1:51 - Where did the inspiration come from to better understand world leaders?
3:48 - What was life like living behind The Iron Curtain?
5:24 - What was your relationship like with your father?
7:01 - Did you ever feel validated by your father?
9:43 - How Stephen was honored as a father in the Middle East
16:07 - What do we need to do to re-establish a masculine rite in western culture?
19:08 - What are the ingredients of a noble culture?
22:06 - Developing a local band of brothers
25:51 - What to avoid when building your band of brothers
28:10 - Who is the greatest leader you've ever studied?
29:37 - What did you admire most about him?
34:10 - Finding redeeming qualities about your father
36:04 - Advancing your father's mandate
38:45 - What you see in your father, you see in yourself
39:25 - Does a man's mandate need to be related to his father?
41:53 - What did you learn about George W. Bush and Barack Obama when you wrote your biographies about them?
44:25 - What are your thoughts about Iraq and the Kurds?
47:40 - How (and why) effective leaders need to tell stories in order to make impact.

• Building Your Band of Brothers
• Mansfield's Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self
• The Faith Of George W. Bush
• The Faith of Barack Obama
• The Miracle of the Kurds: A Remarkable Story of Hope Reborn in Northern Iraq

Peter King: Welcome to the PK Experience. I'm very excited to bring to you today New York Times bestselling author and popular speaker, Stephen Mansfield. Now I met Stephen a few months ago at a men's event in Kansas City where we were discussing things like leadership and frankly, how to be better men, better husbands, better fathers, a lot of which was inspired by Stephen's book, Mansfield's Book on Manly Men, but Stephen has written many other bestselling books. The one that really was his breakthrough book was The Faith of George W. Bush, which Time magazine actually said helped shape the 2004 US presidential elections and was the source for Oliver Stone's award-winning film, W. Stephen went on to write the book The Faith of Barrack Obama and he's written many other celebrated biographies like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln as well. One of his most recent books, The Miracle of the Kurds has given him the notoriety to become a respected voice and advisor in the conflict over in the Middle East between the Kurds and radical extremists. With that, I'm very excited to bring to you today's interview with Stephen Mansfield.
We're going to keep the intro very short, Stephen, because there's so much I want to talk to you about in this hour today. First of all, thank you so much for joining us on the call this morning.

Dr Mansfield: It's my privilege. Thank you, Peter.

Peter King: I was looking, doing some research on you, and I'm fascinated by just your interest in all these different world leaders, these different men who led throughout time. Your interest in politics is intriguing to me. Your interest in what's going on overseas right now and your experience overseas, of course, but I wanted to ask you first and foremost, where did the inspiration for you to better understand these different leaders, where did that inspiration come from?

Dr Mansfield: I think to understand me, you have to understand that I grew up largely in Europe. My father was an army officer, a military intelligence officer so my most formative years were in Germany during the Cold War and in Berlin particularly during the Cold War. I was behind the Iron Curtain for most of my teen years.

Peter King: Wow.

Dr Mansfield: My father, we literally had what we used to call the bat phone in our home, a red phone that glowed and rang that my father would answer and then, he would go out on movements and that was connected to the Pentagon and all that. My point is not to be dramatic. My point is to say that being aware of world events, being aware of the personalities on the global stage, that was part of my upbringing.

Peter King: Wow.

Dr Mansfield: Dinner time conversation was often what's Helmut Kohl doing in Germany? What's Brezhnev doing in Russia? What's President Nixon doing or what have you? This was common stuff. My parents were military [inaudible 00:02:57] intellectuals and so I grew with that sort of orientation. They were readers. There were always books in our home. There was always this elevated discussion.
Then later on in my life when I went to university, I had some very, very gifted professors who turned me in the direction of majoring in history and, of course, that took me even further in this direction. Then I've just been fortunate enough to work internationally and live in DC half the year and continue that passion. But I have to say, [I'll attribute 00:03:26] to my parents and the US army for embedding these values in me early on.

Peter King: That is fascinating. I would say to some extent, it was a matter of survival then just to know what the policy decision makers were doing at the time. You were actually behind the Iron Curtain. Did I understand the correctly?

Dr Mansfield: Yeah. That's correct.

Peter King: Wow.

Dr Mansfield: Back before the wall came down so to speak, Berlin was what they used to call an Island of Freedom behind the Iron Curtain. You had East Germany and Berlin was a free city within East Germany. It came out of the Second World War and then sort of the descent of the Iron Curtain. I was living in a free city, but that free city was behind the Iron Curtain. I literally spent my teen years growing up behind the Iron Curtain and I had experiences like my German friends would have me over to their house to spend the night and they lived closer to the wall than I did, and I would hear machine gunfire at night. Somebody would be trying to escape from East Germany across no man's land and I would hear machine gunfire or suddenly, there'd be an alert and tanks would start going down cobblestone streets, which makes an astonishing level of noise. The whole city [could hear it 00:04:38].
Again, I'm not trying to paint myself as any kind of hero, but my upbringing very much was on the cutting edge. My high school in Berlin used to get bomb threats from the Baader-Meinhof Gang all the time. The helicopters would descend on the football field, and the military police would show up, and they'd go to the school with dogs. This really was my normal sophomore year in high school kind of experience.

