King, Obama, TR and Taft: thoughts about America
Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m thinking not just about the great civil rights leader but also about the state of the nation — where we’ve been, where we are, where we might be going. That leads me to reflections on a couple of former presidents, and also on the challenges facing our newest president, Barack Hussein Obama, who will be sworn into office tomorrow. And I’m thinking of what advice Dr. King, who never held a public office but was one of our greatest leaders ever, might have for Mr. Obama, who takes office at a time of multiple perils and instability.
So, first: to Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the man who succeeded TR as president in 1908 and whose bid for a second term Roosevelt scuttled in his own failed third-party campaign in 1912, awarding the presidency to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. We don’t usually think of Taft as one of our more nimble presidential thinkers, but he did have his moments, as Candice Millard passes along in her fine book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, which we discussed earlier here. Here’s what Taft had to say about the man who first put him into the White House and later kicked him out:
“The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die in the battle field. He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”
Roosevelt was a great man, but we’ve had enough of that. You can’t say George W. Bush has the spirit of a berserker — this is not a man who wants to go onto a battlefield and join in the carnage himself — but he has acted with an impetuous relish for war when patience and diplomacy would have served the entire world far better. Obama, we have the feeling, is not a rash man. Yet, as all presidents are, he will always be pushed by those advising quick and violent action.
So it’s good — not just today, but all days — to listen to Dr. King. Here are a few of his thoughts, for Barack Obama and for all of us:
“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
“War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
January 19th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Thank you, Bob, from the heart. I’ve been thinking these past two days (and before that actually) about my own white liberal experiences with the civil rights movement, and what Obama’s election means in that context. My parents sent me to very self-consciously integrated private schools, starting with Downtown Community School in the 1940s, where Pete Seeger was the music teacher for a short time. He was blacklisted of course, and it must have meant a tremendous amount to him to participate in that fantastic concert on the Mall yesterday. Robert Weaver was on the board of Downtown Community School; he was the first African American cabinet member; his son was in my class there and later at Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, a Quaker boarding school, also self-consciously integrated, where I patted and soothed, or tried to, my black roommate while she wept all night it seems to me because the parents of the girl she wanted to room with the next year (father was a Quaker and on the board of the school) wouldn’t let her. That was the year that Walter White was a vespers speaker and on the eve of Brown vs. the Board of Education told us that the Supreme Court would decide to integrate the schools. And when the Movement began, all of a sudden I was out of touch with my sophomore year roommate and her family, wealthy, middle class blacks from Memphis, who I suspect were lying low. So all of this has gone through my mind, and this as well: can Obama get us out of the war in Iraq? I hope so. Can he start, just start, to turn the economy around? I expect he will. And what about health care? And if it comes to that my friends, what about the Constitution, because what the Bushies have done in this country, Dr. King, has decidedly not been legal. And on and on, but we have found in Obama that rare human being a man who “willingly engage(s) in hard, solid thinking” and who knows the answers are complex and difficult to implement.
Black, white, purple–we’re damned lucky to have him.
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
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