Peggy Noonan

On Saturday night Sept. 8, 2001, I did something unusual. I went to Madison Square Garden to watch the taping of a Michael Jackson special that was soon to be aired on CBS. A friend had come to town with tickets and we decided to meet for dinner and go together. We thought it would be fun because we thought it would be strange.

We had no idea.

The special was aimed at celebrating Michael Jackson’s career. He was newly under the heavy cloud of scandal, and his advisors had cooked up a new story—a reunion of the Jackson family—to replace the scandal story.

Thousands of young people showed up, and some people who were not so young. Top tickets went for thousands of dollars. Michael Jackson, dressed in his black glitter suit, came out and danced with his brothers and sang and grabbed his crotch. The crowd screamed and cheered. Liz Taylor came out in a stiff gown, looking like a statue in Madame Tussaud’s that had been designed to retain water. She sat silently in a sort of little balcony overseeing the action, saying nothing but waving like the queen mother. Marlon Brando too was a guest star. He sat at the center of the stage with a mike in his hand and spoke for about 10 minutes in a kind of deranged if harmless free association. People booed. They couldn’t tell what he was saying, but they didn’t spend this kind of money to see a fat man in a chair say things that might be serious. Liza Minnelli came out and did a number that was either an homage to or a wan imitation of her mother. And then Witney Houston came out.

This part you may remember, for photos of her made their way across the newspapers of the world. She was emaciated, like a person in a terrible famine. Just a few years before she had been America’s sweetheart, singing with perfect poise and pitch. Now there were repeated reports in the tabloids of drug abuse, and her appearance seemed to buttress them. “Skeletonism,” I said to my friend. “I think it’s a disease now. You get famous and then turn into a skeleton.”

There were other acts and other odd moments, and throughout them the crowd cheered and yelled.

*   *   *

Later, as we got into a cab, we said nothing. It was odd to go from such sound to such silence. But we were both pondering.

It wasn’t that any individual moment during the evening was so stunningly bizarre. (Mr. Brando, for instance, was only as bizarre as Brando is.) It was that taken as a whole the night yielded an unmistakable sense of decay and disorder. “I feel like we just witnessed the end of our culture,” I said.

“We are,” he said. “It’s a freak show now. The whole thing, it’s just a freak show.”

Two-and-a-half days later came 9/11 and the ending of a world. When my friend and I talked again he said, “Remember that night? You could see it coming then.”

Why am I treating you to a bad memory? Because I am disturbed about our culture and can’t stop thinking about it. I’m embarrassed by our culture too, and made anxious by it. Aren’t you?

For a while after 9/11 we seemed to sober up. There seemed a new seriousness. It wasn’t heavy and somber, there was a lot of humor and wit, but we were perhaps a little chastened, a little more mature. Sept. 11 was such a shock to the national system that after it the culture’s long slide into narcissistic netherworlds seemed momentarily stopped, or at least slowed. But it’s picked up again.

Last Sunday night I joined some friends at a Texas barbecue restaurant in Manhattan. We were a football-free zone, marking the birthday of a friend from San Antonio. We had a great time eating what Texans call barbecue and we call brisket. I got home about 9 p.m. and put on the television. It looked like a good game. I logged on to Drudge, and saw the big picture of Justin Timberlake, whose expression could have been described as evil if his face had more intelligence, turned toward Janet Jackson, whose famous breast was exposed to show the famous nipple decorated by the famous Goth-looking metal sunburst.

Oh no, I thought. We’re back to the pre-9/11 freak show.

You have all followed the great controversy, although I’m not sure controversy is the right word for an incident the facts of which no normal human would debate. Was it deliberate? No, the Goth pastie, the lyrics “I’ll have you naked before the end of this song,” and Janet Jackson’s slowness to cover her breast and quickness to enact what she thinks is a look of shame, make it clear it was all an accident. Did MTV know it would happen? No, when they put out the announcement promising “shocking moments” from Ms. Jackson, they didn’t mean anything by it. Did the—let’s be generous—perhaps retarded Justin Timberlake realize he’d gone too far? Of course—that’s why he issued the winking statement about “wardrobe malfunction.” Was the NFL taken aback? Gosh, they must have been—who would think MTV would do something vulgar and highly sexualized? Will an FCC fine of $27,500 stop the networks? Oh sure, in their tracks.

Now they’re saying the answer is a tape delay. Believe me, half the country would like to put the entire culture on a tape delay.

*   *   *

Why was the piggy paganism of the Super Bowl so obnoxious? Our culture has been sick for a while—highly sexualized, violent, inspirational to the unstable. Our media have for decades been robbing our children of the not-knowingness that is the hallmark of childhood. It’s not new; it’s just worse, or perhaps I mean more obvious. This was the Super Bowl, after all, a football game in early-evening prime time with children watching, and nice people who hadn’t bought into the concept of seeing a sex show.

Blogger Mickey Kaus raised most quickly some big points. “The issue isn’t nudity but the implicit endorsement of acting out male fantasies of violent and invasive non-consensual sexual behavior. Never mind the message it sends to international audiences—say young, angry Muslims, to pick a random example, who may have been wondering whether America really is immoral.” He added that this year’s game was telecast to 229 countries and territories, including China for the first time.

But at least indignation is broad and deep. So broad and deep there may be hope in it. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, in stepping over the line, could wind up being remembered as the entertainers who reminded us there is a line, or should be.

This might be a frog-in-the-water moment. You remember: You put a frog in a nice cool pot of water, and he’s happy and swims around. But if you put a flame underneath the pot and slowly raise it, chances are he’ll boil to death. On the other hand, if you dump a frog in a boiling pot of water, he’ll jump right out and be saved.

Our culture has been on a boil for years. Then it cooled a bit. The other night at the Super Bowl they put the flame higher and the water began to boil. The frog—that would be us—is still alive. And may, in his shock, jump out of the water.

But the question is: How? How to turn it around. I wonder if all the sane adult liberals and conservatives couldn’t make progress here. But how. Readers?

Let me assert something that I cannot prove with a poll but that is based on serious conversations the past few months with Republicans and also normal people: 9/11 changed everything. Yes, I know you know that. But it has even changed how people who usually vote Republican think about Democratic candidates for president. Our No. 1 question used to be: Can we beat this guy easily? But now we feel the age of terrorism so profoundly challenges our country, and is so suggestive of future trauma and national pain, that our No. 1 question has become: Is he . . . normal? Just normal. Is he stable and adult and experienced?

Only then we ask if we can beat him.

*   *   *

The Democratic nominee in 2004 could win the election. There may be something to the idea that Democrats in general want to get rid of George W. Bush more than Republicans in general want to keep him. One of the men running in New Hampshire tonight could become the next president, and lead the war on terror. And our country cannot afford a bit of a nut.

Which get us of course to Howard Dean. But not for long. I do not know how Democrats in New Hampshire will judge him today, but I can say with confidence that the American people will not choose him as president, because they will not want him near the nuclear arsenal.

Which gets me to Wesley Clark. Forgive me, but he seems to be another first class strange-o. He has been called arrogant and opportunistic. That’s par for the course in politics, but what worries me about Gen. Clark is that it seems to be true to greater degrees than is usual.