Peter King: Wow.

Dr Mansfield: Again, I'm not trying to paint myself like John Wayne here, but when you have that kind of experience, you're paying attention to what's going on in the world. You're paying attention to who's a strong leader. You're paying attention to even issues of manhood within the military structure. My father was Special Forces and so all of that shaped me. All of that framed who I am today.

Peter King: Amazing. Did you get to have a close relationship with your father growing up or was he gone a lot or what was your relationship with him like?

Dr Mansfield: My relationship with my father was fairly distant. He was a good man. He was a war hero. He was home every night for dinner. He was not abusive in any horrible way. Didn't drink and abuse the family or any of the stories that you hear from people. He was a moral man, but he just didn't have the emotional range to connect to his son. I was kind of oddly made. I was both a jock and kind of ... I played guitar, and I read books, and I liked to travel, and I went to art museums so I confused him I think.
We became a little closer later in life and I always knew he loved me. I had no doubt about that. I always knew he loved me. He was always generous with me. I always knew he was proud of me, but no, I wouldn't say we had a deep connection. He would come in to the house in his uniform. He'd take off his uniform and throw on some sweats. He would tussle my hair and then, he would descend into his recliner in front of the TV and that was about the last you heard from him so it wasn't real close.
I'm sorry about that. I wish it was closer, but probably even that gap, even that nagging need made me head in the direction I've gone now urging men to be better fathers and to invest in their sons. I'm not sorry long term. It's not an aching wound everyday, but yeah, it definitely deformed me a bit in my earlier years.

Peter King: I've been kind of looking into this similar thing that I think you're doing as well, which is sort of mending that father-son relationship and better understanding what that relationship is and how can we today be better fathers for our sons. One of the things that I found was that there was a point in time often in really healthy relationships, really healthy father-son relationships where there was a validation if you will, where the son felt validated as a man. Did you ever feel like you got that from your father?

Dr Mansfield: There are certain moments when my father said short things that stuck with me the rest of my life. Those were issues of validation. He wasn't the kind of dad who could put his arm around you and look you in the eye and say, "Look, I love you and I'm proud of you and I'm so grateful that you're my son." You just weren't going to hear those things, but I went through a pretty horrible time once and when he found out about it, he wrote me and said, "You will continue to rise." Now that's not all he said, but in the middle of saying, "Look, I'm sorry you're going through this and so on, but you'll continue to rise," the fact that he even thought I was rising was news to me, but the fact that he had confidence in me and the fact that he believed that I was going to continue to rise, that I would accomplish things in the world, you have to understand we might sit around and talk about the Ford administration, but we would not talk about Stephen's trajectory towards destiny. That was not going to happen.
What he did was he dropped little side bombs of instruction and affirmation, and I remember almost all of them. He once said to me, "I am proud of all of my children and what they do in life professionally, and how they live their lives." I was the only one in the car so he was talking to me. He just couldn't talk directly to me. He just didn't have those skills, but I remember those words forever. Hey, he is proud of what I do professionally and he is ...
Then when I had my first New York Times bestseller, he bought about 1,000 copies and bored his friends with them by passing them out and talked ... That's how you knew he cared. That's how you knew he was proud of you. When my father came and had me sign a book for one of his general friends, I knew he was proud of me, but he didn't have the skills to do what we see in movie fathers sitting down and having long discussions and so on. You just had to learn to pick up the signs along the way, but when I did pick them up, those were real transitional moments for me.

Peter King: This might be a good segue to your story of ... in the Middle East, this is such a great story when you said that you first were acknowledged as a father yourself. Could you tell, for those that are listening that don't know that story ... You know, the story I'm talking about, right?

