Peggy Noonan

I have read the Hillary book by Ed Klein, which has been heavily dumped on by conservatives, and understandably. In terms of political impact it is not a takedown but a buildup. Dick Morris says its sensational charges will only “embolden” her. They will certainly tend to inoculate her against future and legitimate criticism and revelations. The book is poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.

Here are some significant things about Mr. Klein’s book: It comes from an establishment journalist who’s had his professional ticket punched at the New York Times magazine and Newsweek. He has no conservative bona fides; he says he is and appears to be essentially apolitical. This is an anti-Hillary book by the MSM. It has been heavily promoted not by a conservative publication but by Vanity Fair magazine, which published a big fat juicy chapter in its famous “Deep Throat” issue. Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, is the author of an anti-Bush book, passionately opposed to Iraq, and no one’s idea of a wing-nut. (Mr. Carter also bought serialization rights of Gail Sheehy’s book on Hillary, which managed to be both accusatory and politically sympathetic.) Previous successful Hillary books were written by Barbara Olson, Joyce Milton, Dick Morris and me, righties all, and David Brock, who had not a philosophy but employers. The Klein book looks to be a big success in terms of sales (350,000 first printing). This suggests there is a big market for a Hillary biography.

Mr. Klein’s problem is that he assumes the market is conservative and conservatives are stupid. They’re not, actually. They want solid sourcing and new information that is true.

*   *   *

Here is something good about the book. Klein treats Hillary as if she were a man. Remember the stories that said Dan Quayle was a cocaine salesman? That George W. Bush was a coke-sniffing, girl-chasing lush? That John F. Kennedy was a coke-sniffing, girl-chasing cynic? That Lyndon B. Johnson had a roving eye and held meetings with aides as he sat on the toilet? This is hard-guy politics: Run for office and we’ll throw everything we can that will stick and things that won’t stick too. Mr. Klein’s book is in this tradition. It treats Hillary as she has claimed she wants to be treated: not as a special case but like everyone else; not as a minority, not as a woman. Mr. Klein isn’t scared by her sex.

Mr. Klein’s central theme is not original. Hillary Rodham, committed left-wing operative and college radical, recognizes the raw talent and promise of the crude, yearning, cynical and attractive Bill Clinton. She marries him, and each receives something from the arrangement. She ties her wagon to a star and will rise to power with him; he receives ideological ballast, which he perceives as moral ballast, from a woman his equal in ambition and his superior in self-governance.

They rise. He compulsively chases women and is politically popular if unserious; she makes money, networks and burnishes their movement credentials. She knows of his philandering and looks the other way. They achieve the presidency and come in time to be seen as main-chancing Ivy League grifters.

He is a sentimental liberal who’ll do what he has to do to maintain his viability in the system; she is his ideological soul, and somewhat zany in her assumption that the United States of America elected her as co-president and desires her to redesign its medical system. They both have a degree of genuine human charm. He was truly warm, at least for a while and at least until he got bored. She was genuinely funny, with a quick wit and an ability to listen.

In the presidency he floundered and she flailed. Then he moderated and she disappeared. Then he embarrassed the country, she joined or led the coverup, they were found out, and she emerged as a patient, loving wife who stood by her man. (For those who’d enjoy an excellent fictional gloss on their story, see Charles McCarry’s “Lucky Bastard.”)

This is, essentially, the story Mr. Klein tells. It has been told before and will be told again.

But he ignores the Rosetta stone of Hillary studies, the senior college thesis she wrote on leftist organizer Saul Alinsky and how to change the American political culture, which her alma mater, Wellesley College, obligingly continues to suppress on her request. There is little on the Rose law firm. There are canned and seemingly cut-and-paste cameos of Hillary aides who are shady and bad because they are Hillary aides.

There is a certain disconnect. Mr. Klein famously suggests again and again that Hillary is, was or will be homosexual. He dwells on this, it seems, to further bolster the charge that the Clinton marriage was from day one a political deal and not a serious and traditional emotional bond. But he also seems to suggest a serious romantic relationship with Vince Foster.

*   *   *

The real problem with Hillary biographies is that the picture they paint, if it is true, is difficult for a normal person to believe. No one could be that bad. No one who has risen so high in American politics could possibly be that bad. To believe is to go to a dark place.

And the charges seem so at odds—so utterly at odds—with the nice, smiling woman who calls abortion a tragedy and enjoys speaking of how much she prays. This is the problem all Hillary biographers have: It’s too grim to believe. To believe that her story as presented by the books so far is true is to believe that she has clung to a premeditated plan for 40 years, that she is ruthless in the pursuit both of her own ambitions and of a deep and intractable leftist political agenda. And that she found her equal in a partner sufficiently hardhearted to stick with the plan, and the secrecy, and the weirdness. It’s too over the top. It seems hard to believe, not because it isn’t true but because it isn’t likely, usual, expected. It isn’t the kind of biography we are used to in our leaders. That is her great advantage.

What is needed is a big and serious book by respected reporters who can dig, think and type, and whose sourcing standards are high and unimpeachable. Will that happen? It would be big if it did. This book is not that book.

You know what would be fun, and actually helpful? If in the latest struggle over funding for public television, people said what they know to be true.

The argument, once again, is about whether PBS has a liberal bias. There are charges and countercharges, studies, specific instances cited of subtle partiality here and obvious side-taking there. But arguing over whether PBS is and has long been politically liberal is like arguing over whether the ocean is and has long been wet. Of course it is, and everyone knows it.

Not just Republicans, but Democrats. I doubt you could find a Democratic senator who, forced to announce the truth, standing at the gates of heaven and being questioned by St Peter, would not, on being asked, “By the way, is PBS liberal?” answer, “Of course.” Or, “Yes, but don’t tell Tom Delay I knew.”

