Saved for a Purpose: A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values

The son of a minister, James A. Joseph grew up in Louisiana’s Cajun country, where his parents taught him the value of education and the importance of serving others. These lessons inspired him to follow a career path that came to include working in senior executive or advisory positions for four U. S. Presidents and with the legendary Nelson Mandela to build a new democracy in South Africa. Saved for a Purpose is Joseph’s ethical autobiography, in which he shares his moral philosophy and his insights on leadership.   In an engaging and personal style, Joseph shows how his commitment to applying moral and ethical principles to large groups and institutions played out in his work in the civil rights movement in Alabama and as a college chaplain in California in the turbulent 1960s. His time later as vice president of the Cummins Engine Company provided an opportunity to promote corporate ethics, and his tenure as Under Secretary of the Interior in the Carter Administration underscored the difficulty and weight of making the right decisions while balancing good policy analysis with transcendent moral principles. In 1996 President Clinton selected Joseph to become the United States Ambassador to South Africa. His recollections of working with Nelson Mandela, whom he describes as a noble and practical politician, and his observations about what he learned from Desmond Tutu and others about reconciliation contain some of the book’s most poignant passages. Saved for a Purpose is unique, as Joseph combines his insights from working to integrate values into America’s public and private sectors with his long engagement with ethics as an academic discipline and as a practical guide for social behavior. Ultimately, it reflects Joseph’s passionate search for values that go beyond the personal to include the ethical imperatives that should be applied to the communal.

Table of Contents:
Preface  vii Acknowledgments  xi Prologue: A Plane Crash in the South Pacific  1 I. The 1950s: The Genesis of Moral Consciousness 1. Growing Up Black in Cajun Country 13 2. Sunday Mornings in Louisiana  23 3. On the Banks of the Mississippi  34 II. The 1960s: Applying Values to Social Movements 4. A Spiritual Journey at Yale  45 5. Alabama: The Search for an Ethic of Protest  54 6. California: The Other War on Campus  74 III. The 1970s and 1980s: The Application of Moral Reasoning 7. Cummins Engine Company: Capitalism with an Ethic  95 8. Debating Disinvestment: A Visit to South Africa  114 9. The Car ter Administration: Private Wants and Public Needs  128 10. Civil Society: Th e Public Use of Private Power  149 IV. The 1990s: Moral Lessons from South Africa 11. From Activist to Diplomat: Race and Reconciliation in South Africa  177 12. Dismantling Apartheid: The Unfinished Agenda  193 13. Ethics and Statecraft : What I Learned from Nelson Mandela  214 14. Presidential Diplomacy: The Clinton Visit to South Africa  232 V. The Twenty- First Century: Leadership and Public Values 15. Leaders Learning from Leaders  249 16. A Lexicon of Public Values: What the Virtuecrats Did Not Tell Us  264 Epilogue: Building Community by Design  277 Notes  285 Index  291

About the Author :
James A. Joseph (1935-2023) was Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke University. Joseph served as the United States Ambassador to South Africa from 1996 to 2000, and as the Under Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior from 1977 to 1981. He was the President and CEO of the Council on Foundations, Vice President of the Cummins Engine Company, and served as Chaplain of the Claremont Colleges. He was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Order of Good Hope, South Africa’s highest award to a citizen of a foreign country. Joseph was also the author of Leadership as a Way of Being, Remaking America: How the Benevolent Traditions of Many Cultures are Transforming Our National Life, and The Charitable Impulse: Wealth and Social Conscience in Communities and Cultures Outside the United States.

Review :
"Saved for a Purpose is a thoughtful and dignified analysis of moral and ethical leadership, timeless life lessons-nuggets of wisdom we would be wise to consider. We can hope that a more humanitarian approach and a cohesive code of ethics and morality would make for a less volatile world." - Brenda Brown Schoonover (American Diplomacy)