I think it's important to pause at every point in your life to be reflective. How did I get here? Where am I going? Where should I go? And these are not easy choices. Most of these are above my pay grade. But one of the things that's really great about occasions like this is to reflect on people that did it the right way. And Dick Betts did it the right way.
The more you get to know the world, for a lot of people, the less you like it. And the more you get to know the world, the fewer heroes are in it. Dick Betts is a real hero. When you think, “how can I be a good person in a world that's not good?” Dick's career shows you one way to do that. It's not the only way, obviously - and Dick knows a thousand times more than I on every subject, including this one - but I think he's got a lot of interesting things that he shared over the years that turned out to be right. He has a really high batting average. And if you know Dick's writings, batting average is a big thing we all miss, right? But what separates people is how often they miss.
Dick was always the first one in the office and the last one out. Dick always said, when I go home, I give my family undivided attention. That work-life balance that the rest of us find so elusive? He found less elusive. He found a lot of success as a human being and as a scholar. And that's not impossible.
For a lot of us, we think nice guys finish first or last. In my experience, that's not true. That anytime you have extreme characteristics, they're independently correlated. That just happens. Which is why it's so extraordinary that people like Dick exist. He can talk more about this stuff, but I think you guys all need to run - don't walk - to your computer or a bookstore and get some of Dick's work. He's just smart and right about a lot of stuff, and where he's wrong, he's wrong in interesting and insightful ways. Not by much.
One of the things that's so rare about Dick is that guys like him don't exist as much as they should, or at all anymore, because the ability to to balance a bunch of different subjects, to look at things, as Dan said, in a liberal arts way from a bunch of different perspectives, is increasingly rare. People don't sit down and read everything they can get their hands on from a bunch of different disciplines, a bunch of different eras, a bunch of different countries. Dick does that right. He earns it the right way. And when he sits down and writes something, he has a literary flair that nobody can match today. He takes expressions seriously. The political writing is a political act, and he knows how to do it like nobody else. It’s like the stained glass windows in Chartres - nobody can quite figure out how they did it. Damascene steel - we lost the technology to do that kind of stuff. Or Greek fire. There's lots of examples of this. That's Dick Betts. Dick Betts is a decathlete. He can do stuff like the nuclear balance in a world class way. Military readiness, intelligence, surprise attack. If you've never read his collection of essays of American Force, I strongly recommend it to you as sort of your gateway drug to Betts-mania.
The more you know Dick Betts, the more you love him. A bunch of my friends told me, “be sure to tell Dick I'm his number one fan-boy!” And lots of you like, “oh, you're giving an award to Dick! Good guys finally get to finish first!” And I'm like, “yep. Couldn't wish it on a nicer guy.”
He also runs something called SWAMOS [Summer Workshop on Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy], which is a summer workshop on the analysis of military operations and strategy. I'm a Swami from ‘05, and hopefully some of you will at one point have the opportunity to get involved with it. It's small classes, but they mix military, brass and academics and try to get theory and policy mix, which is Dick’s wheelhouse. Again. Most people are sort of good at one and good at the other, but they can't blend them equally. Betts can do that, and SWAMOS is just nerd nirvana, right? Because you're surrounded by all these really smart people that have all these different interests, and then you're put together for 2 or 3 weeks and you argue about, “well, but why does that work?” and “what do you think?” and “no, no, where I come from, we think about this differently.” It's really fabulous. And it's a model for how intellectual exchange should go.
I want to say nobody deserves this award more than Dick Betts, and Dick Betts was a champion of “don't do stupid [stuff]” before that was a thing. And when it fell out of fashion, he did the right thing and he stuck by his guns. For all that and many other reasons, please raise a glass to Richard Betts.
Click to watch Dick Betts' Acceptance Speech
With editorial review from Kathryn Heyser '23
Originally published by at ndisc.nd.edu on January 10, 2025.