Peggy Noonan

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.

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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.

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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.

Seems like a long time ago; seems like yesterday. Actually we’re in that awkward period of historical memory in which it’s too soon to see 9/11 as History Channel fodder and too late to feel it freshly. It was 21 months ago; life moves on; we don’t talk about “Where were you?” anymore.

And yet it seems that everything that is happening in the world right now is related to 9/11. President Bush meeting with the new head of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, in Aqaba, Jordan: That is about 9/11. Mr. Bush had no intention of going into the long chain yank that is the Mideast . . . until 9/11, which forced the toppling of the Afghan regime, the U.S. counterassault on the Taliban and terrorism, the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam. All of that came out of 9/11. And Mr. Bush is pushing a Mideast roadmap because he knows what all but children know: 9/11 grew from, was gestated in, the intense hatred of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

President Bush as nation-builder: That is 9/11. He suggested when he ran for president that international nation-building efforts were presumptuous and perhaps hubristic. All changed. Mr. Bush speaking last week to Arab leaders when he didn’t know his remarks were being broadcast, speaking of what “Almighty God” expects of them. That kind of fervor—a lot of that is traceable to 9/11. In an interview two years ago, three months before 9/11, Mr. Bush told me of his recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their talk had turned personal, and Mr. Bush spoke of his understanding of the nature of Christianity and the meaning of the cross. Mr. Bush shows the impulses of the evangelist: When something has saved your life and has the added benefit—you are certain—of being true, you want to spread it around. But those impulses have come out more publicly, less embarrassedly or self-protectively, after 9/11.

The debate over the Homeland Security bill, its cost and adequacy: That is 9/11. Fears that the pursuit of security will result in a constriction of civil liberties: 9/11. The rift with France and Germany, the closer ties with Britain, the official return of members of the military as figures of respect, the resurgence of American patriotism: 9/11.

The bloated national budget: 9/11, for two reasons. One is the cost of security and defense, the other is Mr. Bush’s reluctance to fight Congress on spending when an overall preservation of national political unity is his goal. The Republican Party staying institutionally mum on budget deficits: 9/11. Whatever it takes in an age of rising stakes.

September 11 made it impossible for the American government and America’s elected leaders—all of them, senators, congressmen—to continue to ignore the issue of weapons of mass destruction and those who would wield them. “It doesn’t show up in the polls,” a Democratic legislator told me in 1997, explaining why President Clinton did not seriously address it.

It’s in the polls now.

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Who would have thought that day, who knew that morning, at 8:45 a.m., for instance, three minutes before the first plane struck, that everything in our lives was about to change? “Expect the unexpected,” as the journalist Harrison Salisbury said near the end of his life when asked what he’d learned from history.

Someone speaking of the shooting of John Kennedy once mused on the moment when the trigger was pulled and the bullet launched. That instant bore so much weight of subsequent history that it became a kind of warp in time, a moment whose weight was so much greater than its duration that it was like a collapsing of time, a special lost moment of gravity, like a black hole in space.

I think 9/11 is like that. People are still changing from it, being affected by it. There are those who have wondered why 9/11 was so cataclysmic, compared with, say, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, by essentially the same people with the same motives and intentions. One answer is that on 9/11 almost 3,000 people died, and eight years before the number was six. Another is that the Pentagon was in effect bombed on 9/11. America has two great capitals, of politics and money, and both capitals were hit.

Both answers are true. But truest I think is this: The first time the towers didn’t fall. The first time they were damaged and unchanged. They were blacked with smoke. We cleaned them up.

We took it—some of us anyway—as a warning. The second time—that was not a warning. That was war. And a war shockingly begun, with two great skyscrapers crumbling to the ground.

That was then. New York is rebuilding downtown and taxing uptown. The national story line has changed from trauma to triumph, at least right now. A new Mideast peace process has begun, and there is perhaps a sense that this time, after all we and others have been through the past two years, maybe it can be got as right as . . . well, as it can be got.

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New Yorkers themselves have returned to fighting with each other. There’s been plenty to fight over, from the new taxes to the mayor’s new antismoking laws, which are not so much a policy as a non sequitur—New York is in crisis, let’s ban smoking! And there is the declaration of the organizations of World Trade Center families-of-victims that there should not be a statue of the firemen at the WTC memorial site. Three hundred forty-three of them died that day, but to commemorate their sacrifice would be “hierarchical.” They want it clear that no one was better than anyone else, that all alike were helpless, victims.

But that is not true; it is the opposite of the truth. The men and women working in the towers were there that morning, and died. The firemen and rescue workers—they weren’t there, they went there. They didn’t run from the fire, they ran into the fire. They didn’t run down the staircase, they ran up the staircase. They didn’t lose their lives, they gave them.

This is an important disagreement, because memorials teach. They teach the young what we, as a society, celebrate, hold high, honor. A statue of a man is an assertion: It asserts that his behavior is worthy of emulation. To leave a heroic statue of the firemen out of a WTC memorial would be as dishonest as it would be ungenerous, and would yield a memorial that is primarily about victimization. Which is not what that day was about, as so much subsequent history attests.

But go tell some New Yorkers. They’re all arguing. September 11 didn’t change everything.

This is a book about love. That’s an odd thing to say about a collection that spans 9/11/01 to 9/11/02, and that centers on the attacks on America. But the primary emotion I felt in those days was a love, or a tender sense of appreciation, for everyone who played a part in the drama—the dead, the survivors, the firemen and the heroes on the planes, the families left behind and their shaken neighbors down the block. For us. September 11 changed everyone, and for me, among the changes was one that had a professional impact. It liberated me to include in my work what I felt but had not always expressed: the idea that people are precious, that they’re beautiful and deserving of honor and respect. And the knowledge that we are all brothers and sisters together, whatever our circumstances. Before 9/11, I held these convictions but they did not always seem pertinent, or appropriate, to what I was writing. But after 9/11, I felt free to say what I thought and let it frame my work, and even become an engine for that work.

I think that I have this in common with a lot of people. People always say we became better, more appreciative as a people after 9/11, especially New Yorkers. But I think the event simply left a lot of people feeling freer to be who they were, as if, in Os Guinness’s phrase, tragedy cracked our hearts wide open and forced the beauty out.

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I call this book “A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag” because those were the things that rose from the rubble. The heart stands for those who were brave for others, and for the greater fellow feeling among our citizens that followed the collapse of the Towers and the bombing of the Pentagon. The cross stands for a rediscovered respect and gratitude for religious faith. The flag was the renewal of American patriotism that followed the terrible day. The heart and the cross on the cover were given to me by an iron worker named Larry Keating who ran, without orders or clearance, to the fallen towers early in the afternoon of 9/11, and was the last worker to leave when the takedown and cleanup were over, ten months later. The burn marks and the stress marks where the thick steel bent tell you where they are from. Larry was a reader of these pieces, and when he heard from a mutual friend that I was pouring coffee one night near Ground Zero he found me and handed me an old, beat-up paper bag. Inside were the heart and the cross. He had cut them from Tower Two.

The heart, the cross and the flag rose from the rubble and filled the clouds over the Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a blank Pennsylvania field. They rose with the smoke and entered the air all around us.

I haven’t changed a word. These pieces were written on the run, starting the day the Towers were hit and continuing for 50 of the next 52 weeks. They are imperfect. But it seemed to me when I reread them that their flaws—of tone, language, and emphasis among other things—were true to the event, that they reflected the jaggedness of the time, and the fears and emotions it engendered. It just felt right to print them as they ran.

