I had just been freed from having to work the dreaded lunch shift waiting tables at a Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant and was entering my favorite dive two doors down, where my roommate was the bartender. My plan was to spend the afternoon with her, drinking away what I would now not earn, but I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked in. The lunch hour crowd was glued to the TV set over the bar; I had just missed it, but was in time for the immediate aftermath. The space shuttle Challenger appeared heading off as normal when suddenly it disintegrated into gnarled trails of smoke.
It was stunning, literally. Nobody was able to react, instead everyone just stared at the set. Several more replays only added to the pall; nobody had any words. And then a woman burst into tears, asking aloud how such a thing could happen. Challenger, only minutes before part of a process that had become so routine it was no longer even covered live on the major networks, became a paralyzing disaster. In the blink of an eye, a crew gone, our space omnipotence in tatters. Real time national tragedy.
On January 18, 1986 President Ronald Reagan underwent yet another surgery to remove polyps from his colon. There was no denying that, after taking a bullet and later suffering colon cancer, Reagan was beginning to look at least like every one of his 75 years. While his popularity remained high, there was a feeling the White House was on auto pilot. It would eventually come to light Oliver North was selling tow missiles to Iran as ransom for captive Americans and funneling the money to evade the Boland Amendment, which prohibited US financial support of insurgents seeking the overthrow of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. History would report Reagan was anything but in charge of his foreign policy team in January of 86’.
Yet and still, ten days after an intrusive medical procedure, there he was addressing the nation, assuaging its grief, beguiling us from the unimaginable with straightforward words of basic decency. Whatever opinion one had of President Reagan, at that moment, during that address, it felt obscene to do anything other than accept his condolences for a nation in mourning, his leadership of a country stunned and unmoored by such an unexpected turn of events. In short, the Gipper was earning his paycheck, performing a significant function of the job we twice elected him to do.
It is more testament to the awesome power of the Presidency than the individual’s unique prose or cadence that quotes from such occasions are revered by history. Yet and still, when Reagan finished by reciting a poem, avering the crew had “slipped the surly bonds of Earth…to touch the face of God.” He achieved some measure of greatness that no scandal or mismanagement could deface.
Flashing forward to last week, such recollections only amplify our current shame and abasement. The send off for John McCain at the National Cathedral was appropriate to his accomplishments as a fixture in the US Senate and perhaps the nation’s most famous war hero. Virtually the entire array of our living leadership, past and present, Republican and Democrat, was invited to the poignant ceremony.
That McCain wanted both of the men who stymied his quest for the White House to offer eulogies, speaks to a humility that is part and parcel of the job they denied him. And, of course, the crowd’s bipartisan composition punctuated what he understood to be the essence of democratic governance.
The whole affair was a wonderful display of the best of our aspirations. While soprano Renee Fleming caressed the mourners with her version of “Danny Boy”, one could be forgiven for forgetting, at least for the moment, our national plight, who was right then lumbering around one of his golf courses, tweeting nastiness in between mulligans… persona non grata.
Explaining to students a hundred years hence why a sitting POTUS was overtly shunned from such an important national event will be a challenge, no pun intended. For now we are left with the ugly truth, as awful as it is inane… we elected one of our very worst to the nation’s highest office. How else to explain such a surreal image? A sitting President effectively banned from a gathering of the entirety of living US governance.
Just being disagreeable doesn’t warrant such exclusion; you have to be despicable. Mere dishonesty would never justify so grievous a snub; you have to be a liar, a slanderer of people’s good names. Certainly being politically partisan would not beckon such leperous exile on a sitting President; he would have to be dangerously divisive, ever concerned only with his personal ambitions, an hourly enemy of national unity.
Of course all but his wretched core know this noxious criteria fits our pariah-in-chief to a tee. What will be hard for future generations to understand, presuming we survive Trumpism and posterity does not become propaganda, is why so many who knew better tolerated such a hazardous departure from all established precedent. How is it possible to go in one election from a man invited to give a eulogy at the funeral of a foe he vanquished, to a sitting President from his own party told in no uncertain terms he was not welcome to attend the same service? Who could possibly abide such a situation? You got me on that one. BC