On the night of John Kerry’s win in Iowa, Gen. Clark went on “Larry King Live.” The other guest was Bob Dole, not exactly an ideologically rigid man. His presence seemed to signal the establishment giving a big hello and an insider’s teasing to the relatively new candidate. Remember how it went? Mr. Dole, a little emollient, then a little mischievous, told Gen. Clark, first, that “somebody [had] to lose” in Iowa and, next, that “politically you just became a colonel instead of a general.” This little barb set off a pompous harrumph of a retort: “Well, I don’t think that’s at all—Senator, with all due respect, he’s [Kerry’s] a lieutenant and I’m a general. You got to get your facts on this. He was a lieutenant in Vietnam. I’ve done all of the big leadership.” The exchange ended with Gen. Clark telling Mr. Dole that he, Wesley, had “been in a lot of tough positions in my life, one of them was leading the operation in Kosovo . . .”

“I won a war”? “I pitch a 95-mile-an-hour fastball”? “I’ve done all of the big leadership”? “I’ve been in a lot of tough positions”?

Oh no. Another one.

*   *   *

Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest—the actual meaning of his candidacy—he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate’s hunger. He is passionately for the war until he announces for the Democratic nomination facing an antiwar base, at which point he becomes passionately antiwar. He thanks God that George Bush and his aides are in the White House, then he says they’re the worst leaders ever. Anyone can change his mind; but this is not a change, it’s a swerve, and without a convincing rationale. Last week, Brit Hume asked Gen. Clark when it was that he’d “first noticed” that he—Gen. Clark—was a Democrat. There was laughter, but that was a nice big juicy softball. Gen. Clark flailed and fumbled. Later he blamed Mr. Hume for being a Republican agent.

When you are making it up along the way you make mistakes that might, politely, be called tonal. It is not terrible that he was introduced the other day in New Hampshire by a bilious activist, Michael Moore, who called the president a “deserter.” Gen. Clark didn’t address the charge when he took the stage. He could have been distracted, and it certainly would have been ungracious to say, “Thanks for that introduction, which I must disavow because it suggests a grassy knoll extremism with which I cannot associate myself.” But in the days afterward Gen. Clark was repeatedly questioned about Mr. Moore’s charge. He dug the hole deeper by leaving open the possibility that it was true.

More telling is Gen. Clark on abortion. A pro-lifer wouldn’t have the smallest of chances in the Democratic Party, but a certain Clintonian politesse is expected when the question is raised. “Abortion is always a tragedy but denying a woman her reproductive rights under the Constitution would also be a tragedy”—that kind of thing. This is what Gen. Clark said when he met with the Manchester Union-Leader and was questioned by the newspaper’s Joseph McQuaid:

Clark: I don’t think you should get the law involved in abortion—
McQuaid: At all?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Late-term abortion? No limits?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to delivery?
Clark: Nope, nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to the head coming out of the womb?
Clark: I say that it’s up to the woman and her doctor, her conscience. . . . You don’t put the law in there

.

Gen. Clark was then asked, “What about when she’s grown up and at the prom, can you kill her then?” He said, “Absolutely. Chase her across the dance floor. This is a personal decision for the mother.” Oh—sorry—I made that last part up. He did not advocate killing children 18 years after they’re born. Though one wonders why not. Maybe he does have nuance. His campaign tried to spin it into a plus. He forgot to speak “artfully,” “precisely.” But he was nothing if not precise. He forgot to speak sanely.

All of this was captured by Camille Paglia last summer, in an interview with Salon that at the time struck me as extreme and now seems prescient. Asked what she, as a pro-military Democrat, thinks of the retired general, she said: “What a phony! . . . Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’—a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless.” But, said the interviewer, his supporters say he is handsome and great on TV. Ms. Paglia: “Doesn’t anyone know how to ‘read’ TV? The guy’s an android . . . a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man’s man. And he’s no Eisenhower. . . . This is just another hysterical boomlet, as when the nerdy Northeast media went gaga for John McCain—’Finally, a soldier we like!’”

After this interview, Gen. Clark’s military colleagues began to speak critically of him on and off the record—an apple-polishing operator who abused the chain of command. It is true that Americans respect and often support generals. But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring. The title “general” is loaded enough. We don’t want one who is temperamental and unpredictable and strange.

*   *   *

And so my Democratic friends, patriots who vote Democratic and are voting in today’s primary and the ones down the road. Please. We will take Joe Lieberman or John Kerry or even young John Edwards, men who appear to be somewhere in the normal range. We need a person who could rally the nation on a terrible day, and who could arguably meet the security demands the age requires. We can’t afford flip-outs, or people who are too obviously creepy. Just a person in the normal range. Is that asking too much? Say it ain’t so. Give Gen. Clark his marching orders: Retreat!

One suspects the Democrats will send him packing. Just as one suspects he might eventually withdraw, saying something like, “You won’t have Wes Clark to kick around anymore.”

On the matter of the pope, “The Passion” and the famous papal quote, you are perhaps perplexed. You are not alone. This is a story marked by, among other things, a certain amount of intrigue, and some of it is like something out of “The DaVinci Code.”

My Dec. 17 column reported that Pope John Paul II had seen Mel Gibson’s movie on the crucifixion of Christ, “The Passion,” and had offered a judgment on it: “It is as it was.” The quote came from the film’s producer, Steve McEveety, who told me that it was given to him by the pope’s longtime private secretary, Archbishop Stanislau Dziwisz.

At almost the same moment my piece ran, the National Catholic Reporter ran a piece by Rome correspondent John L. Allen Jr., saying the Vatican had given a “thumbs up” to Mel Gibson’s film. It quoted a senior Vatican official who spoke on condition of anonymity: “The Holy Father watched and enjoyed the film. His comment afterwards was, ‘It is as it was.’ “

The next day Reuters reported in a dispatch with a Vatican dateline that it had a Vatican source who said the pope had seen the film, was “moved” by it, and afterward said, “It is as it was.”

A week later, on Dec. 24, reporter Cindy Wooden of the Catholic News Service wrote a piece saying that “a senior Vatican official close to the pope,” who insisted that his name not be used, had denied that the pope said what he was quoted as saying. “The Holy Father does not comment, does not give judgments on art,” Ms. Wooden quoted the official as saying. “I repeat: There was no declaration, no judgment from the pope.” She quoted another Vatican official saying, “The Holy Father saw this film, but did not express any opinion on it.”

On Jan. 9, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter defended his piece. He reported that he had gone back to his original source, “a well placed Vatican official who is normally a reliable guide to the pope’s mind.” Mr. Allen wrote: “The official is adamant that the original story was right—the pope did indeed say, ‘It is as it was.’ “ Mr. Allen provided new information. The pope and Archbishop Dziwisz had watched the film in the dining room of the pope’s private apartment on a television with a large screen and a videocassette recorder.

*   *   *

Which brings us to this week.

On Sunday Frank Rich of the New York Times, in a column attacking the marketing of the film and those who have supported it, reported that he contacted the Italian translator in the McEveety-Dziwisz meeting. The translator backed the quote up—Archbishop Dziwisz had quoted the pope saying “It is as it was”—and added that the archbishop had also used the word “incredible” to describe the film.

The day after Mr. Rich’s piece ran, Cindy Wooden of CNS returned to the story—with a blockbuster. Archbishop Dziwisz—the man quoted as the source of the papal quote—denied that the pope had told anyone his opinion of the film. “I said clearly to McEveety . . . that the Holy Father made no declaration,” he said.

What gives?

The answer to that question is important for several reasons. The truth matters. What a pope says matters. And what this pontiff says about this film matters. “The Passion,” which is to open on Feb. 25, has been the focus of an intense critical onslaught since last summer. The film has been fiercely denounced as anti-Semitic, and accused of perpetuating stereotypes that will fan hatred against Jews. John Paul II has a long personal and professional history of opposing anti-Semitism, of working against it, and of calling for dialogue, respect and reconciliation between all religions. His comments here would have great importance.

