The 45th, page 28
“I intend to ask Congress to do everything I said I was going to try to do. In fact, I’ve just done it. Everything I talked about, every legislative proposal I mentioned, has, as of three o’clock this afternoon, been put in final form and transmitted to the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.”
“Everything? You’re asking Congress to authorize unlimited enrollment in the military, anyone who wants to join, anyone wiling to serve four years, and in exchange, their college education paid for?” asked Rachel Good with a slightly baffled expression. She did not doubt he meant it, but she wanted to hear how he would defend what, by every account, would involve enormous expense.
“You seem surprised,” replied Julian, amused by her reaction. “It is what I said I would do if I were elected. Did you think I wouldn’t keep my word?”
“No, it isn’t that; I just didn’t think - I think everyone thought - that this was something you might try to do gradually, instead of all at once, that -”
“There are some things that, if you try to do them gradually, piece by piece, never get done at all. This is something that has to be done all at once. It has already been done. I have instructed the joint chiefs of staff to change the criterion so that any citizen between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one can join. I am asking Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to support this increase in the size of our military. I have no doubt they’ll do what has to be done.”
“That won’t be the only cost!” someone shouted. “There is still the question of how to pay for the four years of college.”
Julian shook his head, dismissing what others thought a difficulty.
“Any college or university that fails to provide a four year education at no expense to returning veterans will no longer receive federal funds for any purpose whatsoever. They give scholarships to athletes, full rides to men and women who play games. They can certainly provide the same thing for men and women who have given four years to the defense of their country. They’re not even being asked to do that much. They aren’t being asked to provide board and room. Just as we did with the G.I.Bill after the Second World War, the government will provide the necessary living expenses.”
“You would really cut off funding for, say, scientific research, if a university refused to do this?” asked an incredulous young reporter from one of the more liberal cable news stations.
“In the proverbial New York minute,” replied Julian, without even that much hesitation. “I said over and over during the campaign that the question isn’t how much we have, it isn’t how long we can live, the question, the only serious question, is what kind of people we are, what kind of people we want to be.”
The room had come alive. Dozens of reporters were on their feet, waving their hand, trying to get the president’s attention.
“What have you been doing the last month? Why was there so much secrecy?”
With a shrewd, guileful smile, Julian seemed to ponder the question, or, rather, to consider which among several equally improbable answers he should give.
“There was no secrecy. That would suggest there was something someone wanted to hide. It was not secrecy; there was nothing to report. You want to know what I’ve been doing for the last month? - Trying to think through the alternatives about how we can best achieve the changes we as a country have to make, changes that are necessary to restore in their proper relation liberty and restraint. Do you remember Edmund Burke, the great British conservative, who observed that ‘liberty without wisdom and without virtue is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without ___ or restraint.’ And then,” Julian continued, quoting from memory with the ease of someone reading from the printed page, “Burke, having defined what real liberty requires, describes how those with the responsibility to govern should approach the problem: ‘A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman..’
“Notice that unlike those who are all one or the other, all for changing everything, or all for changing nothing, Burke combines the two. What change is necessary? Change that is in the way of making a restoration, a return, if you will, to the original understanding of things. A country is like a building. With the passage of time the building decays, crumbles, and repairs have to be made to save it. But what kind of repairs? - Those that, so far as possible, follow what the original architect intended when he designed it. That is what I have been doing the last few weeks: thinking through how best to start the work of getting us back on the path we were meant to follow, the path that leads to the kind of freedom Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln understood, freedom to pursue, not whatever we happen to want to do, freedom to do what as reasonable human beings we know we should.”
“Who has been helping you? Who, besides Ismael Cooper, whom we all know is your chief of staff, is part of your team?” asked a gruff-voiced reporter who had been covering Capitol Hill since Ronald Reagan was president.
Julian scratched his head and stared into the middle distance. “Team?” he repeated as if there was some deeper sense to the word. “There is no team, there isn’t going to be any team. I was not elected president to speak someone else’s words, and I was not elected president to prepare legislation I had not drafted, or at least outlined, myself. There aren’t going to be any speechwriters, there aren’t going to be dozens of White House staff. Ismael Cooper doesn’t mind working long hours, and I don’t need that much sleep. And besides, I have the invaluable help of an endless supply of secretaries who take down every word. You wanted to know what I was doing the last month - thinking, and putting those thoughts on paper, dictating everything that needed to be said, everything that the Congress needs to begin its own work.”
Julian stopped, ready to take the next question, but then changed his mind. There was something more that needed to be said.
“We waste too much time. We waste too much time because we are always too much in a hurry, running from one thing to the next, always busy doing something, whatever that something is. We have forgotten what it means to concentrate on one thing, to take our time with it, to go slowly, reading, if you will permit the analogy, one word, one letter, at a time. There is a story told of Socrates that he once stood in the same spot, did not move, from dusk till dawn, lost in some thought of his own. None of us is Socrates, but consider what we could do if we could concentrate on our own work, whatever that work might be, for even an hour without interruption.”