Just about every Democrat on the Hill, and in the newsrooms of our country and the faculty lounges, knows that PBS in general reflects a liberal worldview. That’s why they like it. That’s why they want to keep it.

The Democratic Party naturally desires to retain or increase public funding of a television network whose overall and reflexive tendency is to persuade viewers to see the world as liberals see it. They say this is a First Amendment issue, an anticensorship issue, a Big Bird issue, and some of them mean it. But mostly they’re trying to keep a particular building on the liberal plantation up and operating.

The Republican Party naturally opposes and resents such funding. Why should they underwrite the opposition? Why should they force taxpayers to fund it? They say this is an issue of elemental justice, and many really mean it. But animating some of them, I think, is a certain spirit of destruction. If you are a conservative and have watched the past 30 years of PBS documentaries and talk shows, chances are you are angry, legitimately, and looking to apply a little punishment. Or a lot.

*   *   *

Conservative argue that in a 500-channel universe the programming of PBS could easily be duplicated or find a home at a free commercial network. The power of the marketplace will ensure that PBS’s better offerings find a place to continue and flourish.

This I doubt. Actually I’m fairly certain it is not true. And I suspect most people on the Hill know it is not true.

We live in the age of Viacom and “Who Wants to Be a Celebrity,” not the age of Omnibus and “Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.” A lot of Democrats think that left to the marketplace, PBS will die. A lot of Republicans think so too, but don’t mind.

At its best, at its most thoughtful and intellectually honest and curious, PBS does the kind of work that no other network in America does or will do. Sumner Redstone is never going to pay for an 11-hour miniseries called “The Civil War”; he’s not going to invest money and years of effort into a reverent exhumation of the rich loam of American history. Les Moonves is not going to do “Nova.” Bob Iger is not going to OK a three-part series on relativity theory. Jeff Zucker isn’t going to schedule a calm, unhurried adult drama like “Masterpiece Theatre.” They live in a competitive environment.

Such programming would be expensive, demanding, and a ratings disaster. It would earn Les Moonves the title, “former CBS chief.” Great TV work, the kind PBS at its best produced and produces, is more likely to come out of unhurried and rather removed environments. And boy, was PBS removed. They never had to worry about the bottom line; until recently they didn’t know there was a bottom line. But some great work came from PBS’s detachment from marketplace realities. And it has even been work—such as “The Civil War”—that helped our country by teaching our children the things they must know to go on to become adults who love their country. This, in the world we live in, is no small thing. It’s huge.

*   *   *

Why, then, doesn’t Congress continue to fund PBS at current levels but tell them they must stick to what they are good at, and stop being the TV funhouse of the Democratic Party? Nobody needs their investigative unit pieces on how Iran-contra was very, very wicked; nobody needs another Bill Moyers show; nobody needs a conservative counter to Bill Moyers’s show. Our children are being raised in a culture of argument. They can get left-right-pop-pop-bang anywhere, everywhere.

PBS exists to do what the commercial networks should and won’t. And just one of those things is bringing to Americans who have not and probably will not be exposed to it the great treasury of American art, from the work of Eugene O’Neill (again, ABC won’t be producing “Long Day’s Journey” anytime soon), outward to Western art (Shakespeare) and outward to world art.

And science. And history. But real history, meaning something that happened in the past as opposed to the recent present, with which PBS, alas, cannot be trusted.

Art and science and history. That’s where PBS’s programming should be. And Americans would not resent funding it.

PBS producers would rebel, claiming such programming would rock with age. What they would mean is, There’s little personal status in art, and much in controversy. You don’t get any particular respect for mounting a great play or a producing a great symphony: their excellence is already known. Respect and status come from controversy. But too bad. The point of PBS is not to employ clever producers.

*   *   *

Does all this sound rarefied, a ratings loser? PBS is supposed to be rarefied. As for ratings, let’s imagine this. PBS mounts a production of “Hamlet.” No one will watch it? What if Brad Pitt takes the role? He’d be happy to do it; he gets a high-class venue in which to show he can actually act, and in return he earns the gratitude of those who care about culture or say they care, which is most Americans. He’d get points for doing it for scale, which of course he’d have to. Young people would watch. They would thus imbibe Shakespeare, still the jewel in the crown of Western culture. PBS would be thanked for doing a public service. Conservative congressmen would find themselves in the unexpected and delightful position of being called friends of the arts, and liberal congressmen would be able to say “I told you PBS is worthwhile.”

And so on. Symphonies. A study of the work of George Bellows. A productions of “Spoon River Anthology.” David McCullough on George Washington. A history of the Second Amendment—why is it in that old Constitution? Angelina Jolie as Juliet, Kathleen Turner as Lady Macbeth, Alec Baldwin as Big Daddy when you get around to Tennessee Williams. It will keep him away from politics. Sean Penn as Hickey in “The Iceman Cometh.” There are far more great actors than there is great material. Mine the classics, all of them, of the theater and arts and music and history.

It is true that if you tell PBS producers they are now doing a play series they will immediately decide to remount “Angels in America.” How about a rule: It takes at least 50 years for a currently esteemed work to prove itself a work of art, a true classic. It proves this by enduring. Do plays that have proved themselves to be enduring contributions—i.e., art. Look to the permanent, not the prevalent.

PBS should be refunded, because it does not and will not exist elsewhere if it is not. But it should be funded with rules and conditions, and it should remember its reason for being: to do what the networks cannot do or will not do, and that somebody should do.

I don’t know that Democrats understand how Republicans experience the attacks Democratic leaders make on them. I’m not sure they know how they sound to us.