Finally, it is important what the Holy Father said because no piece of work that is destructive and cruel—and what is more destructive and cruel than anti-Semitism?—should be helped by anyone, including and especially the greatest religious leader of our time.

So while to some this may seem a tempest in a teapot, it is not. It is an important story.

*   *   *

Let me tell you of my experience in the drama. This summer I was invited to a Washington screening of the film. I went with some trepidation: Could the charges of anti-Semitism be true? I didn’t think that Mel Gibson would set out to create a deliberately anti-Semitic piece of work; that kind of movie would have been rejected by audiences and lambasted by critics. But people can do ignorant things and thoughtless things, and their work can be destructive. I didn’t know what Mr. Gibson’s film would be. So I watched, and found myself moved and inspired by the film, which isn’t about hatred but love, and love’s continuing war with evil. It is a film that engenders awe, gratitude, and no small amount of self-examination. What role do I play in the crucifixion of Christ, and what role would I have played if I had been there?

I was relieved. It is a story about Jews and Romans, about Jewish saints and sinners and Roman brutes and cynics, but it isn’t really about Jews and Romans; it’s about humanity. It’s about us.

I didn’t write about the movie because I felt it was a private showing and not meant for public comment.

Jump ahead to just more than a month ago. On Dec. 16, Variety got a scoop: John Paul II had seen the film. What did he think of it? I reached Mr. McEveety, the film’s producer, who told me with great excitement that it was true—he had taken the film to Rome, he had gotten it to the pope, and afterwards he had spoken to the pope’s friend and secretary, Archbishop Dziwisz, who told him that the pope, after seeing the film, had shared his reaction: “It is as it was.”

This was news. But had the archbishop said it for public consumption? Mr. McEveety told me he had discussed the quote voiced by Archbishop Dziwisz with the pope’s longtime official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, head of the Vatican press office. Mr. McEveety said that Dr. Navarro Valls had told him he could use the papal quote when asked about the Holy Father’s reaction to the film.

I was surprised. Dr. Navarro-Valls is famously close-mouthed, and spends most of his time knocking stories like this down. It was unusual that he would give Mr. McEveety permission.

So I e-mailed Dr Navarro Valls at the Vatican telling him I wanted to write a piece for OpinionJournal and asking him about the quote. I didn’t hear back and sent another: “Dr. Navarro Valles [sic], my deadline is in two hours and I do hope you’ll let me know if there is anything on the Pope’s reaction beyond ‘It is as it was’—wonderful words, and I know you have already been in touch with Steve about them, but I would greatly appreciate it if there’s anything you could add regarding general Vatican feeling on the film, any further comment from the Holy Father, etc. Best, Peggy Noonan”

I got a response. “Dear Peggy, I don’t have for now any other comment on this. I [sic] anything is said in the future I will send it to you. Greetings, J. Navarro-Valls.”

*   *   *

I reported the story including what Dr. Navarro-Valls said. I knew that if the Vatican wanted to protest the quote or deny it they would come down on Mr. McEveety and me like a ton of bricks, officially and quickly. I was glad to see reports from Vatican sources in subsequent weeks backing up the quote and the story.

When questions surfaced challenging the quote, Mr. McEveety e-mailed Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked for his help. He answered by e-mail advising Mr. McEveety not to worry, to use the phrase “It is as it was,” and to repeat those words “again and again and again.” Mr. McEveety sent me a copy of the e-mail.

It seemed to me obvious that some in the Vatican were disturbed that the pope’s comment had become public and was being used to defend the film. Several important Vatican figures had praised the film on the record in the past few months, but the film continued to be controversial—and the Vatican hates unneeded controversy. But I knew of Dr Navarro-Valls’s encouragement of the use of the quote, and assumed that at some point he would acknowledge that encouragement.

Instead, intrigue. Yesterday, Jan. 21, Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News e-mailed Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked him about the e-mails the spokesman had sent to Steve McEveety. How could the Vatican deny the pope’s quote when you told the producer to use it again and again?

Dr. Navarro-Valls quickly replied. He told Mr. Dreher that the e-mails were not authentic. He was suggesting that they were fabricated.

Mr. Dreher, a friend who used to be my neighbor in Brooklyn, contacted me and asked for my reaction. I told him I was flummoxed. I immediately wrote Dr. Navarro-Valls and asked him to confirm his e mail to me.

The return address on Dr. Navarro-Valls’s e-mail to Rod Dreher was the same as the one on his e-mails to me. We did some checking on Dr. Navarro-Valls’s e-mail to me of Dec. 17. It was sent via an e-mail server in the Vatican’s domain, and the IP address belongs to a Vatican computer.

I have not yet had a response from Dr. Navarro-Valls, but hope to. I have also written to Steve McEveety and asked if he has any response to Dr. Navarro-Valls’s assertion that what Steve said were e-mails from Dr. Navarro-Valls were in fact not authentic.

*   *   *

Believe me, it is painful to be accused however implicitly of being the accessory to a lie. And it would grieve me more than I can say to have been part of wrongly attributing an important statement to a great pope who is for me a personal hero. Last night I spoke to Mr. McEveety, but he would not speak on the record about Dr. Navarro-Valls or the controversy that continues to swirl. I’ll be writing more soon about this extraordinary story.

One way to look at life is that we’re all waiting. You’re born, you grow into the autonomy of adulthood, and then you have to find a way to pass your time until a) you enter your real life, the one that never ends and is full of joy, or b) you enter the meaningless black void that is death and the silence of the tomb. The trick lies in finding a way to spend your time that is pleasurable, satisfying and honorable. What does this have to do with political prognostication? I really don’t know. I just know that political pundits have chosen, as their way to spend the heart of their adult years, gathering the latest facts on and trying to explain politics.

They are all on somebody’s bus today, traveling with a candidate to a pancake breakfast or a potluck dinner. God bless them, for they work hard. The older ones, the boomer reporters and their elders, went through last weekend what they go through every four years: Not Iowa again! Then they stuffed their suits into a beige Hartman bag and got a taxi to the airport. They have been on the bus since 1972 or ‘80 or ‘84 and they are wondering if history hasn’t gotten flatter and thinner and smaller, if history isn’t merely recapitulating itself, playing out a drama that seems less central than once it did. But they go. Because it’s their job and they’re good at it. And because if they don’t go their peers will gossip. They know the true drama of life is being replayed elsewhere, whereas when they were 28 they thought the Iowa outcome really was the drama of life. That’s what reading too much Teddy White will get you.

The younger reporters on the bus will be saying cynical things right now, feeling that’s the right tone to project their world-weariness. And of course they’re right. Cynicism is not an inappropriate response when surrounded by artifice, and much of modern politics is artifice. In being cynical they’ll also be trying to fit in with the boomers. But the boomers haven’t grown more cynical—they started out cynical. They’re actually nicer now. And what they want is a good hotel with 24-hour room service.

*   *   *

Just a month ago it was easy for pundits: Howard Dean’s in the lead, Dean’s got the mo and the dough. That was the common wisdom. But it has changed. There’s a story now. The new common wisdom is that Mr. Dean is no longer the lead car in the race, that he’s hit an oil spot and is spinning, maybe losing control.

I am a conservative and do not hope for a Democratic victory, but I do hope for a Democratic fight, and I think Mr. Dean would lose in a rout. He seems too odd, too politically immature and too essentially ungrounded to be president. So the new storyline is in my view good news.

The polls say Mr. Dean’s lead in the caucuses is tightening; Dick Gephardt and John Kerry are duking it out for second place; John Edwards is rising. Zogby says it’s Dean 24%, Gephardt and Kerry tied at 21%, Edwards at 15% and moving up. So even if Mr. Dean wins with something like these numbers, his competitors will immediately start saying, “Seventy-five percent of our party did not vote for Howard Dean.” And that will win them all more time.

