Mandela and Bush

Mandela was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island— formerly the site of a leper colony, a lunatic asylum and several prisons. Yet when he was released after 27 years and elected president of South Africa shortly thereafter, he called not for retribution against his white oppressors but for forgiveness. “To go to prison because of your convictions,” he reasoned, “and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.”

That got me to thinking: When was the last time an American politician gave his life or his freedom or suffered any serious consequence— other than loss of office— for an ideal?

For advocating the ideal of freedom in a totalitarian Communist state, Vaclav Havel was subjected to multiple prison terms— once for four years— as well as constant surveillance and questioning by secret police before his tormentors withdrew and he was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. For organizing labor strikes in another Communist dictatorship— Poland— Lech Walesa too was repeatedly arrest and jailed, once for 11 months, before he too was elected president of his country.

Ike and Little Rock

In America, by contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded (albeit from a safe physical distance) the heroic Allied armies that liberated Europe from Nazi Germany in World War II; yet a dozen years later, as president, Eisenhower declined to take the simple but symbolic step of supporting a court order by personally flying to Little Rock and escorting nine black students into a previously all-white high school. Instead he remained in the White House and sent the National Guard to perform that task for him. During New York’s Attica Prison riot in 1971, the inmates and prison officials alike begged Governor Nelson Rockefeller to meet with the inmates and hear their demands for political rights and better living conditions; Rockefeller refused and instead sent in the state police to retake the prison, at a cost of 39 lives, including those of ten prison employees.

To be sure, holding public office in America requires courage. Every U.S. president is a potential target for any lunatic with a gun. Four of our 44 presidents were murdered in office. Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan all suffered assassination attempts. Other presidents, like John F. Kennedy and the elder George Bush, put themselves in harm’s way for their country in time of war when they were young. Yet in civilian life, the notion that an American politician should sacrifice his freedom or his comfort— never mind his life— for a strongly held ideal rarely even merits any conversation.

The ‘existential threat’

Which brings me to George W. Bush.

For more than seven years after the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush and his advisers repeatedly characterized international terrorism— and Al Qaeda in particular— as an “existential threat.” That is, they believed Al Qaeda terrorists posed a viable threat to the country's very existence. Michael Chertoff, a secretary of Homeland Security under Bush, parsed the concept further, declaring the struggle against terrorism to be a “significant existential one.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the so-called Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, explained in a 2003 interview, “We’re dealing with a fundamental existential threat to our way of life, to our values…. It really does require mobilization of a major effort on our part. It requires contemplating a long-term struggle.”

Here, surely, was a cause— the survival of the American way of life— worthy dying for. And whether Bush and his advisers were right or wrong about the threat posed by Al Qaeda, their views, as far as I can tell, were sincerely held, at least by Wolfowitz. Yet the men who championed this cause, from Bush to Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had never themselves been exposed to military combat. And through two terms of the Bush administration, nobody asked them the critical (if rhetorical) question about the alleged existential threat: “Would you be willing to give your life for this cause? And if not, how can you expect other men and women to give their lives?”

Bush’s next chapter

Two years ago, Bush discussed his life in retirement with AARP Magazine. “I’m just beginning to live the next chapter of my life,” he remarked, apparently oblivious to the 6,700 Americans and 100,000-plus Iraqis and Afghans who would never be able to live the next chapters of their lives. “In other words, politics— being governor and president— is not the end of my life. It’s a chapter. Check back with me after I’ve had a little more time to live out this chapter…. I think you ought to be open-minded as to where life takes you…. If I look back to when I was 20 and somebody said you’d be president, I would have said no way. And I ended up being the 43rd president of the United States. It was an awesome experience, and I’m glad I did it.”

And you thought the American presidency was about shouldering responsibility for the fate of the nation, if not the world, when it turns out it’s just another career opportunity. You ought to be more open-minded.

Last month— while Bill Clinton was criticizing Republicans and Dick Cheney was chastising Obama and Jimmy Carter was chiding the Obama administration for failing to provide moral leadership— the New York Times devoted a lengthy article to Bush’s “life of self-imposed exile in Texas.” According to one of the former president’s friends, “I would sum it up as library work, speeches, painting, golfing and mountain-bike riding. The most consistent characteristic about President Bush is that he truly loves and relishes life.”

In that case, can you blame him for not wanting to sacrifice it?

Tribal solution

Now for the good news: Remember that existential threat that Bush and his advisers were so worried about? If Bush’s current demeanor provides any clue, it seems to have evaporated.

Before Africa was colonized by Europeans, many of its supposedly primitive tribes engaged in an intriguing form of conflict resolution: Instead of waging total warfare against each other, rival tribes would appoint their respective chiefs to engage in man-to-man combat; their subjects on both sides agreed to accept the outcome. That way, the theory went, only one man would be killed instead of hundreds. What greater service could a leader provide, went the theory, than to die for his people and spare them death in the process?

Such a notion, of course, never occurred to Bush, or to Osama bin Laden either. Something tells me that Nelson Mandela isn’t the only African who possessed wisdom we could use.