Five Leadership Lessons from Robert Mueller

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I had the opportunity Monday to deliver the “Public Service Plenary” to the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration, and it gave me the chance to pull together a series of thoughts I’ve had over the last year about the value of government, what we owe our public servants, and the terrible moment we’re experiencing right now as we watch the roll-back of the some of the greatest human accomplishments of the 20th century. I spent much of Sunday, also, working in my hotel room to distill some of the core leadership lessons that Robert Mueller always talked about.

I wanted to share the talk — and those distilled leadership lessons — with you today as a special column:

“Wear a White Shirt” — The Leadership Lessons
of Robert Mueller and the Greatest Generation

American Society of Public Administration — Monday, March 23, 2026

By Garrett M. Graff

One of the fun things about writing a lot of American history, as I have had the chance to do over the last 20 years is that you get to see how the same cast of characters appear and reappear across eras.

I’ve come to think of my work as encompassing its own “historical cinematic universe,” akin to my personal Marvel Cinematic Universe or DC Universe, where all the comic heroes and villains live and interact. My work encompasses a living cinematic universe of our time, where all of the books and stories reflect and interact with each other and the “characters” cross from one book to another.

Dwight Eisenhower, one of the stars of my D-Day oral history, has been a major “character” in two of my other books, including RAVEN ROCK — about the Cold War nuclear war plans and all that comes after August 7, 1945 — and WATERGATE, where he chooses and promotes a young Richard Nixon as his vice president. Enrico Fermi — one of the stars of my most recent book on the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb — during a postwar lunch at Los Alamos, asks the most famous question in extraterrestrial studies: If life is so common across the universe, he ponders, where are they? That “Fermi Paradox” gets its own chapter in my UFO book. Bill Cooper, one of the leading UFO conspiracists of the 1980s, was a star character in my LONG SHADOW podcast on the rise of the far-right, as his talk radio show helps inspire a young Austin public access host named Alex Jones. Much of the fun of learning history to me has always been understanding why the world is today the way that it is.

One of my favorite “GMG historical cinematic universe” appearances comes, though, from Elliott Richardson, the brave and courageous attorney general who Friday’s lecture by Juliette Kayyem is named after.

Many people today forget just how many famous names there were in the assault fleet on D-Day, June 6, 1944 — from writer Ernest Hemingway to the actor Henry Fonda to future baseball star Yogi Berra, and future actors Alec Guinness, the Obi-Wan Kenobi in Stars Wars, who piloted a British landing craft, and James Doohan, the Canadian who would play “Scotty” in Star Trek and who was bound for Juno Beach, as well as a young aspiring writer named J. D. Salinger and a young medic named Elliot Richardson, who would later be one of just two men in history to hold four separate presidential Cabinet appointments.

Here’s how Richardson recalled that day on the beaches in Normandy:

Lt. Elliot L. Richardson, medical platoon commander, 12th Regimental Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division: “The first hard thing I had to do after my unit landed on D-Day—a soldier [John Ahearn] with his foot blown off by an antipersonnel mine was lying in a patch of barbed wire just back of the dune line. He was in agonizing pain. Someone had to get to him. I stepped carefully across the barbed wire, picked up the wounded soldier, and retraced my steps. All I could do was put down one foot after another, hoping each time that nothing would go off.”

Richardson, who would go on to be Richard Nixon’s attorney general, later said that this minefield rescue was the only moment of his life that compared to the stress of the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973.

“All I could do was put down one foot after another, hoping each time that nothing would go off.”

I raise Elliott Richardson and his model of courage and integrity in public service because this weekend we lost probably the closest figure we’ve seen in American history to Richardson since — Robert Mueller, the longtime FBI director, who died on Friday.

As some of you may know, I had the chance to get to know Robert Mueller — a famously reticent and spotlight-averse Washington figure — intimately in a way few journalists ever get to know a subject. When he was FBI director, I spent dozens of hours interviewing him, shadowed him through his workdays and traveled repeatedly with him across the country on the FBI director’s jet; interviewed scores of people about his history and career, including his wife, best friend, and closest aides, and wrote the closest thing that exists to a biography of him — the first of thus far four books I’ve done that focus heavily on the bureau — as well as the definitive story about his time in Vietnam, which influenced the course of his life in myriad ways.