Dr Mansfield: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, let me tell it briefly. Some years ago, I was part of a team of people, part of an organization and a network of people going and coming from the Middle East to help the Kurds. The way that we did that at that time was we landed in Damascus and then, went across to the Syrian desert into Iraqi Kurdistan. I got stuck once. My papers got messed up and so I ended up for about a week and a half, two weeks in Damascus. And a friend of mine who was in the Syrian parliament at the time, that sounds very spooky now, but it wasn't then, decided to have a little party for me because he knew was stuck. I was bored. I was hanging out eating too many pistachio nuts and trying to figure out what to do with myself. He had a bunch of guys on a roof top at a Damascus hotel. We tried to talk to each other. Nobody spoke English. It was a little bit stilted, but still, it was sweet of him to try to honor his American friend.
At one point, an older gentleman turned to me and said, "Stephen, do you have a son?" I said, "I do." "And what is his name?" this man said. I said, "His name is Jonathan." Then like he was announcing the second coming, this guy said, "Well, then you have a new name," and he clapped his hands and everybody turned and paid attention. I didn't quite understand what was going on. I turned to the one guy who spoke decent English and it turns out that in Arab culture, being a father is such an honored thing that when a father has a son, this father is given an honorary name that is a combination of Abu, which means father of in Arabic and a shortened version of the son's name. My son's name is Jonathan so my new name was Abu John, A-B-U J-O-H-N.
When that was announced, even though my son at the time was 13 years old back in the States, these guys began to celebrate me. They danced. They had waiters bring out cashews as big as your thumb and big pieces of [naan 00:11:56], lamb and all kinds of stuff. Then the dancing started. They fired some Uzis in the air 'cause there are a bunch of bodyguards sitting around. I'm telling you, they celebrated me as a father until about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning when they backslapped me out of the car back to my hotel.
It was wonderful and sweet, and probably was a little bit of a setup, but when I got back to the room, I sat there on the edge of my bed for a long time. I think I may have dozed, but when I woke up, something was different and I thought about it a long time. Now you got to realize, these are men I can hardly speak to. They were all Muslim. They are all Syrian. They are men I knew I would never probably see again, but something had changed. After a while, after thinking about it, I realized what had changed. This was the first time that any phase of manhood had ever been marked and celebrated by any group of men in my entire life.
Now bear in mind, I'm in my mid-30s. I'm finishing a doctorate. I already got a couple of master's degrees. I only mention that because it's important people know that I was [not without 00:13:02] times of affirmation. I lived an athletic life in high school. Again, bachelors, a couple of master's degrees. I was writing by that time. I'm on staff of a large church. I had good friends. I had the typical American life, maybe a little bit [inaudible 00:13:24], but never, not when I turned 13, not when I graduated high school, not when I graduated college, not when I got married, never had any group of men ever sat me down and maybe talk to me or celebrated me or said, "Hey, you're stepping into a new phase of life. We understand that. Come join us. We're going to celebrate you," much less by the way giving me wisdom for that next phase.
I was really changed by this. I was really changed by the fact that a bunch of guys I didn't know and couldn't talk to had affirmed me, had done something at a certain moment of transition into a new stage of manhood. By the way, it didn't matter to me at that moment. My son had been born 13 years before, the fact that these guys were celebrating some of part of manhood.
When I came back to the States, I realized that it's not just the rituals of the celebrations that we need, but it's the affirmation of manhood. It's the passing on of lore. It's the recognition of what manhood is and a culture of men that brings up the younger men in that culture of manhood. As I began to think about that and meditating on it, read more and look around at the people I saw on the streets and then, I saw in the malls, I began to realize we were in a real crisis. Now I knew it from reading Time magazine or whatever, but I really hadn't seen it in a heart level before that moment.
Pretty important for me and of course now, I'm a very strong advocate not only for the restoration of noble manhood, but also for the idea that we need to have these manly rituals at different phases of life, but the more important thing is that we are restoring righteous manhood in our generation and then, we have something to bring the young man up into, which have never happened for me and that's why I think the story reaches so many men.

Peter King: Yes. I think to me, my favorite part of that story is that there's just waiters with trays of racks of lamb waiting for a cue to come in. They're just off scene waiting to bring in these plates of food, which is that's kind of like my dream come true, but-

Dr Mansfield: Peter, it probably could've been these guys who were part of [inaudible 00:15:32] many them said, "We're not going to be able to talk to this American. We want to celebrate him and honor him. Is he father? Yes, he's a father. Let's prepare to honor him as Arab style [inaudible 00:15:41]."

Peter King: Sure.

Dr Mansfield: I don't care. I don't care if it was a total preparation thing. The fact is in my experience, never had it happened before so I'm so grateful for these men. By the way, I hate to say probably most of them are dead just because of what's gone on in Syria, what's gone on with the president there who's a crazy man, but I will always be grateful for those hours on that roof firing Uzis in the air and dancing with Arab men and celebrating the fact that I was a father.

Peter King: Such an amazing experience. You talk about the missing rites in the Western culture. What do we need to do to reestablish that?

Dr Mansfield: First of all, what's important to know about not only these Arab men, but the way it's worked through history is that you had a culture of noble manhood, which men had bought into and helped each other with. Then once you've got that, you have something you can bring the boys into. There's no sense initiating a boy at the age of 13 or 12 or what have you when he becomes a man into nothingness. Our Jewish friends now, they've got the Bar Mitzvah when the 13-year-old male becomes the son of the covenant. They're technically and they're religiously men within the covenant. I like that idea because ... It can become weird and become ... even my Jewish friends tell me sometimes it's nothing but a party, but where it's taken seriously, it's a welcoming of a young man into manhood, into Jewish manhood.
I'm a big believer in having Bar Mitzvahs, religious or not. I'm a big believer in having rituals that welcome men. When a young man's body begins to change and he steps up and becomes more of a man around 13 or 14, we should be talking to him as older men. We should welcoming him into a manhood, a culture of manhood. We should be talking to him about what the lessons are and teaching him lore of what it means to be a real man. Then he's going to make another transition when he turns 18, graduates high school, and goes off to work or college. Then there's going to be another one when he gets married.
When I got married, my father-in-law at the time thought it was a big joke to say, "Hey, I've got some wisdom [or 00:17:51] you listen to me. Women don't mix." That was his big bit of wisdom for me. I still don't know what it means. He was just being goofy.