In America there is a lot of political integration. Democrats and Republicans are friends. Life forces them to be if they need to be forced, which most don’t. They know each other from the office, Little League, school meetings, the neighborhood. Actually America is mostly filled with people who say not “I’m a Democrat” and “I’m a Republican,” but “I voted for Bush” and “I like McCain” and “I voted for Kerry.” They identify by personal action more than political party, at least in my experience.

Washington is more politically segregated. In Washington, Democrats by and large hang out with Democrats, Republicans with Republicans. This is true in consulting, in think tanks, in journals, in Congress. If you work for a Democratic senator, the office is full of Democrats. The people with whom you share inside jokes and the occasional bitter aside are Democrats. The “neighborhood” in which you go to meetings during your long days is Democratic. The same is true for Republicans.

And it’s inevitable. The structure of things decrees it, as does human nature. Like-minded people seek like-minded people for stimulating conversation and more.

So in some key ways in Washington, the most politically engaged individuals in both parties do not understand each other. This expresses itself in certain assumptions. Democrats think Republicans are mean. Republicans know Democrats are the mean party.

*   *   *

Knowing that, let’s do a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine this.

President Bush is introduced at a great gathering in Topeka, Kan. It is the evening of June 9, 2005. Ruffles and flourishes, “Hail to the Chief,” hearty applause from a packed ballroom. Mr. Bush walks to the podium and delivers the following address.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to speak this evening about how I see the political landscape. Let me jump right in. The struggle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is a struggle between good and evil—and we’re the good. I hate Democrats. Let’s face it, they have never made an honest living in their lives. Who are they, really, but people who are intent on abusing power, destroying the United States Senate and undermining our Constitution? They have no shame.

“But why would they? They have never been acquainted with the truth. You ever been to a Democratic fundraiser? They all look the same. They all behave the same. They have a dictatorship, and suffer from zeal so extreme they think they have a direct line to heaven. But what would you expect when you have a far left extremist base? We cannot afford more of their leadership. I call on you to help me defeat them!”

Imagine Mr. Bush saying those things, and the crowd roaring with lusty delight. Imagine John McCain saying them for that matter, or any other likely Republican candidate for president, or Ken Mehlman, the head of the Republican National Committee.

Can you imagine them talking this way? Me neither. Because they wouldn’t.

Messrs. Bush, McCain, et al., would find talk like that to be extreme, damaging, desperate. They would understand it would tend to add a new level of hysteria to political discourse, and that’s not good for the country. I think they would know such talk is unworthy in a leader, or potential leader, of a great democracy. I think they would understand that talk like that is destructive to the ties that bind—and to the speaker’s political prospects.

*   *   *

Why don’t Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean know this? And what does it mean that they do not know it?

For as you know, the color-coded phrases in the “Bush speech” above come from speeches and statements given by Sen. Clinton and Democratic chairman Dean recently. (Mrs. Clinton’s comments are in green and Mr. Dean’s in purple, and I changed “right” to “left.”)

Clinton is likely the next Democratic nominee for president. Mr. Dean is the head of the Democratic Party. They are important and powerful. They may one day run the country. It is disturbing that they speak as they do.

How do people who are not part of the Democratic base react to their statements? I think something like this: What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand they lower things with their name calling and bitter language? If this is how they feel free to present themselves in public, what will they do and say in private if they ever run the country?

If Mr. Bush ever spoke this way, most Republicans would feel embarrassment. I would be among the legions who would denounce his statement. Democrats are half the country; it is offensive to label them as hateful, it’s wrong. Even though we’re torn by disagreements, there is an old and unspoken tradition that we’re all in this together, we’re all citizens together. It is destructive to act against this tradition.

One assumes all the media, especially the MSM, would treat the speech as if it were an epochal event in the Bush presidency, and the beginning of the end. They would say he was unleashing the dark forces of division; they would label his statement as manipulative, malevolent, immature.

And they’d be right.

*   *   *

There is a tradition of political generosity that prevails among the normal people of America, a certain live-and-let-live-ness. That is why Little League games don’t break out in fistfights, at least over politics. You don’t shun people in the neighborhood because they’re Democrats, and you don’t inform the Republican in the next cubicle that he is evil, lazy and racist. That just doesn’t play in America. There are breaches, exceptions, incidents. We are not angels. But by and large even though we disagree with each other, and even if we come to dislike each other, we maintain, for reasons both moral and practical, decorum. Civility. We keep a lid on it. We don’t lower it to the level of invective. We don’t by nature seek to divide.

When you have been in Washington long enough and have become consumed by your place in the political struggle, you can lose sight of the American arrangement. You can become harsh and shrill. You can become the sort of person who would start the fight at the Little League game. You can become—how might a columnist, as opposed to a political leader, put it?—a jackass. But not a funny one, a destructive one, the type that can knock down the barn it took the farmer years to build.

The comportment of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean is actually not worthy of America. Their statements suggest they are in no way equal to the country they seek to lead. And something tells me that sooner or later America is going to tell them. But in a generous, mature and fair-minded way.

Some wounds don’t fully heal because they’re too deep and cut too close to the bone. The story that Deep Throat was Mark Felt has torn open old wounds. Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and Chuck Colson—all at the top of their game 30 years ago, all very much in the game today—were passionate in their criticism, saying Mr. Felt has little to be proud of, was unprofessional, harmed his country. Ben Stein was blunt: Mr. Felt “broke the law, broke his oath, and broke his code of ethics.” Old Watergate hand Richard Ben-Veniste and the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen called Mr. Felt a hero. The old battle lines fall into place. As to the higher themes of the story, some were credulous. On the “Today” show yesterday Chris Matthews called those who have criticized Mr. Felt “hacks and flacks,” whereas reporters “are looking for the truth” and can be trusted. Glad he cleared that up.