I’ve described him over the years as “America’s straightest arrow,” but more than that he was also a public servant in a style and tradition that we see less and less of in modern life — someone who devoted a half-century of his life to public service. In the summer of 2001, he was nominated and confirmed 98-0 as the sixth director of the FBI. In the years ahead, he would become the first to complete the ten-year term imposed after Hoover’s half-century reign and would be extended by Congress and President Obama another two years, this time by a vote of 100-0. In the end, he was appointed to senior roles in six consecutive presidential administrations of both parties.

Bob Mueller might have been the last person in the US government that both parties agreed upon and respected beyond reproach.

It wasn’t necessarily what I intended to talk about today, but I spent yesterday gathering five leadership lessons that Mueller tried to impart to everyone around him.

1) Make Your Bed

Mueller found his way to public service through Vietnam. He’d had an old-style patrician upbringing — son of a Dupont executive and World War II veteran — the captain of a sub chaser — went to boarding school at St. Paul’s and then to Princeton. There, in the mid-1960s, he followed in the footsteps of his classmate and lacrosse teammate David Hackett, who ended up being killed in Vietnam while Mueller was joining the Marines.

“One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

To say that there were not a lot of blue blood Princeton grads signing up for Vietnam in the mid-1960s is an understatement, but Mueller did — and he served with distinction — he received a Bronze Star for leading his unit, 2nd Platoon, Hotel Company of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, in a battle for a hilltop known as Mutter’s Ridge in December 1968. Then, in April 1969, he was wounded in another firefight, receiving the Purple Heart and the Navy Commendation Medal. He came back to the US and sent off an application to the University of Virginia in hopes of becoming a prosecutor. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Most of all, the military instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline. One day after he’d been director, we were talking he told me how he still made his bed every day as the Marines had taught him. I well-knew and kidded him about his strait-laced reputation, so I laughed and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller insisted it mattered — it was an important, small daily gesture, one of his life lessons on follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it — do it,” he said. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. It’s an element of discipline — you’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Once you think about it — do it. It’s not actually about making the bed at all — it’s about being disciplined, focused, and not procrastinating. Once you think about it — do it.

2) Don’t kill the messenger.

This is a lesson Mueller aspired to achieve more so than he did in reality — but for any leader, it’s one of the toughest challenges: How do you ensure you get bad news? How do you, in turn, deliver bad news? Mueller saw much of his role as FBI director as making sure that he achieved and understood “ground truth,” what was really happening in the country, in the bureau, and in investigations.

Mueller was what he called “an aggressive listener,” because he saw briefings as not just listening — “It’s following up to make certain you understand, following up to make certain you understand what the next step is, whether you can make a decision or give direction for further action.” And, as he stressed, “I want also in any briefing to know the sourcing of the information I am being given.”

Mueller was famously attuned to what he called “weasel words” — the words in a briefing or a meeting that indicated that someone either didn’t fully understand what they were talking about or that there was some uncertainty in the information being provided. So-and-so-suspect is “linked to” or “associated with,” or Mueller’s least favorite: “Whenever I saw the FBI is ‘aggressively investigating.’ Well, what the hell does that mean?”

As Mueller said to me, “I never chastised anybody giving me more information — I’ve only chastised persons for not give me enough information.”

One of his briefers wrote over the weekend, “He valued precision, concision, and detail…. When I gave Director Mueller bad news, he didn't shoot the messenger. Instead, we all perceptibly leaned back as he fixed his stare at the responsible party down the table. I can still picture the eyes of the much more senior officials around me lighting up with a combination of ‘hoo boy’ and ‘glad it's not me-this time’ as the grilling commenced. And when it was my turn to have a bad morning, my comfort was knowing I'd have a fresh shot at meeting his high bar the very next day.”