*   *   *

But this is what seems to me interesting and suggestive that the change shown in the polls is real. The press has kicked in and is playing a part in the drama. The journalistic establishment has become an anti-Dean mover. Tuesday’s New York Times piece on the absent Mrs. Dean, for instance—that was a piece with a sting. They decided to front-page it six days before the caucuses. The morning network news shows and the cable news shows are full of Mr. Dean’s gaffes, Mr. Gephardt’s rise and Mr. Edwards’s potential.

Why? It is true the press wants a race. They don’t want to spend the next three months filing “Dean Wins Again” and “Why Kerry Failed to Ignite.” But it’s more than that. Reading between the lines and listening between the lines, it’s hard to avoid the thought that reporters don’t really like Mr. Dean. The last time a viable Democrat rose, in 1992, the columnists for the newsmagazines and profile writers for the newspapers loved Bill Clinton with a throbbing love. None of those columns are being written now. They don’t love Mr. Dean.

This is not a shock. He seems as unlovable (unless you’re a Deaniac) as he is improbable. But I suspect there’s something else at work. I wonder if mainstream media aren’t trying to save the Democratic Party from Mr. Dean. They know he’s not a likely winner down the road. Boomer reporters who’ve been through the Clinton experience have sharp eyes. I suspect they’re put off by Mr. Dean’s Clintonian aspects, such as his tendency to dissemble. They’re pushing Gephardt and Edwards and even Kerry. They may push Wesley Clark. But they’re not pushing Dean.

*   *   *

Someone said of Mr. Gephardt recently that he always looks like he has a fever. I laughed when I heard this because it’s true. But he also looks like a man who’s calm, stable, mature and experienced. Mr. Kerry continues to look like a sad tree, which is a challenge because his face and demeanor are at odds with his message and determination. But he too is mature and experienced. They’ve both been through a life in major-league politics—they’ve been through the shakedown cruise, they’ve been frisked and fisked. As for Mr. Edwards, he is distinguished by a certain cheerful cool and discipline, He’s positive, he doesn’t get down in the muck, and somehow in pictures he’s always looking up, unlike Mr. Dean, who somehow is always looking down from a stage. True, no one’s tried to kill Mr. Edwards yet, which would account for some of his cheeriness, but he does seem to have the right happy-warrior disposition. Any of these three could give George W. Bush a run for his money. (Mr. Clark, I’m afraid, seems even stranger than Mr. Dean. We’ll talk about him soon.)

Mr. Dean’s bad patch could ultimately be a gift to him. If he emerges triumphant on Monday and it isn’t a squeaker, he will soon be calling himself the Comeback Kid. He’ll claim he’s been through a terrible pummeling and emerged unscathed, proof he can go the distance. He’ll have propulsion into New Hampshire, where he’s strong anyway.

This is a real generational fight within the Democratic Party, those with years versus those with youth. The old versus the young. Every time I’ve seen a political war between old and young—between the liberal mandarins of the Republican party and the young conservatives, and then between the old right and the new right—I’ve been with the young. But this time I see wisdom in the older, middle-class and blue-collar Democrats who are wiping the mud off their boots before walking into the Gephardt fundraiser.

Mr. Dean’s people are proudly antiestablishment. For them it’s the Pussyfooting Party Powers versus an Unformed But Rising Mass. If the Democratic establishment reasserts itself in Iowa, many pundits—including me—will have to eat the words they’ve been speaking the past few months. Dean was not inevitable. In my case, never will words be eaten so happily.

I want to like Howard Dean. I don’t mean I want to support him; I mean I want to like him, or find him admirable even if I don’t agree with him. I want the Democratic Party to have a strong nominee this year, for several reasons. One is that it is one of our two great parties, and it is dispiriting to think it is not able to summon up a deeply impressive contender. Another is that democracy is best served by excellent presidential nominees duking it out region to region in a hard-fought campaign that seriously raises the pressing issues of the day. A third is that the Republican Party is never at its best when faced with a lame challenger. When faced with a tough and scrappy competitor like Bill Clinton, they came up with the Contract with America. When faced with Michael Dukakis they came up with flag-burning amendments. They need to be in a serious fight before they fight seriously.

I do not know how Howard Dean will do in Iowa, but I am one of those who think the Democrats will nominate Mr. Dean, and so I would like to like him and be able to imagine that many others will. I also would like to like him because now and then he says something that shows promise. Yesterday when asked if he ever wonders what would Jesus do, he replied: “No.” This was so candid, I loved it. In the same interview, when asked if his wife would join him on the campaign trail, he said, “I do not intend to drag her around because I think I need her as a prop on the campaign trail.” Political spouses often are dragged around as props. It’s not terrible to say so. It’s refreshing.

*   *   *

But it is hard to like Howard Dean. He seems as big a trimmer as Bill Clinton, and as bold and talented in that area as Mr. Clinton. He says America is no safer for the capture of Saddam Hussein, and then he says he didn’t say it. He floats a rumor that the Saudis tipped off President Bush before 9/11, and then he says he never believed it. When he is caught and has to elaborate, explain or disavow, he dissembles with Clintonian bravado. This is not a good sign.

He is not a happy warrior but an angry one. In the past I have thought of him as an angry little teapot, but that is perhaps too merry an image. His eyes are cold marbles, in repose his face falls into lines of mere calculation, and he holds himself with a kind of no-neck pugnacity that is fine in a wrestling coach or a tax lawyer but not in a president. We like our presidents sunny, easygoing and optimistic. They have access to the nuclear launch code, and we don’t want them losing their tempers easily. Mr. Dean’s supporters no doubt see him as optimistic, but optimists aren’t angry.

There is a disjunction between Dean’s ethnic background and his personal style. His background is eastern WASP—Park Avenue, the Hamptons, boarding school, Yale. But he doesn’t seem like a WASP. I know it’s not nice to deal in stereotypes, but there seems very little Thurston Howell III, or George Bush the elder for that matter, in Mr. Dean. He seems unpolished, doesn’t hide his aggression, is proudly pugnacious. He doesn’t look or act the part of the WASP. This may be partly because of his generation. Boomer WASPs didn’t really learn How It’s Done the way their forebears did. (Boomers of every ethnicity are less ethnic than their forebears.) George W. Bush is a little like this too—less polished, more awkward, than one might expect. At any rate there is some political meaning to this. It will be harder for Republicans to tag Mr. Dean as Son of the Maidstone Club than it was for Democrats to tag Bush One as Heir to Greenwich Country Day. He just doesn’t act the part.

On the other hand, Mr. Dean’s angry look and angry demeanor will not serve him well as he tries to carry the women’s vote.

*   *   *

Howard Dean is as much like George McGovern as 2004 is like 1972, which is to say not much. But Mr. Dean is not Mr. McGovern in a more important way. Mr. McGovern was guided and inspired by his own sense of a particular ideology. He reflected it, and his young supporters, who that year took over the party, shared it. They stood for something. Mr. Dean’s people—and Mr. Dean—don’t seem to have anything as coherent as an ideology. Instead they have attitude.

Howard Dean’s rise is about two things. The first is the war. Most of the other serious Democratic candidates were reasonable about it, if you will. Dean didn’t bother to be reasonable, or to appear reasonable: Bush is a bum and his war is a fraud. This was pitch-perfect for a disaffected base made lastingly furious by the 2000 election. Having gained the advantage, Mr. Dean never let go. His imprint was set. He left his competitors stuttering, “But at the time the president’s data did seem compelling, and so . . .” He forged on. His was the shrewdest, quickest read of the Democratic voter of 2004.

