Friday, September 10, 2004
Renewal in Our Nation’s Capital
Let me sell you on an idea. A few weeks ago, for a last short summer getaway, my wife and I flew to our nation’s capital to see the sights. Washington, D.C. is a wonderful city, especially when Congress is not in session and the majority party is away, scrubbing down (in this case) its elephants for the three-ring circus of the national convention. But go there anytime. Find a way. Join a protest march, if that’s what it takes. And take the kids, too.
When I was ten, my parents took me and my siblings there. We arrived after midnight. I suddenly woke in the back of the station wagon to see right in front of us the massive white dome of the Capitol building—my first glorious vision of the city. I also remember from that visit how we walked the long path of the National Mall past the Washington Monument toward the Lincoln Memorial, those iconic sights amazingly real to me for the first time. Best of all, we visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The summer before, I had watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, and there before me in a glass case was a moon rock. Space suits and capsules were on display. We visited the White House and also Congress in session. We sat for a few minutes above the Senate floor, a surprisingly small space, and overheard some deliberations. My father pointed out Senator Kennedy, Senator Dirksen, and others. I couldn’t understand what the men said, but I could feel that this was our government at work and that it operated by means of civil exchange.
This summer my wife and I spent more time in the art museums, but we also saw the giant pandas at the National Zoo and visited the Museum of Natural History, which has beautiful and dramatic animal displays, insects too! and, as it turned out, included a special traveling exhibit from Cooperstown on baseball and American social history. We walked the grand distances to the major monuments. I saw, for the first time, the Vietnam War Memorial and the new WWII Memorial. The Vietnam Memorial is a work of art in the deepest sense. It cuts a dark slice into the earth to reveal, very simply, the names of the men and women we lost. The new WWII Memorial is classically monumental but less moving. That war, after all, is in less dire need of a public artistic expression capable of transporting us into the sublime realm of pure contemplation, because that earlier war belongs to a narrative that, however devastating, makes sense.
The highlight of my visit, though, was something altogether more subtle than any monument, and yet somehow shocking in the context of American power. It happened on our first afternoon in Washington. We took a long stroll on a bike path that runs between the C & O Canal and the Potomac River. Mostly we encountered the usual serious bike riders. But near Georgetown I noticed a group of walkers moving toward us—six people walking two by two. And as the two men in front came closer, I thought I recognized the man on the left—and suddenly I did know him: the only man in the current presidential contest who literally sparkles with goodwill and glows with a Kennedyesque warmth. He nodded at me and smiled when he saw my look of recognition.
The brief encounter left me with another indelible impression of Washington. This is a city where you might see a Cabinet officer at the corner Starbucks. Sure, this man had his security detail—two large men in white shirts—and his staffers—the two young women with notebooks who were chatting and trailing the others; but he walked by casually, at home in the city. A friendly, southern man. The casualness of the encounter reminded me that we govern ourselves here, if we choose to. This is our republic, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, if we can keep it.
The public spaces, the monuments, the free museums, the great civic institutions: Washington, D.C., you would feel, is your place. There on the Mall we are all simply Americans, and all of the many foreign visitors are like ambassadors, guests whom we welcome to the celebration of what makes us great in the only way Americans can be great, as humble participants in the grand and always unfinished project of making a just society.