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn’t want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

His motives were apparently mixed, as motives often are. He was passed over to replace J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI by President Nixon, who apparently wanted in that place not a Hoover man but a more malleable appointee. Mr. Felt was resentful. He believed Nixon meant to jeopardize the agency’s independence. Here we have a hitch in the story. The liberal story line on the FBI was that under Hoover it had too much independence, which Hoover protected with his famous secret files and a reputation for ruthlessness. Mr. Felt was a Hoover man who joined the FBI in 1942, when it was young; he rose under Hoover and never knew another director. When Hooverism was threatened, Mr. Felt moved. In this sense Richard Nixon was J. Edgar Hoover’s last victim. History is an irony factory.

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt’s information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon’s ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events—the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions—millions—killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

And so the story that Mark Felt was Deep Throat exposes old fissures, and those fissures are alive and can burst open because a wound this size—all this death, all this loss—doesn’t really heal.

*   *   *

Maybe the big lesson on Felt and Watergate is as simple as the law of unintended consequences. You do something and things happen and you don’t mean them to, and if you could take it back you would, but it’s too late. The repercussions have already repercussed. Mark Felt cannot have intended to encourage such epic destruction. He must have thought he was doing the right thing, protecting his agency and maybe getting some forgivable glee out of making Nixon look bad. But oh the implications. Literally: the horror.

Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn’t think it was all about their beautiful careers. I’ll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in “Born Again,” a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren’t dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him.

Is the Deep Throat story over? Yes, in the sense that it will no longer be treated as a mystery. In spite of the million questions we’ll be hearing—and there are and will be many serious questions—the MSM will stick with the heroic narrative. Mr. Felt was Deep Throat. Deep Throat was a great man who helped a great newspaper put the stop to the lies and abuses of an out-of-control White House. End of story. Why? Because in celebrating this story in a certain way journalists of a certain age celebrate themselves. Because to bring unwelcome and unwanted skepticism to the narrative would be to deny 20th-century journalism—and 21st-century journalists—their great claim to glory. Because the MSM is still liberal, and the great Satan of all liberals, still, is Richard Nixon. And because, as Ben Bradlee might say, It’s a goddamn good story.

Or as they put it in yet another John Ford masterpiece, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

You’ve heard the mindless braying and fruitless arguments, but I’m here to tell you the facts, no matter what brickbats and catcalls may come my way. Lindsey Graham defied the biases of his constituency to do what was right, not what was easy. Robert Byrd put aside personal gain to save our Republic. David Pryor ignored the counsels of hate to stand firm for our hopes and dreams. Mike DeWine protected our way of life. These men are uniters, not dividers.

How do I know?

Because they told me. Again and again, and at great length, as they announced The Deal. And I believed them, because I am an idiot. Or as they might put it, your basic “folk” from “back home.”

Listening to them I thought of some of the great and hallowed phrases of our Republic. “The rooster who thought he brought the dawn.” “The only man who can strut sitting down.”

I know they’re centrists, but there is nothing moderate about their self-regard. And why should there be? I personally was dazzled by their refusal to bow to the counsels of common sense and proportion, and stirred that they had no fear of justified insult (“blowhard,” “puffed up popinjay”) as they moved forward in the halls of the United States Senate to bravely proclaim their excellence.

*   *   *

John McCain wryly reminded us not to miss A&E’s biography of his heroic Vietnam experience. Joe Lieberman referred to the group as “this band of brothers, and sisters.” But my favorite was Lindsey Graham, who said, “I know there will be folks ‘back home’ who will be angry, but that’s only because they’re not as sophisticated and high-minded as I am. Actually they’re rather stupid, which is why they’re not in the Senate and I am. But I have 3 1/2 years to charm them out of their narrow-minded resentments, and watch me, baby.”

Oh, excuse me, that’s not what he said. That’s only what he meant. It was the invisible scroll as he spoke. The CNN identifier that popped up beneath his head as he chattered, however, did say, “Conceited Nitwit Who Affects ‘Back Home’ Accent to Confuse the Boobs.”

Oh wait, that’s not what it said. It said, “R-South Carolina.” My bad.

Actually, what Mr. Graham said was, “People at home are gonna be mad at me for a while.” He said he decided to support the deal because “kids are dyin’ “ in Iraq, “Social Security is comin’ up,” and “this is a lot bigger than me.” If only he knew that is true.

*   *   *

Why do they do this? Is their egomania not part of a trend? Have you noticed that every announcement now made on television has become an Academy Awards show in which the speaker announces that he is the winner? I often watch cable news during the day, and in the past year I’ve been taken aback by what happens when a local police chief announces the capture of a serial killer who’s been murdering people for 30 years. The police chief does not say, “We finally got him.” Instead he gives a long speech congratulating himself, lauding law-enforcement personnel, complimenting his department, congratulating investigators and their families, and nodding to the district attorney, the attorney general and the governor. Sometimes the police chief’s voice shakes, so moved is he by the excellence of himself, his colleagues and his bosses. Then he announces a bad guy got caught. The only thing he never says is, “Sorry it took 30 years!” The only question he doesn’t want to hear is, “Didn’t you get tips on that guy in 1978?”

All this self-lauding has become strange. Public figures use the press to laud themselves with no embarrassment, no sense of what is important, and no sense of modesty. If Jack Webb were here he would deck these guys. Broderick Crawford would bark “10-4” and hit them on the head with his Highway Patrol walkie-talkie. Once again I think of the wisdom of Tony Soprano: Let Gary Cooper talk and he’ll never shut up.

Every announcement of news in America has become an Academy Awards show. And every speaker has become a variation on Sally Fields: “I like me, I really like me!”

*   *   *

Back to the senators. Why did they put on that performance the other day? Yes, it was sheer exuberant egotism; it was the excitement of the TV lights; it was their sly conviction that if they laud themselves they will be appearing to laud the institution; and it was, no doubt, the counsel of their advisers that in the magic medium of television, if you declare you are a “hero” often enough people will come to associate the word “hero” with you. Advisers, you must stop telling them this. Please.

