Never Outshine the Master

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s first law of power says the servant who shines too brightly gets destroyed. New Hampshire has run that experiment three times in thirty-five years, and the results say the law is right for the wrong reason.

On December 3, 1991, aboard Air Force One, the most powerful staffer in Washington handed President George H.W. Bush a note he had written out by hand. John H. Sununu was quitting. Three-term governor of New Hampshire, and the operator whose machine delivered Bush the 1988 Granite State primary that rescued his campaign, gone as White House chief of staff after less than three years. Bush answered in his own handwriting and accepted the resignation “with reluctance, regret and a sense of personal loss.”

Days earlier, the president’s eldest son had flown up from Houston to say what no staffer would. George W. Bush’s message, as reported at the time, was that Sununu had alienated the senior staff, the Cabinet and the political operation. The chief of staff got the point. He wrote to Bush that he did not want to be a drag on the president’s reelection, and he was out by December 15.

Seven years later, a writer named Robert Greene published a book that explained exactly what had happened to him. The 48 Laws of Power opens with the one Greene considers foundational: never outshine the master. Make the people above you feel superior. Display your gifts too openly and you will provoke the insecurity of someone with the power to end you.

This is the first of forty-eight pieces testing Greene’s laws against the political record of one small state. New Hampshire is a good laboratory for it. The offices are close to the ground, the primary is the last in the country, and the same families keep showing up. On Law 1, the state has run the experiment three times in thirty-five years. The verdict is not the one Greene’s readers expect.

The law holds. The explanation is wrong. Masters in New Hampshire politics do not punish brilliance. They punish brilliance that has stopped paying for itself.

1991: the servant who became the story

Sununu’s problem was never that he was smart. Bush hired him to be difficult. He earned the nickname “pit bull” doing the job as designed, absorbing hostility that would otherwise have landed on the president. Bush said as much in his acceptance letter, telling Sununu, “You have accepted many of the arrows aimed my way.”

The problem was that the arrows stopped landing on Sununu and started landing on Bush. In the spring of 1991 The Washington Post reported the chief of staff’s use of military aircraft for personal travel, including ski trips and a dentist appointment in Boston. Bush imposed new travel rules. Sununu switched to corporate jets. In June he sent a government car and driver to take him from Washington to a rare stamp auction at Christie’s in New York, then sent the car back empty. Bush was described by people around him as angry and perplexed.

None of that is a policy failure. It is a visibility failure. A president who had campaigned on raising the ethical standard of the executive branch now had a deputy generating a running news story about limousines and stamps. Sununu had become the most powerful adviser in the building and, at the same time, the most expensive one to keep.

Read that sequence again and Greene’s framing starts to look incomplete. Bush did not lash out at a subordinate who made him feel small. Bush ran the numbers. His approval had fallen roughly forty points from the end of the Gulf War, and a reelection campaign was thirteen months out. Sununu was an asset that had turned into a liability, and the president disposed of him the way any executive disposes of one, with a courtesy title through March and a warm letter for the file.

2016: the servant with two masters

Twenty-five years later, New Hampshire ran a harder version of the same test. Senator Kelly Ayotte was in the closest race in the country against Governor Maggie Hassan. Her party’s presidential nominee was Donald Trump, who was losing the state. Ayotte would not endorse him and would not disown him. She said she planned to vote for him.

On October 3, 2016, at a debate at New England College in Henniker, a moderator asked whether she would hold Trump up to a child as a role model. Ayotte hedged. Pressed a second time, she said absolutely she would. Her campaign issued a retraction the same night. “I misspoke tonight,” the statement read.

The Hassan campaign had an ad cut before the news cycle turned over. Five days later, after the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood recording, Ayotte withdrew her support for Trump entirely and said she would write in Mike Pence. On November 8 she lost by 1,017 votes out of more than 738,000 cast, a margin of about fourteen hundredths of one percent.

