A Certain Idea of America, page 4
It was of course one of the epic miscalculations in modern military history.
At some point Armistead heard who was up there waiting at the stone wall. It was the Second Corps. It was led by Win Hancock. Armistead knew: He wouldn’t break.
The charge began, Armistead led his brigade out of the woods and onto the field. Quickly the Union artillery opened up. Shells came raining down; canisters of metal balls whirled through the air. Explosions, musketry. Union men were out in the open, kneeling and firing. Men fell all around. The smoke thickened and the troops could barely see, so Armistead put his black felt hat on the tip of his sword, held it up and called, “Follow me.”
Troops fell, gaps closed. About thirty yards from the wall, “unable to advance, unwilling to run,” the charge stalled and stopped. Armistead knew it was over. He was hit in the leg but kept going. He reached the wall and made it to the other side. He was hit again and doubled over, then hit yet again. He sat down.
A Union officer came over. Armistead asked for General Hancock. The officer apologized: Hancock had been hit.
Armistead asked the officer to give him a message: “Tell General Hancock that General Armistead sends his regrets.”
Armistead died in a Union hospital tent.
Pickett, amazingly, survived, but was bitter about Lee to the end. His division sustained 60 percent casualties. Of thirteen colonels, seven died and six were wounded. The Confederate Army would never recover.
Longstreet was with Lee at Appomattox. Soon after the war he became a Republican—and supported his friend Grant in his efforts to rebuild the South. Naturally they never forgave him.
Hancock survived his wounds and the war. In 1880 he ran for president as a Democrat. He lost to Republican James A. Garfield of Ohio, who’d fought at Shiloh. It was close—he lost the popular vote by only nine thousand. But Hancock the Superb, hero of the Union Army, swept the South.
In time it became known what was in the package Lo Armistead sent Almira Hancock. It was his personal Bible.
All these stories are part of our history and should never be lost. If we lose them we lose ourselves, and we lose, too, part of the gift we give our immigrants, which is stories that explain the thing they have joined.
The stories should be told plain but with heart, too.
We’ve overcome a great deal. We see this best when we don’t deny our history but tell the whole messy, complicated, embarrassing, ennobling tale.
HISTORY GIVES GEORGE H. W. BUSH HIS DUE
December 6, 2018
I feel it needs to be said again: George Herbert Walker Bush should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an epic moment in modern world history, and a close-run thing. “One mishap and much could unravel,” former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, in his eulogy, of those days when the wall was falling, the Warsaw Pact countries rising and the Soviet Union trying to keep its footing as it came to terms with its inevitable end. Patience and shrewdness were needed from the leader of the West, a sensitive, knowing hand.
In A World Transformed (1998), Bush described his public approach as being marked by “gentle encouragement.” It caused him some trouble: “I had been under constant criticism for being too cautious, perhaps because I was subdued in my reaction to events. This was deliberate.” He didn’t want to embarrass or provoke. He reminded Mikhail Gorbachev, at the December 1989 Malta summit, that “I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.”
It was Bush’s gift to be sensitive even to Soviet generals who were seeing their world collapse around them. He knew that a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—and this foe had a nuclear arsenal. He slowly, carefully helped ease Russia out of its old ways and structures, helped it stand as its ground firmed up, and helped divided Germany blend together peacefully, fruitfully.
You’d think the world would have been at his feet, and the prizes flying in from Oslo. It didn’t happen. Why?
Here’s a theory: Bush’s achievement wasn’t seen for what it was, in part because America in those days was still going forward in the world with its old mystique. Its ultimate grace and constructiveness were a given. It had gallantly saved its friends in the First World War, and again in the Second; it had led the West’s resistance to communism. It was expected to do good.
Having won the war, of course it would win the peace. It seemed unremarkable that George Bush, and Brent Scowcroft, and a host of others did just that.
Bush was the last president to serve under—and add to—that American mystique. It has dissipated in the past few decades through pratfalls, errors, and carelessness, with unwon wars and the economic crisis of 2008. The great foreign-affairs challenge now is to go forward in the world successfully while knowing that the mystique has been lessened, and doing everything possible to win it back.
Bush came to be somewhat defensive about his reticence in those days. As a former aide I respected his caution, his sense that the wrong move could cause things to go dark at any moment. But I saw it differently: The fall of Soviet communism was a crucial event in the history of the West, and its meaning needed stating by the American president. There was much to be lauded, from the hard-won unity of the West to Russia’s decision to move bravely toward new ways. Much could be said without triumphalism.
It is a delicate question, in statecraft as in life, when to speak and when not to. George Bush thought it was enough to do it, not say it, as the eulogists asserted. He trusted the people to infer his reasoning from his actions. (This was his approach on his tax increase, also.) But in the end, to me, leadership is persuasion and honest argument: This is my thinking. I ask you to see it my way.