I think everyone in politics now has been affected by the linguistic sleight-of-hand, which began with the Kennedys in the 1960s, in which politics is called “public service,” and politicians are allowed and even urged to call themselves “public servants.” Public servants are heroic and self-denying. Therefore politicians are heroic and self-denying. I think this thought has destabilized them.

People who charge into burning towers are heroic; nuns who work with the poorest of the poor are self-denying; people who volunteer their time to help our world and receive nothing in return but the knowledge they are doing good are in public service. Politicians are in politics. They are less self-denying than self-aggrandizing. They are given fame, respect, the best health care in the world; they pass laws governing your life and receive a million perks including a good salary, and someone else—faceless taxpayers, “the folks back home”—gets to pay for the whole thing. This isn’t public service, it’s more like public command. It’s not terrible—democracies need people who commit politics; they have a place and a role to play—but it’s not saintly, either.

I don’t know if politicians have ever been modest, but I know they have never seemed so boastful, so full of themselves, and so dizzy with self-love.

There. Thank you. I yield the floor.

This is the official end of high heels in Washington, isn’t it?

The Republican Senate staffer, who spoke to me after she returned to her desk following the evacuation of the Capitol, laughed.

“I think it might be, yeah,” she said.

She spoke to me anonymously because she wanted to be free with her observations.

I asked her what it was like at 11:59 a.m. Wednesday, when word came to the Hart Senate Office Building that everyone had to get out. Here’s her story.

*   *   *

“I was on the phone in the office. The girl behind me, about 30 years old, all of a sudden jumped up and said, ‘They’re running off the floor!’ We have a TV monitor in the office that is always showing the floor of the Senate. Sen. [Carl] Levin was running off the floor.
“A few minutes later the alarms came. The squawk box goes off: ‘Evacuate immediately! Evacuate immediately!’ Each office has a big black duffel bag with gas masks and decontamination stuff. We’re all trained in the use of this stuff. Big sealed bag. Somebody grabbed it. We evacuated immediately.

“Every office has been trained—each office is required to have an official security person who makes sure everyone is out. You meet later at a designation.

“So we go down the stairs and out the door. What’s interesting about this is the people who have been here a while know what the drill is, but the kids who’ve just come in, the interns, the new staff, the visitors to the Capitol, they flip out. They haven’t had the experience that you in New York and we in Washington have had.

“Longtime staffers move purposefully. They’re not seized with ‘Oh my God!’ The new ones run. The kids were like they were fleeing for their lives. They are all on their cell phones calling mom back in Dubuque.

“We’re fighting a war; you’re involved because you’re in the Capitol.

“I was here on 9/11. That day I had to be forced to leave because I refused to leave when I found out it was terrorism. When the second plane hit the towers everyone left, but my reaction was, ‘No blankin’ terrorist is gonna make me leave the Capitol.’

“There’s different ways people think after something like this. Some think I could be back home in Iowa with my garden and my house and my kids.

“Others think, I belong to the U.S. government and there’s no way I’m not doing my job.

“This time I left. I don’t want to cause an argument.

“I was wearing open-toed, two-inch heels. Is this the official end of high heels in Washington? I think it might be, yeah.

“This time they did not say remove your shoes. They said, ‘Run, move away from the Capitol, move east, move east.’ You could tell it was something from the way they acted. I thought of Barbara Olson, because I could tell it was serious this time, and I was there that day.

“There were a lot of hazmat trucks, ambulances, the police in black vans, FBI or whatever. I feel like something is working—we’re coordinating better, and more seriously.

“We met at our designation, at the statue at Stanton Park, on C Street Northeast, a few blocks away. We did a headcount. Some people missing, but we knew they were elsewhere when we left.

“We stayed in Stanton Park for 40 minutes. People grabbed a smoke; smart people brought their lunch. The new people had to get their minds wrapped around it. A lotta people on cell phones calling kids, mom. Me too—I didn’t want my family to hear on the TV and worry I wasn’t alright.

“We left the office with a portable intercom. The official security person carries it. It signals when it’s all clear. It also signals when it has to tell us to get farther away from the Capitol. We waited to hear. They came on and said all clear.

“We said, ‘Good, let’s go.’ “

*   *   *

After we rang off I remembered the incident during the Reagan funeral, when everyone was evacuated from the Capitol because a small plane with a broken communications system strayed over restricted airspace. (It turned out to be carrying the governor of Kentucky.) Yesterday’s story is bigger because it involved both the Capitol and the White House, and because it heavily involved the White House press corps, which was given alarming and contradictory instructions: Get in the basement, run away from the building.

You witness a lot of pared down and unmediated human nature in situations like this. During the Reagan funeral, when many were gathered in ceremonial rooms in the Capitol, a gallant old woman, a former government official, calmly and very definitely informed a security man she was not leaving. A friend saw a powerful media figure almost knock over a wheelchair-bound woman as he raced from the room. A witty and brilliant woman turned her heel as she ran in high Manolo Blahniks down the Capitol steps. She slowed at the bottom and told a close friend to leave her, she couldn’t run anymore. He said: No, if you die my life won’t be fun anymore, I’m staying. And he did.

And I am thinking what the woman from the Hart Building told me about the young. It reminds me of Lesley Stahl. After 9/11, Lesley found that the young people in her office in New York were especially shook. Panic attacks, anthrax in the news, the fear that more death was coming.

When a young person would confide his or her fears, Lesley started saying, “Come sit next to me.” She would talk to them softly about how lucky they all were to have to concentrate on getting the news. They would sit with her at her desk and do their work next to her. Then after a while they’d leave, and if they got scared again an hour later, they would come and sit next to her again.