Greene would read that as a courtier destroyed for mishandling a master. The New Hampshire reading is narrower and more useful. Ayotte was not serving one master. She was serving a national nominee, a state electorate roughly forty percent independent, and her own record as an institutionalist, and those three wanted incompatible things. Law 1 has no instruction for that. It assumes a single sun. New Hampshire almost never provides one.

2026: the servant who did everything right

Which brings the series to the September 8, 2026 Republican primary.

The Republican primary for Jeanne Shaheen’s open Senate seat was between two former senators. Scott Brown represented Massachusetts, moved to Rye, lost to Shaheen in 2014, endorsed Trump early, and served as his ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. By Greene’s rules, Brown is the model courtier. He made himself useful and he never eclipsed anyone.

John E. Sununu is the son of the man who lost the White House job in 1991 and the brother of the governor who preceded Kelly Ayotte. He served in the House from 1997 to 2003 and the Senate from 2003 to 2009, then lost to Shaheen. He was a Kasich delegate in 2016. In a 2024 op-ed in the Union Leader backing Nikki Haley, he called Trump a loser.

On February 1, 2026, Trump endorsed Sununu. The Truth Social post gave him a “Complete and Total Endorsement” and praised him as an America First patriot. The Senate Leadership Fund declared the primary finished. The National Republican Senatorial Committee lined up behind him. The ambassador who had been loyal since 2016 got nothing.

Brown did not take the hint. He told Semafor in March he was staying in and did not care what the national party wanted. He sat with NHPR on August 26 and the Keene Sentinel’s editorial board on August 28, running as the independent in a two-man race and questioning whether his opponent holds the movement’s credentials. His public position has been consistent: New Hampshire voters, he says, “are the ultimate authority on our future.”

Set the three cases side by side and the pattern is not about deference at all. In 1991 the loyal servant was removed. In 2016 the careful servant was destroyed by her own caution. In 2026 the obedient servant was passed over for a man who insulted the boss in print, because that man polls better against Chris Pappas.

What this is worth to a voter

Greene wrote a manual for courtiers. That is the limit of it. Read as advice, Law 1 tells an ambitious staffer to dim herself, and the New Hampshire record says that advice is close to worthless. Brown dimmed himself for a decade and was handed the bill anyway.

Read as a diagnostic, it is worth a great deal. Law 1 is a reliable instrument for one thing: it tells you where the power is by showing you who is expected to shrink. Watch which official gets talked over in a committee hearing. Watch which department head answers a records request in five business days and which one takes a month with no consequence. Watch who is permitted to be the story and who is not. The hierarchy is rarely on the org chart. It is visible in who has to be careful.

That statute is the cleanest instrument I know for locating the real hierarchy in a New Hampshire town. Send the same request to two departments. One answers on day four. The other answers in six weeks, or never, and nothing happens to anybody. The difference is rarely about staffing. It is about which office believes it is required to be careful and which one has learned it is not. Law 1 governs the first department. The second one has no master.

That is the use of this series. Not a self-help course for people who want to run New Hampshire, and not a book report. A set of forty-eight lenses, tested one at a time against the record, for readers who would rather understand how the machine runs than be told it runs on public service.

On September 8, 2026, Republican primary voters chose between a man who obeyed and a man who did not. Law 1 says the obedient one should be favored. The endorsements, the money and the polling said otherwise, and Sununu won the nomination, New Hampshire Public Radio reported. The first law of power was tested in public, in this state, one more time.

Next in the series: Law 2, on friends and enemies, and what the New Hampshire Executive Council reveals about who gets appointed and why.

Fact check

Editor’s note: This is commentary and historical analysis. It quotes no part of Robert Greene’s book beyond the title of Law 1, and every example, argument and conclusion here is original reporting and opinion by Granite State Report. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data. Characterizations of Sununu’s 1991 removal and of the 2026 primary reflect published reporting, cited above, and my own reading of it.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.