But there’s more to management and leadership than what’s in a briefing book — in many ways, some of the most important things in any organization are never written down, the ingrained culture, the institutional biases, and what’s really happening in the organization day-to-day. In that sense, a key part of that for him was making sure that he had deputies and advisors — in the bureau they were known as special assistants or counselors — who wouldn’t be afraid to tell him the truth or to cut against the grain of conventional wisdom and habits in the very staid, hierarchical bureau.

Be confident enough as a leader that you can “rely on people who were not afraid to tell [you] what people actually think.”

Part of that goal of transparency and honesty with him was that he always feared his staff and team would try to “protect him” from information or decisions. “They want to keep you from issues where you get mucked up and they want to ‘save’ you — preserve and protect you. The fact of matter is, yeah, it would be nice, but there is no such thing as ‘protection.’ Any decision made by anybody in that institution is my decision — and so don’t try to protect me from it. At least alert me to what the hell is happening if you're not going to let me decide.”

Which brings me to the related:

3) Take care of your people — and surround yourself with the best.

Whenever I talked with Director Mueller — someone who bore an immense responsibility for our nation’s safety day in and day out for a dozen years — he always said his hardest days and hardest decisions were about people. “The hardest decisions you make are personnel decisions, because you are impacting not just the individual there, but his family, his friends, his associates, his esteem. It's one of the hardest and most unpleasant aspects of leading.”

In hiring, he tried to select for four things: judgement, maturity, ability to get along with others, and open to change. Everything else is negotiable. And part of being a good leader and manager is ensuring that your team has, themselves, a good team that complements their own strengths and weaknesses. As he saw it, “There is no one person who has all the attributes you're looking for to fill any particular job, if there are five important attributes, the most any person will have is three. But what you have to do is try to identify those particular attributes and then have somebody in a position nearby to complement that particular person. Over a period of time, the group shifts —and when you change one piece, then you have to account for that so the mix stays optimal.”

One thing he couldn’t tolerate was meanness. “This, again, was a lesson that that you learn in the Marine Corps — one of them is no PDA — no personal display of aggression and meanness generally.”

4) Wear a white shirt.

On his first day as FBI Director James Comey wore a blue shirt to the office — it was a subtle but instantly recognizable statement that there was a new guy in charge who wasn’t Bob Mueller. Mueller as director had worn white shirts, plain ties, and dark traditional suits with almost a religious devotion — and he expected everyone else around him to do the same as director. It was the same unofficial official uniform that J. Edgar Hoover had enforced as director; and I joked — not joked — in my original profile about him in 2008 how “colored shirts are worn at one’s own peril. The head of the bureau’s public-affairs division, John Miller—a former ABC investigative reporter who interviewed Osama bin Laden in the 1990s—tries to sneak in a colored shirt on occasion, but Mueller will look down the table at the 9 am staff meeting and ask, ‘John, what exactly are you wearing?’”

People had long assumed that the white shirts were just him being fastidious and strait-laced. But years after he was director, I off-hand asked him at one point: Why the cult of the white shirt? Mueller was not much interested in introspection, and so I was all the more surprised that his answer was actually the most philosophical thing I ever heard him answer. He immediately launched into how as FBI director after 9/11 he knew he was leading the bureau through a disorienting and wrenching period of change — transforming a traditional domestic law enforcement agency into an international intelligence agency focused on counterterrorism, one as focused on disrupting and preventing crime and terrorism as it was in investigating, arresting, and prosecuting past crimes — and he felt it critical that as he led the FBI into a new future that his style of dress represent a recognizable totem of the bureau’s future. The bureau in the 2000s, after all, was still not that far-removed from the era of J. Edgar Hoover — its corps of executive leaders, who all had 20 to 25 years of service, had all been trained by men who had been hired and trained by Hoover. The white shirt represented their tradition and nodded to the bureau of old. Mueller’s answer was a masterclass in leadership and change management in a few short sentences.