A number of thoughts and observations in this book became Officially Accepted Truths of the event and its aftermath, and were, to the best of my knowledge, said here for the first time. “God Is Back” spoke of the resurgence of religious feeling on the mean streets, “Welcome Back, Duke” celebrated the return of a certain kind of manhood, and “Courage Under Fire” attempted to make New York’s firemen more nationally celebrated and understood. I feared early on that what they did was not getting serious enough attention in the country.

September 11 was also to an extraordinary degree a changer of individuals. For so many people it was a moment in which the points of their lives came together and made their importance clear. For others it was a kind of reckoning.

A lot of lives changed. I’m still seeing them change. You probably are too.

September 11 is a terrible story and a beautiful story. I’ll never get over it and I’m glad I won’t. This is a book for those who feel the same.

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(Editor’s note: This is the introduction to Ms. Noonan’s book, “A Heart, a Cross and a Flag,” a collection of her OpinionJournal essays.)

Last Thursday night Tom Brokaw carried a war report that featured an American GI who’d been shot in the leg outside Baghdad. They showed him being treated in the field on a gurney. His pants had been cut away, and you could see his shorts. They were red, white and blue. They had stars and stripes like a flag. And one of the soldiers treating him looked up and smiled. “Nice shorts,” he said.

I don’t know why the soldier with the patriotic shorts left me both moved and amused, but it did. This guy, this GI, this macho young man with his humorous, spirited statement . . .

Our young troops love their country. That is why they are where they are. It has had me thinking a happy thought, about the success with which our country, for all its troubles the past few decades, has continued to communicate to new generations the simple idea of the goodness of loving America. They have picked up the sheer exuberant joy of understanding a thing and, because one understands it and because it is good, loving it, and then acting on that love to the extent that you would fight for it, you would even die for it. This is a beautiful thing, more precious than gold.

Of the number of encouraging things that have come of this war, one of the greatest is this: that in spite of what they’ve been told and not told, and in spite of the various discouragements to America-love that have long existed in our country, our young people’s love for the nation continues. And so they stand beside her and guide her.

As have so many of their parents, and grandparents. But it seems to me quite stunning, the America love that Americans feel free to feel. They don’t think it’s jingoism or nationalism; they think it’s patriotism, and they think that’s good.

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America has always been a patriotic country, but in the past 40 years—just about exactly 40 years, since 1963 and the death of John F. Kennedy—the idea of patriotism, of loving America and feeling free to express that love, has waxed and waned. In the late 1960s a lot of young people and liberals thought you were a dope to love your country, “to wave the flag.” But that is also the precise moment that American flag lapel pins first became popular. When a local businessman wore one of them, it was as if he were wearing a sign that said “I support my country, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.”

Twenty five years ago at CBS News a major network star said to a newsroom friend of mine, who still wore his pin, “I wish I could wear one of those.” But, he explained, it might be “misinterpreted.” My friend thought, but did not say: Yes, it would be interpreted in a way that suggested you love your country. How terrible.

The network star feared he would be considered biased in favor of America. My friend thought, as he later told me privately, that the star damn well ought to be biased in favor of it. America had given him everything he had, all his riches and fame, because America gave him the liberty to use to the utmost all the gifts he’d been born with. America guaranteed the freedoms he now and then referred to so blithely in his elegant reports. America was a more just and kind place, and an infinitely more humane one, than any of the dictatorships, communist governments or banana republics that network stars spoke of in those days with such delicate understanding and consideration.

American journalists still fear that, being called biased in favor of America. So do intellectuals, academics, local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants, and leftist mandarins of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities. For all cities have them.

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But there was always another America, and boy has it endured. It just won a war. Its newest generation is rising, and its members are impressive. They came from a bigger America and a realer one—a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality. It was full of ambition, of the desire to start here at point Z and jump there to point A, and all within one generation. It was populated by an utterly practical and yet romantic and highly spiritual people.

And it was, is, full of a kind of knowledge that reminds me of what I’ve been reading about the pope. John Paul II believes that God has written on every human heart, and what he has written prompts us to go toward the truth, to actively look for it. It makes us search until we find him; it makes us understand inside that there is good and evil; it leaves us wanting the good. “There are things you just know.” And a thing Americans just knew, and know, in spite of the great gusts of condescension from the academy and others of the professionally half-bright, is this: America is a good country, a country with high meaning and deserving of love. And they have retained that knowledge.

The war is almost over and young Americans on the ground have won it, and they are doing it like Americans of old. With their old sympathy and spirit, and a profound lack of hatred for the foe, and with compassion for the victims on the ground. Iraq, meet the grandchildren of the men who made the Marshall Plan.

*   *   *

Is this corny? Too bad. It’s beautiful to see Americans stand up and embrace their patrimony and go forth into the world with faith. And none of this is unconnected to our president. George W. Bush has given our soldiers something to be proud of, something they can understand and respect. He is, now, after all he’s been through the past two years, Mr. Backbone. He has demonstrated to a seething and skeptical world that America can and will stand and fight for a cause, see it through, help the tormented and emerge victorious.

It is important who he is. George W. Bush is an American of the big and real America. He believes in it all—in the vision of the founders, in the meaning of freedom, in the founding and enduring ideas of our country. He believes in America’s historic insistence on humanity and not inhumanity in war, and he appears to have internalized the old saying that “one man with courage is a majority.”

I used to wonder if George W. Bush’s biography didn’t suggest a kind of reverse Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was born in low circumstances and rose with superior gifts. Mr. Bush was born in superior circumstances and rose with average gifts. And yet when you look at Mr. Bush now I think you have to admit—I think even clever people who talk loudly in restaurants have to admit—that he has shown himself not to be a man of average gifts. Backbone is not an average gift. Guts are not an average gift. The willingness to take pain and give pain to make progress in human life is not an average gift.

All in all these are amazing qualities in a political figure, and in a president. There’s a headline for you: America appears to have a president worthy of its people.

*   *   *

I want to say something about David Bloom. When television journalists die, they’re not always captured and written of in the same way that print writers, such as the late Michael Kelly, are. Part of the reason is that print reporters hang with scribblers, who know how to write eulogies. TV broadcasters tend to hang with TV broadcasters, who are more likely to show you through pictures than tell you through words. And scribblers don’t always fully appreciate TV stars, not having experienced what they’re up against in a daily and institutional way. So I’m not sure David Bloom is going to get his written due, and I’d give a great deal to be able to say I knew him well so I could try to give it. I knew him only slightly but admired him enormously, and personally.

It wasn’t David Bloom’s job to ponder and search for justice, it was his job to tell you what is going on. That’s why he was in a specially rigged-up space-age truck bouncing along the road to Baghdad with the army of the United States. Bloom’s reports were riveting and historic. I hope that truck winds up in a museum. You could see from just watching him on TV, and I saw in the newsroom at MSNBC, as a live feed came in and people stopped talking to each other to watch the screen, that David Bloom was having the time of his life telling America what the Third Infantry Division was doing each day in the war.

He was on fire. He seemed to have no agenda but to bring you the latest. It seemed like every time you turned on the TV he was there, in the green glow of the nighttime desert hookup lights, and he’d be pointing out toward the desert and telling you that this wasn’t a road they were on, it was a long flat place where they had a lot of trucks and Humvees, one after along, which made a convoy, which was pointed at Baghdad.

The U.S. Army is almost in full control of that sad place this morning. David Bloom won’t be with the Mighty Third and reporting on the last fighting and the first greetings, and that’s a shame and a loss to us all. Some fool said yesterday that David just died of an embolism; it’s not a war death. He died of a blood clot, which is the type of thing that tends to be created or exacerbated by physical realities such as long flights or long truck rides through the desert, or tough work covering a war. David died with his boots on.

