Chapter Twelve Chapter Twelve I have traveled all over the world, but the view from the terrace of my writing office in Rosslyn, Virginia, is the most inspiring sight I have ever seen.
Just below me as I stand on the eighth-floor balcony is the famed Marine Corps War Memorial, recapturing the moment in February 1945 when the Marines planted the American flag atop Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima. Every Tuesday evening during the summer months, hundreds of onlookers pack the Memorial grounds as the Marine Corps hosts a full dress parade, replete with its precision-marching Silent Drill Platoon, the Marine Band, and its Drum and Bugle Corps. Having proudly served our Corps, as did my brother and my son, I enjoy a special perch on the terrace at Prospect House, a front-row seat, year after year, to watch the timeless continuity of its martial traditions.
Southward to my right is Arlington National Cemetery, America’s most sacred burial grounds. Clearly visible on the far side of the Cemetery is the Pentagon, that five-sided Puzzle Palace. Farther in the distance, hugging the Potomac River, are the busy runways of Reagan National Airport. In the other direction, off to the north, between the towering buildings of Rosslyn I can see the Georgetown skyline and the dome of the National Cathedral. Closer to me is the infamous Watergate apartment complex, whose very name reminds us of Richard Nixon’s bitter fate, and just across the river is the Kennedy Center. Finally, to the east, on the other side of the stone-walled Roosevelt and Memorial bridges, my gaze can traverse the National Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial near the Potomac River to the Washington Monument a mile or so away, then its end point where it reaches the magnificent dome and outer edifices of the U.S. Capitol itself.
I never grow tired of taking in the beauty and the historic resonance of these national symbols. They speak to the remarkable journey of our country, but they are also personal. I spent five years in the Pentagon, one as a Marine and four as a senior executive during the Reagan administration. Years later, on the morning of the 9/11 attacks, I happened to be visiting “The Building” for a private breakfast with the commandant of the Marine Corps, leaving minutes after learning that the Twin Towers had been attacked and only moments before the Pentagon itself was hit. I walk every weekend through Arlington National Cemetery, past familiar graves and memorials. Many friends and former colleagues are buried in Arlington, as are both my parents.
But it is the Capitol Building that always captures my mood, my attention, and, lately, my most serious thoughts. Inside that building is the Senate floor, a place of awe-inspiring history, a chamber often filled with sound and fury, but also, to be honest, a place where in recent years a whole lot of high-level escape and evasion has been going on. And therein lies the conundrum, the seemingly unsolvable dilemma, the undeniable conflict in emotions for many who have served in the Congress in recent decades. As I contemplate the Capitol Building on the horizon, I feel a sense of gratitude for having had the honor of serving inside it as a U.S. senator. But that sense of pride is mingled with regret that I was unable to do enough, that both political parties have become frozen by money and interest groups into awkward positions and false debates that do not fully reflect the concerns of our citizens. Our political system has become paralyzed. It is no wonder that such a large percentage of the American people have lost their respect for and their trust of our national leadership.
The Capitol also stands as a symbol of my own unplanned journey. As I stare at it from the balcony of my writing office I remember how many thousand times I stood on the northern porch of the Capitol Building, just off the Senate floor, staring westward toward Virginia as I made phone calls or simply took a break during some interminable debate. For just as clearly as I can see the Capitol from my writing office, in those moments I could always see my writing office from the Capitol. When things in the Senate became especially disagreeable or tedious, I would think of the welcome solitude of my writing office and the sense of accomplishment I have always felt in putting words together to tell a story that just might affect as many lives as the mundane legislation that is so often the order of the day in the Congress.
I did not choose either of these professions, but I have been blessed to find success in both. Such has been the irony of my completely unpredicted professional career: that one of these callings never superseded the other, that I loved both but neither to the exclusion of the other, and that while involved in one I always missed the sense of accomplishment and participation that I felt in the other. Leadership has always been my natural calling, while writing has been my refuge, for me the singular place where I can sort out my views and clearly state them.
People in and out of politics often ask why I decided not to run for reelection to the Senate. Commentators speculate that I became frustrated with the tedium, that I hated fund-raising, and that while I enjoyed governance I did not like the ornamentations of politics. Each one of those conclusions holds a particle of truth. But the main reason that I decided not to run again was that by spending another six years or more as a member of that paralyzed body I faced the Hobson’s choice of either turning into a perennial scold or surrendering a part of my individuality to the uncontrollable, collective nature of group politics. I was not ready to do either.
