Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  Some of her editors found her sentiments treacly and hard to take. Those sentiments need to be updated in one respect: many of the fathers now feel the same way. Some people consider this a failure of will. I think it’s progress.

  PERSONALLY

  January 17, 1991

  Woman walks into a bakery, where there’s a sign announcing that the price of bagels will go up a nickel on January 15. “War and an increase in the price of bagels on the same day,” she says.

  “I hope he backs down,” says the baker.

  “Who?” says the woman. “Saddam Hussein or George Bush?”

  “Either one,” the baker says.

  Bagels were more expensive yesterday, and war broke out. Real life was peculiar, with an edge of sadness and of slow motion, and a sense of New Year’s Eve gone nuclear: only one shopping day till Armageddon. “Now it is our job to shift without too much awkwardness …” Bob Costas said Saturday on NBC Sports, segueing from reports of the Gulf War to a football postmortem. That is what it is like. Dinner and war. Homework and war. The mundane and the horrible.

  There’s a moment in one of the Godfather movies when a capo is being executed for disloyalty. “It was business,” he says of his traitorous behavior.

  This is personal.

  It’s personal for Saddam Hussein. This war is a career move. His psyche has been dissected like a biology-class frog, but it seems to me that he suffers from a lethal dose of egomania, that craziness that affects anyone audacious enough to lead a nation. The secretary general of the United Nations came to call, hoping to avert the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, and when he left Saddam Hussein delivered this non sequitur: “He met the American president four times before coming to us.”

  This brings to mind the moment in Woody Allen’s Bananas when the new dictator of a Central American country belittles the danish Mr. Allen has brought him. “He brings cake for a group of people,” complains one of the dictator’s aides, “he doesn’t even bring an assortment.” Saddam Hussein’s comment might be humorous in its egocentricity if it were not so ominous, such a clear indication of how he has intertwined this conflict with those two little words, Big Man.

  For George Bush this is personal, too. I don’t think the wimp factor is the only thing at work here. But I think that the sled of public positioning always stands at the top of a slippery slope, and when it begins to move, it is difficult to stop it or slow it down, even when half the electorate are yelling, “Wait a minute!” Sanctions needed more time to work, more time than the sled allowed. But that, alas, is yesterday’s story.

  This is personal. Most people agree that Saddam Hussein is pond scum and that he can’t be permitted to take Kuwait as though it were the lunch money of the littlest kid in class. But then they ask themselves this question: Would I sacrifice my child for this?

  And the answer is no.

  I only hope that we will continue, when this is done, to take these issues personally. We should take personally the fact that we habitually give aid to the kind of men we can easily and accurately describe as monsters.

  We should take personally the fact that few politicians have had the guts or the vision to shape a coherent energy policy that would lessen our dependence on foreign oil. And we should take personal responsibility for the fact that we have not had the will to conserve or change.

  We should take personally the idea that if there is to be a new world order, it must include a new answer to the question: Why us? It is time for our messiah complex to get a good overhaul. We can no longer afford economically, psychologically, or politically to be the policeman of the world, even if we are the first one called when someone needs a cop.

  That will be then. This is now. Time has stopped. So do our hearts, each time a clinch on One Life to Live is punctuated by the words “We interrupt this program to bring you a special report.…” In Des Moines, a teenager demonstrating against the war said he did not want a big black wall in Washington with his name on it. In the desert, a soldier wrote to his wife saying that he would understand if she remarried. It came to me that no matter how swift the conflict, we will someday soon be reading about the design for the memorial to its dead.

  “When do they decide to call it World War III?” a friend asked the other day.

  I don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know today. I only know that everyone seems sad and afraid, that the loss and mourning began even before the fighting. We are taking this very personally indeed.

  THE BACK FENCE

  January 20, 1991

  If anyone had looked inside the meeting room, they would have seen a peculiar sight. More than a hundred people had paid to hear a lecture, but the speaker had stepped aside because of certain circumstances and instead the audience was staring at a kind of Frankenstein monster, a figure with a brown podium for a body and a small television for a head. Suddenly the head had a face, the face of George Bush, telling the nation it had gone to war.

  We had always expected it to be the television war, and that is what it has been. Tom and Dan and Peter and the pleasant generic newsreaders of Cable News Network stared into our eyes day after day, night after night. No one could bear to turn them off.

  But it is not the television war we expected. There has been precious little war to see in these first few days: magnificent planes, the occasional soldier, a few minutes of footage of what looked like a fireworks display shot in bad light. And the talking heads: this has been a great windfall for retired generals. Once we learned that war had actually begun and Israel had been hit, there was little to discover except that Peter Jennings looks fresh as a daisy on a few hours’ sleep.

  It was not because of the press of news that we seemed incapable of turning the TV off. The television had become a kind of modern communal meeting place from which to absorb history aborning. It was America’s back fence, the one place in this time of dislocation where we were all connected, all having the same sensation at the same time, even if the sensation was shame at thinking that a correspondent in a gas mask looked like a mutant bug.

