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Saturday, August 9, 2008

Reflections by Ron Suskind

(Journalist and author Ron Suskind spoke at the Pacem in Terris 40th Anniversary Dinner in Wilmington on October 18, 2007. This article is based on notes taken by Mary Starkweather-White.)

He began by musing about how as we grow up, we sometimes feel frozen at age 18. And then one day —you look in the mirror and ask, “What’s happened?” He remembered visiting his friend, Kevin O’Connell, a Lawyer of Last Resort, at his law office in Wilmington one time. Ron noticed an urn on a shelf in Kevin’s office. When he asked about it, Kevin pointed to it and explained that it held the remains of a death row client. Kevin said that he kept it there to remind him of what the stakes are. There are times when Ron loves what we’ve become, but it’s not enough, we are still searching. This is a season of injustice and we must see how we as a culture must overcome it—we, as members of the human parade.

Ron has been twenty years on the justice circuit. He wrote a book called Hope in the Unseen about an African American inner city kid from a blighted neighborhood in Washington, DC. When Ron met him, he was a proud, prickly honor student in a war zone. A buddy of Ron’s who had fought in Bosnia told him about children there who still managed to have hope and a capacity to learn -- even in a war zone. How do you summon hope when there is no reason to hope? Yet some people learn in a war zone, with the bullets flying—here and in the former Yugoslavia.

African Americans, Latinos, and others know that our “meritocracy” is complicated. Normally, a kid with a combined SAT score of 910 would have no shot. It makes him ask the hard questions – the ones which cause him to lie sleepless at night. After all, there will be plenty of time to sleep later, when we are dead.

Ron was raised by a little Brooklynite mother who said, “I won’t love you any less of you’re not a success. I just won’t mention your name to anyone.” This is the traditional American canon—that we must achieve. America is the land of self-invention: we cleave ourselves to any accolade. We must win even when the rules won’t let us. But then we have to look at separate questions.

In the 1990’s One of Ron’s sons was born autistic. It has made him examine a host of his expectations. He had wanted him to go to Harvard and become President. But, Ron had to change. Now he wants him to be able to feel the sun on his face and some joy in his life.

In this same time frame Ron met the kids at the high school in Washington DC. When you’re a professional with graduate degrees, you have to fake it a lot. A lot of us fake it three to four days a week. Maybe it was time he started to learn. Although he was a professional, he was taught so much by an African American kid with bad diction with a mother who had been on welfare and a father who had been to jail. Ron learned the hard lessons and was graced that Cedric Jennings and his mother Barbara would take the time to teach him.

As a result, Ron came up with the “Good Enough Reason Rule”: people do what they do for a good enough reason. People turn intent into action for things you can see. If you know their reasons, you know the persons – you will understand them as well as you can know another person. Cedric wanted baggy pants in order to look like Snoop Doggy Dogg. Ron told him graduate school matters, but if baggy pants matter to him, then they matter.

Cedric comes from a high school where 1 person in 10 years goes to the Ivy League. Cedric got into Brown University. His mother was a church lady, although she had had a more colorful past, but she was a church lady now. She and Cedric had made a home for each other for 18 years. The three of us drove up together to Brown. Cedric was crazy nervous during the drive. He would ask at the Molly Pitcher stop on the highway, “Who’s that? Do I have to know her?” and “How about him?” at the Vince Lombardi stop. At the Eugene O’Neill stop: “I bet I have to know HIM!” Cedric was cramming for a life test. We have to give up our knowingness and open our pores.

Barbara (Cedric’s mother) and Ron had it out once. The question that faced us, as it faces all of us, is: “Can we really get along? Can we find the ‘shared’, when there is so much that divides us?”

Cedric said, “We’ve got to stop these interviews. You’ve got to meet my mom. Come to dinner and bring ribs.” This was an experiment in: “Can we get along?” When Ron asked him where he should get them, Cedric told him from Houston’s Restaurant in Georgetown. Although Cedric had never eaten there, his pastor had and had told him that the ribs were good. Ron bought 40 lbs. of pork ribs from Houston’s -- something he had never done before as a Jew, and drove them across Washington to its worst section, so that they could eat together —which was a mitzvah.

Then the shared moment ends and Cedric goes off to do his homework. Barbara said, “I see that he’s talking to you. I tried to stop him. If you use anything he tells you to hurt him, I WILL KILL YOU.” And so the relationship begins with mistrust.