And he brought joy to the endeavor, didn’t he? He brought hunger, and energy. He made being a reporter look like the best job in the world. Rest in Peace, David of Arabia, journalist of warriors.

*   *   *

The past few months I’ve been working on a book on John Paul II, and now I turn to it and some other endeavors, taking a leave from the Journal. I hope to return to the editors and readers I will miss so much, and mean to as things progress and news happens. But for now, with the war ending and, one of these days, our troops, and journalists, coming home, I turn more to the world of the pope and of the spiritual, which seems the right place to be. A special personal thank you here to my colleague James Taranto, who has long edited these pieces, and who will no doubt soon get a call saying, “James, can I file on that?”

The death of Michael Kelly is a sin against the order of the world. He was a young man on his way to becoming a great man. He was going to be one of the great editors of his time, and at the age of 46 he was already one of its great journalists. And one’s first thought about him, after saying the obvious—that he wrote like a dream, that he was a great reporter with great eyes, that he was a keen judge of what is news and what should be news—is this. He was an independent man. He had an indignant independence that was beauty to behold. He knew what he thought and why, and he announced it in his columns and essays with wit and anger.

Virtually from the beginning of his career it was clear—he made it clear—that he would not accept the enforced Official Version of Reality that various luminaries and establishments attempted to force on him and others who report the news for a living. Was the vast American media establishment inclined to think one way? Then he would think another. Not necessarily the opposite—he was not a contrarian. He’d just think what he actually thought. And write it. He wouldn’t let anyone tell him how to think. One would hope that would be a given in the world of big-league reporting, but newspapers and networks are full of journalists who let others tell them what to think.

I knew him as most people did, through what he wrote. I’d met him and admired him easily, but the Michael I read I loved. And so today, without a particular right to, I feel heartbroken. When the news broke, Mencken biographer Terry Teachout expressed with concision what I felt and had not been able to articulate: “This is horrible, horrible news—[Michael] had evolved into a great force for journalistic good, not just as regards this war but in general, and his death will leave a black hole in the sky.”

*   *   *

“I was in complete shock. I just sobbed.” That’s how a close friend of Kelly’s described getting the news, by phone. She didn’t want me to use her name. She is a former worker in the network-news vineyards and a close friend of Kelly’s who’d known him for 15 years, and she wanted to make sure he’d be spoken of in a way that was true. I asked her for her sense of Kelly’s special place in journalism, and her answer conflated the personal with the professional. Understandable. All that he was as a professional came from who he was as a person, as an intellect and a personality and a soul.

She said, “He was brave. And he was a warrior. He would take on anything if he believed it was right.”

You mean he was willing to pay a price for where he stood? I asked.

“Yes. He refused to be part of the conventional wisdom. He was never part of the pack.” She paused. “That’s what drove people crazy, that they couldn’t classify him. But he was willing not to be liked.”

Good thing, as a life of honesty is a life of controversy, and Kelly seemed constitutionally an honest man.

He showed that in many ways. Certainly in his columns on the coming war, and in his support for invasion. Certainly too in his work during the Clinton era, when he was a reporter for the New York Times and then the young editor of The New Republic. At the Times he was the author of the first and still definitive Hillary Clinton take-down, the brilliant “Saint Hillary,” a Sunday magazine cover story. Do you remember it, with Mrs. Clinton posed all in white, ethereal and serene? Her people must have been sure it would be a Timesian puff. It was instead a hard-eyed look of the intersection of vanity and liberalism. No one denied it was brilliantly reported and written with sly spirit, but it was controversial in high end journalistic circles because it did not exactly reflect the reporting of a liberal mind at work.

Kelly went to The New Republic, where he was no doubt hired for his independence and brilliance and then rather obviously canned for his independence and brilliance, in that case for showing disgust with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He landed at National Journal and got a weekly column at the Washington Post.

He summed up his final judgment on Bill Clinton in a column a few years later, when he responded to another journalist’s assertion that Bill Clinton was “unique.” Yes, said Kelly. “What comes across as the most important source of Clinton’s uniqueness as president is the nearly unbelievable degree of his essential unfitness to be president — his profound immaturity, his pathological selfishness, his cynicism, above all his relentless corruption.”

*   *   *

One had the sense, watching Kelly, that while he was often under fire from various establishments it never occurred to him to react with bitterness or weakness, or to hang around resenting power. Instead he became Power. He took over the venerable Atlantic Monthly and turned a magazine that was must reading during the American Civil War into must reading in the age of Bush 43. His favorite part of the editor’s job? Finding, helping, encouraging talent, his friend told me. He didn’t like being an editor, really; he liked being a reporter. A muddy-boots writer.

And he was happy to be in the field with the U.S. Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He had phoned his family from the field just two days ago, and they knew he was happy.

You could see it in his work. You could see it in the specificity and particularity of his writing in the early days—that would be a month ago—in Kuwait. His March 5 column dealt with the debate on whether American reporters should become what he became: a journalist embedded with the military. Maj. Max Blumenfeld explained the system to Kelly:

In the first Gulf War, in which Blumenfeld served as a public affairs officer, the U.S. military, in collaboration with the major American media companies, built a system that was designed to sharply limit direct observational reporting to a relative few journalists, overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of big media. The permitted few were to file “pool” reports and pictures that would be made available to all media through a military clearing process. Unsurprisingly, the arrangement turned out to please no one. The coverage was spotty and shallow, with the majority of American reporters covering the war from hotels and briefing rooms; one reporter’s inevitably subjective view of an event that only he had covered was of little use to colleagues trying to craft an “objective” account several hundred miles away. Much was lost to history. And, of course, reporters who wanted to report the war for themselves simply went off on their own.

The experiment—”the huge experiment,” as Blumenfeld says—this time represents an admirable attempt to do much better. And it would seem that it must be better: A system that allows eyewitness reporting across the spectrum of conflict, no matter how constrained, has to produce a picture of war, and of the military that goes to war, more true and complete than a system that seeks to deny eyewitness reporting. . . .

The Department of Defense ground rules for embedding speak of the imperative “to tell the factual story, good or bad.” For the sake of that great goal, I hope the Pentagon thinks more about loosening things up a bit. But also, I hope so for the sake of the military’s media front line, public affairs officers like Blumenfeld. As any White House press secretary can tell them, there is no hell quite so annoying as the hell of an infantilized media pack.

That, in a piece he tossed off on the way to a war, was, to me, the authentic sound of Michael Kelly. Informed by concern for the claims of history, and for the claims of the truth. Fair minded in reporting the debate. Appealing for greater access for the writers who chose to wear muddy boots. Curious about how it would all turn out. And brave enough to be there.

What an excellent man. What good he brought to his profession.

*   *   *

I think that when excellence enters the world—when an individual brings his excellence into the world—it is like a deep love being born between two people for the first time. It goes into the world and adds to the sum total of good in it. It inspires, and is moving in a way that cannot always be explained or understood. It adds to.

That’s what Michael Kelly’s career did: It added to.

His remains will come home now soon enough, and I hope what comes home is met with an honor guard, for he has earned it, and a flag, for he loved his country, and a snapped salute, for that is one way to show respect. And maybe it would be good if this son of Washington—born there, educated there, drawn to its great industry, politics and the reporting of it—were to find his final rest nearby, among those who fought with distinction for America. Michael Kelly went at great peril to be with U.S. troops, and he fell among US troops, while trying to tell the story of U.S. troops. So perhaps his final rest should be with U.S. troops, in Arlington, where we put so many heroes.

