The Missing Words

Someday a fair and balanced history of this anxious time will be published, and I think it will be full of ‘D’ words.

Words like Dithering, Delay, Denial, Distraction, Doubt, Distrust, and Dysfunction – and the story of how, in the face of Disease and Death, our President spoke to us of Democrats and the Dow.

Most of us tend not to think about our leaders until we need them. But when large crises come – tornado, flood, pandemic – that is when we need able leaders most. A crisis, in turn, is how a leader is tested. Clearly, the coronavirus is now such a test of our leaders at all levels.

I remember, on 9/11, how we were drawn to the words and pictures of President George W. Bush and how he spoke to us about the attack on our nation. Ten months earlier I had voted for Gore, not Bush, and yet on that awful September day our President Bush seemed a good man, who felt what we felt, and was able to speak in a noble way to our stricken and fearful hearts.

Over this past week the presidential historian Jon Meacham has written helpfully about presidents who were exemplary in crisis leadership. He wrote also of the wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For each of these, both decisiveness and language together had high value and much power, and all of it spoke to our deeper resolve as a people. Such leadership made for clarity in those moments and, in the fullness of time, informed the deeper history that we honor in our past.

Something of that grade of leadership is missing now. It’s a level of communication that we need in this current time of crisis, as surely as we need the CARES Act. When the door of every home is shut, when the streets outside are silent, when the center of every heart is troubled, we need more than the promise of an SBA loan, or a check bearing the president’s signature.

In this silent spring of empty schools, empty streets, empty shelves – and no confidence how long we will live this way – something fundamental is missing. The one who should be there for us with steadiness and empathy is not, and others who might speak out in the strange void do not, but instead keep their silence for fear of angering him. This is no way for a nation to live through one of the hardest of times.

And this is exactly why we are drawn instead to the steadier voices of (some) governors and mayors when we observe them being more constant, less peevish, clearer-headed, competent, and nobly decisive.

These seem in this moment to know much better than political Washington not only what things we need – like our jobs and paychecks back – but also what the fuller measure of real leadership requires of them.