Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 65, Ed. 1 Tuesday, November 29, 2016 Page: 4 of 12
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4 - TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2016
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
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Kathryn Lopez
David Shribman
Letters Policy
What we really
need in a leader
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names and hometown will be published.
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Barack Obama
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-
at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices
USA. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Post-Gazette (dshribman@post-
gazette.com, 412 263-1890). Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.
Vice President
Joe Biden
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@whitehouse.gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068, Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0124
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
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“Now that we’ll have a president who has said, ‘I don’t
have heroes,’ I suppose we must all somehow step up and
become heroes for one another,” writer Wendy Shalit
tweeted the day after the election. The mother of three
describes herself as an “evangelist for romantic hope and
the possibility of innocence.”
In a recent conversation, Shalit spoke of a man named
Gershon Burd, a father of five who had died in an accident
in 2013 and led a “secret life.” People knew he was a good
guy, but they had no idea, really — even his family. For
himself, he would buy used shoes and suits. For others,
he would do anything, it turned out. He was gratuitously
generous.
In a 2014 reissue of her 1999 book, “A Return to Modesty,’
Shalit wrote of him: “A stationery store owner in the
Old City of Jerusalem gave out free helium balloons to
all children on their birthdays... only because Gershon
quietly slipped into the store every month and paid for the
balloons. He also paid for plane tickets home, so that other
people could visit their sick parents.” Shalit asked: “(I)s
there anything more extraordinary than a life lived with
such sublime modesty?”
When I picked up “A Return to Modesty” again, I read
this: “The wheel of maturity is grasped when a person
humbles himself to identify with others and stretches
himself to become a more giving person.”
That’s a message that some of the people protesting
Donald Trump’s election need to hear. I didn’t vote for the
man, and I have similar feelings as Shalit’s about what it
says about us that we will have a first lady who described
her husband’s repulsive language about women — which
may or may not have reflected the reality of his approach to
sexual conquests — as male “locker room talk.”
But the poor choices this election year were not the
fault of the candidates but a reflection of ourselves and our
politics. I broke open my copy of William Bennett’s “The
Book of Virtues” — which Shalit also tweeted about in the
wake of the election — and noticed that the first virtue is
self-discipline. It includes some verse
from an unknown author on learning
how to conduct conversations: “If you
your lips would keep from slips,/Five
things observe with care:/Of whom you
speak, to whom you speak,/ And how
and when and where.
“If you your ears would save from
jeers,/These things keep meekly hid:/
Myself and I, and mine and my,/And how
I do and did.”
Countercultural much?
Bennett points to Socrates, who praised temperance in
a leader, writing that it’s the aim “toward which he ought
to direct all the energies both of himself and of the state...
not suffering his lusts to be unrestrained, and in the never-
ending desire to satisfy them leading a robber’s life. Such a
one is the friend neither of God nor man, for he is incapable
of communion, and he who is incapable of communion is
also incapable of friendship.”
Throughout the campaign, people asked me why Trump’s
recklessness in speech and action matter. I think the quotes
above answer that question. But again, he’s about to be
president, and the bigger issue is ourselves. What do we
value, what do we want to value, who are we and who do
we want to be? In the Christian tradition, there’s a call
to be saints, and it is universal. We don’t need a saint as
president, but we do need one who has heroes other than
himself, one who wants to be a hero. That’ll take everyone
pitching in and nurturing virtues like modesty and humility,
like Gershon Burd or so many others whose names will
never be well known have done. They’re lives to celebrate
and emulate.
INTERVALE, N.H. — From this vista, the peaks already
carry a light frost. Pockets of snow rest in the ravines,
and ominous high winds are forecast. In any season, the
Presidential Range is a fearsome place, in this season
especially so.
The summits are named for Washington, Adams, Jefferson,
Madison, even Pierce, and, most recently, Eisenhower. Many
of them are inaccessible except through the most arduous
of climbs. Some of them have subpeaks, which pose special
challenges along rocky paths. Slippery ridges and dangerous
ledges abound. But their greatest distinction, along with the
most severe weather in the country, is that they soar above
the rest.
These peaks in the state that is host to the first primary are
well named. They are presidential, awesome to behold, their
summits difficult to attain. From ground
level they look forbidding, inaccessible.
But whether viewed in sunshine or snow,
whether garlanded in green or draped in
autumn colors, they above all fill us with
awe.