The young are new to history. The job of the mature is to be mature. Here’s to them.

I was at a wedding, standing just off the dance floor, when a pleasant young man in his 20s approached, introduced himself and asked where I’d had my hair done. I shook his offered hand and began to answer, but before I could he said, “I’m gay, by the way.” I nodded as if this were my business, but thought: I wonder why a total stranger thinks I want to know what he wishes to do with his genitals? What an odd way to say hello.

We live in a time in which people routinely violate their own privacy.

I don’t think the young man lacked a sense of privacy. I suspect if I’d said, “Tell me your annual salary,” he would have bridled. That’s personal.

Maybe he wanted me to approve (“That’s wonderful!”) or disapprove (“Unclean!”). Maybe he felt compelled to announce his orientation because homosexuals are so often told that not to declare is to be closeted, and to be closeted is shameful. Maybe he was doing what he thinks he must to do to show integrity.

Whatever his thinking, it has occurred to me that in the old, clucking, busybody America it was not unusual to meet people who needed to be told, “That’s none of your business.”

But in the new and infinitely stranger America there are a lot of people who need to be told, “Buddy, that’s none of my business.”

Or, as people began saying about five years ago, “Too much information!”

*   *   *

Yet there is one change in the national conversation that has been beneficial. It is one case in which the sharing of personal information has struck me as a big step forward.
This is the demystification of illness, especially cancer. It is being demystified by the number of people who have lately come forward to tell people they were ill and to ask for their help. Tony Snow of Fox is one, Peter Jennings of ABC another. Melissa Etheridge came out at the recent Grammy Awards and rocked the house with her brilliance, energy and bald-from-chemo head.

And there is Laura Ingraham. Laura was, as pretty much everyone who reads this column knows, recently diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, like everyone in such circumstances, she was shocked. Then she did an amazing thing. She told friends and family exactly what was happening; then she told her listeners on her popular radio show and asked for their prayers. She gave daily treatment updates on her Web page. Before April, Laura hadn’t been to a gynecologist in 3 1/2 years. Now she is reminding women not to be as “moronic” as she was.

Laura is funny, irreverent, beautiful and about to be married. She once told me that before she met her excellent fiancé she’d met her share of frogs. I teased her that it wasn’t a few, it was more like the ending of “Magnolia.” Her laugh filled the restaurant and made people stare. After she was diagnosed she took a week off from her radio show. But she called in from outside the operating room to report she’d just asked the surgeon if he was offering a lift with the lumpectomy.

It is not possible that her beautiful spirit—and Tony’s, and Peter’s, and Melissa Etheridge’s—isn’t helping people.

*   *   *

Illness used to be considered a personal and intimate matter, and of course it is. But publicizing your struggles with it can save the lives of strangers. The other day the Associated Press reported that more than one-fourth of those who were aware of celebrity urgings to get cancer screenings had gotten such screenings.

Certain illnesses, and cancer is one, have been treated as if they were obscurely shameful. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag said disease arouses dread. An illness “that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.” She quoted Kafka writing from his sanitarium: It was hard for him to get accurate information on his tuberculosis because in discussing it “everybody drops into a shy, evasive, glassy-eyed manner of speech.”

In the past people have acted as if illness were an evil predator and not what it is, a condition that can be treated.

So why not open the windows, air it, let everyone know? Why not let those who choose to talk to God talk to God for you? Laura had full convents praying for her. The day of her operation, a Mass was said for her at a small church in Brooklyn, where strangers very specifically prayed for her full recovery.

The other day I called in to welcome her back to her show and she mentioned a friend had questioned her approach. Was it wrong to be so public?

No. It was healthy.

The case of John Bolton is about politics (unhousebroken conservatives must be stopped), payback (you tick me off, I’ll pick you off) and personality. People who have worked with him allege he is heavy-handed, curmudgeonly and not necessarily lovably so.

I don’t know him, but I suspect there’s some truth in it. Do the charges disqualify him to serve as American ambassador to the United Nations? If reports of his behavior are true—he is tough, pushes too hard, sends pressuring e-mails and may or may not have berated a coworker as he threw paper balls at her hotel door—the answer is no.

*   *   *

Bad temper is a bad thing, but in government it’s a flaw with a long provenance. Bob Dole once slammed a phone down so hard it is said to have splintered. Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos tells us, used to go into “purple rages.” There is a past and possibly future presidential candidate who would regularly phone one of his staffers at home and ream that person out by screaming base obscenities. (I was impressed to learn the staffer felt free to respond in kind, and did.)

Harry S. Truman, as president, once threatened in writing to kick the testicles of a journalist (a music reviewer who had been nasty about the talents of Truman’s daughter). Lyndon Johnson would physically crowd people and squeeze their arms painfully as he tried to get them to do what he wanted; in his case arm-twisting was really arm-twisting. Richard Nixon is said to have snapped to an aide who came to him with some issue, “You must have me confused with somebody who gives a sh—.” He also physically pushed and humiliated his press secretary, Ron Zeigler.

And so it goes, and all the way back. Jefferson was a man of public dignity and the meanest private plotting. Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. (I here invite all readers who work in government to give, in one paragraph, their memory of Most Obnoxious Hissy Fit by or Most Appalling Style of any unnamed government official with whom they have worked, and what they learned from it.)

Bad temper is a bad thing in a public servant, but it is not the worst thing. Worse is the person who judges all questions as either career-enhancing or career-retarding, who lets the right but tough choice slide if standing for it will make him controversial and therefore a target. Mr. Bolton apparently never does that. Worse is the person who doesn’t really care that the right thing be done, as long he gets his paycheck. That’s not Mr. Bolton either. Worse still is the cynic who is above caring about anything beyond his own concerns. And that isn’t Mr. Bolton either.

