The story goes that Vice President Alben Barkley was once told that a man he knew in political circles was badmouthing him. "Oh really?" Barkley replied. "What did I ever do for him?"
Ingratitude is one of the most unseemly vices but that doesn't keep it from being one of the most common. There can be something very binding in permitting someone to do something for you but accomplishing some great good for another can spark hidden resentment.
It is perhaps because of that danger that some of the smartest operators I've known go out of their way to make sure that their major good deeds are anonymous. They genuinely like the recipient and don't want any barriers to that friendship.
There is also the danger of getting too close. An official who'd worked in both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations recalled, "I must have had dinner with Johnson a hundred times and if you told me [senior JFK advisor Theodore] Sorensen never once had dinner with Kennedy, I'd believe it. Kennedy was more reserved, a strange man, he never asked you for anything, but he got absolute loyalty."
That's why the human relations of organizations can be so bizarre. We spend years studying the prose of leadership when we should be reading the poetry.
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