What Unites Us Read online

  WHAT

  UNITES

  US

  Reflections on Patriotism

  DAN RATHER

  & Elliot Kirschner

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2017

  To my grandsons, Martin and Andy, whose spirit of service and love for this country fill me with pride and confidence that our nation can unite and see better days ahead.

  —D. R.

  To Malia, Eva, and Helena—my inspiration, hope, and love.

  —E. K.

  The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

  —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

  Contents

  Preface: Night Flights

  What Is Patriotism?

  FREEDOM

  The Vote

  Dissent

  The Press

  COMMUNITY

  Inclusion

  Empathy

  Immigration

  EXPLORATION

  Science

  Books

  The Arts

  RESPONSIBILITY

  The Environment

  Public Education

  Service

  CHARACTER

  Audacity

  Steady

  Courage

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  Preface

  Night Flights

  The sun has set long ago and the sky is dark. I drive through a bustling metropolis, or a small town, or sometimes the lonely countryside. But there is one constant: My bags are packed and I am heading to an airport. I weave through busy city streets with neon signs. Buildings, too high to count the floors, stutter by me in the traffic. I head down rural roads—farms, fields, and forests flying by my window, illuminated only by my headlights and the infrequent passing car or truck.

  Night flights have been a staple of my career heading to, from, and between datelines. Airports at night, especially when your flight is the last one out, are usually places of stillness. In the terminal, the shops and eateries are darkened and shuttered. Cleaning crews prepare for the coming day. I arrive at my gate and give a half nod to my fellow travelers. Most people understand that the expected behavior on a night flight is one of silence. This is a time when you are allowed, even encouraged, to be alone with your thoughts.

  The taproot for this book was developed over my numerous journeys these many years. If I were to plot on a map my countless flight paths crisscrossing the United States, it would look like a thread stitching our great union together. Along the way, I have forged my own relationship with America, not only from the stories I have reported and the people I have met, but also during those many hours while I waited for sleep that only sometimes came. I look out the window at lights far below or, more often than not, just darkness. We are still a land of wide open spaces. As our great and diverse republic passes below me, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and wonder: Who are we? Where are we going?

  The opportunity for me and my generation to confront those questions is rapidly receding. Like the generations before us, we’ve risen to some challenges and shied away from others. We helped steer the United States through some perilous straits, but we find ourselves once again confronting rocky shoals. I worry about how important norms of American life are being shattered, along with a unity of purpose. I see the chasms of entrenched partisanship, growing inequality on income and opportunity, and the lingering injustices around race, gender, and sexual orientation. I think of my children and my grandchildren. How will they and their generations answer the call?

  We hear often of America’s destiny. All around Washington we see marble temples and monuments to our democracy. They look so solid and seem so rooted in history that we imagine them permanent features on the landscape. Never mind that those buildings, when compared to the life span of other nations, are but new construction. They were built to infuse a sense of awe and purpose in the populace of an improbable country. They are only as permanent as our ideals. And if we lose a sense of humility, we risk losing everything.

  The true foundations for those buildings are not brick and stone, but our Constitution, our rule of law, our traditions, our work ethic, our empathy, our pragmatism, and our basic decency. As I have seen over the years, when we cultivate these instincts, we soar. When we sow seeds of division, hatred, and small-mindedness, we falter. As a wave of anxiety sweeps our nation, as big challenges loom before us, I feel an urgency.

  America at its best is a wonderful, diverse, and spirited chorus. When we sing together, our message is amplified and it can shake the heavens. The songbook for our democracy is infused with our history, the joy of our glories and the pain of our failures. Its music and lyrics can and must be taught to those who will come after us.

  This book is an effort to describe how that music sounds to me, to highlight the melodies that I find resonating in our republic’s core strengths. I profess no great wisdom other than as a chronicler with the exceptional fortune of having had a front-row seat to much of our country’s history. The issues I will raise are too big for any one voice to handle, and I hope my words will spark contemplation and discussion.

  Over the years, I have been joined on these journeys by many treasured colleagues, and one of them is my friend and collaborator on this book, Elliot Kirschner. He and I are separated by many years, and we come from different backgrounds. But we share a deep love for the United States, its history, culture, and people. Our conversations over more than fifteen years of night flights, long car rides, meals, and drinks have helped hone our thoughts. This book is therefore a product of a unique partnership. Elliot’s deep knowledge of the American journey and his gift for writing and storytelling have helped these essays immeasurably.