That is what it is to be presidential,
whether the word is employed to describe
Mount Washington, which at 6,288 feet
above sea level rises above all the others
here, its shoulders breathtaking in their
width and strength, or the city of Washington, D.C., 570 miles
to the south. There is beauty to the word — presidential — its
four syllables each a chime, but those distinct sounds also
are a tocsin of danger, for, as one of the hiking guides in these
peaks warns, “It is your responsibility to understand these
dangers, to make necessary preparations and to take the
appropriate precautions.”
Now, a new figure is preparing to take his place among
the Presidential — among the faces printed on the foot-long
rulers that schoolchildren stow in their desks, if not among
the summits up here in a place that Ralph Waldo Emerson
considered almost sacred. “Here among the mountains the
pinions of thought should be strong,” Emerson wrote in a
period of introspection in 1836, “and one should see the errors
of men from a calmer height of love and wisdom.”
So, at this time, at the change of season and at the change
of presidencies, it is natural to give pause and to reflect on
what it means to be presidential, and, for those drawn to
the hillsides and whose thoughts are lured to the summits,
perhaps to dip into the most reliable guide to trekking these
paths, a well-loved, much-respected reference book that
warns that, among the Presidential, “the weather is vicious
enough to kill those who are foolish enough to challenge the
mountain at its worst.”
At another site scraping the sky, a Manhattan
tower bearing his name, Donald Trump is building an
administration amid pleas from supporters and critics alike
to be presidential, an entreaty Trump has answered in the
past by saying, “I can be more presidential than anybody, if
I want to be.” Separately he explained: “More presidential
than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln. He was very
presidential.”
But what does it mean to be presidential? To be as
unassailable as George Washington? As philosophical as
Thomas Jefferson? As firm yet as gentle as Lincoln? As
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Scaling the presidentials
joyful as Theodore Roosevelt, or as wily as his distant cousin
Franklin? As intellectual as Woodrow Wilson, or as earthy as
Harry Truman? As quietly wise as Dwight Eisenhower? As
inspirational as John F. Kennedy? Or Ronald Reagan?
Each president molds the office to his personality, his
character and his times. James Buchanan regarded it
as a “crown of thorns,” Herbert Hoover as a “hair shirt,”
but they were unsuccessful presidents. James K. Polk, a
successful president, nonetheless described the office as
“no bed of roses.” In his congressional address shortly after
the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963, Lyndon B.
Johnson spoke of “the awesome burden of the presidency.”
Later he told his successor, Richard M. Nixon, that occupying
the presidency was “like being a jackass caught in a hail
storm,” explaining: “You’ve got to just stand there and take it.”
Franklin Roosevelt, whose conception of the office in 1932
still shapes our view in 2016, set our expectations when he
described the presidency as “not merely an administrative
office,” adding, “That’s the least of it... It is pre-eminently
a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were
leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the
life of the nation had to be clarified.”
And so, Trump now has the chance to add his thoughts, to
shape the presidency to his instincts and inclinations; for the
presidency soon will be defined in part by how he approaches
ceremonial moments (his inauguration in January, both his
address and his celebrations) and procedural moments (his
initial budget message to Congress the following month);
how he helps Americans to celebrate and meditate. It will be
shaped by how he shows grief in times of loss, grandeur at
moments of challenge.
He is involved in a great administrative transition, but
also faces a personal transition. “He has to get off campaign
mode and show how he’ll deal with immigration, what he’ll
do in foreign policy,” says Steffen W. Schmidt, an Iowa State
political scientist. “Specifics.”
But in veering from opinion to implementation, he will
take his place in the parade of presidents. “The major thing
is to have reverence for the role,” says Carter Wilkie, a
speechwriter for Bill Clinton. “One of the reasons Reagan was
so popular after Jimmy Carter was that he restored some
dignity to the office.” David Greenberg, author of biographies
of Nixon and Calvin Coolidge, says Trump should “submit to
the ministrations of advisers” with White House experience.
Trump is the first president with no prior elective
experience, which gives him a freshness for the office but
also a steep learning curve. “If you are not an experienced
climber or a trained athlete,” counsels the authoritative guide
to hiking the Presidentials, “you will almost certainly enjoy
the ascent... a great deal more if you build up to it with lesser
climbs.”
It’s too late for that. But intelligent guidance for this office
of duty and danger rests in the advice to hikers. “Ascents of
the mountain in winter are sometimes easy enough to deceive
inexperienced hikers into false confidence,” it counsels, “but
the worst conditions in winter are inconceivably brutal and
can materialize with little warning.” Governing, like hiking, is
harder than it looks, and the path is steep.
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 65, Ed. 1 Tuesday, November 29, 2016, newspaper, November 29, 2016; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1323853/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Cooke County Library.