Others, particularly those who have made politics their career, take a different, fully understandable approach. While in office every senator enjoys the status of minor royalty. Whether or not any among them will inherit the grand legacy of a Daniel Webster or the longevity of a Robert Byrd, most appreciate that the credibility of American democracy rests upon their shoulders with everything they do. Even as they struggle daily with jammed schedules, fund-raisers, telephone calls begging for campaign donations, tedious committee hearings, endless photo opportunities with visiting delegations visiting from home, and no small share of meaningless “gotcha” votes on the Senate floor, they cannot escape the reality that for the moment they are American democracy’s definers. And strange as it may seem during some of the Senate’s more pretentious debates, they are also its highest tier of practitioners.
Make no mistake: politicians at this level of governance are a shrewd and largely intelligent bunch. The seemingly mindless pirouettes you see on the news shows from a senator with, say, an Ivy League degree or a Fulbright Scholarship are hardly the result of mental incapacity or outright personal corruption. Rather they emanate from that most basic human instinct, the desire to survive and to remain in power, boiled down to the cost-benefit analysis of what must be given up in order to remain viable in a transactional world such as politics, where there is often a price to be paid. And you will always hear the same heartfelt justification, even in the private whispers of a personal conversation:
I need to survive in order to continue to do good things. No matter how much I hate this particular vote, I would hate even more to vote with the other side. Besides, I can always undo it down the road with another vote that will cancel this one out. And unless it violates my conscience (which I would never do, you know that), sometimes taking a position that I couldn’t really otherwise swallow is necessary in order to stay in office. How can I do any good if I don’t get reelected?
Let’s be honest. This is not just in politics. Almost everything in life requires some kind of trade-off. We all negotiate on issues large and small, even if it involves the simple matter of whether you or your spouse is going to pick up your kid from soccer practice. On the other hand, political issues are indisputably in a category all their own. A political leader’s foremost role is stewardship of the public good. Any decision made while in public office might affect not only one’s personal future but, more important, the long-term health of the country itself.
I came to the Senate with no illusions. During my campaign for office and at every possible opportunity after I was elected, I sought to highlight our country’s dangerous descent into a society where the elites at the very top have increasingly moved away from everyone else, until America threatens to become a modern-day version of a banana republic. I arrived with a full appreciation of our political process, gained over many years from a wide variety of professional perspectives. I have taken risks, sometimes making money and sometimes losing it, and between the two, to state the obvious, it feels a lot better to be making money. I did not come to the Senate to soak the rich or to punish the powerful. I want everybody to have the chance to become one or the other or maybe both. There is nothing wrong with being rich. Almost every American dreams of it, and it is a healthy dream for our country, as long as the riches and the influence are fairly earned.
But in recent years, preceding and following my time in the Senate, I have worried about the atrophy of another part of what it means to be an American: that we have thrived on a guarantee of fairness as well as opportunity, that our leaders have a moral duty to protect the weak and the vulnerable and also the dream-seekers, and that we must never allow the very rich to become our masters. America was founded on a rebellion against royalty in whatever form it might reveal itself and on a guarantee that mere wealth should never be allowed to dictate the political direction of the country. Nothing would doom the American Dream more quickly than the establishment of a permanent, removed aristocracy, and quite frankly we are on the brink of allowing exactly that to happen. The never-ending debate of how a society must balance an individual’s personal freedom with his larger obligation to community and country has marked every civilization for thousands of years. But our unusual political system holds as its premise the belief that there should be no special access to the corridors of power other than through the force of argument and the rewards of individual talent.
Putting boundaries on the misuse of influence by our most fortunate citizens without unfairly penalizing success is not a contradiction in terms. People from all over the world have always clamored to come to America so that they might be allowed to succeed. But the operative word is fair. Americans by and large do not envy wealth, nor do they cringe before power. But they have the right to expect our government leaders to ensure that we live inside a system that guarantees true fairness.
Recent years have called that guarantee into question. When I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 the average corporate executive made twenty times the salary of his workers. Today that multiple is around four hundred. The reasons are complicated, but it is an axiom in Washington that when money talks, politicians too often balk. Political campaigns need to be funded. The wealthy and the inordinately successful have their own ways of defining the reasons they have achieved the American Dream. For many, it is easy and often convenient to forget the political and economic structure that enabled their success and thus the obligations that every successful American incurs to the greater good as a result. This is not a war that pits our rich against our poor. The silent losers, for more than four decades, have been those workers and small business owners in the middle, who have been paying an inordinate share of the tax bills to keep our system on track.
It is not political bomb-throwing to point out the truth that those who wish to preserve this uncomfortable tilting of the table against our working people have the most money to spend on a wide variety of political fronts, while others who wish for more fundamental fairness lack the financial resources to back up their concerns, causing them to lose their influence in the corridors of power. Having spent most of my professional life as a sole proprietor, I know the frustrations of this reality.