Unanticipated good can come from misfortune. When the war began 11 days ago, on that Thursday morning that began with the big bunker blaster hit on the famous target of opportunity, it seemed possible, if only for 48 hours, that this just might be an easy war. What surprise and relief. There were reports that Saddam Hussein might be dead or injured, and the Iraqi command seemed in chaos.

It seemed too good to be true and was. The past 11 days people have found themselves settling in to the idea that this is going to be a hard, effortful, possibly brutal and certainly dramatic war.

Which means it’s going to be like most wars.

What is happening now in Iraq is what happens when your troops and their leaders do everything possible to limit civilian casualties. They do this because it is humane and necessary to a great power, and also because each civilian death is a propaganda opportunity for the antiwar effort. (More on that later.)

We are going to win, as everyone seems to know, but there is no longer a chance that it will be “easy.” This is bad because easy is better. Easy means fewer dead and less dread. But—a big if somewhat grim but—there is some good to be gotten from the long haul. And perhaps we ought to be thinking about it.

*   *   *

It would have been great if a big massive quick hit forced the gopher out of its hole, left it frozen in the lights and easy pickings for a marksman. You could hope for that, but you couldn’t expect it. One of the reasons many of us who were late to support invasion were reluctant was our sense that a quick enemy collapse was too much to hope for. Saddam had had 12 years since the last war to recover and plan, and in any case the chaos inside Iraq in 2003 was going to be a harder thing to face than a dispirited Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1990.

So this is going to take a while. And that is going to surprise some Americans, including probably some wearing our uniform. The military action our country has been involved in since Vietnam (for a great world power there have been few) has been relatively quick work. We have by and large gone in, made our impression and reordered the reality we had gone to confront. The perfect illustration, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a small island victim of a violent communist coup. President Reagan sent in the marines. They did quick work. Liberation followed, including that of the American medical students who, freed, returned home and startled the world by kissing the American ground.

We gave out a lot of medals in that war. So many that civilians wondered if grade inflation hadn’t come, finally, even to the American military. But there was also a counter-sense that the leaders of America’s military establishment felt they must give the troops the awards and appreciation the American public, still concussed by Vietnam, and American politicians, ever quavering, could not be relied upon to give.

At any rate, U.S. military involvements for the past 30 years have been quick and quickly beribboned.

The second Gulf War will not be quick. And one senses no one will doubt, when it was over, that every medal was earned.

But the long haul is going to mean and demonstrate more than that. A resentful world is about to see that America had to fight for it. They are about to see America could fight for it—that we had and have the stomach for a struggle. Our implacable foes and sometimes doubting friends will see that America’s armed forces don’t just shock and awe, we stay and fight.

The world will be reminded that America still knows how to suffer. In a county as in an individual, the ability to withstand pain—the ability to suffer—says a great deal about character. It speaks of maturity and courage, among other things. The world knew half a century ago that America will absorb pain to reach progress. It is not all bad that they are seeing it again.

Americans too may be heartened to see that we know how to absorb pain. Deep in the heart of many pro-invasion thinkers has been a question they do not ponder for it could only be answered in time. It was: Can we still take it? It won’t be bad for us to see that the answer is yes.

Our armed forces, the professionals, are going to learn that they can do it. They’ve wondered too. They are also going to learn how to do their jobs better, because they’re really going to have to do the job. They are not going to feel when they return that they got all dressed up and the party was canceled. They’re going to know they put on 50 pounds of gear and then slogged through a sandstorm to take town after town. And no one is going to wonder if there was grade inflation in the medal giving.

If we’re in a long-haul war there will be benefits that are not necessarily tangible, but real nonetheless.

*   *   *

The biggest threat to America now, apart from Iraqi regulars and irregulars, is not a person but a phenomenon. It is the twisting or abusing of facts to underscore a point of view one wishes to see disseminated. I mean propaganda. The antiwar left did not pick up its marbles and go home when the war began. They just went home and waited for something bad to happen that they could exploit. They have it now: a war that is taking time and producing deaths on the field.
The antiwar left has shown precious little interest in or compassion for members of the U.S. armed services. And yet you can bet the farm that they are about to discover a great warm hearted concern as the bodies of American fighters come home. The left is going to use those deaths as propaganda in their attempts to stop the war.

A softer form of this propaganda—in fairness that may not be the right word here, as mere sloppiness may be the cause of error—was mentioned in a recent column by Rich Galen, who noted strange media reporting of a poll on US support for the war:

I was flipping through the cable news channels and came across someone who was sadly reporting that only about 34 percent of the country now thought the war was going well. That 34 percent number was shocking. So I looked it up. Here’s the scoop: The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll asked: “How would you say the war with Iraq has gone for the U.S. so far: very well, moderately well, moderately badly, or very badly?” As the commentator suggested, 34% said “very well.” But what he neglected to say was that 51% said it was going “moderately well.” Put together, fully EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of those polled had a favorable view toward the conduct of the war. By the way, the most recent CBS/NY Times poll—not exactly two news organizations with a reputation for being in the employ of the Bush White House—asked the same question and came up with 84% (32% very well, 52% somewhat well).

Rich Galen is one who reads between the lines professionally, but as this war goes on a lot of Americans will find it necessary to read between the lines as progress of the war, and world feeling about it, is reported.

So far so good. The war has begun, and the world hasn’t ended (alarmists, pessimists and prophets on left and right please note). Saddam Hussein may be hurt or dead. And so, on to Baghdad.

An old song from the American civil rights is on my mind and seems on point. It’s about how far the movement had come and would go as long as all involved remained focused, in spite of setbacks, on the new day that was coming. “Keep your eyes on the prize, oh Lord, oh Lord,” went the refrain.

That’s what the coming week is about. As we become, inevitably, bogged down and fogged down by the dailyness and messiness of war, we should keep our eyes on the prize. One senses it is going to be bigger than we think.

We are about to startle and reorder the world. We are going to win this thing, and in the winning of it we are going to reinspire civilized people across the globe. We’re going to give the world a lift.

*   *   *

This is what the American victory in Iraq is going to mean:

It is going to mean, first, that something good happened. This sounds small but is huge. The West has been depressed since Sept. 11, 2001. It has been torn, riven. It has been a difficult time. The coming victory is going to be the biggest good thing that has happened in the world, the West and the United States since the twin towers fell.

The deeper meaning there is that we are witnessing a triumph of activism over fatalism. Victory will remind the world that faith and effort trump ennui and despair. It will demonstrate to the civilized world that the good do not have to see themselves as at the inevitable mercy of barbarians. It will demonstrate that we are not part of a long and unstoppable slide, that we can move forward and win progress, that we don’t have to cower in blue suits behind the Security Council desk. We can straighten up, join together and make things better.

An American victory is going to remind the world, too, that while many have tended to see terror states and terror groups as talented, disciplined and competent, they are not, always. The reigning Iraqi claque has been revealed, or so it seems, to be what many of us hoped it was: a house of cards. It is not bad for the world to see it collapse.

Another thing, and a crucially important one. The United States is showing to the world, to its friends and foes, that it will pay a high price to make the world better. We will put it all on the line. This country is, still, the place that will take responsibility when no one else will. In this our entire country is like the firemen of 9/11 who looked up, saw the burning towers and charged. In the past few days, weeks and months, America charged. It has a lot to be proud of. (Being America it will soon be beating itself up again, but it should take some time over the next few weeks to feel the healthy pride it’s earned.)

*   *   *

The American president has, meanwhile, demonstrated to the entire world that he is neither a bombastic naïf nor a reckless cowboy but, in fact, another kind of American stereotype: the steely-eyed rocket man. Don’t tread on him. It is good for the world that it see him as he is. As for leadership style, remember Jimmy Carter micromanaging the failed hostage rescue mission in 1980? This president was told Wednesday night we may have to move early to take advantage of potentially key targets that had presented themselves. Bush said, “Let’s go.” It takes guts and judgment to trust others who know how to do their jobs.

