great golden age. Or we could see the demise of America, as we know it. The most crucial element to our survival right now is leadership, broadly dispersed, clear-headed leadership.”

Future Community Leaders

That’s where ALF comes in. Jaworski’s fledgling organization, with branches in Texas, Oregon, Connecticut, selects future leaders from the community--newspaper editors, corporate managers, civic leaders--and puts them through a rigorous year-old program designed to make the most of their talents.

“We take people who are strong leaders and put them in a situation, perhaps a near-impossible situation, in which they must perform and make things happen,” Jaworski said.

“We (examine) a whole range of things, but we begin by teaching people how to win trust and become congruent,” he said, “that is, how to make the words and the music go together.”

One essential element of the teaching is recognizing the importance of motivation.

“The ability to motivate and inspire may be the most important attribute a leader has,” he said. “The ability to motivate is a common thread among the leaders of history. Gandhi and Patton were quite different people, but both were able to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”

Saw Through Father’s Eyes

Jaworski began his project after viewing the dark vortex of Watergate through his father’s eyes.

“On weekends he used to sit down with me and say, ‘Joe, the American people got what they deserve,’ ” Jaworski recalled. “ ‘This current generation has simply not been paying attention.’

“ ‘The problem is not just Richard Nixon, but it is the people he has surrounded himself with, the people who have amassed tremendous power. It is with all the lying and the perjury and the dealing in ways totally contrary to the way we envision our leadership.’ ”

The Watergate revelations and Iran hostage crisis, plus the unraveling of a marriage and growing unfulfillment as a mainstream attorney--the Jaworskis, father and son, were ace courtroom litigants--combined to convince young Jaworski that he had a calling.

“I got to looking at myself and said, ‘Hey, our country is in deep trouble.’ There has to be some direction, some leadership. We can’t take the United States the way it was handed to us. We’ve got to rebuild with each generation. Liberty and duty, freedom and obligation, those things may be opposite, but they go together.

‘Had to Be More to Life’

“I also realized there had to be more to life than building a (law firm) and making a lot of money,” he said.

So he left the firm with its big fees and walnut-paneled security, and launched ALF. It was a decade after Watergate.

“I was probably the most surprised at how well the program worked,” he said. “We got quick results. Within a year after (participants) stepped from the program, many were at the top of their organizations. We used to call that a miracle, now we call it a predictable miracle.”

Graduates include judges and bank officials, ranchers and the heads of charities. The police chiefs of Houston and Hartford, Conn., have gone through the program. So has an Episcopal bishop in Connecticut and the president of one of Oregon’s most prestigious colleges.

The bills are paid by corporations, charities and private donations. There is no cost to the participants, who are selected each year by a blue-ribbon panel.

Climb Mountain Cliffs

The highlight of the program follows several months of general orientation. Future leaders are dumped for nearly a week at a base camp in the Colorado Rockies. There they climb sheer mountain cliffs and trek untrammeled stretches far from modern conveniences.

“One of the things we spend a lot of time on is risk-taking capacities,” he said. “I’m not talking about crazy risk-taking, but measured risk-taking. We begin that out in the wilderness and stress being able to make quick decisions and having the courage to stick with them.

“The (wilderness) is a cornerstone. It creates self-confidence. It demonstrates the value of trust. It is a powerful mechanism for showing people we are all part of a greater whole.”

ALF’s board of trustees includes John Gardner, former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and founder of Common Cause; Vice Admiral James Stockdale of Stanford’s Hoover Institute; Harlan Cleveland, former ambassador to NATO; Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and presidential historian James MacGregor Burns.

By the year 2000, Jaworski hopes ALF will expand from three chapters to 50, with some outside the United States.