The room went silent. No one knew quite what to make of it. Was it really possible Julian Drake really believed he could run the government almost alone, that he did not need more than a single assistant and a little secretarial help?
“Yes, actually, I do. What you must be thinking. The regular, routine business of the government is run by the various executive departments and agencies. There has been a tendency over the last half century to concentrate more and more of the power into the White House. That movement will now be reversed. The cabinet secretaries will now be responsible for their departments and directly accountable to the president. Though with important differences, the government will be similar to cabinet government in Great Britain. Cabinet secretaries will meet with me at least once a week, and all of them will be invited to express their views on every question of public policy that has to be decided, and, whenever it seems appropriate I will appear before the Congress and take any questions any member might care to ask.”
“Any question any member might care to ask?” asked a balding, middle-aged newspaper reporter, reading back what he had just jotted down in the spiral notebook he held in his hand, reading it as if he could not quite believe what he had just written. “Anything - any question - whatever any member of the House or Senate decides to ask?”
“Do you think I should treat the members of Congress differently than I treat members of the press? Is there any question you have asked that I have refused to answer? How else would you suggest we open a clear channel of communication? It doesn’t strike me as very helpful spending all our time responding to rumors, and allegations, about what someone is supposed to have said. That is the stuff of tabloid television, it isn’t the kind of public discourse that promotes the efficient conduct of the public business. Other may, if they will, hide behind the anonymity of unnamed sources, there isn’t going to be any question about what I say and what I do. And there won’t be any confusion about what I mean. I will explain my intentions, and I will do it directly with members of Congress and, through press conferences like this, directly to members of the public.”
A woman in her thirties, tall and willowy with bright, ambitious eyes and a flashing, artificial smile, a woman men found irresistible and other women despised, stood like a lead actress taking a curtain call. There was something thrilling in her voice, and an unexpected intelligence in her question.
“A few moments ago, you quoted Burke. ‘The ability to preserve, and to improve.’ And you talked about a restoration. There are those who would ask why we should be in any way limited by the past, why we should not be free to decide for ourselves what kind of future we want to have. How do you respond to them?”
“How would you know what kind of future you want unless you know what kind of past you have had? You cannot remedy a deficiency unless you know, not just what that deficiency is, but how it came into being. There is a more fundamental question: How do you know something is a deficiency, unless you have a standard by which to make that judgment? One example: In the ancient world, in both Rome and Athens, to say nothing of the Persian Empire, or of a great many other places since, few people thought slavery wrong. We fought a civil war to end slavery here. What reason did we have to do that, where, and how, did we learn that slavery was an evil, that slavery for some was incompatible with freedom for others. Lincoln based the case against slavery on the Declaration of Independence, on what you might call the organizing principles of the American republic, the belief, the insistence, that all men are created equal. Everyone talks a lot about the Constitution, what it does, or does not, allow. The Constitution does not interpret itself. What do the words mean, how are they to be read? Lincoln thought the Constitution had to be read in light of the Declaration. It is the Declaration, not the Constitution, that is primary. The famous beginning of the Gettysburg Address, the speech every schoolchild once had to learn by heart, ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ - that does not refer to 1789, when the Constitution was ratified; it refers to 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
“There is another speech of Lincoln’s, the Young Men’s Lyceum speech, given years before he became a national figure. He insists that the country cannot be held together, that it cannot survive, that, far removed from the founding generation, without any memory of their own about the Revolutionary War and the sacrifices that were made, ambitious men will try to become powerful and famous by trying to destroy what had been built, to change,” he added with a significant glance at the reporter who had asked the question. “what had been done, and so put their own mark on the future. The answer, the way to preserve what had been achieved, the way to protect the American experiment in free government, was to establish what Lincoln called a ‘civic religion,’ a belief, as strong as any religious creed, in the sanctity of the Declaration and the principle of equality of which it speaks. In a marvelous phrase that only Lincoln could have formed, he told his audience that ‘every mother should whisper to her newborn child’ and repeat every day, the words of the Declaration, make them the first words the child ever hears, and in that way make the Declaration part of the very being of every citizen. The strongest, and perhaps the only real beliefs, we ever have are those we are taught before we have the ability to doubt or question what we are taught.”
“You’re not suggesting something like that now?” asked a thin young man with rimless glasses. Trained to the constant, changing movements of a computer screen, his eyes did not stay fixed on anything for more than a second or two at a time. Julian looked right at him. The reporter looked away, then looked back, then, immediately, his gaze shifted again.
“Mother reading the Declaration to…?” he mumbled, shaking his head.