The American victory will mean that the United States has removed a great and serious threat to the innocent people of the world. An evil man who was gathering to himself weapons of mass destruction was, is, a danger to the world. And so, with the successful prosecution of the war, the world will be safer.

We will have helped the Mideast become more stable. There were those who warned that invading Iraq would lead to instability in the Mideast, to which the only response was: lead to? The Mideast was instable. Saddam was part of that instability. His removal opens up the possibility of stability.

With Iraq taken care of the United States will be able to move with enhanced strength toward an Arab-Israeli peace that might last. There are those who say Mr. Bush cannot move forcefully here because his base is composed in part of Christian Evangelicals deeply enamored of Israel. And so it is. But with victory in Baghdad Mr. Bush’s base widens, and it will damage him not at all either in the world or domestically to come out strong and do what needs to be done.

And, finally, victory in Iraq means this: every terror state and terror group is more than ever on notice and newly aware that the West does not exist to play victim.

*   *   *

A victory in Iraq is about to enhance America’s stature in the world. America deserves it. Because of all the powerful countries in the world, it is the most trustworthy, reliable and constructive.

Soon this war will be over. It was hard getting there, hard doing it and there will no doubt be hard going. But it will be over, and we won’t come back from hell with empty hands. We will have won a great deal. In the next week and weeks it will be good to keep that in mind, and keep our eyes on the prize.

We have 2.7 million members of the active and reserve American armed forces today. The world owes a great deal to America, and America owes a great deal to them, and not only because of their courage but because of their faith in us. And they have faith in us, and in this place we all live in, this great country, or else they would never risk their lives for us. Which leaves us humbled, and wishing we could say to them what the world should be saying to the country they represent:

Thank you.

The Bush administration, famously inclined toward clarity and bluntness in foreign affairs, did something Friday that seemed almost . . . subtle. Or even obscuring. On the brink of war, with everyone in the world rushing to the radio and TV to see if the invasion had happened or the White House blinked or the Security Council vetoed or Blair cracked, Colin Powell and President Bush marched to a podium in the Rose Garden to announce they were going away. They were going to a sunny island in the middle of the Atlantic. There they would meet with our closest allies and confer at long meetings. And Mr. Bush would be attending those meetings having on his mind his strong convictions regarding a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.

This was startling, and seemed at first a non sequitur. But it’s not really. It’s a shift, and a good one.

First, the Azores meeting. It appears to be a last minisummit before America and its allies move decisively toward invasion. It is a last chance for Mr. Bush to speak in person to our close friends about how far they will and can go in backing the U.S. in the case of a U.N. Security Council veto. The meeting gives the leaders of both Britain and Spain the prominence and respect they are due as hardy allies in a time when loyalty carries a price.

Anything that shows respect and support for Tony Blair in particular is appropriate, because he has done for America what few of its own leaders outside the White House have been willing to do the past year or so, and that is put his career on the line for it. And that is, still, amazing, and the most moving moment in the history of the special relationship since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher stood together for the West and against the Soviets. A former U.S. government official summed up what might be called establishment Washington feeling about Mr. Blair the other day when he told me, “I never thought I’d live to have a socialist for a hero.”

Mr. Blair can only benefit from being shown to be a real and immediate partner of the American president. If photos of a windswept Mr. Blair and a furrow-browed Mr. Bush conferring as they walk side by side along the shore will help do that, then the traveling White House should call in the photographers as soon as they arrive.

*   *   *

But Mr. Bush’s remarks Friday emphasizing a new and comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli peace were truly startling. The administration has for a long time shied away from giving lengthy and specific attention to Israel and the Palestinians, focusing instead and understandably on the Immediates: the war on terrorism, the fighting in Afghanistan, winning support for an Iraq invasion, military planning for that invasion.

The insertion of questions of broad Mideast peace at this point—on the brink of war—is surprising, but in a number of ways it also seems wise—in part because it murks things up a bit. This is the kind of shift that leaves one’s diplomatic foes mildly taken aback and scratching their heads. And when people are scratching their heads they can’t be sticking their fingers in your eye.

Mr. Bush’s move seems to acknowledge and bow to the vague desires of the world regarding a broad new peace plan, without doing anything to blunt his arguments for removal of Saddam Hussein. Calling for an end to Israeli settlement activity, and announcing increased international support for new Palestinian representatives, is probably meant in some degree as a palliative to Europeans, who feel the United States is harsh toward Palestinians and blindly loyal to Israel. And Mr. Bush’s remarks implicitly acknowledged that Iraq is not the only piece in the Mideast puzzle, that the administration has no illusions that once Iraq is settled peace will break out. All the parties in the Mideast have their claims, and the United States does itself no harm in reminding the world it is aware of this.

Maybe most important at the moment, references to future Mideast peace moves helps people—not only the major players in the area but others—think about the future. Because it reminds them there is a future. In a world in which half the people of half the countries on the planet seem to have constant upset stomachs from war tensions, the announcement of future plans for future moves for a future peace seems a relief. So is the fact that Mr. Bush in his remarks seemed to be reminding the world that no, his administration is not actually the Washington wing of the Likud Party.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush, the chief executive who went to Harvard Business School, has since Sept. 11, 2001, been businesslike in focusing on and checking off the items on his daily international agenda. This has helped him produce obvious and orderly progress. The terrorists have been and are being removed, arrested and detained; the war in Afghanistan has been prosecuted; an Iraq invasion has been put forward and argued for in the world. The idea that Mr. Bush is now adding a comprehensive Mideast peace plan to the mix seems hopeful—not a widening of fronts but a broadening of focus. And a welcome acknowledgement of the need for a new activism, and a rejection of the idea of hopelessness, in the hottest and most dangerous part, ever, of the world.

It’s a beat-up little suburban single-story house in a Third World place far away. Faded blue paint on the outside, broken bicycle on a cracked cement walkway, rusty fence. You wouldn’t think twice if you drove by. It wasn’t interestingly decrepit or antique, just modern, cheap and fallen down.

It’s after midnight. A man—thin, bearded, tall—is sitting up in bed, his back against the wall. He’s writing a letter in a lined notebook that rests on a pillow. There’s a little kid’s sort of lamp, 40 watts, to his right, on a rickety plywood bureau that holds his cell phone, PDA, papers, watch.

A sound. The sharp break of a small stick.

He doesn’t move. Stares straight ahead. He isn’t even aware of “seeing” or “feeling”; he has only one sense now and it is hearing.

Nothing. Silence. Now he moves, keeping silent. The sheet soundlessly put aside, his feet on the floor. He sits on the side of the bed, listening.

Nothing. A dog barks a block away. He notes the time. Quietly takes the PDA, cell phone and watch, and puts them in a small brown satchel.

Listens.

Quietly, gently, takes a shirt from the floor and lays it over the lampshade. Waits a minute. Turns the lamp off. Rises slowly, goes to the window. Looks through the screen and the narrow slats of the blinds.

Darkness, a street lamp. Stillness.

He’s all right. An animal probably, a dog or a cat.

Silently still he crosses the room, opens the door, walks to the living room, says something. A mass on the couch moves, sits up. The bearded man says another word. The one on the couch grunts: Yes.

Bearded man goes back to his darkened room, to the bed, lies down, breathes softly, his chest barely raising the sheet. Turns on his side, sighs. The weekend, he thinks. Tomorrow the apartment near the tunnel. Good place. Ramsi, the transfer, the meeting. The visit from the beloved son. A dinner. Festive. Lamb and fresh vegetables . . .