In the van on the way to Brown, Barbara feels each mile going under the wheel as a separation from her son. She is thinking about their 18 years together. Brown requires $48,000 per year. Cedric’s nerves melt away when he arrives. He has made it—an example of American individualism! Ron makes the “Victory” sign to Barbara.

Can you grow, learn, maybe? You are in uncharted terrain. Give up the knowingness. Hear what Barbara hears: all around her parents are pushing their children into the familiar, saying, “I remember my first day at college!” What Barbara sings is flat and elemental; she sings a song about sacrifice and denial and pushing her child to a place she will never be able to follow. After a bit, she feels conspicuous. She is the only one who feels conspicuous, worried about her diction and a stain on her dress. All day no one speaks to her. Ron hears someone wonder if she is a maid. He wants to say, “No, she is a Brown parent, like all these others!”

Against our will the light passes -- can we grab it? Ron has used the Good Enough Reason Rule in all his battles since. It wears people down. In his last 2 books and in the next one, he writes about people who seek the commonweal, who use the power of social justice and moral energy. This is the gravamen of whether we will succeed or fail in the coming century.

Ron hears the same thing around the world. He almost did not make it tonight. The subject of his next book is global. He was supposed to be with Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan tonight in her motorcade. She is trying to bring democracy to Pakistan and she said to him, “I want you to be with me on the plane when I go back to Pakistan and in my motorcade. I want to be in your next book.”

He called Sally and Kevin and said that “BB” wanted him with her. Then he talked to his wife, who asked if he really needed to be in that motorcade. He started to think about his old friend, Danny Pearl, and the price that is exacted for good deeds. And he decided; “I think I am going to Wilmington tonight!” He grew up here—went to school from kindergarten through high school here. He loves this place! Maybe there was an invisible hand drawing him back.

When he goes to Afghanistan, Pakistan or even London, he always hears the same thing: “I wish you people would be straight with us! I see in your collection of leaders the tactics of Bait and Switch. I work as hard as I can to take advantage of the American ideals and have them up on my wall, and I know that I am not there yet. But you aren’t there yet. You don’t even believe in them! You only like democracy if my leader supports you. I would buy into free enterprise, but you rape our landscape!”

The crisis plays out in the White House, London, Karachi, and elsewhere. We are in the middle of a hearts-and-minds crisis! We are living in the miracle of the information age. All around the world people are hooked in and they can see us. We sit at the same table, but only our half gets food—and we yell at them to shut up and listen! We keep telling them what to do.

One Pakistani told Ron: “I have a problem. My son cannot get medicine. You have it but don’t use it. Help me with that. I don’t want to be like you, but a bigger me, without early death!”

They see us now more clearly than we see ourselves. Along with the miracle come destructive capabilities. A small group can destroy now what it used to be only nations could. We are in democratized chaos. We cannot stop them. We have to get serious about showing our big, aching American heart—our magnanimity, our openness—we are people who go on searches. This is just good sense.

Ron was talking to our former ambassador to Pakistan who later worked at the UN. The former ambassador said, “We must be true to our oath. Showing our purpose is so important.” The former ambassador mentioned how important the Peace Corps was. The Peace corps was the best and the brightest going out. They were not judged by how many dams they built, but by the impact they had personally. Maybe now we should have a different kind of Peace Corps? Ron goes to Africa now: one African told him he knows people from 8 countries named Kennedy! Will anybody name themselves “Bush”? People say: “I’m finished with you rich Americans!” They need to see the goodness of the American heart.

Five months ago Ron tried to come up with the definition of the hearts-and minds struggle. He flew into Reagan Airport at 8:30 and had to attend a meeting in Washington. At 11 that morning he needed to go to BWI to catch another flight. The cabdriver overheard him calling the car service. The car service said they will charge $109; the cabdriver said, “Mr. Ron, I will charge $62.” Ron asked, “How can you do it? And you’ll have to wait 2 hours!” The cabdriver replied, “I’ll have breakfast and come back in 2 hours.”

Ron had not really talked to a cabdriver in 10 years, but as they were traveling, he found out that his name was Nouri and that he was from Somalia. Nouri has been here for 20 years. Ron asked him how he ended up here and he told him that when he was young, he played soccer on a Somalian team and traveled quite a bit. He said he had heard one could get an education in America, so he saved his money and bribed officials to get to America.

