By Edwin Cooney
My concluding assertion in last week’s commentary was as
follows: The successful overcoming of every crisis requires the application of
principles that respond best to the fundamental question that the crisis is
asking.
That assertion met with the following response from a good
friend and enthusiastic reader of these weekly musings: "What the hell
does that mean?"
"Does every crisis ask a fundamental question?" my
pugnacious friend and reader wanted to know. That’s a fair question. So, in recent days I’ve been thinking it over with more
care. Thus, I’ve decided to list a
few American crises and ask the questions that should have been asked. I want
to see if it’s possible to guess where we would be today had these questions
actually been confronted. I’ll
define a fundamental question here as a question that gets to the root of a
vitally important issue.
1787 -- Between May and September, 57 men representing the
thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia and struggled mightily to put together a
constitution. One of the stickiest
questions they faced was that of slavery.
They chose to compromise rather than face the question. The founding fathers actually wrote
slavery into the constitution of a free people in two ways. First, they legitimatized it by
allowing for it in the number of people who would be counted as congressional
constituents. (See Article 1,
Section 2 of the United States Constitution.) Indians and slaves were valued as "three-fifths of a
person." Next, they left it
to the individual states to evaluate the worth of human beings within their
borders. The question they should have asked was what effect the institution of
slavery might have on the nation as it expanded and on its credibility as a
bastion of human liberty.
July 1919 -- Woodrow Wilson returned from Paris determined
to compel a Republican Senate to pass his League of Nations. By that time in Wilson's life, every
public issue was a moral rather than a practical matter. His major opponent in
the Senate was Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., Republican from Massachusetts, who was
then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These two academic PhD titans from
Princeton and Harvard just never surrendered principle, especially to another
scholar/politician. The question
President Wilson should have asked himself was whether or not membership in the
League of Nations could conceivably be seen as affecting our sovereignty and/or
our independence. The question
Lodge should have asked himself was whether he should try to find a way to deal
with his central concerns and maximize America’s influence as a formidable
world power and a leader in the world community of nations.
November 23rd 1963 -- Lyndon B. Johnson decides
he must not be seen as weaker in foreign policy matters when compared to the
late President Kennedy. In spite
of the opposition he raised in 1954 as Senate Minority Leader when Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles advocated the question of our possible military
involvement in Vietnam, LBJ decided to persevere with military assistance to
South Vietnam. As he would explain
time and time again, not to resist the North Vietnamese in their aggression
would be paramount to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Hitler. The question President Johnson should
have asked was whether continuance of our military support of Vietnam was truly
a matter of our national security.
June 23rd 1972 -- If a forthright Richard Nixon had asked himself if the
Watergate break-in was a felony more than a political prank, late 20th and
early 21st Century politics might be vastly different.
As I see it, our history would be considerably altered if
the concerns listed above had truly been faced. An impasse on slavery might have caused the colonies to
divide into two nations – the "Confederate States of America"
consisting of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland in
the South led by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and, in the North, the
"United States of Columbia" consisting of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York led by John Adams
or Ben Franklin. The two might
well have united in 1776 or perhaps 1900 once slavery became obsolete and a
changing economy compelled their unity.
It’s staggering to think of how different America might be if politics
and war hadn’t caused so much racial enmity.
Early participation in the League of Nations and our absence
from Vietnam would have prevented almost a million soldier deaths.
A truly forthright rather than an evasive Richard Nixon
would have been reelected in 1972 and would have finished his presidential term
rather than being forced to abandon it.
Yes, I think every crisis has within its nature or, if you
prefer, its DNA, a fundamental question.
To test my little theory, review the numerous crises you’ve
faced in your own life. How often
might you have made a better choice had you just asked yourself a different
question?
“Monday morning quarterbacking” is, of course, almost as
American as baseball, hotdogs, cherry pie and good beer, but not quite.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment