By Anne W. Semmes
Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham is credited with the line, “History, which will surely be our judge, can also be our guide.” Before 400 gathered in Christ Church Greenwich last Wednesday week evening Meacham spelled out that thoughtful line, often with humor, with his addressing his 2018 book “The Soul of America.” His talk is one of an ongoing “Courage & Faith” speaker series, hosted by Christ Church and St. Barnabas Church. Meacham was introduced by Christ Church Rev’d Marek Zabriskie, as “one of the most respected presidential historians of our time, a Pulitzer Prize winning author,” who’d arrived “at a moment when our country and our world feel deeply unsettled. Jon helps us to remember the deeper truths that have carried us through storms before helping us move forward with hope.”
Meacham was described as “a person of deep and personal faith” and “a dedicated Episcopalian.” And of Meacham’s presidential biographies one was of George Herbert Walker Bush told Zabriskie, “Who grew up here in Christ Church.” “He was born in Milton, Massachusetts,” noted Meacham, “but he got here quick.” But it had taken Meacham 17 years to complete his biography. “It was supposed to be posthumous,” he quipped. “But the son of a …wouldn’t die.”
Jumping into his book, “The Soul of America,” he told of it being “a genuine labor of love… Everything I’ve ever thought is in this book… but things are kind of crazy in the country… it is a deeply unsettling and tumultuous time…. I’m not entirely sure the constitutional order survives. It is up to us, the people, Lincoln said, all people act on incentive. The people who are in power, their unit of commerce is vote, and if we voted a different way, they would do different things.”
Meacham believed, “We’re facing a moral crisis… and the choice we have to make is do we believe that the democratic lowercase D covenant is worth deferring our own gratification from instant gratification to a sense where we give and we take because that’s what makes a democracy work. You pay taxes up here so that I get a bridge in Tennessee and you’ll never drive over it, but I’m paying taxes so you have better vermouth up here…”
“If we don’t choose to see each other as neighbors, as best opponents,” he continued, “if we take that category and make it enemies, then autocracy is what naturally follows. Because the oldest truth in human history is that the strong rule the weak, the second oldest truth is that the weak can become the strong and the point of the United States of America, the point of the Western liberal tradition was that the rule of law and a constitutional order would take us above the state of nature … to govern not by the force of our fists, but the force of our ideas.”
“The remarkable thing about the United States of America,” he told, “is that for about 240 years, we had a different answer, and just enough of us decided to take part in that covenant that politics should not be total war every single day, a, fight over identity and power and money.” Meacham would describe himself as, “I am not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. I have voted for candidates of both parties.”
Meacham takes daughter to Capitol
He told of a visit with his teenaged daughter to the Capitol on an “Ash Wednesday in 2021.” And “There’s National Guard troops, not because of a foreign foe, but because of people who chose to believe a lie about an election.” And “The President has provided a running narrative, a reality show that just happens to now be our reality, which I believe is part of the tragedy of the era, but we won’t be able to address what’s wrong without understanding the appeal of the phenomenon.”
“The appeal is that every single day there is a drama being staged for people… sometimes there are Venezuelans in the water and sometimes they’re lawmakers from New York, sometimes they’re lawmakers from Michigan…. It’s a casting enterprise and it is a consuming, enveloping, incredibly appealing drama for millions upon millions of people.”
“We have to tell a different story of lessons learned over decades in our history,” he said. “The greatest American leaders have managed to articulate a hopeful vision that has for just enough of the time managed to overshadow fear. But there is no permanent victory in American politics short of the coming of the kingdom. I talk about the soul of the country because I believe in Hebrew and in Greek, soul means breath or life… it’s the essence of who we are. But to me, a soul is not entirely good or bad. It’s an arena of contention in which our worst instincts do battle with our better angels. And you just hope that the better angels win enough of the time. And I think our history affirms that again and again.”
“If we can check two boxes, the covenant of modern democracies is we’ll do what it takes. Candor matters in this – and empathy.” And the most empathetic man he “ever knew, not just politician but man” was George Herbert Walker Bush. “President Bush always tried to think about the other guy – and George Bush was not a perfect person…He would do almost anything for a vote, but he’d be the first person to call 911.”
Bush and Gorbachev
“This is a man who at the age of 18, drove from Andover to Boston to be sworn into the Navy, was shot down out of the sky at age 20… He was thinking about Mikhail Gorbachev, who had a hardcore right wing in Russia that did not want to see Soviet greatness go away… The wall was coming down, freedom was winning. Bush was thinking how it would work or not work for Gorbachev. It was one of the vital moments in the peaceful conclusion to the Cold War. The Soviet Union is going to collapse without a single American troop being in an unusual forward position. But it happened, not least because George Bush gave Gorbachev room to have his dignity.”
“That case was never made to me by President Bush,” told Meacham. “It was made to me by Gorbachev who said that the moment that Bush decided to be quiet and dignified and restrained because of empathy was one of the critical moments in leading to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. If George Bush can do it, can’t we?”
Meacham ended with another memorable Bush moment. “We’re in this church where in October of 1953, the Bushes buried their daughter, Robin Pauline Robinson Bush… The Bushes had lost her to leukemia.” Pulling a note out of his pocket, he said, “I want to share with you part of a letter that President Bush in the 1950s wrote his mother, also your fellow parishioner, Dorothy Walker Bush, who kept it in her bedside table on Grove Lane until she died in 1992.
“It’s a unique document in presidential literature.” He began, “There is about our house a need. The running, pulsating restlessness of the boys as they struggle to learn and grow needs a counterpart…We need some soft blonde hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a dollhouse to stand firm against our forts and rackets and a thousand baseball cards. We need a legitimate Christmas angel, one who doesn’t have cuffs beneath the dress… We need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum…. She was patient… Her peace made me feel strong…”
And it was during the 17 years with Meacham working on Bush’s biography that he would ask Bush to read that letter out loud to him. “Long before he finished,” told Meacham, “He broke down with an extraordinary level of physical sobbing.” “Why did you want President Bush to read that?” interrupted Bush’s Chief of Staff entering the room. “Well,” Meacham responded, “If you want to know someone’s heart… The President jumped in saying,” ‘You have to know what breaks it. That’s who we should be.’”