  The United States does not belong to any one of us. Its strengths and riches give its citizens tremendous advantages, but we must not deplete them for the future. That wisdom and compassion can also extend beyond our borders. Many of my night flights have taken me around the globe, and I have seen that most people are rooting for the United States to succeed, not by virtue of its military or economic might, but because of our ideals.

  As the cabin lights come on and the captain announces our final approach for landing, groggy passengers stir. A well-trained flight crew has delivered us safely to our destination. I see these air journeys as a metaphor for our national direction. We are bound together by our destiny, and we must work to ensure that there are calm and steady hands at the controls of our government. We can cover great distances, improbably escaping the limitations of gravity, if we choose to embrace the best of our traditions. This is what we hope to inspire with our book.

  What Is Patriotism?

  When I was a young boy, we didn’t have much in the way of material possessions. But around 1940 or ’41, we got our first family car—a heavily used 1938 Oldsmobile that I can still see so clearly in my mind’s eye. Its previous owner had lived along the Gulf of Mexico, and it was thus considered a “coastal car,” which meant it was rusted, especially along the lower-left side. Its engine had also thrown a rod, blowing a big hole in the engine block, which had been patched. It was a bit of a rolling wreck, but I didn’t see it as anything but beautiful.

  In my neighborhood, the notion of a family vacation was an unheard-of luxury, something you might see in the movies but never expected to experience yourself. Yet that year, as the Fourth of July approached, my mother had the idea of driving to the beach in Galveston to see the fireworks over the Gulf of Mexico. My father was a little unsure of trusting the new car to take his young family on the round trip of roughly 100 miles, but my mother was persuasive. When the morning of the Fourth arrived, I was giddy wit
h anticipation.

  A trip from Houston to Galveston these days is relatively easy. At that time it was a big deal. There were no freeways, so we took the two-lane coastal road, and I remember how hot the day was. The humidity must have been approaching 100 percent. All the car windows were down, and to help the time pass, my mother had us sing patriotic songs. First and foremost was “America the Beautiful.” She always thought it should have been made the national anthem, as it is less militaristic than “The Star-Spangled Banner” and easier to sing. I have inherited that opinion. We did sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” too, however, and there was a debate in the car about whether we should stop so that we could get out and stand while we were singing. We ultimately decided that we should probably keep going, our hands over our hearts as we sang. As proud Texans, we included several state songs in our repertoire (“Texas, Our Texas,” “Beautiful Texas,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”). I remember singing my heart out, and we repeated the songs over and over again, stopping to make sure my little brother and sister could learn the lyrics.

  When we finally arrived in Galveston, it seemed magical. I can still taste the salt air and see the sun flickering on the rippling water of the Gulf. As we all sat on the seawall that had been built after the great hurricane of 1900, I thought this work of civil engineering was so marvelous it might as well have been the Great Wall of China. We played on the beach, and when the sun went down, we watched the fireworks. In retrospect, this was probably a modest show —low budget and low altitude—but I was transfixed. I had never seen anything like it. I oohed and aahed at the starlit night. I knew, after all, that “the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas.”

  We had no money for the extravagances of a hotel, so the five of us slept in the car, curling up every which way. As we drove back the next morning, we were all a little stiff, but for that moment life seemed perfect. I have often wished I could have bottled that day to taste its sweet innocence once more. I had no way of knowing then that the country would soon be engulfed in war, and that some of the happy families we saw strolling the beach would have fathers go off to battle and never return. I didn’t know that I soon would be stricken by rheumatic fever and confined to my bed. And I couldn’t have anticipated that my parents, whom I can still picture sitting contentedly in the front seat, would pass away relatively early in my life. All I knew then was that I liked the feel of the road and the sight of the scenery going past. I liked going places . . . and I still do.

  The open road has rightly become a symbol of America, a country whose destiny and people always seem to be on the move. And this family vacation helped fix an image of the United States in my mind as a land of wonder, awe, and optimism. Who can say definitely when and how it begins, that first, faint sense of place, of belonging; that trickle that eventually becomes a wellspring of deep emotional ties to one’s homeland? Did it start when I entered grade school, with the every-morning ritual of saluting the flag, hand over heart? Did it begin by watching my father read the newspaper every day, worrying as the world moved toward war? Did it begin with the loving teachers who taught me about the special values of citizenship, values echoed by my parents at home? All I know is that every one of these experiences bound my developing world together in red-white-and-blue bunting.