  The television war, they called Vietnam, and it was because it taught us what it really looked like, what happens before the clutch of soldiers hoists the flag to the top of the hill. It made real all the ugly stuff, the brutality and the blood. Red is the color of war. Mr. Jennings recalled the other day that General Westmoreland once complained in those days that the television camera saw such a narrow view. But it was wide enough.

  The television hasn’t had a view for these last few days; in truth, television has acted like radio, with still photographs of faces superimposed on maps. But action was not all we were looking for. Sitting in front of the television was the closest we could come to compartmentalizing the sea change. The most enduring memory of my childhood is of a time much like this one, those long November days of watching the Kennedy murder, the mourning and the burial, in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites I have ever known. Before this, that was the most continuous television I had ever watched. Like this, it did not provide much news. It gave you a feeling of America sitting in a circle.

  What Americans have seen these last few days is what they had hoped and prayed for: war without tears. The descriptions of how this missile was picking off that one sounded like a grand video game of the sky. Fighting raged for three days, and the closest we came to seeing casualties was a crumpled van on a Tel Aviv street.

  Everyone hoped that was because things were going well, whatever that means. Or perhaps it is because no one really knows exactly how things are going. Reporters are far away from the front, reporting from hotel rooms with sealed windows or basements where they crouch for safety’s sake. The Department of Defense is taking pool reporters where it wants them to go, which is nowhere much.

  So for now, we are eased into the unspeakable, confronting the concept of combat well before we confront its realities, an incremental process that can only benefit those who believe this is a noble endeavor.
We see map war, diagram war, computer war. The closest anyone got to something else was CNN, which has given new meaning to the term “intelligence network.” For half a day it had three reporters in a Baghdad hotel room describing bombs bursting in air. But the Iraqis cut off their communications, perhaps because Dick Cheney said at a televised briefing that he was getting information from their dispatches. A television war, indeed. The Iraqis watch the Secretary of Defense on television reporting that he is monitoring the front by watching television.

  A new age has begun. Our children will date themselves by the grade they were in when the United States fought Iraq. And as soon as we get accustomed to that, we will need more than retired generals. What we have seen in these first few days is a kind of primitive ritual made modern. When things are very scary, we are afraid to be alone in the dark. There have been people and light in our living rooms. Don’t confuse that with war or news. Both are yet to come.

  THE DOMESTIC FRONT

  January 31, 1991

  There are many ways to watch America in action, but one of the most colorful is to stroll the public spaces of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, that squat, ever-busy gateway to the world on wheels. You can learn something about the State of the Union by the state of this place. And it has precious little to do with cuts in the capital-gains tax.

  The irony of the terminal is that the building has never looked better, with neon wall sculptures and bright lighting. It’s the people that are the problem. The scamsters, who do a booming business in selling telephone calling card numbers for ten dollars a shot. The runaways, their eyes as old as the stories they can tell about serial parents, prepubescent incest, and foster homes. The broken men, with years of booze running red in the veins of their faces. “Excuse me, sweetheart,” some of them say as you edge past, proving that chivalry is not dead, it’s just drunk.

  And all around them move the commuters, angry at being panhandled, tired of walking over prone bodies to get to the greener, cleaner places where they live.

  America is a little like this now. In some ways it has never looked better, with its flags flying and the yellow ribbons tied around its trees. It’s the inside that’s rotting away, the domestic disintegration that war has given us all an excuse to forget.

  On television, reports said that children in Israel were sleeping in hotels, homeless because of the war. Children in New York slept in hotels for years because they were homeless.

  On television they showed bombed buildings that were shells amid fields of rubble. I’ve seen those broken buildings and rubble fields in forgotten neighborhoods all over New York.

  The same country that has rallied round pushing Iraq out of Kuwait has given up on parts of itself. Infant mortality. Teenage pregnancy. Drugs. Dropouts. Bank failures. Home foreclosures. We walk around the bad stuff on our way to somewhere else and mutter under our breath: “Own fault, own fault.”

  Fault is not the point. A capable, no-nonsense woman named Janis Beitzer runs the little world of the bus terminal, and it would be perfectly understandable if she said her job was to put people on buses and all the rest is someone else’s problem. But that would be shortsighted, like missing the opportunity to rally people united behind a war abroad around an equally horrible war at home. Rerouting traffic patterns to discourage loitering, opening a drop-in center for the homeless, hiring social service workers—she’s had to deal with issues no one running a bus terminal ever had to consider before.

  “We didn’t really have a choice,” Ms. Beitzer says.

  Neither do we. America often has a one-track mind, and the track in the last month has led straight to the Persian Gulf. The president knew where the ovations lay in his State of the Union address, a kind of boilerplate noble-cause speech that could have been delivered by any American president engaged in battle abroad. When he praised the men and women fighting in the Gulf, a great roar went up from his audience.

