An interviewer who called on Gen. Ira C. Eaker when he was leading 8th Air Force against Germany found "a strikingly soft-spoken, sober, compact man who has the mild manner of a conservative minister and the judicial outlook of a member of the Supreme Court. But he is always about two steps ahead of everybody on the score, and there is a quiet, inexorable logic about everything he does." Of his own choice, Eaker would have separated from military service after World War I. He wanted to be a lawyer and he also toyed with the idea of running a country newspaper. In his off hours, he wrote books on aviation for junior readers. On the side, he studied civil law and found it "valuable mental training." On the eve of the Guadalcanal landing, Gen. A. A. Vandegrift's final order to his command ended with the stirring and now celebrated phrase: "God favors the bold and strong of heart." Yet in the afterglow of later years, the Nation read a character sketch of him which included this: "He is so polite and so soft spoken that he is continually disappointing the people whom he meets. They find him lacking in the fire-eating traits they like to expect of all marines, and they find it difficult to believe that such a mild-mannered man could really have led and won the bloody fight." When another officer spoke warmly of Vandegrift's coolness under fire, his "grace under pressure," to quote Hemingway's phrase, he replied: "I shouldn't be given any credit. I'm built that way." The point is beautifully taken. Too often the man with great inner strength holds in contempt those less well endowed by nature than himself. While there are no perfect men, there are those who become relatively perfect leaders of men because something in their makeup brings out in strength the highest virtues of all who follow them. That is the way of human nature. Minor shortcomings do not impair the working loyalty, or growth, of the follower who has found someone whose strengths he deems worth emulating. On the other hand, to recognize merit, you must yourself have it. _The act of recognizing the worthwhile traits in another person is both the test and the making of character._ The man who scorns all others, and thinks no one else worth following, parades his own inferiority before the world. He puts his own character into bankruptcy just as surely as does that other sad camp follower of whom Thomas Carlyle wrote: "To recognize false merit, and crown it as true, because a long tail runs after it, is the saddest operation under the sun." Sherman, Logan, Rawlins and the many others hitched their wagons to Grant's star because they saw in him a man who had a way with other men, and who commanded them not less by personal courage than by patient work in their interest. Had Grant spent time brooding over his civilian failures, he would have been stuck with a disorderly camp and would never have gotten out of Illinois.