Talking Points
October 6, 2018
Notes:
1. Reminder – Today at RVC Village Green – Rally and canvassing for Assembly District 21 Democratic candidate Judy Griffin. See also pdf of questions answered by Judy and her opponent in the RVC Herald – here. Judy Griffin Challenges Brian Curran.
2. See NY Times Editorial – “The High Court Brought Low”, including reader comments.
3. Featured OPED
Patriotism for an Age of Unreason
When things are headed in the wrong direction, it’s good to remember who truly loves their country.
By Robert Pinsky
Mr. Pinsky was the United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000.
- Oct. 5, 2018
Peter W. Rodino Jr., a Democratic representative from New Jersey, in his office on Capitol Hill in 1988.CreditCreditTerry Ashe/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
Sometimes you read something when you are young that stays with you forever. In the 1960s, when I was barely out of my teens, that happened to me with Paul Goodman’s “Growing up Absurd.”
In his book Goodman, a radical author influential for my generation, quoted George Washington’s 1783 Circular Letter to the States, in which he described the good fortune of the new nation: its natural resources, its political independence and freedom, and the Age of Reason of the country’s birth, an age of “the free cultivation of letters, the unbounded extension of commerce, the progressive refinement of manners, the growing liberality of sentiment, and above all the pure and benign light of Revelation.” And so forth.
Not blind to slavery, nor to the fact that Washington owned human beings, Goodman nevertheless wrote words about our first president’s letter that have stayed with me for decades. “It is hard to read these sentences without agitation and tears,” wrote Goodman, a self-described anarchist, “for they are simply true and simply patriotic.”
The final word, so unexpected, implicitly reclaimed from scoundrel politicians like Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, moved my callow soul. Patriotism didn’t belong to such forces. It deserved to be embraced and protected.
A few days ago I found a way — much needed — to refresh my patriotism. Almost by chance, I read again about a hero whose story had not come to mind for years.
If young people have not heard of Peter W. Rodino Jr., please look up that name as soon as you can. As a start, an online search will tell you that he represented his Newark district as a Democrat in the House from 1949 to 1989. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he managed the impeachment process against Richard Nixon.
Peter Rodino was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 as it considered impeaching President Richard Nixon. Here, Mr. Rodino conferring with Charles Rangel of New York, left, and Edward Hutchinson of Michigan. CreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times
On a long car ride, in the passenger’s seat, I had been talking with the driver about the current doings of Congress. I entertained her by reading aloud from my phone about Congressman Rodino. What I read — and remembered — moved me to some degree of “agitation and tears.”
Rodino’s birth name was Pelligrino Rodino Jr. His father arrived in the United States from Italy around 1900, and worked as a toolmaker in the automotive industry for 30 years. Pellegrino Jr. was born in 1909. He graduated from the University of Newark and worked at daytime “menial jobs” for 10 years while attending the New Jersey Law School at night.
The next bit, as our car passed through the New England countryside, moved me as an English major, a native of New Jersey and the grandson of immigrants. Childhood diphtheria left Rodino with a pronounced speech defect that he worked to correct by, in his quoted words, “reciting Shakespeare through a mouth full of marbles.”
Mythology does build around politicians. “Born in a log cabin” used to be the label for that. When I told a friend that Nixon financed his first campaign with poker winnings, accumulated on the Navy ship that brought him home from World War II, keeping the cash hidden in his footlocker, my friend wisely said: “That footlocker is Nixon’s log cabin.”
But even if those therapeutic Shakespeare recitations, the marbles, the “menial jobs” are 37 percent fabricated, it is a fabrication I revere: far more heroic, to me, than any number of log cabins or foot lockers.
And the next information is not myth, but fact: During World War II, Rodino was an appeals agent for the Newark Draft Board. That position exempted him from the draft, but in 1941 he enlisted in the Army and was stationed in North Africa, and later in Italy.
After the war, as a representative, he was re-elected by a large margin even in the strongly Republican political environment of 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower carried Rodino’s Newark district.
At this point, my feelings for what I was reading merged with my memory of those long-ago televised Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment. As chairman, Rodino seemed “unlikely” — a frequently applied adjective that may have implied something about the name ending in a vowel and the New Jersey accent.
On July 24, 1974, the opening day of the committee debate on the articles of impeachment, amid the subpoena process for the Watergate tapes, Rodino said, with the eloquence of plain speech: “We have deliberated. We have been patient. We have been fair. Now the American people, the House of Representatives and the Constitution and the whole history of our republic demand that we make up our minds.” Six of the committee’s Republicans eventually joined the Democratic majority in passing three of the five articles of impeachment. After the vote, Rodino later said, he phoned his wife and wept, for our country.
I concluded my reading aloud in the car with words attributed to John Doar, the special counsel to the Judiciary Committee. He said that as chairman, Mr. Rodino “imposed discipline,” and that “there was no partisanship on the staff. In fact, it was remarkably nonpartisan. And that is the result of good leadership.”
“Leadership” is a term I mistrust. Like “creativity” it sometimes varnishes over the absence of what it means. But I feel glad to invoke it as helping me restore my grasp — in what can feel like an Age of Unreason — of the word “patriotism.”
Robert Pinsky, a professor of creative writing at Boston University, was the United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000.
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