*   *   *

What is interesting to me about the charges against Mr. Bolton is that he has not, apparently, been self-protective in the Washington way. People in government (and media, and the office tower across the street) are often courteous not because they believe deeply in the moral necessity of treating others with respect, but because they know rudeness is impractical. It makes enemies; it gives them something they can use against you. Government is inherently full of disagreement; why look for personal ones? It has long been said that in Washington a friend is someone who will stab you in the front. Mr. Bolton, again if the charges are true, has been a friend to many. He tells people off to their faces. That’s refreshing. As a human tic, if that’s what it is, it is probably more individually controllable than the temptation to damage people behind their backs, which is what people in intense environments more commonly and destructively do.

John Bolton is conceded by all, friends and foes alike, to be very smart, quite earnest, hardworking and experienced (undersecretary of state, former assistant secretary of state, treaty negotiator, international development official and old U.N. hand; he played a major role in getting the U.N. to repeal its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism). He is also known as jocular and tough-minded. He has been highly critical of the United Nations. These are all good things.

If he is confirmed he will walk into the U.N. as a man whose reputation is that he does not play well with the other children. Not all bad. He will not be seen as a pushover. Good. Some may approach him with a certain tentativeness. But Mr. Bolton, having been burned in the media frying pan and embarrassed, will likely moderate those parts of his personal style that have caused him trouble. He may wind up surprising everyone with his openness and friendliness. Fine.

Or he’ll be a bull in a china shop.

But the U.N. is a china shop in need of a bull, isn’t it? The Alfonse-Gaston routine of the past half century is all very nice, but it’s given us the U.N. as it is, a place of always-disappointing potential. May not be a bad thing to try something else.

There were many moving and dramatic moments in Rome two days ago, but this is the one I think I’ll remember: the sight of them running.

Did you see them running to St. Peter’s Square as the bells began to toll?

They came running in from the offices and streets of Rome, running in their business suits, in jeans with backpacks over their shoulders. The networks kept showing it in their wide shots as they filled time between the ringing of the bells and the balcony scene.

So many came running that by the end, by the time Benedict XVI was announced, St. Peter’s and the streets leading to it were as full as they’d been two weeks ago, at the funeral of John Paul II.

Why did they run? Why did this ancient news—”We have a pope”—representing such irrelevant-seeming truths and such an archaic institution—send them running?

Why did they gather? Why did they have to hear?

*   *   *

The faith is dead in Europe, everyone knows that. So why did they come?
You say, “They just wanted to be there. It’s history. People are experience junkies. They wanted to take pictures with their cell phones.”

That would be true of some. But why did so many weep as the new pope came out? Why did they chant “Benedict, Benedict” as he stood at the balcony? Why were they jubilant?

Why were so many non-Catholics similarly moved? And why in America, where the church is torn in divisions, did people run to the TV and the radio when word spread?

People are complicated. You can hit distracted people with all the propaganda in the world, you can give it to them every day in all your media, and sometimes they’ll even tell pollsters they agree with you. But something is always going on in their chests. Some truth is known there; some yearning lives there. It’s like they have a compass in their hearts and turn as they will, this way and that, it continues to point to true north.

We want a spiritual father. We want someone who stands for what is difficult and right, what is impossible but true. Being human we don’t always or necessarily want to live by the truth or be governed by it. But we are grateful when someone stands for it. We want him to be standing up there on the balcony. We want to aspire to it, reach to it, point to it and know that it is there.

Because we can actually tell what’s true.

We can just somehow tell.

*   *   *

John Paul II was a great man. We all knew that. Funny how we all knew. And so when word spread that he was dead, they came running.

And because they came running, because four million people engulfed Rome after his death, the eyes of the world were suddenly trained on John Paul’s funeral, which was suddenly an event.

Because the world watched the funeral, they noticed the man who celebrated the mass and gave the eulogy. John Paul II had picked him for that role. He spoke with love. He said John Paul, the old man who always came to the window to greet the crowds and pray with them, was now, today, right at this moment, at the window of his father’s house. It was beautiful and poetic and people—cardinals—who watched and listened to the speaker thought: Yes, that’s true. And the man who was speaking, who even 10 years ago was considered too old and controversial for the job, was suddenly seen by his fellow cardinals, one after the other, as the future pope.

It was impossible. But it happened. No one was really considering Cardinal Ratzinger until that mass.

Those who are pursuing John Paul II’s canonization, please note: his first miracle is Benedict XVI.

*   *   *

We are living in a time of supernatural occurrences. The old pope gives us his suffering as a parting gift, says his final goodbye on Easter Sunday; dies on the vigil of Feast of the Divine Mercy, the day that marks the messages received by the Polish nun, now a saint, who had written that a spark out of Poland would light the world and lead the way to the coming of Christ. The mourning period for the old pope ends on the day that celebrates St. Stanislas, hero of Poland, whose name John Paul had thought about taking when he became pope. We learned this week from a former secretary that John Paul I, the good man who was pope just a month, had told everyone the day he was chosen that he wanted to be called John Paul I. You can’t be called “the first” until there is a second, he was told. There will be a second soon, he replied.
It is an age of miracles and wonders, of sightings of Mary and warnings, of prophecy, graces and gifts.

The choosing of Benedict XVI, a man who is serious, deep and brave, is a gift. He has many enemies. They imagine themselves courageous and oppressed. What they are is agitated, aggressive, and well-connected.

They want to make sure his papacy begins with a battle. They want to make sure no one gets a chance to love him. Which is too bad because even his foes admit he is thoughtful, eager for dialogue, sensitive, honest.

They want to make sure that when he speaks and writes, the people of the world won’t come running.