Peter King: I missed that. Sorry. Say that again. Women don't what?

Dr Mansfield: Women don't mix. It's a bit of Texas humor. That was the thing he wanted to tell me, that women don't fit into a man's culture. Women don't mix.

Peter King: Got it.

Dr Mansfield: Ha, ha, ha, but I sure could've used some great wisdom to know how to be a better husband, and a father, and a man. Anyway, my point is not to complain about anybody. My point is to say when we have a culture of noble manhood, when men like you and I are spurring each other on to be good men, noble men, overcome our lesser selves, lead, father, husband well, take care of ourselves, invest in our community, live out the lore of what it means to be noble men, then we have a culture into which we can initiate the young.
My final thing on that is I always want to cite that great African proverb that says, "If we do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down." That's what's going on with ISIS. That's what's going on with street gangs. That's what's going on with misbehaving middle class white suburbanites, [inaudible 00:18:58] 14 years old, if they're not initiated into a lore of noble manhood, they will burn the village down out of their anger and their resentment, and that's what's going on worldwide.

Peter King: Culture is a big part of it. What are the ingredients of a noble culture to invite them into?

Dr Mansfield: First of all, a culture of noble manhood or great manhood as I call it what we do, always is about a definition of what a man is, an understanding that a man has exceptional powers because he has exceptional responsibilities. He lives according to a code. There's a code of behavior. There's a way he treats himself. There's a way he treats other men. There's a way he orients to the world. There's a way he orients to women and children, and the weak and the needy. That's noble manhood. A lot of times, men don't even get that code 'til they get into the military or they join the police, but that code ought to be embedded in the soul of the very young man. I'm a man. I have special powers, but I also have special responsibilities.
Then the second part of that becomes, and this is what I teach often, is that once the man understands the power of manhood and who he is and what his obligations and responsibilities and powers are, then he's got to tend his field. I've taken that phrase from ancient language, but I believe very strongly that every man in every phase of his life has a field assigned to him. You can say it's assigned by God. If you don't choose to go that way, you can say it's assigned by his own choices, but he's responsible for a field that certainly includes himself, his body, his soul, his wife, his children, his house, his job, his obligations to in-laws and out-laws. His obligations within the community and so on. Then there are other things that may be part of a given season of his life, but he's supposed to tend his field. He's supposed to help everything flourish. He's supposed to protect. He's supposed to defend. He's supposed to encourage. He's supposed to build.
To do all of that, of course, he doesn't have to do it alone. He needs to have a band of brothers and you know, Peter, how big I am on that theme.

Peter King: Absolutely.

Dr Mansfield: That often when we get men together and talk to them about what they ought to be doing to be noble men, we tend to be giving them a long laundry list of things to do that they go home thinking they have to do it by themselves, but I'm a believer that a man needs a band of brothers and a band of brothers is that group of men with whom he does life and the goal of a band of brothers is, of course, have a lot of fun and then hang with each other, be friends, but also to achieve that free fire zone I call it where anything that they need to say to each other to help each other be better is said. Then they're coached along to become better, whatever it is, manhood, weight, how to handle a checkbook, how to love your wife more tenderly, how to relate to your son, whatever it is, whatever those skills are.
All of that is in my core definition and I would add that living for the glory of God. I know not everybody accepts that view, but if you're asking me, I think that God ordained manhood and men live out manhood best when they're living it with the grace and power of God in their lives. All of that is my definition of what it means to be a noble man and what we need to be initiating the young into.

Peter King: That's probably a good point to note that you've written a book, Stephen Mansfield's Book of Manly Men and also, you just recently came out with ... I'm sorry. What's the name of the title again? Build-

Dr Mansfield: Building Your Band of Brothers.

Peter King: Building Your Band of Brothers.

Dr Mansfield: Building Your Band of Brothers. Yeah.

Peter King: Both of which dive more deeply into this subject of course. You and I met a couple of weeks ago out in Kansas City at a meetup. One of the biggest takeaways that I got out of that conversation was the need to develop a local band of brothers. I had felt that I was isolated in some respects many years ago and I recognized I need to develop my core of band of brothers.
It just so happened to me that it often was digital because I was meeting people in different parts of the country on conferences or whatever, but you posed a question who do you call at ... You're out traveling and your wife calls or your kid calls and they're sick or there's a bump in the night and it's 3:00 in the morning, but you're out of town, who do you call that's local? It just shocked me like I don't know who I'd call. Developing that local band of brothers has been really my focus right now. We're actually meeting up on Thursday with a group of guys and getting that going. What advice do you have in developing that local band of brothers and making it something that actually flourishes and is valuable for each of the members in the group?