He arrived in the Kennedy Airport in December. He had no knowledge of the language or the currency. He wandered around the Kennedy Airport for a day and finally saw 2 A’s (for American Airlines), which he recognized as the first letter in the alphabet. He walked up to a fat man and pulled out a piece of paper with the name of the one man he knew in America, who lived in northern Virginia. The fat man made the universal sign for money by rubbing his fingers together and Nouri showed him his $5 dollar bill. The fat man shook his head, then took a piece of plastic out of his pocket and gave him a ticket. With the ticket in his hand and with a smile, Nouri went to northern Virginia. His friend in America worked in a Pizza Hut and got Nouri a job there. He worked there and morning, noon, and night, he ate pizza. He went to George Mason University and got computer skills. He got married and had children. His wife worked as a nurse while he drove a cab. Life was good, he said.

Twice Nouri went back to JFK Airport to find the fat man, but he never found him. Then one day at Reagan Airport he saw a teeny little Vietnamese man in line. The Vietnamese man had no knowledge of the language. He held up a piece of paper. The cabdriver looked at the paper and saw an address deep into Virginia (normally a $200 fare). The Vietnamese man held up $1. Nouri laughed, “At least I had five dollars!” The cabdriver said, “Get in” and drove him to Virginia. He drove him to a teeny house, and a teeny woman came out and the teeny couple hugged and cried. The cabdriver said to the teeny man, “Now it’s your turn.”

That’s ourselves at our best—when we touch people in a way that lives and echoes forever. What will we leave behind? A heart touching a heart. I got plenty—now it’s your turn.

We all need to be a group of secular evangelists — not only to lift our hearts, but to save us. Whatever it was, was lifted and then we saw the light. Maybe Americans can see the light. We are on the right side. We’re the ones who talk about the deep aquifer of what we all share.

He concluded by telling us a story about his father. It is a story that only folks in Wilmington will understand. Ron grew up in Foulk Woods in north Wilmington. His Dad died when Ron was a child. But in the summer of 1969, the most important thing happened—a man stepped on the moon. Ron, his brother, and his mom and dad were watching TV just before the moon walk. Ron and his brother were in their pajamas – the kind with the feet in them. As they watched the television scene, they saw a timer on scene, counting down the time. It was 2:22 a.m.and the moon walk was to start at 2:30 a.m.. Just then the lights went out. Apparently, a car hit a pole on Silverside Road. They all turned to dad, the Answer man. He said, “Just listen to my voice. Come towards my voice. Hold out your hands.”

As a little nuclear family, they went out of the house into the driveway. There was blackness everywhere. The Answer Man said; “We’ll get in the car and search for the light.” He started to drive through Foulk Woods, going 90 miles per hour. It was a battle between Faith and Doubt. Ron’s mother screamed, “Wait! You’ll kill us all!” but his father was incredibly focused. They were flying around a bend in the blackness, and then they saw it -- the beginning of the light.

The car screeched to a halt and they ran to a stranger’s house. A woman opened the door, looked at them, then said, “Hurry, hurry!” They went inside, and since all of the split-level houses were alike, they knew exactly how to get to the den. When they reached it, there were 30 other people in the den from all walks of life. They had all come towards the light, just in time to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon! Every parent said to their children, “You’ll never forget this!” Then everyone hugged.

Ron’s Dad died 3 years later when Ron was 11. Ron had locked that memory inside for a long time. Last year Ron turned 46, the age his dad was when he died. Ron is the driver now. We all are the drivers now. We all know the light, we all know what that lace is – a place where everyone is connected and related – a place where there are no strangers, just us. Nights like this bring us one step closer. God bless you and your good works! Tikkun olam (“repairing the world”)!

Questions and Answers

1. Can Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf work out their problems? The country of Pakistan is going to go through some horrors and they won’t get out of it unless they can find a solution to the modern nightmare of acuity; seeing us as we are. Americans should be going over there in droves, asking the people, “What can we do to help?”

In this age of transparency, we know exactly what the goals of the terrorists are. They are saying, “We will make Americans destroy themselves. We will make America forsake her values.” They are thinking about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. They are planning these things strategically, while we say, “Bring it on.” The solution is not coming from Washington. There is gangrene there. Washington has adopted a rule, “Message is all.” What are we going to do about it. It is going to have to come from us – person to person. American innovation will need to go into overdrive.

