Fear and Trouble in America
"I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming Liberal."
—Hunter S. Thompson
July 21, 2003 [1]
I’m going to be 73 years old tomorrow, which means I was eleven when FDR died. Last weekend I attended my youngest son’s commencement at Bucknell University, where Bob Woodward spoke. He mentioned that he had written about seven presidents in his professional lifetime. I’ve lived through the terms of twelve. Aging is like shuffling over to a telescope to look backward in time at the stars.
Woodward is one of our journalistic stars, and in his unique Midwestern drawl he cut through the typical starchiness and predictability of the commencement venue. The gist of his remarks was, as you might suspect, bound up in Watergate.
Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, invited me for lunch in her dining room. So I went up and I met with her. As I said, she backed what we did. I walked into the room and she had this look on her face of, "What have you boys been doing with my newspaper?"
People have wondered how can you get a look like that on your face. If you'd been there, you would have realized what it was.
Then we sat down and she started questioning me about Watergate and Nixon and his people and what it was about. I was blown away with what she knew. She was so conversant with the material. But she had a management style which I later would describe as mind-on, hands-off. Intellectually, totally engaged in what we were doing, but her hands were not on, telling us how to do it, never.
. . . And she said, "Okay, when's the whole story going to come out?" I said Carl and I felt it was criminal conspiracy as we had written in the paper, that people had not told the truth, they were frightened, they compartmentalized information so the answer was "Never. We were never going to learn the full story."
Across the lunch table, I'll never forget this. She had this pained, stricken look on her face and she said precisely the following: "Never? Don't tell me never."
I left the lunch a motivated employee.
But the "Never? Don't tell me never" was not a threat. It was a statement of purpose. What she was saying was: "Use your resources, the resources of this newspaper."
The stakes could not be higher. We have an obligation beyond ourselves to find out what happened here, and what it means.
That is a moment where I realized that I was working with somebody and for someone who knew precisely what the job was. That the job is to get to the bottom of things.
The story was meant to illustrate Woodward’s point about finding work that you love and finding people to work with whom you respect. For me it recalled the utter fearlessness of Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee in those years when they could have lost everything. A few years ago I heard Woodward and Bradlee, relaxing in wing chairs on a small stage in Southern Maryland, talk about Watergate and the pressures on the Post to call off its dogs.
We should remember how focused, persistent and thorough Woodward and Bernstein were, and that they had the backing of people who explicitly trusted their capability and perseverance. W & B may have been riddled with doubt but they pressed on. We have few such investigative reporters left today, and journalism itself has come upon hard times.
On the way back to Maine, I wanted to stop at Hyde Park (New York) to make my first visit to the Roosevelt home and library. The house and grounds hold the essence of FDR: informal flower and vegetable gardens, the arboretum, a stable with ribbons and photos of long-dead horses, the lengthy tree-lined drive down which he struggled in his braces for exercise. Before you take the tour, a half-hour movie presents the major accomplishments and character of FDR, its central theme “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” from the first inaugural.
I had a flashback to the Chicago Tribune headline trumpeting his death in 1945—and a flash-forward to George W. Bush, whose administration of fear has no peer in our history.
Politics Without Prozac
In the Roosevelt Library (the nation’s first presidential library and a modest one by present standards), there is a grand display of materials pertaining to World War II, FDR’s finest hour. In January 1941, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, he delivered the “four freedoms” State of the Union speech. People everywhere, he asserted, must have
- freedom of speech and expression
- freedom to worship each in his own way
- freedom from want
- freedom from fear.
In defining the latter, he called for a world-wide reduction in arms as a goal “attainable in our own time and generation.” At the same time, he asked Congress for Lend-Lease, a massive aid program to our allies in Europe without which they would have perished. FDR was no peacenik. He was in fact preparing his country for the war he knew was inevitable and which many others (including my father) opposed.
Some of the astonishing hatred for Roosevelt which I heard as a child still persists: “FDR “spoke of assuming ‘unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people, dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.’ That line could have been uttered by Stalin or Hitler with equal comfort.” The right wing still confounds Stalin and Hitler—and both, it seems, with Roosevelt.
Samuel Goodman, my grandfather, had a doctrinaire distaste for Roosevelt but respected Harry Truman, as did many Republicans, because he had cojones and was willing to listen to all sides, even Senator Robert Taft. As a kid, Sam quit high school and went to work to support his family which came to Chicago from Columbus, Ohio, around the turn of the 20th century. By the time the Depression took hold, Sam was running the selling and retailing end of the Florsheim Shoe Company, and his efforts helped keep the firm alive.
It had been strictly a family business, and Sam got in when it was small, went to work in the shipping room and by 1936 was made chairman of the board. Your classic American success story. He created and developed a series of national retail stores and with them a new business model for merchandising shoes, thereby establishing one of the great American brand names, Florsheim. The store became a giant display case for the product: white shoes, black shoes, wingtips and oxfords.
