These four former statesmen offer examples for us all
The buses and bicyclists still linger at the Ocean Avenue wayside. They peer across Cape Arundel to Walker’s Point, listening to the surf, feeling the spray, perhaps wondering if the way the sun plays off the rushing water, the twinkles seeming like a thousand points of light, might have prompted one of the most powerful metaphors of the George H.W. Bush presidency.
Bush, whose 1988 Republican presidential nomination acceptance speech imagining “a better America ... an enduring dream and a thousand points of light” spawned his nonprofit voluntarism organization, is now 94, the oldest former president in history. In Georgia is one of his presidential predecessors, Jimmy Carter, himself two months shy of 94. In Minnesota is Walter F. Mondale, Carter’s vice president and Bush’s predecessor in the post. He is 90. And in Washington is Bob Dole, like Mondale an unsuccessful presidential nominee. He turned 95 last month.
These four men in their 90s — two Republicans, two Democrats — account for 10 national campaigns, two presidencies, three terms as vice president, one as governor, seven Senate terms, six House terms, two stints as Republican National Committee chairman and three ambassadorships. One is a presidential and double-gubernatorial father, another a Cabinet spouse. They all have had remarkable wives, independent-minded and sharptongued, spokeswomen for literacy, the arts, mental health, and automobile and worker safety.
“We’ve all lived a long time, and that’s unusual for the country,” Dole, who had three dozen years on Capitol Hill, told me just before his birthday. “I think age brings wisdom, and if you give advice, sometimes people take it.”
The four seldom give much advice anymore — they feel they had their time in the arena, and now it is others’ turns — but they stand as examples, partisan pugilists, to be sure, but exemplars of public service.
“Dole and I were in the Senate together,” Mondale recalled in a conversation the other day. “There was heated rhetoric, but in those times, we kept the idea of comity in mind. We don’t have that anymore. Honest to God, I don’t know what we have now. I’m quite worried about that.”
The two nonagenarian presidents both served single terms but grew in the estimation of Americans as their White House years receded. Bush is an enduring symbol of American grace, and there have been more than 6,300 “points of light” citations, coveted salutes across the country.
Carter might have edged out Herbert Hoover, another oneterm chief executive, as the best former president in American history. Indeed, Carter may be better remembered for the Habitat for Humanity houses he built than for any White House record he built.
In these four careers are great lessons for those of us who share the air they breathe in the nation they served.
One of those lessons is integrity (Carter’s vow never to lie to the American people). One of them is courage (Bush’s willingness to accept a tax increase after his read-my-lips vow of “no new taxes,” a reversal of policy that cost him the support of many in his own party). One of them is grit (Dole’s recovery from debilitating war injuries and his later role as champion of the Americans With Disabilities Act). One of them is dignity (Mondale’s shining example after losing 49 states in the 1984 election and his gentle nobility in the years that followed).
Today politicians of the old school and the old days are ridiculed, their sense of fair play dismissed, their willingness to act in a bipartisan way cited as examples of a corrupt insider political culture. Once, these men fought fiercely, but those fights now are over. “They’re all friends of mine, and I’m glad we’re all around,” Mondale said. “I’d like to add a few more years for all of us.”
A few more years — and a few more political figures like them.