To Mueller, it was about that you can’t change everything at once. “If you want to affect change, you cannot affect overarching, overwhelming change — and expect it to be effective. We have to prioritize and pick those particular areas that need change, but then emphasize other areas of stability. As a result of September 11, I came to recognize fundamental change cut across the basic elements of the Bureau — how you hire, how you train, how you operate — all had to undergo fundamental changes. It couldn't be done that way — you had to pick up pockets of support and do it piecemeal to build acceptance of the system. You have to prioritize the changes you want to make and then co-opt segments of the institution to support it so that you build an acceptance for that change over a period of time.”

As you lead and manage, focus on the most important change — drive the most important change — and ensure that your teams and organization can recognize what they’re doing and why. The FBI might have radically changed under Robert Mueller, but if J. Edgar Hoover had walked into the 7th floor director’s suite, he would have instantly recognized his bureau. As you think about change in your own organizations, don’t forget to think about what your own white shirts are — and how you can preserve them too.

And lastly:

5) In the end, it is not only what we do, but how we do it.

This was one of his favorite refrains: “Whatever we do, we must act with honesty and with integrity. There are no gray areas here; there should be no room for doubt. Regardless of your chosen career, you are only as good as your word. You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, and indeed persuasive. But if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer. And once lost, a good reputation can never, ever be regained. As the saying goes, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

It’s this last point that feels so poignant and important to me. Time and time again this past year, I’ve been thinking about the failure of our system of checks and balances. It turns out, in the end, that there’s only one check and balance that actually matters: Good character. Everything else in a constitutional system follows and relies on that simple foundation.

I’ve spent the last twenty years covering national security and have, over the years, interviewed or met almost every senior decision-maker in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement from the 21st century — FBI, CIA, NSA, and ICE directors, CBP commissioners, the directors of national intelligence, and most of this century’s attorneys general, DHS and defense secretaries and secretaries of state, not to mention dozens of sub-Cabinet officials — the deputies, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries who make up the day-to-day decision-making at most levels of government. Many I’ve gotten to know quite well. Some are good friends.

Prior to January 2025, almost to a person I trusted that they took seriously the rule of law and their constitutional obligations under their oaths of office. I didn’t always agree with their decisions and sometimes debated with them the morality underlying their decisions, but never once doubted that there had been a robust discussion and debate about the legal and constitutional obligations behind the scenes before they made their decisions.

For generations, we have been protected from doubt, uncertain fates, and problems because voters chose leaders of both parties with good character who, in turn, appointed people of good character, who, in turn, were constrained by a professional, nonpartisan, and merit-based civil service of good character that took seriously their oaths to serve the Constitution and not an individual.

Once you elect or appoint someone who has no moral core — who then appoints people with no moral core and fires those who do — nothing else in the system of checks-and-balances turns out to matter.

Which brings me to the final topic I want to address today. Why America is struggling right now — it is no coincidence to me that this is all happening is exactly 80 years after the end of World War II.

The scale and scope of World War II is almost impossible to fathom—a war that consumed entire continents and raged across entire oceans. Estimates of the war’s full toll stretch north of sixty million, including 15 million combatants and 45 million civilians, largely Chinese and Russian, as well as the six million Jewish people killed in the Holocaust. Perhaps two million died in the battle of Stalingrad alone, and in a single night of firebombing, the US killed around 100,000 people in Tokyo, the deadliest single night of warfare in human history.

The 80th anniversaries that have passed us by in recent years feel especially poignant as they marked an unofficial final passing of the generation who won that greatest of all wars. The National World War II Museum estimates that less than one percent of the US’s 16.4 million veterans from that war are still alive.

Along the way, as I’ve spent the last four years writing about World War II and I’ve watched the modern-news unfold, I’ve come to believe that in losing the World War II generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, or the memories of working in homefront factories building aircraft in Willow Run in Michigan, landing craft at Higgins Industries in New Orleans, or manufacturing uranium in Oak Ridge, Tenn., as part of the Manhattan Project.

We are losing, too, the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism.

