A Certain Idea of America, page 20
Oh, dream maker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going I’m going your way
That’s America, the dream maker and heartbreaker, but you’re intertwined with it, you’re not alone.
Two drifters off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
I’m nobody from nowhere but it’s all out there waiting for me. You’re not really American until you have a poignant sense of the bigness of things. When “Moon River” came out, in 1961, the American president had a little plaque on his desk: “O, God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting ’round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon river and me
It’s all within grasp, all possible. Again, I’m not alone. The lyricist Johnny Mercer nodded to Huckleberry Finn, the abandoned boy who shoved off down the river and came upon the man who became his best friend, the escaped slave Jim. “The huckleberry reference was an attempt to engage in a suggestive, even protometaphorical manner with America’s central and founding dilemma, race,” Mercer said.
Actually he never said that. I made it up. But years ago that’s what I thought was on his mind, that we’re all on this journey together and have to get it right. And maybe it is what Mercer meant.
That song came from our culture.
And I’m thinking of what the words mean to me as they call my name and I meet with the doctor and have my exam.
Then, because this is America and we are citizens, our conversation turned to what has been happening.
The doctor is worried about his three kids in grade school. They see the headlines and hear everything. They do shooter drills in their schools. “And it’s everywhere.”
Yes. I said one of the painful things we’re witnessing is the loss of the fantasy worried parents had, the fantasy of “I can give all this up and move to Ketchum, Idaho. I can leave the unsafe place and go to a safe place and bring up my children apart from all this.”
I said the lesson of the last twenty years is that there is no safe place. He agreed: “This is us.” Then he said, “So we’ll have to solve it.”
You’re hating that I left the music, aren’t you? I hate it.
But here a responsible person would note that we are in a crisis, as the doctor suggested. It’s not a problem, it’s a crisis, it’s continuing, it has a hundred causes, we have to chip away at it hard. In a crisis you try this thing and then that; you experiment, boldly. You become daring.
We argue about which solutions are right, but all the solutions are part of the solution. We are in a mental-health crisis; it’s not a right-wing talking point. We need more hospitalizations and more hospitals. We do need red-flag laws so that those who are potentially harmful to themselves or others have their guns taken. We do need deep national background checks, and let judges adjudicate disputes. We do have to help the single mother who knows her son is a ticking time bomb—she needs a better response than “There’s nothing we can do until he hurts someone.” We should try banning assault weapons. I don’t care if we don’t have statistics proving it will help—do it anyway, as a crisis measure, do it for ten years again and see if it helps. If the National Rifle Association were wise, it would be supple now, in crisis. If the president were wise, he’d look to the country and put distance between the NRA and himself. If Democrats were wise, they wouldn’t turn this into a game.
I want so badly on this pretty August day to tie this back to the old songs and their confidently asserted values. I can’t. There’s no nice song about people scared for their kids and afraid for their country.
A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF A WORRIED LAND
October 20, 2022
Half a century ago William F. Buckley wrote a small gem of a book called Cruising Speed, about a single action-packed week in his life as an editor and writer. I’ve just had a Buckley-like week—at Purdue University in Indiana to speak with students, then back to New York to interview Henry Kissinger for the White House Historical Association, and then on to make the main speech to the Al Smith Dinner, the Archdiocese of New York’s big annual bipartisan charitable fundraiser. In all these venues the same theme emerged. People are worried about America and the world.
Purdue has a strong sense of community and its students are quick, affable, and penetrating. I met with about seventy of them Monday for questions and answers in a political-science class at Beering Hall, and almost all their questions betrayed a perplexity about America. They were worried that our political polarization might prove fatal, that we might lose our democracy. They see signs of it. A student asked how Trump supporters can believe, after all the investigations and judicial decisions, that Joe Biden lost and he won. I said there are a lot of parts to that. Americans have always loved conspiracism, it’s in our DNA. When I was a kid it was the CIA killed JFK, Dwight Eisenhower is a communist, fluoride in the water is a plot. In our time this tendency has been magnified and weaponized by the internet, where there’s always a portal to provide you proof.
Part of it is American orneriness—people enjoy picking a fight, holding a grudge, being the only person who really gets what’s going on. Part of it is the sheer cussed fun of being obstinate. Some of it is committed and sincere—an ineradicable belief that established powers like to pull the wool over our eyes, a belief made more stubborn because sometimes they do. In the case of politicians it can be a mystery how sincere they are and how much is opportunism. If the locals say Trump won and I’m running for office, then Trump won! The only thing I could think of to help was keeping lines of communication up and the conversation going.
Later, in a “fireside chat” with Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, a student asked about something I’d written years ago—that presidential nominees always look alone up there onstage, like lone cowboys acting out some kind of personal destiny. I said yes, it had been awhile since a candidate looked as if he had an ideological movement behind him, a fully thought-through political philosophy that propelled supporters. Such a movement implies mass, a force that came up from the people. Mr. Daniels said movements get things done; they will political change into being. He threw up a quote from my first book, thirty-two years ago, that said liberals in the media don’t dislike conservatives.