2. What about going to other countries with natural capitalism? In The Price of Loyalty, when Paul O’Neill went to Africa with Bono, it was about bringing water to Africa. More kids die from diarrhea in Africa than from AIDS. Transactional economics (foreign aid, loans, etc.) all have strings attached. We need to give it without strings. We do not trust truth and free will.

George Kennan, when he was looking at war-ravaged Hamburg in 1947 said, “If the West is to have any pretense of superiority, we must learn to fight our wars not just militarily but morally.” Our moral energy is at the core of our actual power. There is a passage in Deuteronomy that says, “Justice, justice, this you must pursue.” When Ron was interviewing Douglas Feith, he noticed that he had an embroidered sampler of this quotation hanging on his wall. Ron asked him, “Do you know why they mention justice twice?” Feith said that he thought is was for emphasis. Ron told him that, although the Hebrew scholars usually disagree about everything, in this case they all agree. Justice is repeated, once for the ends and once for the means. It covers victory and mercy. We need to close Guantanamo. We need to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What we need is a truth therapy.

3. Do you see anyone in the political process who could turn the situation around? Ron said that he would dodge the question. The smoke-filled rooms may have chosen better candidates for the Presidency than the caucuses in the cornfields of Iowa. The current political method of primaries is a kind of game show with a trap door with alligators – and people are watching to see who falls through. The current politicians are not going to change. The hearts and minds crisis in our country is about trying to recapture something that only the people, not Congress, can change. Informed consent is being challenged and being replaced by as uninformed consent as possible. “Informed consent” – informed by what? The Greeks would say, “Reason.” How about informed by emotion – fear? What informs consent now can be division.

The governmental repressive machine is working. Paul O’Neill was given 19,000 documents when he left the Treasury Department. One of these documents shows that at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush Administration in January 2001, plans for the post-Saddam crisis were in place. Secretary of State Colin Powell warned about the dangers of upsetting an already volatile Middle East region. The President responded, “Sometimes a show of force can really focus things.” George Tenet spread out a big satellite map, known in CIA circles as “intelligence porn” and alleged that it was a photo of a chemical or biological weapons factory. Paul O’Neill remarked that the photo looked a lot like one of his aluminum plants. In The Price of Loyalty, Paul commented about this meeting by saying, “The President is like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. There’s no connection.”

Ron Suskind and Paul O’Neill have what they call the “Wife Test.” After they have been interviewed on TV, if they are worried, they call their wives for their opinion about how things went. Ron and Paul O’Neill were on the “Today” Show and Katie Couric interviewed them about the book. She asked Paul O’Neill if there were anything in the book that he regretted. He said that he regretted his remark, “The President is like a blind……” because it sounded too angry.” Cornelia, Ron’s wife, said that she thought that the interview was fine. When Ron complained that Paul had not followed the advice that he had given him before the show (not to talk about that remark) she said, “That’s just Paul. He’s unmanageable.” Rove put pressure on them and tried to discredit them, but his efforts backfired because the message that it conveyed to people was that The Price of Loyalty contains classified information and it is in your local bookstore.

You have moral energy that is power that self-interest will never muster. The current powers that be know that they cannot defeat us. We have the truth and the power. The song, “We Shall Overcome,” was sung as a hymn of salvation as “I Shall Overcome.” Rev. Martin Luther King changed to “I” to “We” because the song is no longer about personal salvation, but about social change and the transformation of society. It will need to be “we” since all of us will have to be involved. Rev. King said that we will be reviled; we will be spat upon; some of us will have to suffer physical death, so that others will not suffer the psychological death of bigotry. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We are by our nature a hopeful people. The arc doesn’t bend on its own; it bends because people of shared purpose grab it and push.

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1998), The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill (January ,2004), and The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (June, 2006). He often appears on network television and currently writes for Time Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and the Wall Street Journal. He spoke at the Pacem in Terris 40th Anniversary Dinner at the Doubletree Hotel on Concord Pike, Wilmington, on October 18, 2007. [The editor expresses her deep gratitude to Mary Starkweather-White whose excellent notes comprise this article. We only regret that words fail to convey Ron’s great dramatic ability to tell a story with an actor’s skill with accents and a comedian’s sense of timing. Hearing him in person is spell-binding.]
Reflections by Ron Suskind

(Journalist and author Ron Suskind spoke at the Pacem in Terris 40th Anniversary Dinner in Wilmington on October 18, 2007. This article is based on notes taken by Mary Starkweather-White.)