Losing the last of Greatest Generation means we are losing the last of the generation who understand just how evil actual fascism is, how hard it is to rid the world of authoritarian governments once they’re established, and how hard it is to build a successful alternative.

Losing the Greatest Generation means we are losing the last of the men who stormed ashore at D-Day, the last ones who fought for every bloody square meter of Pacific jungle, and the last of the men who fought their way into Berlin and liberated Nazi concentration camps, seeing first-hand the worst humans can do to one another.

But that also means that we’re losing the generation who had the understanding and magnanimity and saw the necessity to build what came next — the men and women who pushed to found the United Nations and NATO, to implement the Marshall Plan and reconstruct Europe and rebuild Japan, and to build on the Bretton Woods agreement with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and to found international aid efforts like USAID and the Peace Corps. It was a generation that, at home too, understood the unique opportunity and benefit that would come from investing in science and education, from building government partnerships and support for higher education and medicine.

They were a generation not just of fighters, but of builders and dreamers.

It’s easy to look eight decades later at these institutions and criticize them as imperfect — to point out their very real flaws and say they’re too moribund or sclerotic to respond to modern day problems. It’s much harder to look at them and celebrate the reality that they worked — for eight decades, they have helped the world not be perfect but be better than it was, and, above all, they kept the peace, providing an all-but unprecedented period of global prosperity and peace between the great powers.

At the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower — a man who had much to celebrate across his career — declared at the end of his time in the White House that perhaps his proudest accomplishment was seemingly the most basic: “We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen.”

Eisenhower never felt he got the credit for keeping the peace; going to war is easy, he knew — keeping the peace was harder.

We have government because we want our country to be a great place to live, work and play. As all of you know, our cynical caricature of government is wrong. Far from being riddled with and corrupted by waste, fraud, abuse and laziness, government is (or was) filled with people working hard — people painfully aware that they’re stewarding government resources, doing so artfully under tight constraints, all of whom could be doing something for more money elsewhere.

Government is filled with the most thoughtful and caring people doing hard things for all the right reasons. As former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel says: “The quality of life we have, it’s all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast, and you don’t even know it.”

We forget how much safer and more secure daily life is today than it was even a generation or two ago.

More than that, though, in an age where billionaires and Silicon Valley geniuses try to tell us how to fix society, we must remember why we have government in the first place: Because no one else will do these things. There is no profit motive in much of the work you all do, no private business that will step in and spend years or decades solving these difficult challenges that we ask government to solve.

[As Dave Eggers wrote last year in the book “Who Is Government?”,] “If [government was] not doing it, it would not be done.”

The World War II generation uniquely understood that the natural state of the world and geopolitics was Hobbesian — freedom, democracy, and peace were not natural conditions of the world. They required active involvement, reinforcement, and hard, grinding, day-in, day-out effort to secure and extend.

Moreover, they knew intimately and up-close that the alternative to peace and freedom — fascism and war — was worse. America itself flirted with authoritarian fascism before. It’s easy to forget the model that Father Coughlin and other right-wing leaders of the 1930s offered Americans disenchanted with the Great Depression. But as fascism’s dark cloak descended across Europe — as secret police began demanding “papers, please” and kidnapping people off the streets and disappearing them to concentration camps, as Hitler’s government cracked down on free speech and expression, labeling critics “evil” enemies of the state, as they cut off access to science and education and demanded arts organizations fall in line, persecuted homosexuals, and closed borders to visitors — America made a different choice. It, along with a precious few allies like Great Britain, stood and fought for democracy when it counted most.

We now know that freedom and democracy prevailed, but for longer than we are comfortable to remember, it was a close-run thing. After, that generation of officials, policymakers, and veterans wanted to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, and they devoted their entire working careers to that task. Building the postwar architecture that has secured the world and underpinned a tremendous economic boom and elevation of global standards of living was neither easy nor a foregone conclusion after the war.

Their decisions and institutions were never perfect — America has never been a perfect country but for generations its goal has been to be one that gets better — and that postwar era reflected a broadly shared mission, aspiration, and belief that a safe and secure world was one that was good for Americans at home too.