For our own societal health, we need to find a better way.
This reality has shaped my political career and will continue to inform it. The vast unearned disparities between those at the very top and even our middle class were the principal focus of my rebuttal to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2007, outweighing even our foreign policy blunders in the Middle East. The stagnation of communities and of true opportunity at the very bottom of our social scale was one of the strongest motivations behind my years-long attempts to reform our criminal justice system. The continuing policies that blatantly protect the advantages of our corporate and financial elites impelled my attempt to impose a windfall-profits tax on those who benefited from the government’s bailout of the financial sector following the economic crash of 2008 and 2009. Tellingly, it was no accident that senior leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties deliberately prevented even a vote on this legislation because an open vote would have required our politicians to take a stand and either confront our financial elites or admit that they live and work under their thumbs. The clear unfairness of a system that taxes capital gains at a rate far less than ordinary income led me to oppose any increase in taxes on earned income but to favor taxing capital gains at the same rate that those who actually work for their income are required to pay. Bemoaned and criticized by today’s minions on Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, this is hardly a revolutionary concept. President Ronald Reagan favored its implementation in 1986.
I held these beliefs before deciding to run for the Senate, and I hold them still. Despite the deliberate distractions on social issues that take up so much of every media day, an elected official’s positions on these issues provide a litmus test on how seriously committed he or she is to bringing true fairness to our society.
• • •
Over the years as I watched so many of our political leaders talk and dance around the issue of fairness, I developed what I came to call the Great-Aunt Lena Test.
Lena, one of twelve children, was my granny’s youngest sister. Although spending part of her early adulthood in Memphis, she lived most of her life in the tiny hamlet of Kensett, Arkansas, where my mother herself was born. I made Lena a promise many years ago, and I have always done my best to keep it.
Aunt Lena never had any children of her own. As the years progressed, I became her favored nephew. In August 1976 I drove down to Arkansas, carrying the burden and the honor of delivering the eulogy at Granny’s funeral. On the evening I arrived in Kensett I paid my respects to Lena, who was now herself widowed and alone. I could sense a strange unease in her as we sat, silently watching each other across the expanse of her sparsely furnished living room. It was so quiet that I could hear the bug zapper in her side yard, popping and snapping like a distant firefight as it fried whole flocks of Arkansas mosquitoes rising up in the damp evening air from the nearby ponds and swamps. Inside Lena’s living room the loudest noise was the creaking of her rocking chair as she pushed the bare hardwood floor with her toes. I had known her my whole life, but sitting across from her at that moment I had somehow become a different, quizzical creature to her.
She rocked back and forth, measuring me with her bright, intelligent eyes. Finally a small, knowing smirk crossed her face. “So you’ve been to law school,” she said, greatly unimpressed. “Did they teach you how to lie yet?”
Seven months later I returned to Kensett to visit with her again. I was now working for Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt. Having made a speech for him in Hot Springs the night before, I left my motel at five-thirty in the morning and drove nearly two hours so that I might take Aunt Lena to breakfast. These were the days before cell phones, so I had called her from a pay phone in nearby Searcy, announcing that I had arrived to buy her some biscuits and gravy at the locally famous Harding’s Restaurant.
Unimpressed, she had rebuked me. “I already ate,” she said grudgingly, it now being all of seven o’clock in the morning.
This, I will admit, confused me, coming from the woman who had showered me with more than a few family treasures over the years. “Well, how about if I just come by to say hello?”
“If you want to.”
Twenty minutes later I turned onto the small street that bordered her house. Aunt Lena didn’t even let me inside. She stormed out of the front door as soon as the car pulled into her narrow gravel driveway, leaving me no doubt that she had been watching from her window and waiting for me to arrive. She was a fiery ball of indignation, five feet high and plump, wearing light-blue slippers and a white cotton house robe. She had curled her grey hair tight against her scalp with rollers and bobby pins, probably last night before she went to bed. And for some reason that I could not figure out, she was carrying a broom handle.
Now eighty years old, Aunt Lena carefully made her way down from the porch one step at a time. Her eyes never left me. She was carrying the broom handle like a scepter or maybe a spear. There was a little cinder-block-walled goldfish pond in her front yard just off the porch. It was late March, but overnight a thin layer of ice had covered the pond. She stopped at the edge of the pond as I walked toward her, still watching me as if I were an invader. Then she suddenly turned away from me and jammed the broom handle into the middle of the pond.