He began by musing about how as we grow up, we sometimes feel frozen at age 18. And then one day —you look in the mirror and ask, “What’s happened?” He remembered visiting his friend, Kevin O’Connell, a Lawyer of Last Resort, at his law office in Wilmington one time. Ron noticed an urn on a shelf in Kevin’s office. When he asked about it, Kevin pointed to it and explained that it held the remains of a death row client. Kevin said that he kept it there to remind him of what the stakes are. There are times when Ron loves what we’ve become, but it’s not enough, we are still searching. This is a season of injustice and we must see how we as a culture must overcome it—we, as members of the human parade.

Ron has been twenty years on the justice circuit. He wrote a book called Hope in the Unseen about an African American inner city kid from a blighted neighborhood in Washington, DC. When Ron met him, he was a proud, prickly honor student in a war zone. A buddy of Ron’s who had fought in Bosnia told him about children there who still managed to have hope and a capacity to learn -- even in a war zone. How do you summon hope when there is no reason to hope? Yet some people learn in a war zone, with the bullets flying—here and in the former Yugoslavia.

African Americans, Latinos, and others know that our “meritocracy” is complicated. Normally, a kid with a combined SAT score of 910 would have no shot. It makes him ask the hard questions – the ones which cause him to lie sleepless at night. After all, there will be plenty of time to sleep later, when we are dead.

Ron was raised by a little Brooklynite mother who said, “I won’t love you any less of you’re not a success. I just won’t mention your name to anyone.” This is the traditional American canon—that we must achieve. America is the land of self-invention: we cleave ourselves to any accolade. We must win even when the rules won’t let us. But then we have to look at separate questions.

In the 1990’s One of Ron’s sons was born autistic. It has made him examine a host of his expectations. He had wanted him to go to Harvard and become President. But, Ron had to change. Now he wants him to be able to feel the sun on his face and some joy in his life.

In this same time frame Ron met the kids at the high school in Washington DC. When you’re a professional with graduate degrees, you have to fake it a lot. A lot of us fake it three to four days a week. Maybe it was time he started to learn. Although he was a professional, he was taught so much by an African American kid with bad diction with a mother who had been on welfare and a father who had been to jail. Ron learned the hard lessons and was graced that Cedric Jennings and his mother Barbara would take the time to teach him.

As a result, Ron came up with the “Good Enough Reason Rule”: people do what they do for a good enough reason. People turn intent into action for things you can see. If you know their reasons, you know the persons – you will understand them as well as you can know another person. Cedric wanted baggy pants in order to look like Snoop Doggy Dogg. Ron told him graduate school matters, but if baggy pants matter to him, then they matter.

Cedric comes from a high school where 1 person in 10 years goes to the Ivy League. Cedric got into Brown University. His mother was a church lady, although she had had a more colorful past, but she was a church lady now. She and Cedric had made a home for each other for 18 years. The three of us drove up together to Brown. Cedric was crazy nervous during the drive. He would ask at the Molly Pitcher stop on the highway, “Who’s that? Do I have to know her?” and “How about him?” at the Vince Lombardi stop. At the Eugene O’Neill stop: “I bet I have to know HIM!” Cedric was cramming for a life test. We have to give up our knowingness and open our pores.

Barbara (Cedric’s mother) and Ron had it out once. The question that faced us, as it faces all of us, is: “Can we really get along? Can we find the ‘shared’, when there is so much that divides us?”

Cedric said, “We’ve got to stop these interviews. You’ve got to meet my mom. Come to dinner and bring ribs.” This was an experiment in: “Can we get along?” When Ron asked him where he should get them, Cedric told him from Houston’s Restaurant in Georgetown. Although Cedric had never eaten there, his pastor had and had told him that the ribs were good. Ron bought 40 lbs. of pork ribs from Houston’s -- something he had never done before as a Jew, and drove them across Washington to its worst section, so that they could eat together —which was a mitzvah.

Then the shared moment ends and Cedric goes off to do his homework. Barbara said, “I see that he’s talking to you. I tried to stop him. If you use anything he tells you to hurt him, I WILL KILL YOU.” And so the relationship begins with mistrust.