Something deeply admirable, though: No modern president now considers silence to be an option, ever. It is moving to remember one who did, who trusted the people to perceive and understand his actions. Who respected them that much.
To the state funeral in the Washington National Cathedral: Its pomp and ceremony served to connect Americans to our past and remind us of our dignity. In a way, it was a resummoning of our mystique. It was, for a moment, the tonic a divided nation needed.
There was majesty—the gleaming precision of the full-dress military, the flag-draped casket coming down the aisle, the bowed heads and hands on hearts, the bells tolling, the dignified solemnity.
For those of us in the pews there was none of the sadness and anguish that accompanies the leaving of a soul gone too soon, or tragically. This was a full life happily lived, and we were there to applaud, to see each other and say, “Remember that time?”
There was a sense of gratitude that the old man had, the past week, gotten his due. For decades the press and others had roughed him up—“wimp,” “lapdog.” His contributions had not been fully appreciated. Now they were. We were happy but not triumphalist.
We were reminded: History changes its mind. Nothing is set. A historical reputation can change, utterly. Sometimes history needs time and distance to see the landscape clearly.
And history is human. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the seniormost world leader, was there. Back home her party was in the middle of a battle to choose her successor, and she couldn’t afford to be gone. But when she heard of Bush’s death she said she had to come to Washington. She told reporters that without Bush she “would hardly be standing here.” She had grown up in East Germany.
There was something else. She had told Bob Kimmitt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, that Bush had treated her “like a somebody when I was not.” Meeting with the obscure junior minister in the Oval Office in 1991, the president treated the young woman with great personal and professional respect. And so there she was this week, because history is human and how you treat people matters.
Two other points about the funeral. Its unembarrassed religiosity and warmly asserted Christianity were beautiful, and refreshing. The burial rite was from the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, and it was a great and moving moment when the presiding bishop, the Most Reverend Michael Bruce Curry, met the flag-draped coffin at the Great West Doors and said, “With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body of our brother George for burial.” Such simple, humble, egalitarian words. “Our brother George.” The frozen chosen done themselves proud.
And there was a consistent message in the speeches. George Bush in his ninety-four years asked for and received everything—a big, loving family, wealth, position, power, admiration. But the lesson of that life was clear: He worked for it, he poured himself into it. He gave it everything he had. He made sacrifices to be who he was.
We gave a lot of attention to his life this week, in part because we want to remind ourselves that such fruitful lives are possible. We want to show the young among us what should be respected and emulated, and that public service can be a calling, and that calling brilliantly met.
This was a good man, a brave one who proved himself solid when major edifices of the world were melting away. He was kind and gentle.
And he loved America.
We were lucky to have him—the steady one, the sensitive one. The diplomat.
ON MARGARET CHASE SMITH
December 3, 2020
History can sometimes help us through current moments by showing what’s needed and providing inspiration.
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of a great act by a great lady. Margaret Chase Smith was a U.S. representative from 1940 to 1949 and a senator from 1949 to 1973. Her name is always followed by “the first”—the first woman to serve as a senator from Maine, first to serve in both the House and Senate, first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention.
She was generally considered a moderate to liberal Republican, and sometimes called a progressive one. She wanted to provide citizens the help they needed to become fully integrated into society and productive within it.
She was independent and made this clear early. She was initially the only member from Maine to support Lend-Lease and extension of the draft. She survived these votes because she understood her state: It was isolationist but also patriotic, against war but for preparedness, and Mainers didn’t like partisanship messing with foreign policy. She was for civil rights, supported Social Security and Medicare. She had a strong sense of where she was from, and felt the civic romance of it. She told biographer Patricia L. Schmidt that she loved Maine’s small-town church spires, and her dream was to see that each town had the money to buy a spotlight so the white spires could be seen for miles at night.
She faced criticism from the right. No, she’d blandly state on being questioned, union leaders hadn’t endorsed her in the last election, but she couldn’t help it if union members loved her.
She was by nature honest and humorous. Her dignity and simplicity led people to think her a blue blood, but her roots were modest. Her mother worked in a shoe factory, her father as a hotel clerk and barber. She got her first job at thirteen in a five-and-dime, didn’t go to college, and became a telephone operator. She was proud of all this and liked to speak of her roots, not to brag about her steep climb but as a kind of affirmation: Look what’s possible in America.
She’d married a local politician who became a congressman, Clyde Smith. When he died in 1940 she filled the remaining months in his term and was reelected in the first of many landslides. There were Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington clubs.
