The Audacity of One

CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly at Maternally Challenged [5].

About 20 years ago, I was having a conversation with a political reporter friend about the problems I had with what is considered state-of-the-art political coverage. I was making the not-very-original observation that political coverage is too much about process and not enough about ideas, when my friend – who was and is considered top-notch in the field – said laughingly, “Oh, Tracy, you’re so serious.”

Yeah, well, guilty as charged. Being “serious” – at least in a naïve and idealistic way, which I admit to being – is the kiss of death among political reporters, which is why I’ve never managed to be one. People like me have been providing inadvertent entertainment for political insiders at least since Frank Capra made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939. Capra’s basic take on life – that even obscure individuals can make a huge difference in the world – is a favorite target of parody by political writers, and for an example we need only turn to a story in the Style section of the Washington Post last week:

“Surrounded by placards declaring ‘Enough Is Enough,’ Huckabee showed the ad he said he wasn't going to run, leaving reporters scrambling to determine whether this was a planned maneuver, an act of bad timing or something lifted from a Capra movie. ‘I just realized that this is not how we run our campaign in this state,’ the candidate said. ‘We've gotten here by being positive.’ All that was missing was Zuzu's petals” – a reference, of course, to that famous scene in It’s A Wonderful Life. You could practically see the curled lip lifting off the page, like some wizardly device in a Harry Potter movie.

Leaving aside the obvious question – if a candidate ever were to actually make a sincere gesture, how would a reporter with that attitude ever know? – let us turn our attention to two examples that provide some heavy-duty evidence that maybe Frank Capra was right and the Received Wisdom is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

Exhibit A: Charlie Wilson. The former congressman from Nacogdoches, a.k.a. East Texas, is the real-life star of the movie now making the rounds entitled Charlie Wilson’s War. The movie is a dramatization of how the real Charlie Wilson almost single-handedly and secretly maneuvered to get roughly a billion dollars in congressional funding to buy weapons for the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s, enabling a handful of tribesmen to defeat the mighty Soviet empire. As the movie makes clear, Charlie Wilson was (and is) a True Believer – a staunch anti-Communist whose political motives were pure even when his personal life could be characterized as several bus stops past “raunchy.”

Exhibit B: an unknown Polish doctor. Maybe someday I’ll figure out his name, but for now all I know about this man is that he surreptitiously swapped an identification card that had a red X on it for one that did not, and by doing so enabled a 9-year-old Jewish boy to slip through a bureaucratic crack and avoid the gas chamber at Auschwitz in the winter of 1944-45. There is some evidence that the same doctor performed this heroic feat for more than one person – but what I know for sure is that the boy he saved, Tommy Buergenthal, went on to survive the infamous Auschwitz Death March. Buergenthal lost every member of his immediate and extended family in the Holocaust, except for his mother, with whom he was reunited after the war. He later emigrated to this country, became a citizen, studied law at New York University and Harvard and went on to a distinguished teaching career. Today he is the United States’ judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague [6]. Legal scholars consider him one of the principle architects of international law of the post-World War II era. He’s also an unlikely late-life literary rock star in Europe, having recently published his memoirs, entitled (in German) Ein Gluckskind (A Child of Fortune) [7], which is on best-seller lists in Germany and Scandinavia.

Not even Frank Capra could have invented either one of these stories, and neither tale exactly fits the “great man” theory of history. Charlie Wilson wasn’t a household name even in the 1980s, when his influence was at its zenith, and we may never know who that Polish doctor was. And yet: Look what they caused to happen. Who says one obscure person can’t make a difference?

But here’s the thing: This awesome power can work in more than one way. As Charlie Wilson’s War makes clear, it’s possible to get so carried away with your own pure motives that you forget to plan just as carefully for the day after you change the world as you do for the big day itself. When Wilson rather belatedly realizes that helping the mujahadeen boot the Soviets out was merely the first chapter, not the last, it’s too late to conjure any more congressional funding out of thin air. Afghanistan was left in economic and social ruins, a state of affairs that radical Islamic fundamentalists would exploit to the hilt, to our nation’s immense and continuing sorrow. As Wilson himself put it, in his own earthy way, “We f---d up the end game.” Did we ever.

In part, this is because we do what we do in the face of a future that is veiled to us. That Polish doctor acted with compassion and heroism, no doubt about it – but for all he knew, he could have been saving the life of the world’s next great dictator, a kid whose unquenchable thirst for revenge would someday lead him to do unto others what had been done, almost, unto him. The world lucked out on that one; we got a Thomas Buergenthal, not a Charlie Manson. But it could have gone differently.

What we’re left with is a powerful ambiguity: It is possible for one small person to change the world – but the world can change in unexpected ways. Pure motives rarely produce pure results, and that’s a conclusion I admit I’ve been reluctant to come to; idealists like me are not good at the messy real world of political compromise.

So what does all this have to do with covering politics? If I could travel back in time and have that conversation again with my political reporter friend, knowing what I know now, here’s what I think I’d say. “You’re right. I am too serious. But you and your colleagues aren’t serious enough.” The great temptation among idealists like me is being blind to reality; among political reporters, it’s forgetting that true idealism exists, and that it can have awesome power.  And no, I’m not voting for Mike Huckabee.

Click here for more columns by Tracy Thompson. [8]