A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America Hardcover - 2008 - 1st Edition

Summary

Excerpt

Chapter One
SCORPIONS IN A JAR


Mister President, on that I ask for the yeas and nays.” “Is there a sufficient second? There appears to be a sufficient second. The yeas and nays are ordered. The clerk will call the roll.”

These final words calling for a vote on the Senate floor have been uttered by the presiding officer, from a chair that oversees the entire Senate chamber. If someone were watching the proceedings on C-SPAN or from the small visitors’ gallery above the chamber, they would see a puzzlingly empty spectacle. In most cases, only a few senators are on the floor, having spoken while standing behind one of a hundred desks that form a semicircle in front of the elevated platform where the stiff, seemingly bored presiding officer sits behind a parliamentarian, two legislative clerks, and a journal clerk. With that, those observing might be forgiven for thinking that the debate they have just witnessed was nothing more than kabuki, a pantomime of stilted, false formality played out to deaf ears, as unheard and unremarkable as a tree falling in an empty forest.

But in almost every Senate office, indeed at almost every desk, the television sets and computer monitors are on, having followed the floor statements that precede the vote. And much more has been done, well before the speeches began. Committee hearings have been held. Memos have been written. Recommendations have been drafted. Discussions and internal debates have taken place. All that remains is for the individual senator to decide which way he or she will vote. And within fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on the rule attached to the legislation, that vote must be cast personally, a yea or nay offered to the roll clerk sitting just below the presiding officer.

Some votes are easy, either because they are perfunctory, such as judicial and military nominations that have already been extensively scrubbed by trusted committee chairmen, or because they are procedural, calling upon a senator’s loyalty to the party leadership, or because the philosophical arguments are clear. Some votes are enormously difficult. Many involve great stakes for the nation on issues that are far more complex than the inconclusive legislative answers that are being offered, a dilemma that many senators identify as “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Others involve deliberate traps by clever members of the opposing side, meaningless in their true impact because of procedural gimmickry but designed to soil the voting record of senators up for reelection and to provide fresh fodder for the bombast of the talk-show crowd. Casting such “gotcha” votes, one cannot help but think of Rudyard Kipling’s knowing lament in the classic poem “If”: “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools . . .”

I am a junior senator, ninety-fifth on the seniority list, and so by Senate standards my office in the Russell Senate Office Building is less than splendid. But having spent most of my life outside of government, I know what splendid is, and how much it usually costs if you’re paying for it out of your own pocket. From that perspective, my office meets the test–the high ceiling, the ancient fireplace along one wall, the classic furniture, the modern technology evident in the top-of-theline computer on my desk, all bought and maintained with money that came from hardworking people who have paid for such emoluments through their taxes. And especially splendid, invisible but permeating, is the history that both haunts and inspires me every day. It is not always enjoyable to serve as a United States senator. But it never ceases to be an honor.

Members of my legislative staff, led by the legislative director, enter my personal office to go over the vote and to discuss other possible votes for the day. I sit on a hard-back, wooden-armed chair, facing them as they take their usual seats on the sofa that meets the wall. Above the sofa is a large print of George Washington in military uniform, kneeling in prayer next to his horse at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. The print is a personal possession. I brought it to the office when I entered the Senate, as one of a host of reminders designed to focus my sense of purpose as I carry out my duties. Samuel
Cochran, one of my four times great-grandfathers, served in the Virginia Line as an enlisted soldier under General Washington. He crossed the Delaware under Washington’s command. And Samuel Cochran was no “summer soldier”: apropos of the scene in the painting, he kept the faith with Washington and suffered through the infamous winter at Valley Forge.

Across the room, amid a wall full of family pictures behind my desk, my mother’s father, B. H. Hodges, stares out at me from a small picture framed in barn wood, as he has done in every office I have occupied for more than twenty years. My grandfather is just in from his patch of truck farm vegetables, wearing knee-high working boots and bib overalls. A cloth hat is pulled low over his ears to protect him from the scorching east Arkansas sun, which has already baked his face tobacco brown. The hat’s brim is bent up in front, which along with his burning eyes gives him a defiant air. Defiant he was, and tragic, too. He was a fighter, a lonely champion of lost causes who himself lost everything because of the causes he championed. The picture doesn’t show it, but he is lame from a busted hip, with a longtime wound that still seeps openly through breaks in his skin, and will soon die for lack of medical care.

Pictures and reminders fill my office. Samuel Cochran, B. H. Hodges, my parents, my wife, my brother and sisters, my fellow Marines from a time of brutal combat in Vietnam, my five children and one stepdaughter; those who went before me, those who were young with me and grew older by my side, and those who will be here long after I am gone. They look over my shoulder as I work. They give me balance, and also a sense of accountability. I owe those who went before me the kind of country they fought to create and wanted to perfect. I owe those who served alongside me the kind of country we tried to protect. And I owe my children the kind of country they want to see preserved and further greatened.

I have a world-class staff, made up of men and women who represent every aspect of American society, capable of researching and debating any issue that confronts our country. I know they are world-class because I personally interviewed and hired every one of them, after sorting for months through hundreds of talent-filled applications. The memos have been prepared by whichever staff member is responsible for the subject matter of the vote. On the more important votes, we will already have had numerous discussions. On every vote, I have received and considered their recommendations. On every issue, the approach I have demanded is that my staff focus on substance over politics. And on matters of substance, I have required that they focus on societal fairness above all else. I ask a series of questions about the issues embodied in the legislation. On the more complicated votes, I may ask them to debate the matter in front of me. And then it is time to vote.

