Hyper Competent Sidekick / Real Life

Politics

• Historians of Nazi Germany note, that Adolf Hitler enjoyed cultivating this trope to his benefit. He enjoyed playing the charismatic leader whose patronage and support was the sure and accessible path for lower-level and ambitious generals to reach to the top. This was codified by Ian Kershaw as "Working Towards the Führer" after a memo put forth by a low-level underling:
  "It is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the , to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work."
  — Werner Willikins State Secretary of the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, 21/2/1934
  • Heinrich Himmler (himself the pretty incompetent sidekick to Adolf Hitler), the man who supposedly carried out the Holocaust, had Reinhard Heydrich who carried out and created many of the ideas of the Holocaust. He was so vicious, it is said some of the Nazi officials who were his subordinates were more afraid of him than Hitler. This makes sense, as he created the concentration camps and the rest of the Final Solution.
  • Heydrich had a general tendency to be this - Hitler used him for literally everything. Olympics? Hitler put Heydrich in charge of preparing for them. Governing Moravia? Heydrich was made the governor of a territory with a vibrant resistance movement and compromised the resistance entirely. Running Interpol? Heydrich perverted it into being a vehicle of Nazi policy.
  • Hitler had several of these, something which was not hard to accomplish. The most notable examples would be Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, and Gerd von Rundstedt. Manstein was the general who masterminded the Fall of France, a command he achieved by butt-kissing and buttering up Hitler in a personal meeting, which allowed him to leapfrog several rungs over the pre-established chain of command.
• Vice President was originally a ceremonial and even place-holding title. It's more active and busy in recent American history:
  • Vice President Walter Mondale was this to Jimmy Carter, serving as Carter's troubleshooter (particularly in foreign affairs).^note Mondale's foreign affairs experience later earned him an appointment as ambassador to Japan under the Clinton administration. Richard Nixon filled the same role for Eisenhower. Prior to Mondale and Nixon, the vice-presidency was little more than a ceremonial posting, and usually a dead end for a political career.
  • As VP, George H. W. Bush was the chief architect of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. While Reagan had domestic experience as former California governor, Bush ran foreign affairs owing to his background as a WWII veteran, ambassador to China and CIA director. Bush himself took over many roles traditionally overseen by the National Security Advisor, and he encouraged Reagan to support anti-communist movements and attend peace talks with Mikhail Gorbachev.
  • Vice President Dick Cheney was often portrayed as The Man Behind the Man to President George W. Bush and is thought to have been the architect of a lot of his foreign policy. It was even common among Americans who did not think well of the Bush Administration to insinuate that it was, in fact, the Cheney Administration.^note In actuality, memoirs and other inside accounts offered a more complicated picture. In Bush's first term, he relied heavily on Cheney to handle foreign policy issues like the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War. However, in the second term, Bush grew more assertive and frequently overruled Cheney's suggestions, especially when Cheney pushed for military strikes against Syria and a tougher stance against Russia. It helped that the (Yale and Harvard educated) President affected a slightly-slow Good Ole' Boy public persona.
  • Joe Biden as VP to President Barack Obama personally oversaw the Stimulus Package with funds directed towards investment in multiple parts of the economy and towards renewable energy. Biden also forced the White House's hand on open support of gay marriage and LGBT equality, which Obama had previously taken a cautious wait-and-see approach before finally committing himself to. In the 2012 Election Debate, after an initial weak showing in the debate against Mitt Romney, Biden was widely credited for rescuing the campaign back on the advance in a much-praised performance against Paul Ryan.
  • It's believed that some of Nixon's achievements in policy were put forth mainly by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, ranging from helping him open relations with China, negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, and masterminding the coup of Salvador Allende. Of course, some historians have qualified this, since much of the information comes from Kissinger or his associates.
  • While the crucial bills on civil rights legislation were introduced during John F. Kennedy's presidency, his VP Lyndon Johnson was the one who bulldozed them through Congress when he succeeded Kennedy in the Oval Office. Even before that, Johnson played a key role in the first civil rights laws passed by Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was Senate Democratic leader. In both cases, he used every political trick in the book ranging from calling in decades' worth of political favors to simple bullying and intimidation to get the necessary votes for the bills to pass.
• Australian deputy Prime Minister Paul Keating was arguably this to Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Despite being a high school drop out, he was the architect of far-reaching economic reforms that changed the entire way the economy functioned. He did all this while the Rhodes scholar Hawke acted as the lovable, yard glass chugging head of the Labor party.
• Alexander Hamilton served as this to George Washington during the latter's Presidency and the early part of Post-Revolutionary America. Washington, wanting to cultivate a non-partisan reputation, often had Hamilton promulgate his policies and views, being that he was a much better political street-fighter, had a way with words, and possessed knowledge of political science that Washington didn't. Historians often note that his career rose and fell with his association with Washington and that he never entirely managed to step out of his mentor's shadow. Without Washington backing him, Hamilton's great personal flaws came back to bite him badly, and he ended up burning all his bridges, torched his few friendships (such as with Aaron Burr), and then triggered the duel which got him killed.