That was true when I wrote it, I said, but it seems less true now. In the seven years since Donald Trump came down the escalator, mainstream media has changed its nature. I understand why they thought they had to stop Mr. Trump—our big media come largely from New York, which had known him for more than thirty years and saw him not as the commanding presence on The Apprentice but as a con man who always seemed to operate one step ahead of the law. They felt they had to oppose him, but that very opposition left them not “reporting” but becoming what only some of them wanted to be, openly activist and of the left. This too contributed to polarization: People who more or less used to trust them to throw the ball straight no longer do, and find other news sources, some of which are specious.
I went home to New York and, on Wednesday night, to interview Mr. Kissinger. With a book out and crises brewing he’s on the scene and, at ninety-nine, treated as what he is, a legend. I think here Henry’s friend Bill Buckley might have fun and call him the biggest thing since Bismarck. Mr. Kissinger is grave about the current moment. The evening was informally off the record, but I don’t think he’d mind my saying I asked him about broad feelings of anxiety about the world: Is it unrealistic to be experiencing this moment as uniquely dangerous? During his answer—no, it is not at all unrealistic—he reflected that he’s been thinking a lot about World War I and how the leaders of the nations engaged in that conflict had no idea, at the beginning, the magnitude of the losses coming, that they just stumbled in and stumbled on.
His advice seemed to echo what we discussed at Purdue: In tough times, keep all lines of communication up and operating. You never know what might come in on the wires. Keep the conversation going.
On Thursday night, I gave the main speech at the Al Smith Dinner. A little more than six hundred people gathered in the Park Avenue Armory, every politician of note in the state and city, and business figures and philanthropists, many on the broad dais in white tie and tails or gowns. The trick at the dinner is to be as funny as possible while training your fire equally on both parties. The assumption is everyone’s better when they’re laughing. I did my best. Chuck Schumer’s been in Congress so long that he’s considered a preexisting condition. Kevin McCarthy told me at the last national prayer breakfast that Jesus loves America best, that’s why the Bible is in English.
Will President Biden run for reelection? He’s showing telltale signs of aging. Held a state dinner and insisted it start at five p.m. so he could get the early-bird special. Afterward he invited the visiting prime minister to go upstairs and watch Hogan’s Heroes. Then he spent a half hour trying to rewind Netflix. A month from now he turns eighty but the White House has been playing down any celebrations. Internal memos about it have such a high security classification that copies have been found at Mar-a-Lago. But personally I prefer age to some of the younger congressmen and -women, who are, basically, airheads. I’ve interviewed them. They think Machiavelli is a clothing designer. They think bilateral and trilateral are muscles you work in the gym.
And there’s Ted Cruz. When Ted ran for president, he called me and asked me for advice. I said, “Ted, just be yourself.” That was mean of me.
Then there’s Mike Pence, a good man. But hearing him give a speech is proof that the dead are trying to contact us.
And so my Buckley-like week: the questioning young at Purdue, the wisdom of a great statesman in New York, and on to the Park Avenue Armory for the Catholic Church raising money for kids and immigrants by teasing itself and others. A good thing in life is not to get jaded but to see that even in a world of trouble life is moving, stimulating, even splendid, that you’re lucky to be here and doing what you’re doing. I think Bill Buckley would have enjoyed himself.
“HOME AGAIN, AND HOME AGAIN, AMERICA FOR ME”
November 23, 2022
Words of thanks to someone I knew well as a child:
I had an old great-aunt. She was my grandfather’s sister. Her name was Mary Jane Byrne but we called her Jane Jane. When I first encountered her, in the 1950s, I was a little child and she was ancient—about sixty.
She lived in New York and went to a local parish, St. Vincent Ferrer. When I was little she told me it was the pennies of immigrants that made that great church. I asked why they did that. She said, “To show love for God. And to show the Protestants we’re here, and we have real estate, too.”
She came to America about 1915, an Irish immigrant girl of around twenty from a rocky little patch in the west of Ireland. She came by herself, landed at Ellis Island, and went to Brooklyn like everyone else. She settled in a neighborhood near the old Navy Yard, where relatives put her up on the couch.
She dropped her bags and went straight to Manhattan, where the jobs were, and became a maid for a family on Park Avenue. She lived in a little room on the side. In time she became a ladies’ maid, learning to care for a wardrobe and jewelry and brush the lady’s hair. She respected her work and came to love the finer things. When they got thrown away she’d bring them home and we’d have them. I remember a cracked hairbrush, made from real tortoiseshell, with beige bristles.