The second reason for his rise is that he is not an insider but an insurgent. He has an insurgent’s attitudes and subtle disrespect (or sometimes unsubtle, as when he referred to members of Congress as cockroaches). The young and Internet-savvy found this approach attractive. (An essay should be written by a Democrat on what it was about the Democratic establishment—the men and women of the Clinton era, the party members in Congress—that elicited such contempt.) Mr. Dean’s forces used the Internet with great and impressive creativity, and not only in fund-raising. Have you seen Flat Howard? It’s a life-size Howard printout you can get off your computer. You tape the pieces together and have a life-size Howard Dean. They’re ingenious and spirited in Dean-land.

Because Mr. Dean is operating as an insurgent, his supporters hold him to different standards. Is he inconsistent? No, he’s nimble. Is he dishonest in his statements? No, he’s just tying those establishment types in knots. Mr. Dean’s supporters seem to like him not in spite of his drawbacks, but because of them.

*   *   *

Mr. Dean’s problem in the future will not be so much credibly pivoting right on major issues as attempting to pivot into something like the normal range in terms of temperament, personality and the interpretation of things he’s already said when he’s popping off—and he pops off a lot. Some of the things he has said or suggested—Osama bin Laden shouldn’t be presumed guilty, for instance—are the rhetorical equivalent of Michael Dukakis in the tank. He looked silly. He looked unserious. Mr. Dean is going to look that way, too.

I hope something surprising happens in Iowa, and New Hampshire, and in the South. I hope it becomes a real fight on the Democratic side, and I hope that fight yields up someone who is serious, substantive, and thoughtful. But that’s not what I see coming. What I see coming is a Dean nomination followed by a rancorous campaign followed by a Dean defeat.

We have all seen the stories this Christmas season—they are not new, they are only more so—of the local struggles between what I suppose might be called the forces of modernity versus the forces of faith. Tussles in schools and townships over the Christmas display, the prayer, the T-shirt, the cross, the statue of Mary. It’s all a continuation of what Michael Kinsley once sardonically referred to as the crèche menace. But it has moved beyond the crèche: It is increasingly a movement to ban on all public property—and pretty much in public, period—the signs and symbols of a religious holiday that roughly 90% of Americans celebrate. It doesn’t even have to be Christmas-related. Last week there was the story of the Florida housing group that banned a statue of the Virgin Mary from the front of a house in the community.

They are very busy, The Banners. They seemed to have calmed down after 9/11, when half the country exploded with spontaneously put-forward religious symbols (crosses, votive candles, cards with saints’ faces), and it was somehow . . . allowed. Shock shook The Banners into reasonableness; tragedy concentrated their minds; they retreated. But now they are back, and it is the meaning and actuality of 9/11 that has receded.

*   *   *

The motives of The Banners are mixed. Some seem to have aesthetic distaste for religious symbolism that is the outward and visible expression of an inner distaste for religion itself—it’s old fashioned, unworldly, very booga booga woo woo, which can’t be helpful, can it? Some of The Banners seem driven by malice and the impulse to bully—your religion is not my religion, so it will not be mentioned in public, bub, no matter what the holiday or how many celebrate it.

But some of The Banners mean well and believe their efforts are constructive. They believe that assertions of religious belief are inherently divisive, that to put forward the symbols of belief is threatening to society’s peace. They believe that the displaying of the symbols of one faith is an implicit denial of the beliefs of another faith. They do not think that faith is part of the answer; they think it is a big part of the problem (see fundamentalist Islam; see the protracted war in Northern Ireland). They think that if only people would stop being religious, we wouldn’t have religion around roiling people’s emotions and making them violent. (If you say to them, “Man is prone to violence, and one of the things that tends to make his heart gentle is faith in God,” their eyes widen in shock: That couldn’t possibly be true!)

*   *   *

I have witnessed these arguments close up—I suppose everyone in the country has—and I have learned something. And I didn’t want to let the season end without saying it. I learned what I learned by talking to mothers as they debated these issues outside school. This was years ago, when my son was in grade school.
This is what I learned: Censoring doesn’t work. Accommodation does. But a particular kind of accommodation.

The answer is not banning religious symbols. This brings resentment and engenders a quiet seething that does not encourage peace and understanding.

The answer is not to banish religious symbols from the public square. The answer—the pro-peace position if you will—is to fill the public square with the signs and symbols of faith. It is not to banish them from the schools, it is to teach them in the schools.

The answer is not to present in the school’s display case the sorry little compromise of the 1990s—the tired little Santa and the dusty dreidel. The answer is to display a menorah and explain what it is, and its history, and what it means to Jews. The answer is to display a crucifix or a cross and explain what it means to Christians. And, yes, the answer is to show a Koran and explain what it is. The answer is not to ban Christmas carols from the school pageant but to sing them; they are part of our culture and history, and they are beautiful. And there are other religious songs that are not Christian. Sing them too.

The answer is not to banish belief but to bring it in and explain it in loving terms to our hungry-minded children. This will truly teach them appreciation and diversity and respect and regard for others. We, their parents, are limiting them and harming them by hiding the things of faith, or forcing them underground. They deserve light.

*   *   *

I’ll end with a happy story. A few years back I had a small patch of patio in Manhattan, in an apartment building up in the 90s off Park Avenue. It was a little outdoor area overlooked by scores of apartments. The patio was empty and sad looking when I got there, so I started to put in some flowers and bushes and then I put out a two-foot-high plaster statue of the Blessed Mother. It was as if I’d summoned the forces of hell. Maybe I had. One neighbor started putting flyers under my door explaining that idolatry and Mary-worship consigns its unfortunate devotees to hell. Other neighbors complained about the garden. People got mad.

I was taken aback. I think part of it had to do with class. You can tool the streets of working class Lodi, N.J., and see little Marys in the front and back yards and no one says boo. But you can go from one end of Park Avenue to the other, and never—and I mean never—see a Virgin Mary in a window or a roof garden. I know. I have searched. There are Catholics on Park Avenue, but mostly there are rich people. And believe me the rich of Manhattan seem either not to like religious symbols or they know to keep them to themselves. Display is vulgar (and working-class).

The rich are lucky, but they are also human. Like most humans they think they have what they have only because of their efforts; or, as is often the case in America, they’ve been lucky so long they think they deserve it. They think they got it because they made better decisions and more sober choices. I think they forget God had anything to do with it. Displaying the signs and symbols of faith is just not very . . . Park Avenue.

Anyway, putting Mary out there in a public space engendered resentment. Mary—poor Mary, the most peaceful and loving of women—was causing quite a fuss. So I took Mary into the house, and she lived for three years in a closet. Then I moved to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn there was another patch of land, another patio area. With flowers and bushes it could be beautiful. So I hired a local landscaper, and I showed her Mary. I told her I really wanted to put the statue outside but I didn’t want to cause trouble with the neighbors. I told her of my problems in Manhattan. The landscaper looked at me, perplexed. Finally she spoke. “This is Brooklyn,” she said. “You can do Mary here.” And so I did, and she is out there now.

There’s a big Mary of Fatima across the street at the local church, too, so I am surrounded by Mary. My having her there is my way of saying, “A likeness of the beauty and sweetness of the mother of God is here in my garden and I hope it brings you peace.” No one has complained. No one has said a thing.