• Aaron Burr was this to Thomas Jefferson in terms of the public and social aspects of politics. He could be seen as a tragic deconstruction, as the Democratic-Republicans developed a tendency to threaten and blackmail Burr into doing all of their PR work, one time to such an extent that he nearly worked himself to death, up until the end of his vice-presidency in 1805 (at which point they took some drastic measures to prevent Burr from using his uncanny social skills against them).
• Before and during Red October, Vladimir Lenin was fortunate to have a couple of these:
  • First, there's Leon Trotsky, a Menshevik and critic of Lenin who finally supported the latter during the Russian Civil War. Trotsky was Lenin's second, and the founder and leader of the Red Army, which Lenin was proud to note was more or less willed into being in a short span by Trotsky after the Bolsheviks had originally disbanded the army following their seizure of power and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky was incredibly intelligent, incorruptible, and capable, but he was also proud, haughty, and unwilling to suffer fools (and he was Jewish, which, despite Lenin's best efforts, would not quite be forgotten). Upon Lenin's death, Trotsky's personal unpopularity and general lack of political skills (which Lenin had) left him vulnerable to Josef Stalin and got him chased out of the USSR. Even in exile, Trotsky, while attracting a number of admirers and well-wishers, generally failed to show the same organizational elan that Lenin did. While he's considered by some a more complete intellectual than Lenin, others lament that he lacked the particular knack for daring, improvisation, and luck that defined his patron's career.
  • Josef Stalin was a useful Dragon to Lenin long before the Revolution. Stalin carried out any number of tasks to benefit the Bolsheviks, ranging from armed robberies to raise funds to terrorist attacks to undermine the Tsarist regime to supposedly even acting as The Mole inside the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. He continued proving his worth during Red October, doing everything from editing the Bolsheviks' newspaper Pravda to organizing armed uprisings against Russia's Provisional Government to overseeing the Bolsheviks' annual congress while Lenin was in hiding to playing a key role in the Bolsheviks' final seizure of power. He acted as one of Lenin's Co-Dragons alongside Trotsky, creating the "Decree On Nationality" designed to gain the support of Russia's ethnic and national minorities, and requisitioned grain and other supplies for the Red Army during the Civil War. Lenin later appointed Stalin as the General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, whose duties historians like Edvard Radzinski suspected were deliberately left vague to give Stalin a free hand in running the Bolsheviks. Stalin used his new office to appoint his cronies to important positions throughout the Party, which played a key role in making him the Dragon Ascendant when Lenin died in 1924.
• Che Guevara was this to Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution. In the guerilla war, he was a good strategist, fierce disciplinarian, and a good tactician. As a bureaucrat and manager in the post-revolutionary regime, he had his moments at least in organization but made errors. As a revolutionary leader in his own right, he failed utterly, with aborted and half-hearted campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia to his name (with the only thing to speak of being a romantic "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner against a CIA-Bolivian firing squad).
• Until his assassination in 2020, Iran's Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani served as this to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. A highly skilled military strategist and tactician and a master of asymmetrical warfare, Soleimani was a chief architect of the growing power of Iran and Shia militancy throughout the Middle East, and was responsible for many of the country's external military successes and was involved in the propping up of Syria's Bashar al-Assad in addition to the funding of Hezbollah, much to the irritation of the United States (who deemed him a terrorist and attempted to have him killed more than once). His keen mind for military affairs propelled him up to a position of power surpassed only by the Supreme Leader himself, and above de jure second-in-command roles such as the President and the IRGC Commander-in-Chief. This powerful position, combined with his chessmaster tendencies, made him an arguably far more feared figure worldwide than Khamenei and helped him gain an almost celebrity-like persona in his home country. These factors combined made Soleimani's death a big deal worldwide, with some even fearing World War 3 due to the retaliation from Iran.
• In the modern history of China, you have Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In the early '30s, Mao and Zhou were equals and, if anything, Zhou was the senior to Mao. He was a major leader of the Shanghai Communist Cell (which was purged by Chiang Kai-shek and was, in fact, the first Communist cell started in China), and led several counter-purges against the nationalists in the late '20s and early '30s. Then, Mao triggered The Long March, and became the senior Communist leader of China, drawing Zhou into his orbit. Nobody knows for sure how close their friendship was, or if their relationship was ever more than professional (on account of the stone wall in China on this period of history), but, both of them were the foundations of the modern Chinese state, with Zhou somehow still being respected (cited by Deng Xiaoping as a mentor and genius) even if he more or less washed his hands clean of the Cultural Revolution and let Mao's excesses continue unfettered. Zhou Enlai was considered in The '50s and The '60s the great diplomat of Communist China and considered by Henry Kissinger to be one of the most intelligent and impressive men he has ever met.

