Dr. Robert Brescia, executive director of the John Ben Shepperd Public Leadership Institute at Odessa, Texas, is eminently qualified to speak about Americanism, leadership, ethics, and public service. A graduate of the Army War College and the Command & General Staff College as well as many other military schools, Brescia has twenty-seven years of public service as a soldier, NCO, and commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. His qualifications and awards include the U.S. Army Ranger Tab, Airborne qualification, the Department of the Army Staff Identification Badge, two citations of the Legion of Merit, four awards of the Meritorious Service Medal, the Southwest Asia Service Medal, the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal, and the Silver Rose.

In his subsequent automotive global business career, Brescia was recognized as one of the top five logisticians in North America. He graduated with distinction from the Executive Leadership Doctoral Program with George Washington University.

He is the author of Disruptive Power in American Discourse and The Americanism of John Ben Shepperd.

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

Robert Brescia

with foreword by Jeanine Pirro

Destination Greatness: Creating a New Americanism

Infinity Publishing

Politics and Social Sciences/Civics and Citizenship

978-1495812385 paperback, $15.95; also available as Kindle ebook, 248 pages

October 11, 2016

It is too late to drag the 2016 election out of its deep, dispiriting mud pit.

But Robert Brescia’s Destination Greatness: Creating a New Americanism likely will rank high on many reading lists once citizens and leaders begin searching again for ways to bring civility and sanity back to the national political scene.

Dr. Brescia, a leadership expert and executive director of the John Ben Shepperd Public Leadership Institute in Odessa, Texas, opens his noteworthy new book with a cautionary statement: “I am worried about us as Americans, because I am observing a trend of abandonment of what has made us great in the past. Too many Americans have lost the extraordinary bond between them and the nation. They don’t feel the same obligations to uphold, through their everyday behaviors and actions, the values that make us exceptional.”

He wrote Destination Greatness, he adds, to help describe “what Americanism is today and how we can improve as Americans.”

He emphasizes that “[g]reatness is not a political buzzword. No political party nor individual owns the word. It’s all about all of us together. Americans first—then Democrats and Republicans, or other affiliation afterward. Truly we need to be one in a worldview that holds America above the divisive and distracting political fray.”

But he cautions: “The Americanism that flourished after World War II and also during the 1980s is not the same Americanism that we experience today. The reason for that is simple: our society has dramatically changed since those days. Solutions that worked then will not work in the second decade of the 21st century. Our world is a lot flatter and much smaller. If ‘the whole world is watching,’ as the political demonstrators chanted in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, then you can magnify that same effect by a hundred or even a thousand in our times.”

In his book’s fifteen chapters, Dr. Brescia outlines a positive road map to American greatness that leaders at all levels could follow during the coming years and decades. The topics he covers range from finding and building upon common ground in a divided nation to improving American statesmanship and clarifying the role and powers of the states within a New Americanism. He calls for renewed emphasis on good ethics and using well-honed debate skills rather than hurling insults at political opponents. And, he contends, the president who emerges from the next election must know how to lead the nation starting on day one, without on-the-job training.

This is not a lengthy book, yet Destination Greatness is rich with worthy ideas and positive encouragements. Greatness can be achieved again within a United States of America, the author declares.

One of the first steps, of course, is healing the rancorous divide that roils and tarnishes our current political climate. In his new book, Dr. Brescia offers hope and belief that this can be accomplished. “You didn’t break it and it’s not your fault,” he insists, “but we will fix it together.”

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