Now Sam was a rather modest and retiring captain of industry and none of this was exactly broadcast while I was growing up. I put the pieces together over time, witnessing and being part of his later years. There is a picture of him on a Florida beach wearing a business suit and looking stern while his jacket flaps in the breeze. Formal but not forbidding is how I would describe Sam. Churchill and Lincoln were in his pantheon, and he educated himself by reading about the lives of great men.
Going through FDR’s home in Hyde Park—dark, Victorian rooms filled with stuffed birds, tasselled lamps and walls of books—I thought of Sam’s home in Highland Park (Illinois)—light, spacious, decorated rooms, with lovely formal gardens out back where I played as a kid. FDR’s “Springwood” is a glorified country house—funky, full of memorabilia and echoing his mother Sara’s era more than his own. Sam’s was built in the late 1920s and represented a certain epitome of upper-middle-class style. If you were going to move to the suburbs and live well without garishness (or tradition), this was how to do it. The contrast in personal styles couldn’t have been greater.
The Big Bad Wolf
Yet Roosevelt’s call to action in the Depression had an analogue in Sam’s business success. Both were endeavors to cope with a desperate economic reality. By contrast, modern-day politics seems hangdog and pitiful. Every issue is filtered through the lens of a protean, stifling kind of fear, perhaps better termed anxiety. Instead of being the art of the possible, politics has become the science of negative outcomes.
The government is paralyzed; our leadership is a joke; we tilt at shadows—the “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” FDR warned against. Nixon and Johnson at least had the Viet Cong. Bush could not even focus on Bin Laden.
The psychology of fear has made it impossible for us to see a way out of Iraq, since every alternative seems fraught with horrendous consequences. In World War II the consequences were a lot more horrendous and finally there could be no question of inaction.
After an incredible mobilization effort, we could win against the Nazis. The War on Terror, a bogus, ill-prepared enterprise to begin with, has now immobilized us and morphed into a war on Islam. There is no way we can win in this quixotic crusade. Woodward seemed shocked when Bush during an interview called him an elitist because he didn’t understand the necessity of exporting freedom. Said the president, "I believe we have a duty to free people, to liberate people."
We have no such duty. We are a nation founded on reason, law and balanced governance, not on the principles of faith or conversion or the practices of the Inquisition. The power of America lies in a commitment to fairness and opportunity. FDR’s four freedoms were a set of principles asserting fairness in a time of tyranny and Depression, not a manifesto to make over the world. His freedom from want was the first announcement of the War on Poverty, an enterprise which goes deeply against the conservative grain because without want you have no markets.
Without fear, however, you have strength. I don’t see a lot of evidence of strength anywhere these days and, as others have written, the country seems to have lost its way. Motivated by political fears and self-interest, the Democrats have failed to act on the will of the people. What are they afraid of? Accusations of failing to support the troops? What nonsense. Hillary Clinton, whom I once worked for, seems to have sold out on health care. Bush fears “surrender” and has already lost the war. The Republicans fear a “bloodbath,” already occurring.
The candidates are flip-flopping all over the place. The media entertain us with images of slaughter interspersed with Hollywood bimbo-ventures, vapid commentary by newsreaders and escapist commercials. None of the “top-tier” candidates of either party is being straightforward. Nobody has the balls to take charge or speak the truth.
After Eisenhower and JFK, we have been treated to a progressively dysfunctional politics in which it is more important to please the voters than present a consistent, informed vision. This is as true for Congress as it is for the presidency. Unlike the economic depression of the 1930s, this time the distress is impalpable—a malaise, as Jimmy Carter once called it—a spiritual depression.
I keep telling people I am going to move to Mexico . . . or somewhere, anywhere to get away from the pervasive unreality that has taken over this country. Some are so entrenched in their special, parochial interests that they cannot accept even the possibility of global warming. One would think that, like Pascal betting on the existence of God, they might realize that being wrong can provoke eternal consequences.
My youngest, just-graduated son Alex never knew his great-grandfather, who died in 1957. But maybe he’s got a little of that self-made, bootstrap ethic that’s come down to him in the genes. Going against all recent family tradition, he wants to be a capitalist, God bless him. When he was seven and we lived in DC, his school class was invited to the White House one morning to meet President Bush the elder, who read to the kids from a doggie book and was by all accounts charming.
I hope Alex is discovering that the secret of greatness, as FDR and my grandfather knew, is to be strong and genuine. If there’s one political lesson I could teach him, and as the last century so amply demonstrated, it’s that fear is the engine of tyranny. Telling lies and twisting truth is what Joseph Goebbels did. To give in to fear is to lose your strength and very likely your soul. Why have our people forgotten that? Why have they ignored the lesson Katharine Graham taught Woodward, to pursue truth and “get to the bottom of things”?
At 73, a person doesn’t have a lot to fear. I do fear for this country, though it will take more than the latest Bush to lead us down the path to tyranny. It’s all the other ones without balls I worry about.[2]
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1. Hunter S. Thompson, “Welcome to the Big Darkness,” in Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness—Modern History from the Sports Desk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 234.
2. “Hitler had only one big ball./Goering had two but they were small./Himmler had something sim’lar,/But Goebbels had no balls at all.” College chant from the 1950s, sung to the tune of “Col. Bogey.”
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