  But the domestic initiatives in his speech were sketchy, perfunctory, and shockingly beside the point. At a time when many Americans still believe this war is inextricably linked to our reliance on foreign oil, he kissed off energy conservation with one vague sentence. Elimination of PACs and a cut in capital-gains taxes don’t seem like pressing issues for a country with thousands of people sleeping in the streets and thousands of mothers giving birth to addicted babies.

  Time magazine named George Bush “Men of the Year” at the beginning of the month, declaring him adept at foreign affairs and fuzzy on domestic issues. It was the first known case of a multiple-personality defense for an elected official. Now the president has a mandate to play to his strengths and to forget the national weaknesses. And his own.

  A one-track mind is not enough for government. If the president thinks only of war, the home front will have disintegrated, in some cases beyond repair.

  The soldiers he invoked to such rousing effect the other night will come home. Some of them will lose their houses if the recession continues. Some of them will watch their children die on city streets if we do not do something about crime and drugs. Some of them might even wind up someday in a bus terminal, sleeping on the floor, in the home of the free and the brave. When that happens we will know that we have lost the war, the war we turned our backs on while we were busy with yellow ribbons.

  REGRETS ONLY

  February 7, 1991

  It’s often used as a sour quip, the sentence “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” a dismissive remark, a coda. But then you see hindsight with tears in its eyes, and realize that perhaps this is one of our greatest tragedies, that our mistakes become clear to us only when we see them over our shoulders, trailing us like an ugly dog.

  Hindsight is 20–20 for Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense who raised the Vietnam War from its childhood through its horrid years as an uncontrollable early adolescent. Hindsight is 20–20 for Lee Atwater, the twangy campaign whiz who never met a clever, nasty remark he didn’t like and who helped make George Bush palatable, and president.

  Both men are troubled by their pasts, which would be only terribly sad if it were not that their pasts are our history. Because of that, their torment is a national tragedy, and their regrets prefigure our future.

  Mr. Atwater writes in the current issue of Life magazine about the days since he discovered that he had a malignant brain tumor. The pictures are heartbreaking. Somewhere inside the bloated, limp body in bed and wheelchair is the sassy guitar player who celebrated the 1988 Republican victory by throwing a blues concert. But you can’t see him here.

  He talks about the triumphs, but what it all comes down to is this: that he has found God and discovered the sheer meanness of his professional style. “In 1988,” he says, “fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”

  Mr. McNamara appears in Time, talking to Carl Bernstein, and his words make you want to weep, for him and for our bungled opportunities. Of Vietnam he says, “because of misinformation and misperceptions, there are misjudgments as to where a nation’s interests lie and what can be accomplished.” It is a statement with great resonance these days. Of the exaggeration of the Communist threat he concludes, “We could have maintained deterrence with a fraction of the number of warheads we built.”

  The regrets of two men, one aging, the other dying. Mr. Atwater helped poison the level of electoral discourse, so that those two words may never seem seemly in tandem again. Mr. McNamara was a primary architect of the war that cost this country thousands of young lives and its illusions about itself. In different ways, at different times, they contributed to the notion that we are a nation of bullies.

  Can George Bush’s second thoughts on the war in the Persian Gulf be many decades behind?

  It reminds me of fathers who come to their children, now grown, and say, “These are the mi
stakes I made. Please forgive me.” And we do forgive, but we are saddled with our characters, shaped by those mistakes.

  It reminds me of what that graceful writer Paul Fussell, who is at work on an anthology of writings about war, once said, “If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.”

  And Mr. Atwater’s words about one of his daughters, pretending to interview him: “She had seen me interviewed so many times on TV, perhaps she thought that was the only way she could find out the truth. Watching her, I felt guilty about the degree to which my career—and my illness—have robbed me of crucial time with my children.”

  And Mr. McNamara, who says that his wife’s death may have been hastened by the national trauma of Vietnam—“She was with me on occasions when people said I had blood on my hands”—and who is asked by Mr. Bernstein about the people who really know him, the real McNamara, the inner man. Here is the answer: “People don’t know, and probably not my kids. And let me tell you that’s a weakness. If you’re not known emotionally to people, it means you haven’t really communicated fully to people. I know it’s a weakness of mine. But I’m not about to change now.”

  We’re not about to change now. Manhood stands with its old definitions: aggression, winning at all costs, work over family, control over vulnerability. And, finally, regrets as corrosive as Mr. Atwater’s disease, as sad as Mr. McNamara’s eyes—about what we did in the world, about who we are at home, two things that are inseparable.

  War was inevitable. And inevitable, too, someday, will be the hindsight, the documents that tell us this was unnecessary and ill advised, the advisers who reveal their misgivings years too late. The regrets, in hindsight.