Real Influencers: Fourteen Disappearing Acts that Left Fingerprints on History

By Kenneth Weisbrode

What is influence and why might real influencers be those whose names we no longer remember? Ken Weisbrode embarks on an exploration to trace the most powerful strands of cultural and intellectual influence, and demonstrates it might not be what we think it is.

"The influencer is a person who made an art of absence in the trade of cultural and sometimes political capital. The ones in this book represent a range of vocations, from politics to diplomacy to novel-writing, but almost all were cultural entrepreneurs. They were not puppet masters, gray eminences, unsung heroes, or Svengalis––although one or two have been portrayed thus. Rather, their influence is spread by virtue of their willful disappearance, of its perpetuation of a new language and cultural standard, and of their many conscious and unconscious imitators. The reason they had such influence was precisely because a part of their method was to be less visible in order to watch their ideas, habits, and styles proliferate without their names necessarily being affixed. […] Yet, to understand such a modus operandi is necessary today when the proliferation of social media influencers are squandering cultural capital so quickly by the simultaneous promotion of their products, above all, themselves." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781587316920

Book preview

PREFACE

About twenty years ago I was asked by a friend to help with some research for a British university. I knew nothing about the topic, Iranian nuclear technology, but the pay was good and the job was easy. One day a few months into the project, my friend telephoned with some urgency: There were a few names that needed filling-in. I dropped everything and did as I was asked, thinking little about it. The next morning there was an article on the front page of the New York Times about this exact subject, with a couple of the sentences I had written reprinted verbatim and delivered as settled opinion. I had no idea how or why they ended up there. But, I wondered, is that how it’s done?

I’ve thought about this incident off and on ever since—and the it above, which is influence. A history teacher of mine once said it’s impossible to prove, and therefore a risky subject for anyone to take on. I believed him, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it, almost obsessively, making it the subject of my own work over the years. It cannot be proved; but it cannot be denied either. So how do we measure influence? How do we detect it? And how, if we are determined to be more than mere observers of life, do we exercise it?

I have used the convenient and predictable term fingerprint in the subtitle of this book. A fingerprint is usually not visible to the naked eye; a chemical solution and training are needed to detect it. It does not last forever, but it does last after the deed is done or the body that had been present is gone. It is, in other words, a temporary piece of history, not as fleeting as events themselves may be, and only in the smallest of ways a record of those events. Yet it exists for a time, and therefore has a history that may be significant.

The notion of the fingerprint is often used in literature and popular culture in such a manner. My own acquaintance with it (and the concept of influence) came by way of an unpublished memoir with the title, How Little Wisdom: Memoirs of an Irresponsible Memory . . . Written Solely But, Hopefully, for the Entertainment and Perhaps Edification of the Family; Diplomatic Memoirs are as Boring as Other People’s Snapshots or Operations. A portion of it was later published with the title Fingerprints on History. The author was a diplomat, Theodore Achilles, who happened also to be one of the principal authors of the North Atlantic Treaty. Nobody would know that had they not taken the time to find his fingerprints in the form of his initials and name on accompanying memoranda in official archives; or if by some chance they stumbled across his memoir, which I had done thanks to the generosity of an acquaintance who possessed a copy. But I had also known of Mr. Achilles. I had once worked for the organization that he founded, alongside a granddaughter, as it happens, and knew a thing or two about his career, although he had died a few years before all that. So I had a bit of the solution before finding the fingerprint, to be fair.

A good friend of Mr. Achilles was a man I knew well. His name was John Gray. He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known and had a great influence on me, or so I feel. He was an engineer and one of the youngest to work on the Manhattan Project. From there he ran the first civilian atomic energy station, at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. He also worked for some time for Admiral Hyman Rickover in the U.S. Navy.

John Gray was one of those men who are stereotypically described as soft-spoken, inconspicuous, yet almost Yoda-like figures. He was not tall, walked with a stoop, and usually wore a Greek sailor’s cap. One could pass him a hundred times on the street and fail to notice his face. He was not the sort of person who made an entrance. He spoke to me usually in short, sometimes cryptic sentences. Often he’d only nod or wink. The only really distinctive thing about his appearance or physical presence was the blueness of his eyes.

Somehow, I came to sense that John Gray knew just about everybody, in the energy industry, in the nuclear business, in private equity (he used to buy and sell companies), and probably in one or two other areas. I also came to feel that people like him, however unique they could seem to an impressionable young (or not so young) person, they were a dime a dozen in an imperial capital like Washington, D.C. How exactly do they wield influence? Where is the power in such influence; or what is the difference between power and influence, and why does the difference matter? Where do they acquire their ability to influence? Or do they just appear to have it?

John Gray had a simple method for influence: He once told me that about all you could hope for in life was to have real influence at the margins. He never told me what real influence and margins were, but he planted a seed in my thinking about the subject. My interest in the concept of influence, and the rationale for this little book of portraits, derives from that seed. I am less interested in figures of so-called great influence: the people who move mountains by inspiring millions of followers and altering the fate of the world. We know their names. Or in momentary influence of the contemporary variety, which seems to me less about influence and more about persuasion or compulsion. I am interested instead in a quieter type of influencer. Not necessarily more discreet or even less ambitious, but more deliberate in exercising influence at the margins and thereby leaving a lasting fingerprint, not only on the margins but sometimes at the center of human affairs.

The influencer in this book is a person who made an art of absence in the trade of cultural and sometimes political capital. The ones in this book represent a range of vocations, from politics to diplomacy to novel-writing, but almost all were cultural entrepreneurs. They were not puppet masters, gray eminences, unsung heroes, or Svengalis, although one or two have been portrayed thus. Rather, their influence is spread by virtue of their willful disappearance, of its perpetuation of a new language and cultural standard, and of their many conscious and unconscious imitators. The reason they had such influence was precisely because a part of their method was to be less visible in order to watch their ideas, habits, and styles proliferate without their names being affixed. If proliferation didn’t have an obvious imprint and reflect back on the taker well, so much the better, and so much the better does it happen. In a sense this is maximally hubristic. And deeply non-ascetic in disappearing. Yet, to understand such a modus operandi is necessary today when the proliferating social media influencers are squandering cultural capital so quickly by the simultaneous promotion of their products—above all,