She never asked anyone to vote for her because she was a woman, but because she was the better candidate. Still, she thought women brought particular “sensibilities” to office: “The thing that concerns women more than anything else is the betterment of social conditions of the masses. Women are needed in government for the very traits of character that some people claim disqualify them.”
She could be wry. NBC’s Robert Trout once asked what she’d do if she woke up in the White House. “I think I’d go right to Mrs. Truman and apologize. And then I’d go home.” She thought a lot about how other people heard things. When she spoke to grade-school children, she always explained that, though it is true she sat on the floor of the Senate, she wasn’t really sitting on the floor.
But it is her “Declaration of Conscience” speech for which she is best remembered. It was 1950 and she was increasingly disturbed by Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. In February he’d made his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. He claimed to have 205 names of known communists; in later statements he put the number at 57 and 81.
The base of the party found his opposition to the communist swamp in Washington electrifying. His wildness and disrespect for norms was seen as proof of authenticity: He’s one of us and fighting for us.
Smith was anticommunist enough that Nikita Khrushchev later described her as “blinded by savage hatred,” and she was certain communism would ultimately fail. But you don’t defeat it with lies.
She always listened closely when McCarthy spoke. Once he said he was holding in his hand “a photostatic copy” of the names of communists. She asked to see it. It proved nothing. Her misgiving increased.
She didn’t want to move against him. She was new to the Senate; he was popular in Maine. She waited for her colleagues. They said nothing.
Finally she’d had enough. On June 1, 1950, she became the first Republican to speak out. On the way to the chamber Joe McCarthy suddenly appeared. “Margaret,” he said, “you look very serious. Are you going to make a speech?”
“Yes,” she said, “and you will not like it.”
He has some intelligence network, she thought. It left her rattled.
She took her seat. McCarthy was two rows behind her. When she was recognized she said the Senate needed to do “some soul-searching.” The Constitution “speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.” Those “who shout the loudest about Americanism” are ignoring “some of the basic principles of Americanism,” including the right to hold unpopular beliefs and to independent thought. Exercising those rights “should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.”
People are tired of “being afraid of speaking their mind lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists.’…Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”
She took on both parties, accusing the Democrats of showing laxness and “complacency” toward “the threat of communism here at home,” and the Republicans of allowing innocent people to be smeared.
She feared a fiery McCarthy rebuttal. He quietly left the room. She was praised in some quarters—Bernard Baruch said if a man had given that speech he’d be the next president—and damned in others. Her colleagues didn’t like being shown up by a woman.
McCarthy got her dumped from a subcommittee. The Maine press didn’t like that and pushed back: “They Done Our Girl Dirt.”
Her speaking slot at the 1952 Republican convention was pulled. She told biographers that at first she was given twenty-five minutes in a prominent spot, then fifteen. Finally House Minority Leader Joe Martin told her she could have five minutes. “And you have to represent a minority.”
“What do you mean, ‘a minority’?” Smith asked. “You represent the women,” he said. She passed.
Yet she had three more landslides to come. Maine admired her independence and integrity. She didn’t lose a reelection bid until 1972. She was almost seventy-five. Times had changed.
What are we saying?
When history hands you a McCarthy—reckless, heedlessly manipulating his followers—be a Margaret Chase Smith. If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you’d recognize that such baseless charges damage democracy itself. You wouldn’t let election officials be smeared. You’d stand against a growing hysteria in the base.
You’d likely pay a price. But years later you’d still be admired for who you were when it counted so much.
RICHARD NIXON’S EXAMPLE OF SANITY IN WASHINGTON
March 31, 2022
This extended moment of history reminds me of Washington in the years before and during the Civil War. There was a kind of hysterical intensity among our political class in those days, on all sides. The instability was so dramatic—Representative Preston Brooks caning Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, poor Mary Todd Lincoln with her rage and manias, and her husband telling her that if she continues like this she’ll wind up in the asylum. Those are famous examples, but you can’t pick up a book about those days and not see what looks like real and widespread personal destabilization. There was a lot of self-medicating, as they say. The journals and diaries of Mary Chesnut, who resided in the heart of the Washington establishment as the country broke apart and in capitals of the Confederacy as it formed, tell constantly of the officers and politicos coming to her home to drink into the night, and the ladies and their laudanum. Something strange had been let loose as things broke apart.
I started thinking things were entering Civil War territory during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 and the demonstrations around it—the hissing mobs in a Senate office building, where 293 were arrested; the screams as the Judiciary Committee chairman began his opening statement; the harassing of senators in elevators; the surrounding of the Supreme Court and scratching on its big bronze doors. I know the charges against Justice Kavanaugh were grave, I know they incited passion on both sides, but this looked to me not like activism, which to achieve anything must have at its core seriousness, maturity, and discipline, but like untreated mental illness.