I was fine with that. At least she had finally stopped staring at me. “Froze last night,” she said when I reached her, as if we had just left each other in her front yard the day before. She gazed intently into the water, ignoring me, moving the broom handle around the pond with both hands as if it were a large spoon.
“What are you doing?” I asked, for it did seem peculiar.
“You can’t let the ice kill off them goldfish.”
“No, you can’t,” I admitted. “I see the point of that.”
If she had been a weaker-willed woman Aunt Lena would have allowed herself to shiver and complain, standing there in her thin robe and sockless slippers. As it was, she was in total self-control. A sudden hard stare froze me as if I had been caught in the flash of an old-time camera. “How is Washington?” she said, as if it were an accusation.
I shrugged helplessly, giving up. “Okay. What did I do wrong, Aunt Lena?”
She was ready for that. In fact I had just walked into a long-considered ambush. “How can you do this?” she asked querulously. “Getting involved in politics up there in the Congress with that bunch? And then working for a Republican?”
She waved the broom handle into the air. “Only one of them is any good. Every time I see that man Jimmy Carter on TV I see the blood of Jesus Christ, dripping off the cross onto his back. Did you ever notice? Jimmy Carter, Jesus Christ, both with the same initials?”
I didn’t want to keep her going, but I was tempted to point out that Johnny Cash had the same initials too. And he was from Arkansas. “Aunt Lena,” I began, but she cut me off.
“You’ll forget us anyway,” she said. This was her real point. “They all do. Wear a pretty tie, get a big head, get a nice salary, make all those promises, and then lie through your teeth so you can stay up there.”
“I already live up there, Aunt Lena.”
“You always were a back-talker,” she said. “Don’t be disrespectful. The point is, none of them career politicians up there in Washington really remember us, James Henry Webb Junior. They don’t care. What are we to them, except trash? We don’t swing any state when they vote for president. We don’t have the money to scare them or to make them respect us. The people who pretend they know the history, they are somehow afraid to utter the truth. And here’s the truth: if you’re poor and white you’re out of sight. That’s what bothers me. What are you going to do to set them straight? Or are you too worried about having a job?”
To put it mildly, her angry, helpless words perplexed me. Deep inside me I knew she was motivated not by hatred or resentment but by a confused sense of justice. And there was more. Inside the intensity of Aunt Lena’s gaze I saw my granny, now dead less than a year, reflected in the ageless mirror of my young memories, standing before me with the same near-violet eyes and the same buttermilk skin before the wrinkles had begun to set in, back when I was a child, while she brushed the cowlicks from my hair and sent me off to school. Someday you’re going to be famous, Jimmy Webb, and they’re going to make a movie about your life. Now, you behave, you hear me? I don’t want to see anything bad in that movie.
“Aunt Lena, it’s just a job I got. I’m not a congressman.”
She tilted her soft face away from me, a silent rebuke. The cold had seeped inside her robe. She stifled a shiver, adamant that she would not show me any form of weakness. Finally she pointed toward the fields that stretched forever from the other side of the cemetery that began just across the road that bordered her yard. The morning fog clung to the weeds and the cow pies and the high grass of the pastures. A thin herd of cattle nosed their way right up to the barbed-wire fence that marked the far boundary of the Kensett Cemetery. If it had not been for the fence the cattle would have been filling their cuds from the grass that grew atop my own grandparents’ graves. They grazed contentedly in the dew-filled morning meadow, just as they had done in the years of my childhood and even before that, in the time that my mother and Lena and Granny had strolled among the trees and the thick grass and the anthills, wondering what was on the other side of the far fields and if there really was a place called California.
But to Aunt Lena out here in her little house in Kensett, time truly stood still. This day itself could have been a hundred years ago. That was her power. It had been her fate. And in some ways it would always be my burden.
“I remember when your mama and her sister Eunice came back to the house on a hot afternoon not long after her daddy, your grandpa, died of sorrow and a stroke on the same day that your mama’s older brother had died of a raging fever a few years before. Eunice said she felt sick and queasy. She was only eight. She and your mama had drank out of a water barrel in the yard behind somebody’s house just down the street there. Eunice crumpled up that night and later she died of typhoid fever. Did you hear of anybody lately who died in America of typhoid fever, Jimmy? And your mama always blamed herself for having lived when Eunice died, I don’t know why. So your grandpa died and the boy died and Eunice died, and when she was just a baby her older sister had already died of a fever in the middle of the night, some sickness that nobody could identify with the name of a disease. All we knew was that your granny woke us up in the middle of the night and told us we needed to kiss her little baby good-bye. I still remember that. Just kiss the baby good-bye was all that your granny said. So we all lined up to kiss her. That baby’s forehead was hot as a frying pan when I put my lips to it. And the next day we were still waiting for the doctor who never came.”