Dr Mansfield: I'm a big believer, first of all, in the idea of band of brothers. Second of all, that men relate best when they have some indirect thing, what I call an indirect connection. Men are not really that good at sitting around a table staring at each other going, "How are you feeling, bro? What's going on in your life?" But men need to do something. Play hoops, help a widow with their repairs on her house, help the elderly, whatever. Have something else going. Have the barbecue. Have the game party. Have something else going.
Then what you want to do is start moving towards beyond just the fun and friendship level to sort of what I call a covenantal level, which means if you really got the work out thing together and I'm really good at my finances and you're [inaudible 00:24:33], making that up of course, that we look at each other and say, "Dude, help me lose weight. Help me work out better. In the meantime, I'll help you with your investments and your ... " and you start helping each other do some of the skills of manhood better.
Out of that phase, out of that covenantal phase, comes that free fire zone that I talk about a lot because you got to get to the point of transparency and openness where you're open to anything being addressed in your life that needs to be addressed to make you better. If men will not push too much the direct stare at each other's eyes, try to dredge up emotions, and just let it evolve naturally knowing what the goal is, I think that they'll be able to get to a level of transparency.
What you want is to pull down the walls, pull down all the cultural walls, the southern graciousness and the Western independence and the Yankee isolation and coldness. Some people say I'm a Yankee so I can say that. And just have that free fire zone that basically, I'm invested in you, you're invested in me. We're making each other better. That's what you're going for. Most men don't have it. In fact, most men as you've said don't even know who or can't even name a best friend, and [that's another reason 00:25:38] why male suicide rates are skyrocketing. Most men report unbelievably lonely lives and the fruit of it is absolute devastation throughout everything they're involved in.

Peter King: Yeah, I agree. What advice do you have in what not to look for? Who should you alienate as you're building your band of brothers assuming that you're wanting to create some boundaries there to make sure that there's integrity in the group? What are you looking for to make sure this does not creep in?

Dr Mansfield: First of all, let me say, 'cause the only reason I even bring this up is the guys ask me all the time, a woman really can't be part of your band of brothers or be a band of brother. I have female friends. I value them. I'm grateful for them, but a lot of guys think, especially in our current generation, that a woman can be in that band of brothers relationship and that's not the case.
Second of all, you want to move away from turning the group or allowing anyone to turn the group into a therapy session for any one person at any one time. This is not a therapy session. This is not an intervention. It may have to be from time to time. This is a bunch of guys doing life together and investing in each other's lives. If anybody pulls the whole thing in one direction to make it about them or makes it too much psycho babble or won't maintain confidentiality, they can blow up the group. You want a bunch of guys who can keep their mouth shut, are deeply invested, eventually get to the point of being absolutely fierce in the pursuit of each other's good, and again, will maintain that free fire zone that is absolutely essential for men to grow.
By the way, let me just say 'cause some guys listening here may be taking notes and thinking man, this is too hard. It's what us guys do all the time, but we all jump on the basketball court today and just have a pickup basketball game. Inevitably, you're going to turn to me and say, "Dude, throw the ball down the field. Man, pass it off. Hey, I'm free underneath." We're going to start coaching each other. We don't know each other's names, but we start coaching each other, help each other being better. "If you'll dribble to the left over there, you can go to the hoop." Immediately, we get into a game like that, we start helping each other and coaching each other, even risking offense. It's what men naturally do.
But somehow, we've been talked out of doing it with each other's personal lives and I think it's essential that we restore that. Yeah, you do want to protect. You want to protect confidentiality. You want to not let one person dominate or drag the thing in a therapeutic direction. Once you find it, it's going to be one of the most valuable things in your life.

Peter King: Awesome. Great advice. You've studied so many amazing leaders obviously intensely and to great depth in the different books that you've written. Which is the greatest leader that you feel that you've studied?

Dr Mansfield: From a manhood perspective, the leader I most relate to is Theodore Roosevelt, but my overall hero in life, probably the guy I most admire and to a small degree am like ... I'm certainly not acclaiming any greatness. I'm talking about in weakness and other things is Churchill, Winston Churchill is the one I most read about, most study, most listen to, written a book on, and I constantly take counsel from. I wouldn't say that he's the archetype of manliness. I'd say Roosevelt is more that for me, but overall in life, leadership, vision for the nations, are sent out of difficulty, overcoming a hard relationship with a father and all that kind of thing, Winston Churchill is definitely my guy.

Peter King: Yeah, yeah. He's somebody that I know a little bit about, probably more through documentaries and things like that that I've seen on Netflix or what not, but certainly a presence during a very great trying time for the world. What would you say was it about him that you admired most about him?

