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POLITICS
Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
47
PHOTOGRAPH BY JARED SOARES FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
○ “What are the values the Republican Party
stands for anymore? Rule of law? Really?”
JamesComey
On Leadership,
Trump, andWhy
He Left theGOP
Former FBI Director James Comey’s book,
A Higher
Loyalty,
made headlines for its barbed comments
about President Donald Trump. But Comey’s real
subject is leadership. On the eve of the irst anniver-
sary of his being ired by Trump, Comey sat down
for a wide-ranging talk on his time as a public ser-
vant, what makes a good boss, and how he rates two
men he’s worked for—Trump and the latest addition
to his legal team, Rudy Giuliani—as leaders.
Bloomberg Businessweek: You’ve had a lot of famous
bosses, yet the one you point to as the best is Harry
Howell, who ran the grocery store where you worked
as a kid. What did he have that presidents and top gov-
ernment oicials didn’t?
James Comey: The best leaders are a combination
of two pairs of attributes: They’re conident peo-
ple, but they also have humility to leaven that coni-
dence, and they’re tough and kind. What made me
want to please Harry so much is that he was able to
create an environment where we knew he loved us
but he kicked us in the butt. He was kind and tough,
and he had enough conidence that he wasn’t threat-
ened by us. Just the way he reacted to me destroy-
ing, by accident, a prototype label gun and dumping
a lake of milk in the back of the store, an insecure
boss could not react that way.
So you found higher levels of insecurity among top
members of the federal government than you did with
a grocery store manager?
Yeah. And in our current president I found a
much higher level of insecurity than I did in a man-
ager of a grocery store.
You explicitly draw comparisons between the mob
and President Trump. Did you struggle with whether
to include that?
Yes. In fact when the thought irst occurred to
me I pushed it away, convinced that it was too
dramatic. And it kept coming back. And so, yes,
I tried actually to not think that, but the leader-
ship styles were so strikingly similar, that’s why
it kept popping back in my head. I guess there’s
some risk that people think I’m saying the pres-
ident is robbing banks or breaking people’s legs
like a mob leader. I mean the leadership culture
is strikingly similar.
In what regard?
In that it’s entirely boss-centric. The only thing
that matters is what you can do for me. How does
the decision we’re going to make beneit the boss?
It’s all about the boss, not about any external values
or anything higher than that, and that’s the way the
Cosa Nostra family is run, and that’s why the com-
parison kept striking me.
Back when you were a young New York prosecutor in
the 1980s, your boss was Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S.
attorney for the Southern District of New York. Was
he a good leader?
No. At the time, I thought he was a cool leader.
I found it very exciting to work for someone like
that, but I had never led at that point. I’ve since
realized that the second U.S. attorney I worked
for, Helen Fahey, was a far better leader. She