  Childhood is often sentimentalized, and I know now that the country I was growing to love had its flaws. I already knew the pain of the Great Depression and would soon live through the crisis of world war. I would then go on to a career that forced me to confront the often simmering and sometimes explosive injustices of the United States: its bigotry, exploitation, callousness, and corruption. It may seem counterintuitive, but these flaws made me love my country all the more.

  For I have seen how a nation can pick itself up and make progress, even at divisive and dysfunctional political moments like the present when we seem to be spinning backward. I have found that the vast majority of men, women, and children I have met over the course of my life are kind and well intentioned. For all the stories of misdeeds on which I have reported, there have been many more of heroic actions and communal empathy, whether it is a public official resisting tremendous pressure and casting a vote of conscience or townspeople standing side by side to form a sandbag line against a raging river. It is true that the news headlines often paint a dark and dispiriting picture. But in every community, on every day, there are so many who choose to do the right thing.

  Today we are a divided country. Too many decent and law-abiding men and especially women are being told that this nation is not for them, that their values make us weaker, that their voice is better left unspoken. We see elected officials pounding their chests, saying their vision of America represents the only real patriotism. To them I say that patriotism is not a cudgel. It is not an arms race. It also means confronting honestly what is wrong or sinful with our nation and government. I see my love of country imbued with a responsibility to bear witness to its faults.

  Our nation was built on a foundation of ideals. To be sure, we are a country of natural wonder—a cross-continental expanse of fertile farmland, churning rivers, great resources, and some of the most beautiful places on Earth. But more than land, we are bound together by a grand experiment in government, the rule of law, and common bonds of citizenship. This is what it means to be an American. It’s tragic that those with the strongest ancestral tie to the land, the Native Americans, have so bitterly felt the chasm between the soaring words of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution and the harsh reality of governmental policy. When tribes gathered to protest the oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the strength of the grievance was as much rooted in centuries of persecution as it was in the pipeline itself. Despite their inability to halt construction, those activists, facing at times violent suppression, reminded us that the right to peaceful protest, due process, and equal protection under the law should apply to all who live here.

  Most Americans can trace their ancestors only as far as men and women who came to the United States well after its founding. But our creed has long been that all citizens can claim an equal legacy of this nation as their own, whether they just took the oath of citizenship or their family arrived on the Mayflower. We all are allowed to celebrate the Fourth of July as citizens, even though few of us have predecessors who were on this continent in 1776.

  And we should neither forget nor be paralyzed by our prior national sins. We can all feel the swell of pride walking through our nation’s capital city, even though we must tell the story of how some of those buildings were built by slave labor. We can revel in the opportunities of democracy, even though bigoted laws were passed in the chambers of Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. We must look clear-eyed at the problems of the past and present, but be encouraged that our electoral and legal systems provide a framework for improved justice in the future.

  In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered one of the most eloquent personal visions of American patriotism ever delivered. Using the logic of economics to make a moral point, King called for an incredible debt to be paid. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” The reckoning, King said, was long overdue: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

  In my mind, King wasn’t calling for a revolution, even though that is how many at the time perceived it. He wasn’t even arguing that there was something inherently rotten with the protections and provisions under which the United States was founded. Rather, he believed
, and justly so, that the translation of those ideals into practice had been lacking. If our constitutional protections had been dispensed more equally and fairly, he asserted, then the dreams of which he spoke would be a lot closer to reality. King was not restrained in his criticism of the status quo, but he spoke freely and with the moral backing of our founding documents. In my years covering the civil rights movement, I was always struck by the fierce determination of these men and women to fight for their place in the future of a country that had mistreated them. They were infused with an unbreakable optimism that they would prevail. This spirit has been echoed time and again by those who have demanded their full constitutional rights as American citizens.

  I have long been suspicious of those who would vociferously and publicly bestow the title of “patriot” upon themselves with an air of superiority. And I have generally taken a skeptical view of those who are quick to pass judgment on the depths of patriotism in others. George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, warned future generations “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” I like to think of this as an admonition, not only to be wary of the patriotic posturing of others, but also to be alert to the stirrings of pretended patriotism within oneself.

  It is important not to confuse “patriotism” with “nationalism.” As I define it, nationalism is a monologue in which you place your country in a position of moral and cultural supremacy over others. Patriotism, while deeply personal, is a dialogue with your fellow citizens, and a larger world, about not only what you love about your country but also how it can be improved. Unchecked nationalism leads to conflict and war. Unbridled patriotism can lead to the betterment of society. Patriotism is rooted in humility. Nationalism is rooted in arrogance.