Dr Mansfield: I got to tell you that there are many, many, many things, but the thing that I probably admire the most was that he had what should have been in all natural forces working, should have been an unbelievably deforming relationship with his father. During most of Winston Churchill's young life, his father was descending into mental illness and he hated Winston. The elder Churchills, Winston's parents sent him off to what we would call private schools, what the British call public schools, and Winston was just at these schools isolated and alone, would write his parents heartbreaking letters, "Please come visit me. Please, I've been here for a year. Please come take me home. Please come take me home." The letters would just rip your heart out.
The father would make a speech at a facility two doors away from Winston's school and wouldn't go visit him. Churchill was haunted, so haunted by his father's image later in life that he ... I'm not taking away from the possibility this genuinely happened. I'm not going to pass judgment on that, but Churchill believed that the man actually appeared to him. He actually wrote a booklet called The Dream describing his father appearing, and this is while Churchill was prime minister, his father appearing to him and taunting him and saying he'd never accomplish anything and so on. Now, of course, psychologists will say this is a projection of a psychological state and it might well be. I'm not going to pass judgment on it, but the truth is that Winston Churchill was haunted by the image of his father his whole life.
What I admire about him is that when his father died and his father died hating Winston, Winston said, "I could give myself to bitterness about him the rest of my life, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to take up his mantle, take up as though his sword has fallen on the field of battle, and I'm going to live out his mandate for the rest of his life." Rather than give himself to a deforming kind of bitterness, Churchill instead said, "I'm going to live out my father's legacy. I'm going to make a success of what he left undone," and instead Winston Churchill, a lot of what he achieved came about because he was saw himself as living out his father's mandate, whereas another man might've descended into drunkenness and suicide because of the hatred of Lord Randolph.
I think that's what I most admire and it really says something to men. Doesn't matter what kind of man your father was, even if he never told you a kind thing in your whole life, if you can just find some part of his life to live out his legacy, maybe he was a drunken fool, but every Easter, he'd hand out eggs to the kids on the streets or whatever, some small thing that you can pluck out of your father's life, even if he was not a good man, then that can become a mandate for you, that can become a sense of empowering destiny for you. That's what Churchill did that I most admire. He has many, many things that I've patterned myself after and I'm mentored by, but taking his hateful father's legacy and making it his own and allowing that to fuel him to greatness is I think a largely unknown, but essential part of the Winston Churchill story.

Peter King: That's such a powerful reframe. I was given some great advice many years ago that's along those same lines. It said, "Your father is pushing the football," to use a football metaphor here, "to pushing the football as far down the field as he can. Of course, he's trying to get it in the end zone, whatever that means to you, but that we as sons can pick up the football where he left off and push forward down the field."
I think what that helped me do just in my relationship with my father is to understand that sure, I can fault him for this, that or whatever, but to recognize that he got the football way back further than where I got it and he was able to push it so much further down the field so that by the time I really came online and started to be aware of all this that man, I'm so grateful that I didn't have to deal with what he dealt with and now I can pick it up and move it forward, and not have the resentment tying me down, which is I think somewhat similar to the story that you were just talking about with Winston Churchill.

Dr Mansfield: I want to say, too, that and this is really important for a lot of men 'cause for a lot of men, they feel somehow tainted by their father's legacy passed on to them, but I know men whose fathers were for the most part not very good men, but they found one thing, just one thing that they could pluck out of their father's life. The illustration I just use as an example, I knew a guy whose father was a drunk. He lost jobs, beat his mother, on and on and on. But every Easter, for whatever reason, his father would go out and buy chocolate eggs and then boil eggs and paint them and all that kind of stuff, and he'd walk the neighborhood giving out eggs to kids around Easter time. I can't even explain why he did it suddenly, why he became the Easter bunny when he'd been a demon all year.
But my friend said, "Look, my father loved children. He cared about people. He cared about Easter even though maybe he had to clear a drunken haze to get there. I'm going to take that as a mandate." My friend has developed organizations that care for the poor and gone on and prospered, and gives a lot away. All of it comes out of a sense of mandate from his father who otherwise might've left him a drunken failure by the side of the road as he nursed his bitterness about his father.
I couldn't agree with you more. My father was a war hero and a high ranking military officer, and I could sit around and belly ache for the rest of my life that he didn't hug me and love me and take time with me or understand me, or I can take his life as a mandate to go and achieve and serve noble causes and accomplish things. I think that's what we men have to do 'cause most men, I hate to say it, most men have some troubling relationship with their father. Once they get over their initial pain and bitterness, the key is to pick through the rubble of the father's life if it's that bad and find something that can become a mandate.

Peter King: You've been mentioning this idea of the mandate either possibly brought to someone's experience through God or through their own recognition of what's needed. How do you know what the mandate is?