When the PC talking points came out in 1985 no one sent Brooklyn the memo. We have mezuzahs and Marys all over the place. We have a vital synagogue and social center just down the block, and the headquarters of the Jehovah’s witnesses down the other; the synagogue is next to a home for Franciscan priests. A few blocks away on Atlantic Avenue the mosques are next to the Baptist churches. One of my neighbors is an ardent Lebanese Maronite, and another is a lover of Buddha. He keeps a statue in the window.

This is actual diversity. Everyone gets to be, we don’t fear faith. May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn, and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way.

Here’s some happy news this Christmas season, an unexpected gift for those who have seen and admired Mel Gibson’s controversial movie, “The Passion,” and wish to support it. The film has a new admirer, and he is a person of some influence. He is in fact the head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Pope John Paul II saw the movie the weekend before last, in the Vatican, apparently in his private rooms, on a television, with a DVD, and accompanied by his closest friend, Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz. Afterwards and with an eloquent economy John Paul shared with Msgr. Dziwisz his verdict. Dziwisz, the following Monday, shared John Paul’s five-word response with the co-producer of The Passion, Steve McEveety.

This is what the pope said: “It is as it was.”

*   *   *

Officially the Vatican has avoided formal comment on the film because its contents have been a matter of recently famous dispute and argument. The movie has been accused of being harsh toward Jews, and Mr. Gibson, the film’s director, has been accused of anti-Semitism. This summer a group of scholars associated with the U.S. Bishops Council obtained an apparently stolen copy of an early draft of the script and came forward to denounce it as scripturally incorrect and potentially injurious of Christian-Jewish relations. Mr. Gibson protested, and the bishops more or less fled the scene, but the damage was done.

Since then, church officials have tended to treat the film as if it were a car crash that happened down the street: It can complicate your life to go there, and it can get messy. Six weeks ago, at a diplomatic reception in Rome to mark the 25th anniversary of John Paul’s papacy, I spoke to an important American cardinal about the controversy and urged him to see the film and come to his own honest conclusions. He blinked anxiously behind thick glasses. No, he said, he shouldn’t, the movie is a matter of “dispute.” (The church is very odd these days in that it dodges those controversies on which it has known authority and expertise, and seems to embrace those controversies on which it seems to have nothing to add but airy non sequiturs. See the comments this week of Cardinal Renato Martino, who said it was not compassionate of U.S. forces to publicly search Saddam Hussein’s head for lice. Yes, how brutal. Why, it was like what Saddam himself would have done with a captured foe, except once he was done with him he wouldn’t have a head. But never mind.)

*   *   *

John Paul II, who even with the challenges of his current illness has more good sense than many of his cardinals, knew of the controversy surrounding Mr. Gibson’s film, and wanted to see it. Producer Steve McEveety, who had flown to Rome uninvited to show the film to as many Vatican officials as he could, gave the DVD to Msgr. Dziwisz on Friday, Dec. 5. The monsignor and the pope watched it together. Where did they watch it? I asked Mr. McEveety in a telephone interview this week. “At the pope’s pad,” he laughed. In the papal apartments. “He had to watch it late in the evening,” Mr. McEveety said of John Paul. “He’s pretty well booked. But he really wanted to see it.”

Afterwards, Msgr. Dziwisz gave Mr. McEveety the pope’s reaction. The pope found it very powerful, and approved of it. Mr. McEveety was delighted. Msgr. Dziwisz added that the pope said to him, as the film neared its end, five words that he wished to pass on: “It is as it was.” The film, the Holy Father felt, tells the story the way the story happened. A week later Mr. McEveety was marveling at what he felt was the oracular quality of the statement. “Five words. Eleven letters.” (I asked the pope’s veteran press spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valles, if he knew if the pope had said anything beyond “It is as it was.” He e-mailed back that he did not know of any further comments.)

“I was kind of relieved—it’s a scary thing,” said Mr. McEveety. “But Billy Graham saw it and was very supportive, and now JPII. The amazing thing is they’re in agreement on the film.”

*   *   *

Why is this news? Not only because John Paul has, it seems, broken free of the Vatican apparatus to see the film, and not only, obviously, because of who he is, but also because of his history, the facts of his life. He is a scholar, a poet and former playwright who loves the drama and himself considered acting on and writing for the stage professionally.
And no pope has done more for Jewish-Christian relations than he. He has had a profound engagement with Jews and Judaism both since his elevation and before it. He would know cheap when he sees it, and he would know anti-Semitic, too. His approbation would not be given lightly.

Michael Novak, a scholar of this pope, summed it up for me. He said John Paul’s life has been marked by “a profound sense of the irrationality and barbarity which fell upon the Jews in World War II, which he saw and experienced, which suffused his desire thereafter to pitch his life close to the Jews. One sees it in his lifelong friendships, in his visit to the Jewish community in Rome, in his unforgettable visit to Auschwitz, and in his deeply affecting visit to Jerusalem. His prayerfulness, his reverence for those who have suffered, and his acute wish that this suffering will be lifted by the grace of God, have been visible and moving to all who have observed him.”

*   *   *

“It is as it was.”

I don’t know if those words will settle the matter. But for me they do, and for many they will.

I saw a screening of “The Passion” in Washington last July with about 50 writers, editors and activists. I worried that it might seem to be anti-Semitic, that it might rouse passions in viewers in a way that would cause pain to Jews and others. I came away reassured. It is a moving film, and what it moves you to is tears, and thought. It doesn’t rouse, it seeps in and inspires introspection and consideration. It is the story of a Jew who was the Messiah; it is the story of his loving Jewish mother, his ardent Jewish followers, and his Jewish opponents, who saw him as heretical and dangerous.

He is brutally put to death by non-Jewish Roman soldiers, who are portrayed as sadistic in a businesslike way, on the acquiescence of a tired, non-Jewish cynic who then sought to wash his hands of culpability. It is a film that leaves the viewer indicting not Jews and not Romans and not cynical bureaucrats. It leaves you indicting yourself: it leaves you wondering about what your part in that agonizing drama would have been back then, and what your part is today.

I’m glad the Holy Father chose to see it; I’m glad he has spoken; I’m glad his judgment was, “It is as it was.” If this ends the controversy, or quells it, and I believe it should, that would be a beautiful gift to everyone this holiday season.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”—Paul Bremer

First, let’s just be happy. Let’s feel a burst of joy.

Let’s not be boring people who Consider the Implications. Let’s not talk about the domestic political impact. For just a day let’s feel the pleasure history just handed us.

*   *   *

All morning the words of an old song of the old America have been running through my head. From “My Fair Lady,” from the age when Americans whistled Broadway show tunes on the street. Rex Harrison (a bow today to our valiant allies, the English) jauntily crows over Eliza Doolittle’s first triumph.

“Pickering Tonight, old man, you did it!
You did it! You did it! You said that you would do it;
And indeed you did. I thought that you would rue it;
I doubted you’d do it. But now I must admit it
That succeed you did. You should get a medal
Or be even made a knight.”

As far as I’m concerned he could be singing this to American troops, and the American administration, and America’s allies, and the Iraqis who suffered through so much to get to this moment.

This is a great day in modern history. A terrible man whose existence had been for decades actively harmful of humanity was forcibly removed from power, run to ground, and has been captured living in a hole. As I write, the television is showing videotape of his hair being checked for lice and his mouth being inspected with a pencil light for signs of disease. The white plastic pinpoint light illuminates his throat and gums. It looks like the mouth of hell. He has been utterly defeated and quelled. He can’t kill anybody now. He cannot gas women and children with chemicals that kill them; he cannot personally torture dissidents, or imprison them. He cannot tell his soldiers to throw opponents off the tops of buildings. He can’t impose his sickness and sadism on the world. The children of Baghdad dance in the streets. A nightmare is over.