For the 80 years since the end of World War II, the US model of innovation, trade, and economic hegemony has been built on a foundation of six seemingly inviolable traditions and policies held steady across both Republican and Democratic administrations: (1) easy access of immigrants to the US, particularly its unparalleled world-class schools and universities; (2) rich and steady government support of higher education, medical research, and laboratories; (3) broad and ever-more-frictionless trade access to US markets and, reciprocally, a flow of US products to the rest of the world; (4) a firm, unyielding, and unquestionable adherence to the rule of law at home that made the US a predictable and safe place to create, build, and do business at home; and (5) a similarly firm, unyielding, and unquestionable network of geopolitical alliances abroad that knitted together a security blanket that stretched around the entire globe, backed up by the most powerful and widest-ranging military ever seen in human history.

All five of those pillars helped firm up and underpin another equally critical pillar: (6) a politically independent and fiscally prudent monetary policy that established the US dollar as the world’s safest reserve currency. This made US Treasury bonds the savings bank for the entire world—for democracies and authoritarian regimes alike!—and made US banking networks and capital markets the place to be for any company looking for access to investors.

I would — for the purposes of today’s topic — add a seventh pillar too: We built and empowered a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based, career civil service and administrative state that we asked and allowed to do the best work it could — using objective data, science, and principles of good government to ensure the best policy outcomes for our society, regardless of the political party in charge.

Today, this system’s greatest achievements lie in things that don’t happen — recessions, depressions, and bank runs that never materialize, famines that don’t break out, wars that don’t start, nuclear conflicts that never occur, poverty that doesn’t crush lives, children who don’t die of measles, sanitariums filled with polio victims in iron lungs that don’t exist, and kids’ cavities that never develop. It’s easy to lose sight to what an achievement that has been precisely because, decade by decade, the awful things that used to happen all the time have slipped from living memory into history.

We’ve gotten so used to it that we can’t fathom how much work year after year, by hundreds of thousands of public administrators, bureaucrats, diplomats, soldiers, and scientists goes into making life boring — and none of us now are old enough to remember what life was like before.

The fact that most of the people you all serve will never know your names is in fact one of the greatest gifts government can give a people.

Instead of honoring that work and carrying it forward, though, today we have a generation of government leaders, from the White House to Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court to state houses across the country, who seem focused on speed-running the unwinding of those monumental human achievements. We are watching a new generation of reactionaries, neo-fascists, would-be authoritarians, and crack-pot science-conspiracy theorists who have grown up in the most peaceful, prosperous, and healthy age in human history undo some of the most magnanimous things humans have ever done for one another.

It is impossible to overstate the gift of security, wealth, opportunity, and sheer innovation that these foundational pillars of the US policy achieved for both the world beyond and Americans at home.

I worry, amidst all of this, that the type of person Robert Mueller was — a dedicated apolitical, nonpartisan public servant, a man more concerned with the good of the country than his own personal profit — represents a literally disappearing breed in Washington and across American government writ large.

For years, I had believed that the next FBI headquarters would be named in his honor and known as the Robert S. Mueller Building — but now I worry even more that it won’t be, and all that that failure to recognize his tradition and breed of public service will mean for Washington, the FBI, our politics, and our country.

If the United States is ever to succeed and thrive as a democracy again, we need to find, inspire, train, and elevate the next generation of Robert Muellers.

I hope as you return this week to the critical work that you all do day-in, day-out, work that I and your citizens and constituents will never know or understand, you think about and keep at the forefront of your mind how you can carry forward the great gifts bequeathed to us by the Greatest Generation.

And don’t forget to make your bed.

GMG

PS: If you’ve found this useful, I hope you’ll consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with a few friends:

PPS: This speech was based on and draws from a series of essays and columns over the last year, including “Remembering Robert Mueller,” “We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower,“ “The Only Check-and-Balance That Actually Matters,” “What We Lost When We Lost the Greatest Generation,” and “An ode to the remarkable people who make up the federal government.”