What to do to help? See his enemies for what they are, and see him for what he is. Read him—he is a writer, a natural communicator of and thinker upon challenging ideas. Listen to him. Consult your internal compass as you listen, and see if it isn’t pointing true north.

Look at what he said at the beginning of the papal conclave: It is our special responsibility at this time to be mature, to believe as adults believe. “Being an ‘adult’ means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties.” Being an adult is loving what is true and standing with it.

This isn’t radical, or archconservative. And the speaker isn’t an enforcer, a cop or a rottweiler. He’s a Catholic. Which one would think is a good thing to have as leader of the Catholic Church.

You are a cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, a modern man, and for the past seven days, in private conversations in Rome with cardinals you trust, you’ve been admitting what you would never say in public.

You were shocked at the outpouring for John Paul II. You were shocked at the four million who came to Rome, at the line that stretched across the Tiber, at the tears.

You had no idea.

Not that you didn’t have real affection for the old man. He was probably a saint. All that suffering, dragging his broken body into each day the past five years. That’s a long time on the cross.

But you thought he was yesterday’s news. Everyone had already said goodbye to him at those big audiences in the Paul VI hall. And let’s face it, the church under John Paul was slammed every day as conservative, ossified, reactionary.

Here’s another strange thing. In the polls on churchgoing and belief it’s always Catholics on the street in Europe and America who say they want change and reform. They’d been saying it for years! And yet it was Catholics on the street from Europe and America—real nobodies, not to be impolite but just regular Catholics—who engulfed Rome to weep and yell Santo, Santo!

*   *   *

You sit and think: We have to consider what the crowds signified, what the outpouring meant. Maybe God was telling us something.

You try to walk through the data. Everyone says John Paul was popular because he was a rock star. He had a special appeal to the young. People loved him because he was so vibrant and dynamic.

Then you think—or rather that part of your mind that habitually questions your main themes on any given day tells you—Wait, the guy could barely walk, he couldn’t even move his face. He looked like, God forgive me, the Hunchback or something. He was writing encyclicals and telling people what seems to be good is not good, and what seems to be old is true. That doesn’t sound like a rock star.

You think: The fact is, John Paul was not an expression of his times, he existed in opposition to the times. He defended church doctrine and moral teaching because he thought they were true! He wouldn’t abandon the truth. In the Catholic colleges of America they didn’t see the truth he spoke as true. They thought it was archaic. Catholics in colleges and newsrooms, on campuses and on TV, are always going on and on about the world needs contraception, we need married priests, we need women priests. Now it’s the right to die.

*   *   *

The cardinal was getting a headache. So many colliding thoughts. Worse, they were thoughts at odds with the common wisdom. And the cardinal doesn’t like to be any more at odds with the common wisdom than he absolutely has to be. Life is tough enough.

He goes to dinner at a fine Roman restaurant with a handful of cardinals. He has a glass of Chianti, and then two. The service is excellent. Rome knows how to treat a cardinal. And Rome appreciates the burden that faces them: how to replace John Paul, the man the church just found out is considered irreplaceable.

The cardinals’ conversation turns to the funeral.

A Cardinal from South America says, “I had a thought. When the crowd kept applauding during the Mass—to me, looking out at them, it seemed as if they were saying: ‘We’re not just observers anymore, we’re the Church, Hear us!’ It seemed to me possibly quite significant.”

Silence as they all considered this.

An old cardinal with what seemed a German accent cleared his throat.

“What they want, I believe, is a healthy church. For all John Paul’s illness, they thought he was a healthy man. Emotionally and psychologically healthy in a way modern culture is not.

“It seems to me the meaning of the crowds, the meaning of the cries at the mass, is this: ‘We loved this hero of truth, and we want a hero of truth.’ They want someone who won’t bow to the thinking of the world. They want someone who will clean the stables, too. The corruption and worldly values of the church, the sex scandals—these must be dealt with.”

At this point an American cardinal made an indignant sound, and tried to interrupt. But the old cardinal raised his hand and continued.

“The church needs someone who’ll clean the church, defend it and refresh it. At the same time we need a man who can engage the world intellectually on the coming bioethical dramas and explain why trying to create human life in a Petri dish will be the end of us, the end of humanity. For man will do what he can do, and when he can grow replacement humans to give people new hearts that will allow them to live forever, well, that’s what they’ll do. We’ll have human fetal farms, you wait.

“But even more important than any of this, the new pontiff must have a holy soul. He must be a man who prays to God, is led by God, loves God above all. And here’s the great problem for us: this person may not be the most charming or accessible person in the world.”

A young cardinal leaned forward. “I don’t disagree, my friend, but in order to teach the world you must draw its eyes and ears! We need someone who captures the imagination of the world. We can’t lead unless they look and listen. For that we need a rock star.”

Silence again.

Then a young cardinal from Asia said, “Excuse me, but I have less knowledge about our brother cardinals than you. Is there a man who has all that is needed plus he’s a rock star?”

The cardinals thought. “No,” said one. “Or not that we know.”

“If that is true,” said the cardinal from Asia, “It would seem our duty is to choose a great man who is not necessarily a dramatic or endearing figure. The Holy Spirit will give him voice. Our time will need greatness. ‘For nowadays the world is lit by lightning.’ “

There was silence again.

Someone called for the bill.

*   *   *

Outside was an enterprising crew from NBC.

“Your excellencies, how are the bishops thinking? After the outpouring of love the past 10 days, are you thinking that you need a dramatic figure, a rock star who’ll capture the imagination of the world?”

“The Holy Spirit will decide,” said the old Cardinal with the German accent.

And our modern cardinal walked home to the Vatican, met with his aides in the suite, lay down with his headache, which was now very bad, closed his eyes and thought: Now more than ever. He dragged himself up, and knelt by the bed.