He nods off.

All is peaceful. Or as peaceful as his life is. Images tumble through his brain—the mountain, the dust where the cars sped by.

*   *   *

Boom!

There’s a white light.

Bomb. His mind says the word before his eyes open. The house is blowing up. Yelling, light from the window, the door to the bedroom explodes off its hinges.

Men, rifles, masks. The leader moves fluidly, surely, is straddling him, is sitting on his arms, a rifle in his face.

“Osama bin Laden, you are under arrest by order of the United States government.”

Silence. You can hear the clock tick.

“U.S. Army Rangers.” He leans in close. “Hoo-ahh” the soldier whispers in his ear.

Silence.

“Get it all,” the leader says.

“Want this?” says a soldier. White linen in his hand.

“Do-rag,” says the leader. “He don’t need it now.”

Outside a thousand troops—the Pakistani Frontier Corps, the 82nd Airborne—surround the house.

Cars, military vehicles, lights. The bearded man, yanked from the bed, is dragged, handcuffed, into the back of a Hummer. Rangers, rifles drawn, surround him—one at each side on the middle seat, two in front, two in back. Four rifles aimed at his head.

They roar off down the highway. Dust shoots out. Vroom.

Behind them they can make out a rising cheer.

A convoy speeds behind them.

*   *   *

The Americans in the lead vehicle say nothing. They are from Indianapolis, Long Island, Sacramento, two from Ohio—one downstate and one Cleveland—and one from outside Tallahassee. The guy from Sacramento—his cousin died in the World Trade Center. He’s thinking: Payback is hell.

The mission leader, the guy who straddled the prisoner, he’s the one from southern Ohio, and he is old. He’s 42. He is career Army. This is the great moment of his life.

Radio transmissions. A siren off somewhere. Silence. Silence. Twelve minutes to base.

Ten minutes to base.

All smooth.

Eight minutes.

The Old Man thinks: Almost home. Man, the moment calls for something. Should have imagined this. Shoulda brought something.

In another Hummer behind them, a guy with a machine gun stands and surveys. Inside is a Ranger who’s a combat vet, served in Somalia. Battle of the Bakara Market. Looks, believe it or not, like Tom Sizemore. He’s driving. His forehead glistens. He calls this condition Beads of Joy. He is doing what he was born to do, and he is doing it well, and it’s all by the book except for one thing. He can’t stop smacking the wheel with his hand as he drives. Like they did in Jersey on the way to the shore when they were listening to Bruce.

Back in the front vehicle the bearded one is staring straight ahead. He can’t stop swallowing his spit. Little bird chest on him, heaving. And four rifles pointed at him.

The Old Man thinks: We’re OK. Smooth as . . . whatever.

Five minutes to base.

Jersey Shore Guy in the second car knows it’s over, this is big and this is done. He’s thinking just like the Old Man. This moment cannot go unremarked. He feels around at the CD player. One disc in it. Oh man—the Old Man’s music. That thing he gave me. Damn.

And: What the hell. Gonna disobey, gonna pay. He grunts, snaps the CD door closed, puts the volume up high, hits play.

Suddenly a crack, an electric boom. Everybody in the first car flinches.

But—it’s music. Crazy Jersey Guy in the second car is blasting the wild opening of the first cut of “Graceland” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon:

And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road . . .
These are the days of miracles and wonders
This is the long-distance call

Driver of the first car grabs the radio. Old Man stops him. Laughs through his nose. Says, “Give it a second.”

They race forward in the darkness.

“Don’t cry baby, don’t cry . . .”

And the Old Man gets on the radio and tells Crazy Jersey Guy to knock it off, cut the music. “Report to me on reaching base.”

They roar onto the grounds, and the general and everyone are there, and they get the prisoner out of the car. There’s a man at each side, holding him up by his arms. He’s jerky on his feet; he’s a mess—covered in sweat, wearing underpants and a sleeveless undershirt, skinny legs, matted hair, matted beard, wild eyes. This nothing. This piece of . . .

The general has been reading about Lawrence of Arabia. He looks at Osama and thinks: The Prince of Our Disorder.

Some Delta guys are on the side and they’re taken aback by what they see. The Wuss Who Started the War.

*   *   *

No photographs were to be taken, but one of the guys on the side had one of those small magic digital things and he took a picture. Saw it later and just did it, just sent it out on the Internet. The picture makes its way to every news service in the world.
Weeks later, after all the news—the invasion, Saddam gone, more al Qaeda arrests—the president of the United States had a meeting that he’d been looking forward to. It was in the Oval Office. It was early evening and the lamps seemed to light it with a golden glow. The door opened, and in marched the men who got Osama. The Ranger crew, the Screaming Eagles who guarded them.

The president gave them great medals and thanked them on behalf of a grateful nation. Then he asked for the Rangers who’d stormed the hideout. They stepped forward. Bush said he was sorry their names would have to stay secret but it was best under the circumstances, too much still going on, didn’t want to let them be a target for some nuts.

“But when the time is right,” Bush said, “your country will be told who you are, and what you did. And then—better get ready for the sculptors and all the statues.”

They laughed, and the president turned to the Old Man. “I want to thank you for what you did,” he said. “Heard a rumor you got something for me.”

“Yes sir!” said the Old Man. “Do-rag, sir! Worn by Osama bin Laden in the recent past.”

The president took the linen, weighed it in his hands, said he’d have it cased in plastic and put up in the Roosevelt Room, where they have the banners marking every U.S. military action in all our history.

Then the president said, “Who’s Jersey Man?”

Silence. Then the Tom Sizemore guy says, “Here, sir.”

“Hear you like music.”

Silence.

“Hear you like Paul Simon.” Jersey Man laughs, Old Man laughs. Everyone laughs.

“Got a state dinner tonight, may have heard. East Room. Marine Corps band. Venerable. But they’re gonna try something different. Special request of the president. “Graceland.” Rehearsing all afternoon with the harmonica and kind of hand organ thing and guitars. Sounds good. We put a table aside. Hoping you’d join us. That’s an order.”

“Hoo-ahh,” they said.

Recently Andrew Cuomo asked me to contribute to a book of essays on the future of the Democratic Party. I thought I would send it to Andrew through OpinionJournal.com. That way he will be able to see your responses pro and con and perhaps include a few of them in the book, too.

*   *   *

Dear Andrew,

As a former Democrat I’m happy to talk to my old party about its future. Some of my words may sting a little, but I send them to you in hopes your party will see in them food for thought, and for progress.

All political parties have problems—infighting, internal dissent, philosophical disagreements. But the modern Democratic Party has problems that are essentially different from that, and could actually do it in.

The first is what seems to me a lack of a constructive spirit within your party. Great parties exist in part to give us markers for the future. They offer a rough map that will get us to a better and higher destination. In the Democratic Party now, and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the Democrats, “the other.” When the president is a Democrat you now support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn’t have a map, and isn’t interested in markers, and is only interested in his own day-to-day survival.

I am not saying you are too partisan. Partisanship is fine. But Republicans by and large don’t suffer from blind loyalty or blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes). They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended Richard Nixon’s career). Recently it was Republicans who did in their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a certain kind of nonsense. If George W. Bush begins to seriously compromise conservative political philosophy, or to behave in a manner grossly offensive in a leader, they will turn on him too.

The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there’s something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything—that victory is the purpose of politics.

If the purpose is just winning, you can do anything to win. And you can do anything to stay. You never give an inch. But people who never give an inch sometimes wind up occupying tired and barren terrain.