On days off she’d visit us in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, in Massapequa, where my family moved and I went to public school. She’d sleep on the couch in our living room. As is often true with immigrant families, ours was somewhat turbulent, but Jane Jane was peaceful and orderly. If we were together on a Sunday, she took me to Mass. I loved it. They had bells and candles and smoke and shadows and they sang. The church changed that a bit over the years, but we lost a lot when we lost the showbiz. Because, of course, it wasn’t only showbiz. To a child’s eyes, my eyes, it looked as if either you go to church because you’re nice or you go and it makes you nice but either way it’s good.
Jane Jane carried Mass cards and rosary beads—the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the saints. She’d put the cards on a mirror, hang the rosary beads on a bedstead. I look back and think, wherever she went she was creating an altar. To this day when I am in the home of newcomers to America, when I see cards, statues, and Jesus candles, I think: I’m home.
She didn’t think life was plain and flat and material, she thought it had dimensions we don’t see, that there were souls and spirits and mysteries.
She came from rough people but she had a natural love for poetry, history, and politics. She wasn’t ideological—ardent Catholics don’t need an ideology, they’ve already got the essential facts. But she was, like all the Irish and Italian Catholics and European Jews of Brooklyn, a Democrat. I don’t think they ever met a Republican. I think they thought Republicans were like Englishmen with monocles.
But the poetry—she’d walk around day and night declaiming, with a rich Irish accent, popular poems she’d read in the newspapers. The one I remember best was a poem written in 1909 called “America for Me.” It’s about seeing the great cities of the world but knowing where you really belong. Its refrain: “So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!”
She loved Franklin D. Roosevelt, but most of all she loved Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points, his principles for the world after the Great War. She would walk around reciting them: “Freedom of the seas! An end to armaments! Sovereign nations living in peace!”
I’ve never known anyone like her. Sometimes life overwhelmed her. She’d disappear for a while, I’d hear she’d been hospitalized, she’d come back joking about doctors. There’s a lot of turbulence in any life, in all families, but for recent immigrants I think it can be hard in ways we don’t see. Because they let go of a lot when they left, and there was no one to keep them there, which can make it harder to gain purchase in the new place.
She passed away when I was a teenager, unchanged, the same mystical force. But what she did for me—she gave me a sense of the romance of life, the romance of politics and history, the sense that history’s a big thing and has glory in it. Great causes, acts of valor. And she was in love with America because it could be the stage of the love and the valor. America reminds you: Life is dynamic, not static, it moves, and there’s something magical in this.
Years later, when I was grown and a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, the president was coming back from a foreign trip and had to give brief remarks on returning to U.S. soil at an air base in Alaska. I got the assignment. I was new and nervous, but as I worked an old memory tugged at my mind, and I knew what Reagan would say. He’d say, “And it’s home again and home again, America for me.”
And so he did. And that was my tip of the hat to Mary Jane Byrne of County Donegal and Park Avenue.
She would have loved being here tonight, loved being with you. She would have looked at the dais—the men in white tie and tails, the women in flowing gowns. She’d want to brush your hair with a tortoiseshell brush. She would have been awed to be in the same room with a prince of the church, and awed when I said, “Jane Jane, this is my friend Cardinal Tim.”
We’ve all got great stories, everyone in this room, and it’s good to keep in mind the romance of it. All of you here have responsibilities in a world very far from Jane Jane’s. A lot of what you carry is a great burden. Whatever your pressures—whether it’s trying to safeguard the investments that people have made with you, or to maintain the trust of those who voted for you, or to raise the funds for the charity that depends on you, or to keep the faith of those who have prayed with you—whatever the pressure, I think she’d hope that you not become jaded, that you maintain a sense of the mystery of it all, the unseen things, the feats of love and valor.
A few weeks ago Aaron Judge hits sixty-one and stands on the field to make eye contact with Roger Maris’s family, and my son texts me: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Jane Jane steals into me for a moment and I think, How can you not be romantic about life?
Adapted from a speech delivered at the 2022 Al Smith Dinner at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City
SPIRITS IN THE SKIES OF SUMMER
July 13, 2023
Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend, I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her twenties, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and she was at a club or great mansion of some kind with a big broad lawn. There were tables scattered along the lawn where people were eating lunch, and suddenly they heard a sound from the sky, a deep booming stutter. They all looked up. It was an airplane, the first any of them had ever seen. It must have taken off not far away and had trouble, and now here it was, barreling down toward them to land on the lawn. Everyone said, “Oh, my gosh,” and scrambled out of its path. The plane touched down and came to a halt. The pilot jumped out, did something to the engine, jumped back in, started the engine, used the lawn as a runway again, and took off.
It was the most amazing thing, she said, everyone was so excited.
“What happened afterward?” I asked. Meaning, what did everyone say after such a marvel?
She cocked her head. “We finished lunch.” Which, even as I write, makes me smile.