In the van on the way to Brown, Barbara feels each mile going under the wheel as a separation from her son. She is thinking about their 18 years together. Brown requires $48,000 per year. Cedric’s nerves melt away when he arrives. He has made it—an example of American individualism! Ron makes the “Victory” sign to Barbara.

Can you grow, learn, maybe? You are in uncharted terrain. Give up the knowingness. Hear what Barbara hears: all around her parents are pushing their children into the familiar, saying, “I remember my first day at college!” What Barbara sings is flat and elemental; she sings a song about sacrifice and denial and pushing her child to a place she will never be able to follow. After a bit, she feels conspicuous. She is the only one who feels conspicuous, worried about her diction and a stain on her dress. All day no one speaks to her. Ron hears someone wonder if she is a maid. He wants to say, “No, she is a Brown parent, like all these others!”

Against our will the light passes -- can we grab it? Ron has used the Good Enough Reason Rule in all his battles since. It wears people down. In his last 2 books and in the next one, he writes about people who seek the commonweal, who use the power of social justice and moral energy. This is the gravamen of whether we will succeed or fail in the coming century.

Ron hears the same thing around the world. He almost did not make it tonight. The subject of his next book is global. He was supposed to be with Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan tonight in her motorcade. She is trying to bring democracy to Pakistan and she said to him, “I want you to be with me on the plane when I go back to Pakistan and in my motorcade. I want to be in your next book.”

He called Sally and Kevin and said that “BB” wanted him with her. Then he talked to his wife, who asked if he really needed to be in that motorcade. He started to think about his old friend, Danny Pearl, and the price that is exacted for good deeds. And he decided; “I think I am going to Wilmington tonight!” He grew up here—went to school from kindergarten through high school here. He loves this place! Maybe there was an invisible hand drawing him back.

When he goes to Afghanistan, Pakistan or even London, he always hears the same thing: “I wish you people would be straight with us! I see in your collection of leaders the tactics of Bait and Switch. I work as hard as I can to take advantage of the American ideals and have them up on my wall, and I know that I am not there yet. But you aren’t there yet. You don’t even believe in them! You only like democracy if my leader supports you. I would buy into free enterprise, but you rape our landscape!”

The crisis plays out in the White House, London, Karachi, and elsewhere. We are in the middle of a hearts-and-minds crisis! We are living in the miracle of the information age. All around the world people are hooked in and they can see us. We sit at the same table, but only our half gets food—and we yell at them to shut up and listen! We keep telling them what to do.

One Pakistani told Ron: “I have a problem. My son cannot get medicine. You have it but don’t use it. Help me with that. I don’t want to be like you, but a bigger me, without early death!”

They see us now more clearly than we see ourselves. Along with the miracle come destructive capabilities. A small group can destroy now what it used to be only nations could. We are in democratized chaos. We cannot stop them. We have to get serious about showing our big, aching American heart—our magnanimity, our openness—we are people who go on searches. This is just good sense.

Ron was talking to our former ambassador to Pakistan who later worked at the UN. The former ambassador said, “We must be true to our oath. Showing our purpose is so important.” The former ambassador mentioned how important the Peace Corps was. The Peace corps was the best and the brightest going out. They were not judged by how many dams they built, but by the impact they had personally. Maybe now we should have a different kind of Peace Corps? Ron goes to Africa now: one African told him he knows people from 8 countries named Kennedy! Will anybody name themselves “Bush”? People say: “I’m finished with you rich Americans!” They need to see the goodness of the American heart.

Five months ago Ron tried to come up with the definition of the hearts-and minds struggle. He flew into Reagan Airport at 8:30 and had to attend a meeting in Washington. At 11 that morning he needed to go to BWI to catch another flight. The cabdriver overheard him calling the car service. The car service said they will charge $109; the cabdriver said, “Mr. Ron, I will charge $62.” Ron asked, “How can you do it? And you’ll have to wait 2 hours!” The cabdriver replied, “I’ll have breakfast and come back in 2 hours.”

Ron had not really talked to a cabdriver in 10 years, but as they were traveling, he found out that his name was Nouri and that he was from Somalia. Nouri has been here for 20 years. Ron asked him how he ended up here and he told him that when he was young, he played soccer on a Somalian team and traveled quite a bit. He said he had heard one could get an education in America, so he saved his money and bribed officials to get to America.

