In honor of Veterans Day, we asked CEOs to share a memory of something special that someone has done for them. Following are personal narratives from multiple CEOs.
Jeremy D. Wacksman
Chief Executive Officer, UPS
As a child growing up in the South, I had a grandfather who came from the late 1800s. He told a great story about the day in the 1920s when he was a young soldier who had gone to Washington to help teach African Americans to vote. The white political leadership had threatened to send them back to the South, where they could not vote, if they participated in the vote. It was a very unique example that occurred way before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that helped desegregate schools and threw out legal obstacles to voting.
Larry Kudlow
President and CEO, Waukesha, Wis.-based Kenosha Industries
Larry Kudlow, president and CEO of Waukesha-based Kenosha Industries, served four years in the 1970s as director of the FCC in a time when Ronald Reagan was chairman. He took a Republican approach to the job, at least the way he understood the job, and brought back some traditions from what he called “the golden era” of FCC appointments. During his tenure, he held hearings on the strictest federal telephone privacy rules in the nation and on the national encryption standard.
“It’s less likely that you will be able to keep a telephone conversation secure, or encrypt it — it should be encrypted with the strongest standards available,” Kudlow said. “We have got to come back to making sure that those standards are going to be adopted at the FCC.”