America did this. American troops did this. The American people, by supporting those troops and this effort, did it. And a particular group of soldiers led by a particular U.S. army officer did it. As Dana Priest of the Washington Post has just reported on NBC, he is a big, tall, bearlike guy who loves his job and whose attitude toward his mission was, apparently, a natural and constitutional optimism. We don’t yet know his name, but he’ll be famous by tomorrow morning.

*   *   *

What do we learn? Well, as Samuel Johnson said, “Man needs more to be reminded than instructed,” so what are we reminded of through the happy ending of this story?
That human agency works and is an active force in history. You don’t have to sit back and accept; you don’t have to continue to turn a blind eye; you don’t have to sit and do nothing, because all action involves choice and all choice invites repercussion. You can move forward. You can take action. You can go in and remove a threat to the world. You can make the world safer. You can help people. Just because they live in Iraq and we don’t bump into them every day doesn’t mean they don’t merit assistance and even sacrifice.

We are reminded, all of us, that patience is necessary, that nothing big can be accomplished without it. America and Iraq searched day and night for Saddam Hussein for eight months. And for some time they searched for a man half of them thought had already been obliterated in the early days of the war. But they didn’t know and they had to find him if he was alive. They had to find him even if he was surrounded by a thousand troops and explosives. So there was their patience, and there was the patience of Washington: political patience. If he’s there, we will find him. The administration’s foes had attempted to embarrass them for eight months. The administration simply said: If he’s there, we will find him; we won’t give up until we do. Good for them for not spinning it but simply having faith in the troops and being patient.

And we are reminded that when you do what is right, you can be rewarded. When you summon the guts to take a controversial stand, and accept the price of that stand, and the price comes in every day, you can win. And that victory can make things better.

*   *   *

Now Iraq’s Baathist movement is over; its chief is humiliated, revealed as a coward, caught and ridiculous. Now the people of Iraq will be able to testify in court about what he did, in front of his face. Now we all may find out a great deal more about what exactly Saddam did with the weapons of mass destruction we know he had in the past, for he used them on the Kurds and against Iran in the old war. Where did those weapons go? Where are they now? What about Saddam’s relations with al Qaeda? What papers will we find now, what evidence? And what will he say in an attempt to save his skin?

Next stop, Osama. May we find him in a hole. May we search his beard for lice and his gums for disease. May we see in the reflection of the light the mouth of hell, and may we close it for him tight.

*   *   *

All the journalists and politicians, they are always embarrassed to feel joy when something like this happens. They fear it will show a lack of understanding that history is a heavy and ponderous thing, a big tragedy machine, and all progress is illusory. Celebrating a military triumph—and this was among other things a military triumph—seems to them tantamount to Kiplingism, quaintly ignorant and unhelpfully nationalistic. That’s why everyone on TV today is furrowing his brow. They know joy is the wrong thing to be feeling. It’s unsophisticated.

But normal people don’t have to be sophisticated. They can be normal. And happy. And say what normal Americans say when something great in history happens. “Thanks, God. Thanks a lot.”

What a great man Bob Bartley was. He had guts and he was honest and independent and he worked hard. He was living proof that journalism doesn’t have to be a vanity production. It can be big. It can change history. He did.

It is hard to convey, in the age of the conservative ascendancy, what it was like 30 and 40 years ago for conservatives of Bartley’s generation. There was no Rush, and no hundred conservative magazines, and no top 10 conservative radio shows and no cable. It took guts to stand where you stood. There was a Democratic Party lurching left and a Republican Party dominated by pale and chubby men who had reluctantly or eagerly embraced liberalism because, as they used to say, they knew what time it was. They knew liberalism was the unstoppable future, and they understood that a good blow-dry haircut is more or less what you need to lead in the modern era. They liked being liked by what was then Georgetown.

There were a few strange-o’s like Barry Goldwater and his fans, and Reagan running for governor out there in California, but otherwise nothing was happening within the conservative movement. As a matter of fact the phrase “conservative movement” didn’t exist, because there really wasn’t one. Only hardy Bill Buckley’s witty and impassioned National Review, which was not only the gold standard but just about the only conservative organ grinding out ideas and observations.

Until Bob Bartley. And the cluster of economists, firebrands and policy intellectuals who gathered to him, and who lit the pages of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial section with a light so bright it became a beacon. Under Bartley, true freedom of speech came and reigned in a great modern American newspaper. The new supply-side economic theory? Tell us your facts. An argument for the end of post-Vietnam era American defeatism? You can talk about it here. The culture getting coarser? Pull up a chair. You didn’t have to be a standard doctrinaire liberal to find a voice here.

That sounds like common sense. But it was an achievement. It was Bartley’s.

*   *   *

As a personality I’ve never seen such a disjunction between manner and status. He did not take himself seriously but took the great issues that roiled our country seriously, and he took it on himself to be a combatant, and then a leader. And he was honest about it. Startlingly honest. He didn’t respect liberal journalists who made believe they weren’t liberal, and he wasn’t going to go that route. He declared what he was—a supply-sider, a conservative, a believer in the legitimacy of American prestige and power—and allowed the reader to judge his views and opinions through an honest lens. That was something kind of new, too.

He was by nature mild, soft-spoken, and possibly shy. I was never sure. When you sat and talked with him he was direct, humorous, probing, unself-conscious. That doesn’t sound shy. At the same time he maintained a certain reserve and wasn’t given to the spontaneous spilling of emotions, secrets, insights or gossip. I always thought it interesting that he didn’t care if anyone knew who he was. He didn’t care if you were impressed. Part of this, I think, is due to the fact that he thought that if the waiter in the restaurant didn’t know he was the great Bob Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal, he’d have a more authentic experience with the waiter. And if you had to have an experience it might as well be an authentic one. I also think he was constitutionally incapable of vanity.

At the same time he knew who he was. (Maybe that’s why he didn’t have to have strangers know.) He didn’t care if he was at the hot party or meeting or event. When I spent time with him and his wife at the 2000 Republican Convention, we had dinner in an outdoor pizza place, with paper plates and plastic forks. He sat and quietly watched important journalists run by on their way to the convention floor to see the action. I don’t think Bob thought that’s where the action really was. I think he thought that in his head was where the action was. I think he was right.

He was unillusioned and yet optimistic, felt human agency could change a great deal, and loved America in a way so Midwestern and ingrained that he never had to mention it or show it. It was just there, like his soft gray hair.

He was one great man. He was a great American. The Founders would have loved him. So many of us are grateful that George W. Bush, earlier this month, gave Bob the presidential Medal of Freedom, our country’s highest civilian honor. Well given. Freedom never had a better friend.

A week ago today Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, Bishop Wilton Gregory, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Council, and a handful of bishops met in Washington with a few dozen Catholic laymen to discuss the future of the church. The official name of the conference was “A Meeting in Support of the Church,” but everyone knew the context.

Two months before, in July, Cardinal McCarrick and Bishop Gregory, both influential leaders in the church, held another meeting with laymen. That meeting, alas, was secret, and they had invited only those who might be characterized as church liberals. The story leaked, as stories do. Many, I among them, thought that holding a secret meeting to discuss a scandal borne of secrecy was ham-handed and tin-eared, at best. Why were only those who share one point of view asked to attend? Why was there no follow-up in terms of a statement from the participants on what was discussed, suggested, declared?

The cardinal and the bishop were said to be embarrassed when news of their meeting broke. Those often characterized as conservative asked for a similar meeting; the cardinal and the bishop obliged. And so last Monday’s meeting, which thankfully was on the record, although participants were asked not to quote from the speeches they heard but rather to characterize them.