A typical day in the Senate requires several trips to the Senate floor and back, although the journey is usually underground so that on some days once I arrive at work I never see the sun. I walk fast. I have an aversion to wasting time. My sense of constant motion is one of the reasons that my eldest daughter, Amy, nicknamed me “the Tasmanian Devil” when she was in her teens. Given the efficiency of my pace, it takes about five minutes to reach the Senate chamber from my office. Normally, I do so through a connecting corridor that begins in the basement of the Russell Building, passing underneath Constitution Avenue and ending up in the basement of the Capitol. If time is short, I can also catch the train–a small tram located in the same tunnel that shuttles continuously back and forth between the two buildings. Years ago, when I was serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Secretary of the Navy in the Pentagon, I calculated that I had walked more than a thousand miles along the maze of corridors between my office and Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger’s. I have no doubt that I will surpass that mileage well before my Senate term expires.

I have lived a fairly complicated life, filled with unpredicted twists and turns. A phrase in “Gerontion,” one of T. S. Eliot’s greatest poems, frequently returns to my consciousness when I consider that journey: “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors /
and issues . . . Think, now! ”

From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career. I’ve worked in government, first in the late 1970s when I was the youngest full committee counsel in the Congress, then in the 1980s as a Defense Department official, and now as a senator. I’ve written nine books, six of them novels, a process that allowed me to spend considerable time overseas and also among widely varying communities here in America as I researched and wrote. I’ve taught literature at the university level. I’ve worked on numerous film projects, some of them with Hollywood’s top producers and directors. I’ve traveled widely as a journalist, writing from such locations as Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. In addition to fighting in Vietnam, I’ve covered two wars–the Marines in Beirut for PBS in 1983, and then as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan in 2004. I’ve worked as a business consultant in Asia.

Financially and personally, my life has been one roll of the dice after another. I’ve had good years and bad years, but I’ve never lost my willingness to take a risk and I’ve never been bored. My curiosities have taken me down some pretty strange alleyways, to some of the darker, meaner corners of the world. And in that respect, when it comes to examining many of the issues of the day I have brought to the Senate a different set of experiences, and thus a different referent, from most of my colleagues. At the same time, I will admit that I acquired a certain level of cynicism along the way when it comes to the glitter- and- tinsel side of government and the trappings of power. And coming to the Senate after so many real-world, nonpolitical experiences, I will also admit that this well-honed skepticism is largely intact.

But the one connecting dot in all of my experiences has been a passion for history and a desire to learn from it. Not the enumeration of monarchs and treaties that so often passes for academic knowledge, but the surging vitality from below that so often impels change and truly defines cultures. The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote vividly about war and peace, showing us the drawing rooms and idiosyncrasies of Russia’s elite. But in reality, he was telling us that great societal changes are most often pushed along by tsunami-deep impulses that cause the elites to react far more than they inspire them to lead. And this, in my view, is the greatest lesson of political history. Entrenched aristocracies, however we may want to define them, do not want change; their desire instead is to manage dissent in a way that does not disrupt their control. But over time, under the right system of government, a free, thinking people has the energy and ultimately the power to effect change.

The American experiment, incomplete as it is in its evolution, is the greatest example of the possibility of balancing these two competing impulses. We ebb and flow, decade after decade, as the better minds among us seek to define the playing field of American success. And we are engaging in this debate, as best we can, under the principles of true representative government.

This leads me, perhaps surprisingly, to my innate distrust of the ornaments of power, because even an earned skepticism has its limits. If one has a sense of history and cares for the place of the United States of America as a unique, enduring model of the benefits of democracy, no amount of cynicism can diminish the largeness, and even the greatness, that surrounds you when you walk the hallways and enter the chambers of the Capitol. Indeed, even when viewed from the outside landscape the Capitol dominates Washington, rising with an austere grandness above the skyline, and lit with a glowing majesty at night. The Capitol, quite frankly, humbles me, and for me it is a particular privilege to walk unescorted and unchallenged along its corridors.

Still walking, I reach the far end of the tunnel and ride an escalator up a floor, reaching the basement of the Capitol. From there I join several colleagues as we take one of the “Senators Only” elevators to the second floor. The elevator doors open. Almost as in a movie, I step from the solitude of the elevator into a scene of instant chaos. Dozens of senators have been exiting the four elevators that open at this narrow corridor. They must now pass through a thick crowd of journalists who have interposed themselves along the corridor, which leads to the doorways of the Senate chamber. The news reporters wave microphones and notebooks, calling out to different senators, wanting print or radio interviews regarding their positions on different pieces of legislation or the latest hot issue that faces the Congress. Mini press conferences are being held in tightly knit groups as I move toward the chamber.

Media reviews

“The best tour of the capitol I’ve ever taken . . . a vivid analysis of the folly of our foreign policy and the unfairness of our domestic one.”
—Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg.com

“A Time to Fight may be the best evocation of the twenty-first century Democratic Party’s emerging style and philosophy. Webb is a . . . terrific writer . . . and now he has written a policy book that is actually worth reading, an unprecedented feat for a sitting politician.”
—Joe Klein, Time

“Jim Webb is a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side . . . He offers a fresh approach to politics and stirs excitement.”
—Elizabeth Drew, New York Review of Books