*   *   *

You have grown profoundly unserious. This is the result of the win-at-any-cost mindset. A recent illustration: President Bush broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them we must move in Iraq. He was able to do this not because the presidency is the Big Microphone—President Clinton used to complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone—but because he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting to make our country and other countries safer. Maybe history will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his passion springs from conviction.
Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have by and large approached Iraq not with deep head-heart integration but with what appears to be mere calculation. What will play? What will resonate? These questions are both inevitable and a part of politics. But again, they are not the purpose of politics. Lincoln himself said, “Public opinion is everything,” but he was speaking of public opinion as a fact he had to consider as he tried to push the country in a new direction. He did not think public opinion itself was a direction. And he didn’t think it was a policy.

The modern Democratic Party is unserious in other ways. In the 1950s and ‘60s the party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America was an exceptional country. (See the speeches of Adlai Stevenson among others.) Because it was exceptional it needed to remain strong. (JFK: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, suffer any hardship . . . to secure the survival and success of liberty.”)

They also believed America had real flaws, actual sins, that needed to be righted. They assumed this exceptional country could right them. (That’s what optimism is in politics; it’s not smiling a hearty smile in front of a podium and pointing with a commanding air toward all your friends in the audience.) They wanted racial integration for the good of justice and the good of our country. They wanted more government assistance to the poor for the same reason. They were anticommunist. They were grownups. They were thinking.

Vietnam changed everything of course, and even though this is an old story I’ll touch on it. Your party’s problem was not that it opposed the war—that was one honorable position among many. The mistake the Democrats made was to allow their antiwar movement to become infused with bitterness and hostility, with a spirit of destructiveness. By the end the animating spirit of the movement looked something like this: We do not love this place; we prefer leaders unsullied by the grubby demands of electoral politics; we are drawn to the ideological purity of Ho, Fidel, Mao. And by the way we’re taking over: Oppose our vision and we’ll take care of you by revolutionary means.

That was the ultimate spirit of the movement, and it began to take over your party. The old-bull liberals were swept away, more radical Democrats arose, and they led your party to become not a united and spirited force but a party of often warring pressure groups. The pro-abortion lobby, the affirmative-action lobby, other lobbies. You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.

The Republican Party still manages to cohere around principles that are essentially clear and essentially conservative. The Democrats are not cohering. They are held together by a gritty talent for political process—message discipline, for instance. But what good is message discipline if there’s no serious and coherent message?

*   *   *

There is another problem. You have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they’re better than other Americans.

Let me quickly chart the life of a former Democrat. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, the Democrats seemed to me the party of the working class and middle class—the party of immigrants, strivers and those who adhered to an expansive reading of the American dream. I shared that dream, and saw my home as the Democratic Party. I was swayed by JFK and Bobby, by their implicit sense of honor about being Americans, as if they thought to be an American was a great gift and yet had a price: You had to help your country, you had to have guts and an open mind, you had to care about people others forgot.

I thought of Republicans as bland, unimaginative, vaguely immoral people who drank things like gin and tonic where they played things like golf. I remember reading in high school or college and being moved by someone’s wonderful old turn of the century agitprop poem—”The golf links were so near the mills that nearly every day / The laboring children could look out and see the men at play.” I assumed those men were Republicans.

My father had been a poor kid in Brooklyn who grew up on what was then called relief. He’d talk about the rancid butter people like him were given to eat. But he thought Franklin Roosevelt was the only president who’d ever done anything to help the workingman, and he had a resentment of those who were comfortably middle class, or upper middle, or rich. I inherited this. These were the biases I brought to the conversation when talk turned to politics when I was a teenager and young woman.

But—again—the antiwar movement startled me. I knew America was imperfect, but I also loved it. I had no illusion that other countries were perfect, or superior. I couldn’t imagine an unelected dictator had more legitimacy than an American president. I will never forget a moment when on local television they showed one day an antiwar march meeting up with a bunch of New York hardhats near City Hall. They fought, and the hardhats tried to raise the American flag. I watched and realized I was pulling for the hard hats.

I worked in Boston after college and saw affluent, well-educated and deeply insensitive officials forcing busing on working-class people who were understandably aghast at the idea that their young children couldn’t go to the school down the block but had to be bused to a place far away where they knew nobody. I worked in an all-news radio station, and many of my colleagues, the writers and editors and producers, were young liberals gone left, bright and engaged by life. They were almost all for busing. Their enthusiasm for it—they hadn’t yet had children whose presence might have moderated their thoughts and conclusions—left them patronizing the ill-educated and no doubt racist poor-Irish-Catholics-who-have-nothing people of South Boston, who opposed busing. Again I was startled. This was like the antiwar movement. It was like Henry Cabot Lodge looking down on the help! It would never have occurred to me to look down on anyone. But boy, these liberals did. They were real snobs. And it was class snobbery.

I was, as a young woman in the ‘70s, trying to commit myself professionally for the first time. I wanted to do good work, and really tried. But I saw in time that I was being clobbered by taxes, and in time I had a subversive thought. Hmmm, liberals who back busing are taxing me extra heavy so I can pay for busing. Great.

*   *   *

Liberals were also acting as if street crime was an inevitable result of societal injustice. I didn’t doubt there was truth in that, but I also knew street crime was the result of street criminals, and they should be caught and thrown in jail. But how can you find time to do that when you’re busy reforming society top to bottom like little Pol Pots? In fact, why do it at all when the fact of exploding street crime seems to support your theories about American inequality and injustice?

Once one late night on the T, the city transit system, I got off at a downtown stop and noticed a woman who’d gotten off with me. She was about 60, she was furiously going through her purse, and she had the kind of flopping expression of someone who’s just lost control of her facial muscles. I asked what was wrong and she turned to me and began to cry. She said she’d had her purse next to her on the subway, she feared the kid next to her had opened it, she was afraid, she got off, and all her money was gone. He’d taken everything. She did not appear to be someone who could lose $40 or $60 lightly. I helped her report it and I think I gave her money. But hers was truly the face of the oppressed: an old lady alone who’s lost control of her face. And who was oppressing her? It wasn’t the tough-on-crime crowd.

All of it came together bit by bit, and I started to become a conservative, and in time a Republican. And for the very reasons that my father was a Democrat.

Not a word of what I am saying is new. You’ve heard stories like this before. But it is still fiercely pertinent to your fortunes, because the journey I describe was common. It was the journey millions and tens of millions of people were taking at the same time, in the same era, for the same reasons. By the ‘80s their numbers were massive. They were the ground troops of the Reagan revolution. They left the Democratic Party. They left you. Here’s your problem: To this day they haven’t come back.

And they’re not teaching their kids to love you.

I see the modern Democratic Party as the party of snobs. I wonder why your much-proclaimed compassion is distributed on such a limited basis—to this pressure group, that minority group, this special interest group.

Yes, all parties do this to some degree, but again, the Republicans the past quarter century seemed to be building coalitions that embraced the same general principles—freedom in the world, security at home, smaller and less mighty government wherever possible, more money left in the pockets of the people, a respect for the things that were tried and true. They recognize the fact of evil in the world, and they’re unwilling to excuse crime and criminals.

The Democrats seemed motivated not by general principles and beliefs but only the need to win, which left you protecting your market share by bribing groups you’d once been able to champion. You’ve become confused as to your purpose, your reason for being. Yes, Republicans have pressure groups too, and the party pays great attention to them. But the GOP’s pressure groups are in line with the sympathies of the party as a whole. When the National Rifle Association agitates for its issues, it’s agitating within a party that supports the right to keep and bear arms.

*   *   *

Let’s stick with the right to keep and bear arms for a minute. My Democratic friends, when you think about this question, ask yourself if snobbery as a political force isn’t part of the reason you stand where you stand.