He arrived in the Kennedy Airport in December. He had no knowledge of the language or the currency. He wandered around the Kennedy Airport for a day and finally saw 2 A’s (for American Airlines), which he recognized as the first letter in the alphabet. He walked up to a fat man and pulled out a piece of paper with the name of the one man he knew in America, who lived in northern Virginia. The fat man made the universal sign for money by rubbing his fingers together and Nouri showed him his $5 dollar bill. The fat man shook his head, then took a piece of plastic out of his pocket and gave him a ticket. With the ticket in his hand and with a smile, Nouri went to northern Virginia. His friend in America worked in a Pizza Hut and got Nouri a job there. He worked there and morning, noon, and night, he ate pizza. He went to George Mason University and got computer skills. He got married and had children. His wife worked as a nurse while he drove a cab. Life was good, he said.

Twice Nouri went back to JFK Airport to find the fat man, but he never found him. Then one day at Reagan Airport he saw a teeny little Vietnamese man in line. The Vietnamese man had no knowledge of the language. He held up a piece of paper. The cabdriver looked at the paper and saw an address deep into Virginia (normally a $200 fare). The Vietnamese man held up $1. Nouri laughed, “At least I had five dollars!” The cabdriver said, “Get in” and drove him to Virginia. He drove him to a teeny house, and a teeny woman came out and the teeny couple hugged and cried. The cabdriver said to the teeny man, “Now it’s your turn.”

That’s ourselves at our best—when we touch people in a way that lives and echoes forever. What will we leave behind? A heart touching a heart. I got plenty—now it’s your turn.

We all need to be a group of secular evangelists — not only to lift our hearts, but to save us. Whatever it was, was lifted and then we saw the light. Maybe Americans can see the light. We are on the right side. We’re the ones who talk about the deep aquifer of what we all share.

He concluded by telling us a story about his father. It is a story that only folks in Wilmington will understand. Ron grew up in Foulk Woods in north Wilmington. His Dad died when Ron was a child. But in the summer of 1969, the most important thing happened—a man stepped on the moon. Ron, his brother, and his mom and dad were watching TV just before the moon walk. Ron and his brother were in their pajamas – the kind with the feet in them. As they watched the television scene, they saw a timer on scene, counting down the time. It was 2:22 a.m.and the moon walk was to start at 2:30 a.m.. Just then the lights went out. Apparently, a car hit a pole on Silverside Road. They all turned to dad, the Answer man. He said, “Just listen to my voice. Come towards my voice. Hold out your hands.”

As a little nuclear family, they went out of the house into the driveway. There was blackness everywhere. The Answer Man said; “We’ll get in the car and search for the light.” He started to drive through Foulk Woods, going 90 miles per hour. It was a battle between Faith and Doubt. Ron’s mother screamed, “Wait! You’ll kill us all!” but his father was incredibly focused. They were flying around a bend in the blackness, and then they saw it -- the beginning of the light.

The car screeched to a halt and they ran to a stranger’s house. A woman opened the door, looked at them, then said, “Hurry, hurry!” They went inside, and since all of the split-level houses were alike, they knew exactly how to get to the den. When they reached it, there were 30 other people in the den from all walks of life. They had all come towards the light, just in time to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon! Every parent said to their children, “You’ll never forget this!” Then everyone hugged.

Ron’s Dad died 3 years later when Ron was 11. Ron had locked that memory inside for a long time. Last year Ron turned 46, the age his dad was when he died. Ron is the driver now. We all are the drivers now. We all know the light, we all know what that lace is – a place where everyone is connected and related – a place where there are no strangers, just us. Nights like this bring us one step closer. God bless you and your good works! Tikkun olam (“repairing the world”)!

Questions and Answers

1. Can Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf work out their problems? The country of Pakistan is going to go through some horrors and they won’t get out of it unless they can find a solution to the modern nightmare of acuity; seeing us as we are. Americans should be going over there in droves, asking the people, “What can we do to help?”

In this age of transparency, we know exactly what the goals of the terrorists are. They are saying, “We will make Americans destroy themselves. We will make America forsake her values.” They are thinking about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. They are planning these things strategically, while we say, “Bring it on.” The solution is not coming from Washington. There is gangrene there. Washington has adopted a rule, “Message is all.” What are we going to do about it. It is going to have to come from us – person to person. American innovation will need to go into overdrive.