Dr Mansfield: You find the thing that resonates most with your life in the life of your father. I've never served in uniform. The times of my life did not work out that way, but my father served noble causes. He served behind the Iron Curtain serving the cause of freedom and he loved his nation. I thought about all that and it became an influence to me. I want to serve noble causes. I want to protect the defenseless. I want to leave a legacy. When I go to my father's grave, the fact that he was a war hero, a decorated war hero, and served around the world, and achieved high rank, and no one in his family had even gone to college. He went to the military academy and so on.
I'm not bragging about him. I'm saying, "Look, if I can't find some sense of Stephen, here's a commission to you from your father from a prevision generation," then I'm just an idiot because this was a man who accomplished a great deal and even if he didn't invest in me personally, I can still sort of light a torch from his flames so to speak. Like I'm saying, that doesn't have to be that you walk in the same footsteps. If your father was a doctor, you don't have to be a doctor. I don't have to be an army officer because my father was, but to not descend into bitterness and anger and resentment, to light a torch, to go off and accomplish noble things inspired by even the slim sliver of an example from your father is something every man needs to do.
In fact, I know a guy whose father died before this young man was even aware of who he was, and his father had a bad reputation, but in my friend's older years, one guy who knew his father when he was growing up said your father was amazing when it came to this. It was one small thing, I won't go into it now, one small thing that he did, and he did for other people. In the midst of just boxes full of negative about his father he'd been told all his life, one guy told him one story that told him something good about his father and that ignited all kinds of things in my friend's soul and gave him a sense of mission and purpose. Again, guy was already accomplished. He was already an MD and practicing medicine, but there'd always been this sort of weight in his soul when it came to what he received from previous generations.
Anyway, the point is to pick through the rubble, find the good stuff, let it be a general inspiration to you because the way you view your father is often the way you're going to view yourself. If you see him as a bum, you'll know you're there's a bum nature in you. What we want to do is have you see yourself as being projected forward by something good and noble out of your father's life.

Peter King: That's very profound. That's probably worth a little bit of self reflection right there.

Dr Mansfield: Yes. Yeah. All of us are in that situation. I don't care if your father was president of the United States. He still had his idiotic parts and you still got to pick through the rubble and choose what to be propelled by.

Peter King: Absolutely. I mean I think this is an excellent guide for men that are looking for something deeper, for looking for a deeper purpose, but do you feel that it's necessary? When you talk about this idea of a mandate and its connection to one's father, is that absolutely necessary or could it be maybe you were just born and you were gifted in playing the guitar? It has not necessarily any relationship to your father or do you feel that there always needs to be a connection to your father?

Dr Mansfield: I would say it doesn't have to always be your father, but I will say we are made to be part of something that precedes us, flows through us, and carries into the future. Now that can be tribal. That can be family. I have a friend whose father was the one screw-up in his entire family. Everybody else was fairly accomplished and moral and respected and so, he drew from the broader family rather than from his specific father who was sort of the misbehaving black sheep of that family.
I have another friend whose parents were both tragically killed just shortly after he was born. He never knew them. He didn't really know much about their families, but he was part of an ethnic tribe that was noble and literally had a chief ... This is in the Middle East and so, he drew from the positive of his tribe and used that and let that be a mandate, even though he never knew much about his own personal background.
I think we are meant to have a legacy passed down. We are meant to leave a legacy. We are meant to receive from a legacy. We're meant to have a heritage. That can be as broad as, "Hey, I'm an American. I want to serve noble causes." It can be as broad as, I don't know, I've got native American friends who are like "Look, I'm part of the wolf tribe amongst the Cherokee and we've always been such and such, and I'm going to live that out." The point is we are all meant to have a heritage and for men, that sense of heritage is meant to come most immediately from our fathers. If we can't find it there, it can come from other places, but we should deal with it first. The main thing is no man should live his entire life living out the implications of bitterness and anger towards his father. There are more noble and healthy ways to go, and that's the things I like helping men do.

Peter King: It's such a noble and worthy cause right now. There just seems to be such a deficit in real masculine leadership and so such powerful work right now. I admire what you're working on. I have a question. I was looking at some of the other books that you wrote. I know we're a little bit short on time, but I'd love to just ask you The Faith of George Bush and then, you ended up writing The Faith of Barack Obama as well. I was curious what you learned out of those two books.

Dr Mansfield: I love writing about the faith of leaders and how their faith inspires them. Two very different men, two very different religions, George W. Bush was from this noble New England family that transplanted out to West Texas Oil fields and he was sort of the family screw-up. He was sort of the family drunk. Then he found an Evangelical version of faith right about the time he turned 40 and it really changed him. It really changed him. He stopped drinking. He began to learn more about his faith, more about the Bible, began to get good mentors and that was right before he became governor of Texas. Really, his public political life grew out of his faith and the values that it gave him. It was a conservative, traditional, sort of evangelical methodism is probably what it was.
Barrack Obama, very different situation, we all know that he grew up largely fatherless. He had a biological father, obviously, but the man never connected with him. He was ruthless. He was a ruthless wanderer by his own description. Then he also came to a profound faith fairly early in his life and was baptized and welcomed into the church of Jeremiah Wright. Theologically, left leaning, whereas George W. Bush was theological conservative; political left leaning, whereas George W. Bush's mentoring was politically conservative, but both men, their personal lives and their politics animated by a version of faith. I'm kind of known in DC and elsewhere for making the case that Barrack Obama was serious about his faith. He believed the core of the Christian gospel as traditionally handed down and then, he was very left leaning theologically and left leaning politically, and George W. Bush was the opposite. What I'm fascinated with is how a man's public life becomes animated by a faith that is sincerely held, and that was I think the strength of those two books and they did very well. I'm very grateful to have written them.