Aunt Lena nodded toward the cemetery. “She’s buried right over yonder, you know that, just next to your granny and your granddaddy, and the boy and Eunice.” She gave me a look. “And soon I will be too.”
“I have visited those graves,” I said.
“And you’ll visit mine too, I guess. Although I doubt you’ll come here very often, from the evidence I see.” Lena shrugged. “The difference between you and me is that every morning when I wake up I can look right there—right there, and I can see them. And I think about them.”
“I think about them every day, Aunt Lena.”
“A little bit.” She did not budge an inch. “But not in the same way. You never could, because if you did you would not stop talking about it, even up there in Washington, just like I can never stop talking about it down here, even if I’m talking to myself, in my own mind. It’s different if you only think about it when you can’t always see it. Your mama got out, and she met your daddy, and then along the way came you. And who would ever have thought it that my sister Georgia would have a grandson who could be born out of all of this confusion and then go to law school and work in the United States Congress?”
She was looking toward the cemetery as she talked. “Jimmy Webb, I don’t know how to say this. I’m so proud of you, but you also make me feel disappointed.”
“I will do my best, Aunt Lena,” I said. “I do mean that.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I think you just might sell out. That’s a pretty big circus up there. If you do, you will have to face yourself on Judgment Day, but I am not going to let you off the hook that easy. Do those people that you work with and those others who give everybody the money even care a little bit about what we went through? Would caring about it get an airplane built? Would it make them a profit on their prescription drug legislation? Would it get their kids into a special college? Would it get them a government contract to go blow things up in some foreign country? Does anybody up there even know that when we settled out here there was not even a road or a school or a hospital, and that it only got worse over time? That when me and your granny and even your mama was growing up we went barefoot, picking wild poke salat in the spring so we would have some greens to eat, and brushing our teeth with twigs? Do they know that we could not even tell when the so-called Great Depression hit because people back here were already so far down, there was nothing left to take from us, black and white alike? Did they ever hear the word pellagra? How about typhoid fever and cholera?
“No, they don’t know any of that,” she said, looking at me with a mix of regret and disgust. “The memory of it is all gone now, just like a dream dies at the opening of day. And who should be reminding them? You, Jimmy Webb! Your granny, my big sister, is calling out from her grave. What are you going to give her?”
She had knocked me speechless, as if somebody had hit me in the back of the head with a baseball bat that I never saw coming. “Aunt Lena, there is not a day that goes by when I don’t remember my granny. I’m not God. I’m just one little peckerwood who lucked out and got a job up there in the Congress.”
“And how many people from our family ever did that? I’m watching you. And when you make me proud you can come back inside my house.”
She walked away, not even looking back. I grew a little sad as I climbed back inside the rental car and backed out of her gravel driveway. Still ignoring me, she labored up the porch steps and opened the door to her well-kept little house. She had won and she knew it. She had retained her fierce and unvanquished pride. Her house, small and simple as it was, was now off-limits to me, no matter what my title. I was banned from her premises, as unwelcome as a hill of fire ants. And just to make the point she slammed the door behind her, disappearing inside.
It occurred to me, driving back toward the airport at Memphis, that all I really needed to do in order to regain her respect was to make her proud and to make her understand that no matter the seductions of that place called Washington, I would never change who I was or what I believed.
We later did make up. A few months after my visit, Aunt Lena sent me a little pewter elephant with its trunk high in the air and a circle on its back where you could store your matchsticks, which she told me she had found at a flea market. She passed away at the age of ninety-one, but it was before I ran for office in Virginia as a Democrat, and by that time half of Arkansas had already become Republican. More important, Aunt Lena’s admonition stuck with me from the moment she turned away and carried her broom handle back inside her house, leaving me shivering and alone as I stood next to the goldfish pond in her front yard. Stupid me. I had been so full of my upward success that I had forgotten to reassure her about what I was going to do with it.
You’ll forget us anyway. Lie through your teeth so you can stay up there.
And so from time to time, when debating the merits of one policy or another, I have given myself the Great Aunt Lena Test: What do you think, Mister Webb? Would Aunt Lena let you in her house today? And that became the same unspoken question that I daily put before my colleagues as I watched and listened to so many debates during times of stress and turmoil.
In our country’s mansions there are many rooms. But when you speak, when you listen, when you rant in favor or in opposition to one bill or another, when you vote on this policy or that, and especially when you are asking for political contributions to assist you in your journey, here is the easily answered test:
Whose house is it that you’re trying to get inside?