2. What about going to other countries with natural capitalism? In The Price of Loyalty, when Paul O’Neill went to Africa with Bono, it was about bringing water to Africa. More kids die from diarrhea in Africa than from AIDS. Transactional economics (foreign aid, loans, etc.) all have strings attached. We need to give it without strings. We do not trust truth and free will.

George Kennan, when he was looking at war-ravaged Hamburg in 1947 said, “If the West is to have any pretense of superiority, we must learn to fight our wars not just militarily but morally.” Our moral energy is at the core of our actual power. There is a passage in Deuteronomy that says, “Justice, justice, this you must pursue.” When Ron was interviewing Douglas Feith, he noticed that he had an embroidered sampler of this quotation hanging on his wall. Ron asked him, “Do you know why they mention justice twice?” Feith said that he thought is was for emphasis. Ron told him that, although the Hebrew scholars usually disagree about everything, in this case they all agree. Justice is repeated, once for the ends and once for the means. It covers victory and mercy. We need to close Guantanamo. We need to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What we need is a truth therapy.

3. Do you see anyone in the political process who could turn the situation around? Ron said that he would dodge the question. The smoke-filled rooms may have chosen better candidates for the Presidency than the caucuses in the cornfields of Iowa. The current political method of primaries is a kind of game show with a trap door with alligators – and people are watching to see who falls through. The current politicians are not going to change. The hearts and minds crisis in our country is about trying to recapture something that only the people, not Congress, can change. Informed consent is being challenged and being replaced by as uninformed consent as possible. “Informed consent” – informed by what? The Greeks would say, “Reason.” How about informed by emotion – fear? What informs consent now can be division.

The governmental repressive machine is working. Paul O’Neill was given 19,000 documents when he left the Treasury Department. One of these documents shows that at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush Administration in January 2001, plans for the post-Saddam crisis were in place. Secretary of State Colin Powell warned about the dangers of upsetting an already volatile Middle East region. The President responded, “Sometimes a show of force can really focus things.” George Tenet spread out a big satellite map, known in CIA circles as “intelligence porn” and alleged that it was a photo of a chemical or biological weapons factory. Paul O’Neill remarked that the photo looked a lot like one of his aluminum plants. In The Price of Loyalty, Paul commented about this meeting by saying, “The President is like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. There’s no connection.”

Ron Suskind and Paul O’Neill have what they call the “Wife Test.” After they have been interviewed on TV, if they are worried, they call their wives for their opinion about how things went. Ron and Paul O’Neill were on the “Today” Show and Katie Couric interviewed them about the book. She asked Paul O’Neill if there were anything in the book that he regretted. He said that he regretted his remark, “The President is like a blind……” because it sounded too angry.” Cornelia, Ron’s wife, said that she thought that the interview was fine. When Ron complained that Paul had not followed the advice that he had given him before the show (not to talk about that remark) she said, “That’s just Paul. He’s unmanageable.” Rove put pressure on them and tried to discredit them, but his efforts backfired because the message that it conveyed to people was that The Price of Loyalty contains classified information and it is in your local bookstore.

You have moral energy that is power that self-interest will never muster. The current powers that be know that they cannot defeat us. We have the truth and the power. The song, “We Shall Overcome,” was sung as a hymn of salvation as “I Shall Overcome.” Rev. Martin Luther King changed to “I” to “We” because the song is no longer about personal salvation, but about social change and the transformation of society. It will need to be “we” since all of us will have to be involved. Rev. King said that we will be reviled; we will be spat upon; some of us will have to suffer physical death, so that others will not suffer the psychological death of bigotry. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We are by our nature a hopeful people. The arc doesn’t bend on its own; it bends because people of shared purpose grab it and push.

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1998), The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill (January ,2004), and The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (June, 2006). He often appears on network television and currently writes for Time Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and the Wall Street Journal. He spoke at the Pacem in Terris 40th Anniversary Dinner at the Doubletree Hotel on Concord Pike, Wilmington, on October 18, 2007. [The editor expresses her deep gratitude to Mary Starkweather-White whose excellent notes comprise this article. We only regret that words fail to convey Ron’s great dramatic ability to tell a story with an actor’s skill with accents and a comedian’s sense of timing. Hearing him in person is spell-binding.]

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