Last week several participants came forward to quote what they themselves had said at the meeting, and to give their general views. I’ve been asked what I said, for I was one of the speakers. And so, here is what I said to the bishops.

*   *   *

First, I think in some small way the meeting was historic. The non-Catholic public would probably assume that bishops and cardinals frequently talk with conservatives in the church. The non-Catholic American public would probably assume bishops and cardinals are the conservatives in the church. But this is not so. Conservatives in the church often feel that they are regarded, and not completely unkindly, as sort of odd folk, who perhaps tend to have a third hand growing out of their foreheads and tinfoil hats on their heads. We say, “Please, we must speak more as a church about abortion,” and church leaders say, “We may possibly do that after issuing the report on domestic employment policy.” We ask the church to teach Catholic doctrine, and they point out that the press doesn’t really like the church. We ask them to discuss the pressing issues of the moment, such as cloning—we’re entering a world in which industrial fetal farms may grow replacement people for replacement parts—and instead they issue new directives on how it would be better if people sang songs during the mass after communion, and hugged each other instead of shaking hands during the moment of peace.

So it was real news that Bishop Gregory and Cardinal McCarrick met with conservatives and heard them out for almost an entire day. And it was important that the conservatives assembled were so earnest (it was Princeton’s Robert George who warned of a future that could include fetus farms) and so direct, too.

I had planned to address the teaching of Catholic doctrine, which is something the American Catholic Church doesn’t really like to do in any depth, at least for the people in the pews. But it seemed to me that earlier speakers had so much to say on so many topics that are crucial and pending that the scandals were given short shrift. So I rearranged my speech as others spoke.

There were some central questions behind my remarks. Do these men understand the extent and depth of the damage done by the scandal, and is still being done by it? Do they understand the church must move comprehensively to stop it?

To speak of a problem so difficult and yet so delicate, and to do it in front of men who lead the wounded church, and who came up through a system that we now know to have been marked by institutional sickness, seemed to me—well, delicate is the best word I can come up with. And so I thought the only fair way to begin was to say that I meant to speak with candor, as one does among friends, that we all love the church and love Christ, and that candor demands candor about myself, too. I said that I speak from no great moral height, that I was certain I had “the least impressive personal biography in the room,” that I am no moral exemplar, “far from it.” I said I wanted to make this clear because “Who we are both as individual people and as a church, who we really are, is at the heart of things.”

Then I said my piece. I told them the scandal was in my view “the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the American church”; I told them they had to stop it now, deal with it fully; that if reports of abusive priests “continue to dribble out over the next two and four and six years, it will be terrible; it could kill the church.” I spoke of how terrible it is that just the other day a priest in Maine was finally removed from his parish two years—two years!—after it was revealed that he was one of the priests who had set up the pornographic Web site “St. Sebastian’s Angels.” I said, “Two years after he was found to be doing what he was doing—and he’s still in business!”

I attempted to paint a picture of a man in the suburbs of America, taking his kids to church. He stands in the back in his Gap khaki slacks and his plaid shirt ironed so freshly this morning that you can still smell the spray starch. He stands there holding his three-year-old child. He is still there every Sunday, he is loyal and faithful; but afterwards—away from church, with his friends, at the barbecue and the lunch, he now feels free to say things about the church that only 10 years ago would have been shocking. “He thinks the church is largely populated by sexual predators, men whose job now is to look after their own.” And then perhaps he says, “But not my priest.” But maybe these days he doesn’t say “but not my priest” anymore.

And so, I said, we must move. “We use buzzy phrases from the drug wars like zero tolerance” for sexual predators, but maybe we should use words that reflect who we are and where we stand—“defrocking,” and “excommunication” being good words that speak of who we are as a church.

I told the bishops and the cardinal that we are a demoralized church, and—I told them this was hard to say—that they too must feel demoralized. “Imagine a leader of our church. He became a priest to help humanity, to bring it Christ. And he became a priest and did great work and rose to a position of leadership. And now he is in the meeting where the archdiocese lawyer muscles the single mother who brought suit against the local priest who molested her son after she took the boy to the priest so he could have a “good male role model—and learn of the greatest male role model, Christ.”

So, we are demoralized. But there is help. I spoke of the scene in Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion,” which I knew some in the audience had seen in screenings. Mr. Gibson had attempted, obviously, to base his film on the Gospels. But there are a few moments in which what might be called his art asserts itself, and he does it his way. There is one scene like this that for me was the great moving moment of the film. The broken and brutalized Christ falls under the weight of the cross. He is on his way to Golgotha. He’s half dead. When he falls, his mother runs to help him, and he looks up at her, blood coming down his face, and he says, “See, mother, I make all things new again.”

I quoted this dialogue to the bishops and the cardinal. And when I said the words Christ spoke in the film my voice broke, and I couldn’t continue speaking. I was embarrassed by this, but at the same time I thought, Well, OK.

What choked me was thinking of Jesus. And thinking of how we all want to be new again, and can be if we rely on him; but it’s so hard, and deep in our hearts while we believe we do not believe, could not believe, or else we’d all be new again.

Anyway, I regained my composure and concluded my remarks with some hard advice. I said the leaders of the church should now—“tomorrow, first thing”—take the mansions they live in and turn them into schools for children who have nothing, and take the big black cars they ride in and turn them into school buses. I noted that we were meeting across the street from the Hilton, and that it would be good for them to find out where the cleaning women at the Hilton live and go live there, in a rent-stabilized apartment on the edge of town or in its suburbs. And take the subway to work like the other Americans, and talk to the people there. How moved those people would be to see a prince of the church on the subway. “They could talk to you about their problems of faith, they could tell you how hard it is to reconcile the world with their belief and faith, and you could say to them, Buddy, ain’t it the truth.”

I didn’t know if this had hit its mark until the meeting was over, when an intelligent-looking and somewhat rotund bishop spoke to me as I waited for a cab. I was trying to rush to the airport and make the next shuttle home. He said, “I’d give you a ride but I don’t have the limo!”

I laughed. Now I think perhaps I should have said, “You will.”

I was asked privately after my speech if I meant to suggest the church should divest itself of its beautiful art and cathedrals and paintings and gold filigree. No way. We are neither Puritan nor Protestant; Catholicism is, among other things, a sensual faith, and it is our way to love and celebrate the beautiful. Moreover, regular people have as much access to this finery as the rich and powerful. But the princes of our church no longer need to live in mansions in the center of town. Those grand homes were bought and erected in part so the political leaders of our democracy would understand the Catholics have arrived. But they know it now. The point has been made.

*   *   *

Anyway, the response from the bishops and the cardinal was not clear to me. They did not refer to any of my points in their remarks afterward. When the meeting ended I tried to find Cardinal McCarrick to speak with him, but he was gone.

I don’t imagine any of the laymen left the meeting with a feeling that great progress had been made in any area. I left with a feeling that some progress may have been made in some area, but I couldn’t say what area or why.

I did not come away angry, as some have, or depressed. I came away satisfied that I’d said what I thought needed saying, somewhat sad and perplexed. Why would this be happening? What does God want us to do? And how can flawed and ridiculous people like us help?

Someone at the meeting quoted the historian Paul Johnson saying some years back to a new Catholic, “Come on in, it’s awful!” We all laughed, but you know I think it was the one thing everyone in the room agreed on.

Anyway, I’ve been asked what I said, and this was it. There has been no reporting of remarks from the meeting in July with the liberals of the church, and I hope there will be. It would be good if some of those who were there would report what they said, and how it was received by the bishops and cardinal. That might be helpful, as this old church finds its way.