“If you’re suggesting that it probably isn’t possible, you are probably right,” said Julian, with a look meant to encourage confidence. “But that only proves the necessity of doing something that will help remedy the deficiency in what let us call our civic education, doesn’t it?”
Unbuttoning his suit coat, Julian stepped to the side and rested his left arm on top of the podium. The young reporter was three rows back. Julian talked to him as if they were alone in the room.
“Have you noticed how much you can tell about someone by who they look up to, who they would like to be like? You see it all the time, don’t you? Kids on a playground, trying to be like the player - whatever sport is involved - they idolize. Young men, young women, starting their careers, almost always there is someone they admire, someone they hope one day to be like. We all do this, try to imitate those who have done, and done well, what we ourselves hope one day to do. When you were just starting out, a young reporter, I imagine there must have been someone - a broadcaster, a journalist, a writer - someone who set the standard you wanted to meet. We do this as individuals. The great question - Lincoln’s question, and not just Lincoln’s - is what do we look up to as a people, who do we admire, who among those who have led us do we revere? Who, to be more precise, would we want our children, and our children’s children, to honor? Who do we want to hold up as models in our public life? Everyone who happened to hold an office, even if it is the highest office in the land, or those, and only those, who brought distinction to the office in which they served? The answer seems obvious. And that is the reason why, among the other things I am asking Congress to do, I am requesting that we get rid of one holiday and replace it with three others. I am asking that President’s Day be abolished, and that we go back to what we had before, a separate celebration of the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln.”
“You said three holidays!” a voice shouted from the back. “Washington, Lincoln - who, which president, is the third?”
Louis Matson had long ago given up trying to guess what went on the mind of Julian Drake. He had told him that he wanted to get rid of a holiday that honored all the presidents, everyone who had held the office, treating as somehow equivalent the better and the worse. It was, for Julian at least, important to remind each new generation what greatness meant, to set an example to be followed, to honor the best of the best, the greatest presidents the country had had. Washington, who won the War of Independence, who, as first president, established the standard of even-handed justice and dedication to the public interest; Lincoln, who saved the union and, in that famous phrase of his, gave a new birth to freedom. Julian had not said anything about a third president who deserved to be remembered the same way.
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
For a moment, no one knew what to say, or quite what to ask. Julian Drake had not been nominated by the Democratic Party and yet he wanted a national holiday to celebrate the birthday of the president whose work Republicans had been trying to dismantle for well over half a century! It was stunning, unbelievable, beyond anything anyone would have thought possible, even from someone everyone was already convinced was not just unpredictable but essentially unknowable. Louis Matson had a feeling, a certainty, really, that the third addition, the decision to include Roosevelt had only just been made, that sometime after Julian told him what he was going to do, restore the two holidays so the memory of Washington and Lincoln would not be buried in the obscurity of an abstraction, a holiday honoring the office, he suddenly remembered that something more needed to be done. It might have occurred to him just now, when he started to explain what he was going to ask Congress to do.
“Not Teddy Roosevelt,” someone asked, just to be sure. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt?”
“The third founding,” said Julian, without a moment’s hesitation. Washington, the first founding: the new nation, the new constitution; Lincoln, the second founding: the Civil War to guarantee we remained one nation, one nation in which freedom was the equal birthright of everyone. Franklin Roosevelt because with the industrial age, the age of large concentrations of private power - big business, big labor - the government took responsibility for the material well-being of all our citizens. Franklin Roosevelt because he saved democracy when other countries, faced with the problem of industrialization, took the road of either fascism or communism; saved us from the anthill existence of people condemned by totalitarianism of whatever kind to live their lives as the unthinking parts of a machine. No one, before or since, has had as great an influence on the way we live, or on the way we think about what government should, or should not, do.”
Chapter Nineteen
They were all there, every conservative commentator, every conservative critic, every conservative who thought himself an intellectual, every politician who identified with the conservative cause, all of them part of a movement that had suddenly found itself confronted with a president who insisted they had forgotten what conservatism really meant. They sat at tables of ten, two thousand men and women, their voices a constant cacophonous hum in the cavernous ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel. It was one of those annual events in which one speaker after another tells his audience what they already know and proves to everyone, audience and speaker alike, his own profound intelligence.
Dinner had been served, dinner had been eaten, bottles of wine had been opened, glasses had been emptied, glasses had been filled. One conservative writer, author of several books that, if they had said very little, had said it well, remembered a line from Disraeli, spoken at the end of a dinner when the champagne was poured, ‘At last, something warm!’ It brought a smile to his face, but he thought better than to repeat it out loud for fear that he would have to explain to the others at his table who Disraeli was. Three tables away, in the second row from the dais in front, Angela Murray sat next to Rufus Chambers, insisting in a loud voice that it had been a waste of time to come.
