We spoke to Old Member and former Rhodes Scholar Colonel John Tien Jr (PPE, 1987) about leadership, devotion to public service, and how it feels to be a trailblazer.
Your career is very multi-faceted, and you have had senior roles in the military world, the financial services sector, government, as well as academia. What has been the major similarity in your experiences of these worlds?
Leadership is universal. I have seen striking examples of both good and bad leadership across all these sectors. Fortunately, I have seen more good leaders than bad, and I think the common attribute for the good leaders is that they adopt the model of servant-leader. That is to say, they serve those who serve a broader mission. In many roles in the United States of America, you take an oath to defend the constitution to work for the good of the country and the good of the people of America. Our leaders take a similar oath of office, and it should act as their true north. The good leaders don’t just enable and resource their people, they also help them to develop and be the best version of themselves in order to support the broader mission. Bad leaders are usually pretty easy to pick out because they are the opposite of servant leaders. They are narcissistic, self-serving, and double-dealing; they are not honest or transparent and their motivation is very clearly not for the good of others.
Bad leaders are usually pretty easy to pick out because they are the opposite of servant leaders.
The main thread that runs through all your roles is a devotion to public service; what motivates you in your work?
I am a first-generation immigrant in the United States of America. My father was born in mainland China, and his father was a member of the Nationalist Chinese Party, effectively the opposition to the Communist regime, so they had to escape China to avoid persecution. They came to the US to build a life, and my father met my mother who was the daughter of immigrants. We lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and being a person of colour growing up in the 1960s was not the easiest experience. When it came to the time for college, my father advised me to consider West Point, the military academy. This was not my vision of the college experience. However, he said ‘you would not be in the United States of America, you would not be a US citizen with all the opportunities that this great country has to offer, had they not let us in.’ So I went, and once you go to a military academy, you start to realise the framework and the narrative of service to a larger cause.
You have served in the Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations. What have been the main challenges of working in government and how have these changed over the past two decades?
I could teach a whole class on that to the PPE students! Each administration had its own particular challenges, but a common thread for all of them was the challenge for the President to lead the whole population, not just those who voted for them, and to serve in the interests of all Americans. It was also a recurring challenge for the administration to assume the global responsibility that should go with being one of the largest democracies in the world.
In brief, specific challenges for Clinton were handling the post-Cold War opportunities and navigating the establishment of new structures, like the World Trade Organisation. For George W. Bush, the obvious challenge was responding to the seminal moment of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent new world order. Obama came into power on the heels of two big things: turning the corner on the war in Iraq and major financial crisis at home. Biden brought America economically, and from a healthcare standpoint, out of the grips of the global Covid-19 pandemic. These are the points I pick out because they are the things I worked on at the time and helped to support. (My roles in the administrations were as follows: I was in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in the Clinton administration as a White House Fellow; I was in the White House office of Iraq on the National Security Council (NSC) for President George W. Bush; I was the NSC Senior Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Obama; and I was the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, which had amongst its many responsibilities, to deliver hundreds of millions of vaccinations across the United States, for President Biden.)
Your career includes a number of firsts, such as being the first Asian American to serve as the First Captain and Brigade Commander (West Point’s top-ranked cadet position) and then the first Asian American to be confirmed as the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. How has that felt?
Although I didn’t realise it at the time when I was 22 and became the first-ever Asian American First Captain and Brigade Commander at West Point, Asian Americans sometimes had an externally and self-imposed “bamboo ceiling” of advancement. This unconscious and honestly, sometimes conscious, bias can be stifling. As a 22-year-old, however, all I knew was that I would be following in the footsteps of prior West Point First Captains who had gone on to lead the United States military in several global conflicts: Generals Pershing, Wainwright, MacArthur, and Westmoreland. Once I became First Captain and later the first Asian American to be confirmed as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I appreciated that I was a trailblazer, a role model, and now someone who needed to take on an additional responsibility to be both very good and very visible while attempting to do good. I certainly aspired to be the former and actively did the latter.
I appreciated that I was a trailblazer, a role model, and now someone who needed to take on an additional responsibility to be both very good and very visible while attempting to do good.
Upon your retirement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2023, you were awarded two of DHS’ highest civilian awards: the DHS Distinguished Service Medal, and the United States Coast Guard Distinguished Public Service Medal. What has been the proudest moment in your career?
In my almost 40-year professional career, I’m most proud of having led more than 1,100 U.S. Army Soldiers in combat during our 14-month plus long deployment in Iraq. Along with our Iraqi civil servant, police, and military partners, we massively improved stability and prosperity during some really difficult times for those communities. When I handed over governance and security responsibility to the Mayor of Tal Afar in late 2006, the people of Tal Afar cheered their leaders for being the kind of leaders they wanted and now trusted.
You have taught at both the United States Military Academy West Point (Political Science) and you are currently a Distinguished External Fellow at Georgia Tech. What do you enjoy about teaching and research?
When I retired from the U.S. Government Executive Branch in 2023, I knew that one way to give back would be to teach again at the university level. While I did not have a DPhil or PhD, I knew that I had decades of practical knowledge. Fortunately, the Georgia Institute of Technology has given me a chance to be both a Distinguished Professor of Practice and a Distinguished External Fellow to help our students with their education, research, and intellectual interests. I’m most inspired when after I finish a guest lecture, a student asks a particularly insightful question or shares a comment that they admit they hadn’t considered before I taught. Students today are amazingly self-reflective and very thirsty for new knowledge. I see my role as providing some practical context to what they want to learn about.
What made you choose to study PPE at Queen’s?
I wanted to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to read PPE because at West Point I had come to realise that I was very interested in International Relations. I was growing up in the mid-1980s during a time of pretty significant developments in International Relations and I wanted to be able to understand how countries interacted with each other and how they could protect national interests while also doing what was right for the world through democracy. PPE attracted me because I felt it could teach me the basis for how countries made decisions, how they operated from a policy standpoint, and then how they converted that into action both domestically and internationally.
The thing I really liked about Queen’s, and the reason I put it on my preference list, was its size. As a small to mid-sized college, I felt it was the perfect place for the college experience I wanted where I could know everybody in my cohort.
The thing I really liked about Queen’s was its size. As a small to mid-sized college, I felt it was the perfect place for the college experience I wanted.
What was your favourite place in Oxford?
Being on the river Isis. I had rowed at West Point and then joined QCBC, becoming Vice Captain in my second year. It was a great experience.
Can you tell us an anecdote from your time at Queen’s?
I got married between my first and second year at Queen’s. My wife and I then went on holiday to the Middle East over Christmas and decided to fly back the day after Christmas Day, not realising that Boxing Day is a holiday in the UK. There were no buses from the airport, so our round-trip tickets were no use. There were no mobile phones, no Uber. A guy offered to take us back to Oxford for cash so we went for it but I wasn’t completely comfortable with the whole thing having never done anything like that before, so I asked him to take us to Queen’s instead of our graduate married accommodation. When we got to the College it was all locked up, so we knocked on the big door and Sandy the Porter came out and asked why I was there on Boxing Day. I asked if we could come in and have some tea and toast in the MCR. Essentially, I was just after the security of the College. And he let me in; I was home.
What advice would you give to students at Queen’s today?
For today’s students at Queen’s College, I would recommend they engage in active discourse, debate, and conversation with their fellow students about what they are studying. Colleges and universities are unique in that they bring together at the same time, human beings who are thirsty for learning and are at relatively the same level of education. What a great environment and community in which to learn.
Can you recommend a book?
For our PPE students today, I have a number of books to recommend, but I’ll share just three: No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Hearts Touched With Fire by David Gergen; and Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.
