Bob Schieffer’s special comment on today’s Face the Nation:
Some thoughts on this July 4th weekend …
In his wonderful book, “Founding Brothers,” historian Joe Ellis says of the American Revolution that “no event in American history, which was so improbable at the time, has seemed so inevitable in retrospect.”
As we think back on the rightness of America’s cause, we find it hard to believe that it could have come out any other way.
Yet, as Ellis writes, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the signers had no idea how the revolution would end. The most likely outcome was failure.
No matter the rightness of the cause, the signers were defying the most powerful nation in the world, and no colony had ever successfully broken away from a mother country.
Revolution after revolution against imperialist powers followed ours, but until ours, none had succeeded.
All the signers of our declaration knew for certain was that if it failed, they would hang. Somehow, they won.
On the Fourth of July, we celebrate (as we should) the wisdom and the vision of the founders and the way, in one document, that Thomas Jefferson summarized the aspirations of all people: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But let us never forget the one thing that made all the rest of it and what came after it possible: courage - the courage of those who bet their very lives on a project that all signs suggested would fail.
There was nothing inevitable about the American Revolution.
July 6th, 2008
Thanks to the Center for the Study of the Presidency for pointing to this profound and timely Lincoln quote:
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must
rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew,
and act anew . . . Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.”
—Abraham Lincoln
June 5th, 2008
The HBO Miniseries John Adams features in it a conversation between Dr. Benjamin Rush and Mr. Adams that probably never happened. They were discussing who should be told of Abigail Adams death (since Dr. Rush apparently preceded Mrs. Adams in death, it’s safe to assume the conversation is fictitious).
Dr. Benjamin Rush: What about Mr. Jefferson. Surely he will wish to share your sorrow.
Adams: If I should receive a letter from him, I would not fail to answer.
Rush: Perhaps if you were to write yourself?
Adams: The man did me and my reputation great insult. He honored and salaried every villain he could find who was my enemy.
Rush: Well that is why it is you who must show the magnanimity of great minds. I always considered you and him the north and south poles of our revolution. Some talked some wrote and some fought to promote and establish it but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.
Thus, fictitiously of course, began the real letters between the “north and south poles” of our revolution that ended, poetically, in the death of Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson on the same day, the 4th of July, 50 years from the birth of the nation that they formed.
Adams wrote to Jefferson:
You and I have passed our lives in serious times and we have suffered ourselves to be the passive subjects of public discussion and reaped animosity and bitterness… But you and I ought not to die until we have explained ourselves to each other. As long as there is government, there will be differences of opinion… Whether you or I were right, posterity must judge, yet I ask of you who shall write the history of our revolution. Who can write it?
Who shall write the history of our revolution? Why, of course, it is no one but us.
Adams last words before his death were “Thomas Jefferson lives.”
Ironically, Jefferson had at that time already passed away.
But we live. The philosophical descendants of Jefferson and Adams are alive and well. The history of our revolution is still being written, this amazing experiment in “the course of human events.”
We write.
May 4th, 2008
As a general rule of thumb, when we find ourselves at a point of contentious disagreement (like on about everything nowadays), it’s time to back up a little, to zoom out.
Abandoning a narrow perspective, taking a wider one, we often find things we agree on, sometimes enthusiastically. There are times when we’re spinning in our own little mental circles, all the while just a few short measurements from others spinning in theirs, with much mutual agreement no one has bothered to unearth for all the darn spinning.
I think our Founding Fathers’ opus - our Constitution - is just such a wider view, a plumb line in this country. . . left, right, whatever. That’s part of why The Village Square will pay attention to those old dead guys with quill pens. In our time, we are charged with stretching to answer the questions raised in the conversation they started.
In part, our mutual reverence for the Constitution is a bit of a Rorschach test - we see in it what we want or expect to see. So perhaps our agreement is somewhat illusory, but isn’t that still a miracle? Isn’t that nearly the best we can hope for, where the consent of the governed keeps hanging on, 230 years after?
“A Republic, if you can keep it” in the words of Founding Father Franklin.
But beyond the Rorschach test-ness of it, part of the beauty of what they built is in the very tightrope they walked in the building. Their agreement was tenuous, as is ours, as it will likely always be. And yet, still today this unlikely mix of people moves forward together. Ugly and uncivil sometimes, yep. But still together.
Tightrope walking is pretty tense, but we’d better get back on it.
August 29th, 2007