Gun owners hunt. They keep guns to protect themselves in dangerous places—rural areas where help isn’t always immediately available, for instance. They like and respect firearms and are committed to their right to have them. A lot of gun owners live down South or out West or in the less fashionable sections of the Northern industrial states. They are mostly not coastal and urban in their cultural interests. They are not the media elite, the academic elite, any kind of elite. Do you respect these people?

As long as they’re law abiding, and responsible enough to respect the damage guns can do, conservatives completely support their right to have arms. (Sure they should be registered, but registration should exist to allow the law abiding to have guns, and not be twisted into a way to keep guns out of everyone’s hands.)

Liberals/leftists as a class—and I’m sorry but really, you’ve become a class—don’t usually know people who shoot. They don’t like people who shoot. They look down on them; gun owners are boobs and yahoos out in the sticks killing Bambi. As for living in a rural area where there’s no nearby police force, why don’t you just . . . move?

Let me be, admittedly, mean, but to make a point I can’t figure out how to make any other way. Those who oppose the right to keep and bear arms are not as a rule the kind of people who would, or could, take down a nut waving his gun at the kids in a McDonalds. Those who oppose gun rights are more like the kind of people who when the incident was over would write a sensitive essay about how it felt to come face to face with one’s existential powerlessness when faced with the sudden force of a sick man who alas shot two kids right in front of me. You may mean to be helpful in the abstract, but you are not helpful in the particular.

Conservatives are on the side of the citizen who’d protect the kids and takes down the bad guy with the gun. Aren’t you, really? Shouldn’t you be, “for the good of the children”?

Do you wish Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, and the stewardesses and pilots of the hijacked jets of 9/11 had been armed? I do. “That’s a dramatic, worst-case scenario,” you say. Sure. But life is full of dramatic, worst-case scenarios. Is your life so comfortable and protected that you’ve forgotten this? Did you ever know it? Really, doesn’t mere snobbery have something to do with where you stand?

This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.

*   *   *

Here is a challenge for modern Democrats. The old things the party stood for—civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, the women’s movement, a more appreciative and accepting view of those who feel marginalized—have been fully or in good part achieved. And the Democrats now seem like people who’ve run out their string and have grasped at radicalism not only because of lingering ‘60s sentiment but also, simply, to stay afloat.

An example: abortion. The Democrats became the party of what they called abortion rights. Fine. It seemed to them right at the time and a step toward human progress. But now, 30 years later, after all the things we’ve seen and pondered, after all that science has shown us, the Democratic Party has grown not less radical on abortion, but more. Your party won’t even agree to ban third-term abortions—which is the abortion of a baby who looks and seems fully human and capable of life because he is. The Democrats oppose parental consent even in the cases of 14-year-olds who are themselves children. It opposes directing doctors to inform frightened young women before an abortion is performed that there are other options, other possible paths.

This is so radical. So out of touch with the feeling and thought of the vast middle of the country. So at odds with our self-image as a nation. We think we try to protect the vulnerable. We think we’re kind.

Democratic leaders are radical on abortion because they live in fear of—brace yourself, more snobs coming—a pro-abortion lobby that has money, clout and workers, and that can kill the hopes of any Democratic aspirant who doesn’t toe the line. And that pro-abortion lobby is largely composed of the professionals, journalists, lawyers and operatives who long ago showed such contempt for America. And for Southie. And for taxpayers. And for those who hold to a spiritual or nonspiritual sense of right and wrong, good and evil, and who have a visceral sense that abortion is bad for our nation and its future.

The Democratic Party’s complete obeisance to this lobby makes Democrats look bought, frightened and craven. It also makes them look stone cold. You look that way when you back stone-cold policies.

Here’s a funny thing. I’ve met a lot of the Democratic nomination hopefuls, and they don’t seem cold or indifferent. They seem like people who are doing what they think they have to do to survive. You’re making these guys do some bad things.

And there’s this. Deep down, in some still vital area of human knowledge within you, the place where you just know things, you have got to know that no political party primarily funded, supported and led by fierce pro-abortionists, by people whose great interest in life is seeing to it that the right to kill infants is retained, can long endure. Nothing can long stand on a foundation like that. Nothing.

*   *   *

One wishes the Democrats well if for no other reason than the Republican Party will be at its best only when it faces a worthy and vital competitor.

So here’s my advice: Look at the clock. Know what time it is. Half the country is wondering if we are in the end times. (Excuse me, I mean they fear man may be living through a final, wrenching paroxysm, the result of man’s inhumanity to man and of the inevitable culmination of several unhelpful forces and trends.) So wake up and get serious. Get your heart back, and your guts. Be constructive, not destructive. Help. If President Bush advances an agenda you deep down support, then go public and help him. If he advances what you honestly oppose, come forward with constructive alternatives.

Don’t “position” yourself on issues like Iraq, think about your position on Iraq and be guided by a question: What will be good and right for America and the world? Reach your conclusions and hold to them as long as you can hold them honestly. A lot of people, not all but many, can see when you’re only positioning yourselves.

Stare down the abortion lobby, the gun-ban nuts, etc. Be moderate. Make progress. The next time someone like the late Bob Casey, a popular governor of a great industrial state and pro-life due to conscience, asks to address your convention, let him. Welcome him. People like him widen the tent.

Be pro-free-speech again. Allow internal divisions and dissent. A vital political party should have divisions and dissent.

Develop a new and modern Democratic rationale—the reason regular people should be Democrats again. Stop being just the We Hate Republicans Party. That’s not a belief, it’s a tic.

Stop being the party of snobs. Show love for your country and its people—all its people. Stop looking down on those who resist your teachings.

Stop taking such comfort in Bill Clinton’s two wins. Move on. He was a great political talent, but he won by confusing the issues, not facing them. That’s a trick that tends to work only at certain times and only with powerful charisma. And even with that his leadership will be remembered, is already being remembered, as “a holiday from history,” in Charles Krauthammer’s phrase. And he never hit 50% of the vote in either of his victories, even when he had peace and riotous prosperity on his side. He didn’t have coattails. (See Gore, Albert Jr., life of.) And he rose in large measure because George H.W. Bush broke his pledge, raised taxes, and saw the economy plummet. That was calamitous for the Republicans. Your great hope now is more calamity. If George W. Bush suffers a post 9/11 disaster at home or abroad in the next few years it may—may—propel a Democrat into the White House. But who respects a party whose great hope is widespread pain?

So stop allowing Bill Clinton to present himself as Mr. Democrat. Ask him to stay home. He reminds people of embarrassment. He uses up all your oxygen. Love him or hate him, we all know he’s the personification of slick, and slick isn’t what you want as the face of a great party.

Stop the ideology. A lot of Democratic Party movers and intellectuals have created or inherited a leftist ideology that they try to impose on life. It doesn’t spring from life; it’s forced on life, and upon people. Stop doing that—it’s what weirdos who are detached from reality do. Have a philosophy instead of an ideology, hold it high and dear, and attempt to apply it, not impose it.

Respect normal Americans again, even those who are not union members. We’re all touched by grace, we all deserve a voice, and you could learn a few things if you’d listen to those who’ve had to struggle through life.

And by the way, I’d like it if you started smoking again, at least for a while. Democrats were nicer when they smoked. Then they let all those Carrie Nation types in the party beat them to a pulp, and regular Democrats stopped feeling free to be regular flawed messy humans. That was too bad. Why don’t you send the Smoking Ban Lobby back to the abortion-rights meeting, and tell them to leave you alone?

You’re still one of our two great political parties. Show some class, the good kind. Throw your cap over the wall as JFK said, and boldly follow.