Peter King: Yeah. Yeah. The dichotomy between the two of those is quite diverse and fascinating. I have not read them yet, but I'm looking forward to reading them. How much more time do we have? Do you have a few more minutes?

Dr Mansfield: Yeah, I've got a few more minutes.

Peter King: I'd love to ask you a little bit about The Miracle of the Kurds, the book that you wrote and what your current thoughts are on what's going on in the Middle East right now?

Dr Mansfield: It's a great time to ask me that 'cause I've just recently returned from another trip to Iraqi Kurdistan where I was working with the Kurds. On September 25th of 2017, the Kurds are going to have a referendum on independence. That means everybody in Iraqi Kurdistan is going to vote on whether they want to break off and be independent from the rest of Iraq. Iraq is a failing state. It's coming apart at the seams so the Kurds are almost certainly going to vote almost unanimously for independence. That will begin a series of negotiations with Baghdad for a Kurdish independence. It will also bring the attention of the UN to the whole matter. Of course, the US is the key to this thing, but I think that the Iraqi Kurds are going to form the world's next new nation.
I've been privileged to work with them, and advise them, and help with aid within their borders for many years, and now what I was doing this last time was advising them on the religious liberty clauses in their constitution. They realized they're going to have to have ... Really, they should present their constitution to the world. They've had kind of a draft constitution sort of bubbling along for a while and now, they're getting more formal about it. I've been advising them on those religious liberty aspects of their constitution, meeting with their religious leaders, and looking at how they can have religious liberty there in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The good news is that a pro-democratic, pro-Western, moderately Islamic, even pro-Israel in many cases independent republic is going to arise in the belly of the Middle East here very soon and I think the United States should be supporting it. So that's why I'm helping over there. I first got involved in all this by the way when I was living in Nashville Tennessee and when Saddam was persecuting the Kurds, thousands of Kurds poured into Nashville Tennessee because there had been some leading Kurdish families there for a while. I began, like other people there, to help and to teach them English and to help them get driver's licenses and jobs and so on, and that's what brought me in connection with the Kurds.

Peter King: I was going to ask you. That's fascinating. They came here and you established those connections here. That's fascinating.

Dr Mansfield: Yes.

Peter King: Oh, man. Wow. I feel like there's so many other things that I want to talk to you about and to dive into, but we've covered a lot of different topics in the near hour here that we've been chatting and like I said, I know we're short on time. I want to be respectful of that. Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time today and chatting about all these different things. It's important work. I think what you're doing is a great lighthouse for many other men who are aspiring do somewhat similar things in creating a more noble culture for masculinity in our world today and so thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your journey with us as well and being so open about your experience.
I do want to ask you actually really quick before we go, I made a note while we were talking, one of the things that I've noticed about many great leaders that I've been exposed to in the last several years is their ability to story tell. Is that intentional with you? You're a great storyteller. Did you develop those skills or is it just natural to you? What's your perspective on that?

Dr Mansfield: No, I had to learn that over time. I had to get better at it. I was pretty bad at it when I first started, but I think when you want to communicate with people, story is the easiest way for the human brain to assimilate information and if you're going to be an effective leader, you have to be a good storyteller. You have to be able to tell a story in 15 seconds just walking somebody through the plant floor or you have to be able to tell a great story in 30 minutes in a major speech in DC. The stories you tell ... Ronald Regan was great at this as a politician. Churchill was great at this. Margaret Thatcher was great at this. [Golda Meir 00:48:36] was great at this.
This is an essential part of leadership because ultimately, here's what I know for sure, in six months the gentlemen who are listening to this podcast will remember the stories you and I tell more than they will remember any data that we gave them or any current analysis or anything of that nature. They'll probably remember my Abu John story more than they'll remember anything else I've told them. If you want to have an impact on people, you got to be a good storyteller. I wasn't good at it initially, and I've gotten a little bit better now just through practice and through asking the feedback of other people, and through studying really good storytellers. So appreciate you asking me. Yeah, that's an essential part of certainly our culture of manhood, but also of leadership.

Peter King: Yeah, absolutely. Let's wrap it up there. Stephen, thank you again. I appreciate your time and look forward to maybe doing one of these again in the relative near future. Thank you again for all the work that you're doing.

Dr Mansfield: I look forward to it, Peter. Thank you.

Peter King: All right. Take care.

Dr Mansfield: Hey, buddy. Bye-bye.

Peter King: Bye-bye.