Military

• To a degree, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet and J. E. B. Stuart were this to Robert E. Lee. Lee was certainly no slouch, but at Gettysburg, with Jackson dead and Longstreet at odds with him, Lee made some major tactical blunders that are often interpreted as his having become dependent on a team of Hyper Competent Sidekicks he could trust with the details of carrying out his orders.
• This happened a lot during the later parts of The Roman Empire, especially in the 5th Century West, where ineffectual emperors were backed by military strongmen. Not all of them were constructive, but a few of them pretty much kept the West from falling apart immediately, most notably Aetius and Stilicho. Their deaths didn't bode well for Rome. Even the East had this. Flavius Belisarius was the famed general of Justinian the Great and a fantastic commander.
• Claudius was this to Caligula. At least for the first six months, when Caligula was sane. The jury's still out on after that, but it was only by accident that Claudius became emperor at all.
• Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was this for Octavian, later Emperor Augustus. While Octavian was a highly competent administrator, he needed someone who could match wits with Mark Antony on the battlefield and come out on top. That was Agrippa. He managed to absolutely crush not only the remnants of the conservative resistance to the Second Triumvirate but also obliterate Antony's forces both at sea and on land. It is widely accepted that Octavian may never have become emperor if he did not have Agrippa handling the military side of things. After he became Emperor, Agrippa successfully parlayed his skills into civilian endeavours, becoming a major sponsor of infrastructure and public works, and other buildings.
• A frequent occurrence in Prussia/Imperial Germany from 1812-1918. Field commands were traditionally given to high-ranking nobles, who were raised for the task but nevertheless had varying levels of competence. After Prussia's crushing defeat to Napoleon at the Battle of Jena (1806), Gerhard von Scharnhorst was put in charge of reforming the Prussian military, and came up with the idea of retaining the contemporary social structure, while cleverly undermining it by forcing the Field Marshals to co-operate with their Chiefs of Staff, who were appointed on Scharnhorst's advice. The most notable example of this was Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, who became a national hero and public icon during World War I, even though most of his decisions were made by the obscure no-name Erich Ludendorff.
  • In practice, Hindenburg had never been a very competent officer, and he had already been retired in 1911. The master strategist behind him and true brain behind the victory at Tannenberg was Colonel (future General) Max Hoffmann. Both had been decorated for the battle, Hoffmann promoted to General and Chief of Staff for Eastern Front Armies, yet the propaganda system gave the full credit to the old Prussian General and turned him into a national hero.
    • As the chief of staff in the Eastern Front, Hoffmann would pull off another one, masterminding the defeat (and collapse) of the Russian Empire while Prince Leopold of Bavaria was nominally in charge.
  • What Scharnhorst wanted to counteract most was the fact that especially in an army that went to war as infrequently as the Prussian one, high command tended to go to long-serving officers who had proved their bravery and gained some merit and done nothing wrong so bad to diminish their claim to command by virtue of their accumulated seniority. The system also allowed the commander and his chief of staff to complement each other. For instance in the Wars of Liberation General (later Field Marshal) Gehard Leberecht von Blücher supplied the more flashy courage, charisma and a natural talent to hold impromptu speeches to inspire his subordinates - including non-Prussian ones - with the strategic, tactical and administrative know-how of his chiefs of staff Scharnhorst and August Neithard von Gneisenau. There also was an interesting, effective synergy between the impulsive and audacious Blücher (it was an important factor that he was one of the few allied Generals who was not scared of Napoleon) and his somewhat more cautious chiefs of staff.
  • Another notable case was Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian Chief of General Staff in the wars against Austria (1866) and France (1870-1871) when the (nominal) commander-in-chief was Wilhelm I of Prussia. In fact, a number of pundits and experts (including Friedrich Engels) had tipped the Austrians as most likely to win the war of 1866 because the Prussian army was led in the field by its uninspiring and militarily unremarkable king, while the Austrian was led by a general of proven worth. (Another factor that led people to fatally underestimate the Prussian high command was Moltke's age - he was born in 1800).
  • Much the same in Russian Empire also. The nominal commanders-in-chief were either the Tsar himself or one of his close relatives (e.g. Grand Duke Nicholas, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, at the beginning of World War I). The trouble is that Russians often did not have a competent general who would act as the de facto commander. (Soviet Union continued this trend during World War II: Stalin (at least in the latter half of the war, when the Soviets were really winning) was the nominal commander-in-chief. The actual military command was exercised by Zhukov, as the Chief of General Staff.)
    • Ivan Konev was, in turn, Zhukov's Hypercompetent Sidekick, being just as talented and more intimately involved with the actual fighting.

Professions

• This is the typical situation in many modern militaries when you have wet-behind-the-ears junior officers fresh out of training placed in charge of units with NCOs who sometimes have been serving longer than the officer has been alive. The general wisdom is that while the officer makes the decisions (and bears the responsibility for those decisions) and can overrule the sergeant appointed under him, a good officer will consider the sergeant's advice whenever possible.
• Sherpas for mountaineers, especially Tenzing Norgay for Sir Edmund Hillary, as noted elsewhere. Small subversion in that Norgay DID become famous, and Hillary gave him all possible credit.
  • It's worth noting that the famous photograph from the summit of Mt. Everest is, in fact, a photo of Norgay since Hillary was the only one who knew how to operate the camera, and standing on a mountain peak at 29,000 feet is not the time or place to try and give photography lessons.
• This can occur with examples of "Ass" in Ambassador, since (in the case of the United States) the actual ambassadors to friendly countries like France and England are given the jobs as political favors by the president, while the actual nitty-gritty day-to-day running of the embassies/consulates/what have you are done by career Foreign Service Officers. The career FSOs, i.e. the ones who've made a long life out of doing the job, are often considered equivalent to high-ranking military officers in terms of authority and expertise.
  • Pretty much the entire civil service in the United States operates this way: agencies and departments are nominally run by political appointees but the day-to-day work is done by career professionals, some of whom have served through multiple administrations and even more appointees.
• Shigeru Miyamoto is generally considered the father of the video game industry. Over the past four decades, his achievements range from creating the Mario and Zelda series to being one of the Wii's main designers to jump-starting the entire video game industry after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. But despite his near-endless achievements — which are why he is the first member of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences's Hall of Fame — he has never officially been Nintendo's president.

Arts

• The Duke Ellington band was an amicable partnership between the extroverted Duke and Billy Strayhorn, the major songwriter. Ellington was the showman, while Strayhorn was the trained conservatory musician, serving as the band's secondary pianist and Ellington's partner in songwriting. Ellington and Strayhorn had a knack for writing or arranging songs tailored specifically for the strengths of the musicians; it was noted that musicians tended to play better under Duke than on their own. Ellington's work schedule was also affected because he was almost continuously touring, giving him little time to finish many of the things he started, so he'd get Strayhorn to finish them instead, which Strayhorn was happy to do. Strayhorn got more attention after his death, with Duke Ellington giving him a tribute album, ...And His Mother Called Him Bill, and for the fact that he was a rare example of an openly gay Jazz giant, and a friend of Martin Luther King Jr..

---