SOOTHING BALM OF GILEAD: A PRESIDENT’S WORDS TO A SHOCKED NATION

By: Paul S. Marchand


One of a President’s toughest jobs is applying soothing balm of Gilead at a time when the body politic has experienced a shock.  Though it is set forth nowhere in the Constitution, the President must be prepared to be not merely the commander-in-chief, but the comforter-in-chief as well.

 
Not all Presidents are able to do so equally well.  No President has ever equaled the adroitness, the empathy, and the awesome compassion with which Abraham Lincoln addressed words of comfort to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, in the immortal letter he sent to her upon being it being represented to him she had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.

Indeed, so felicitously chosen were President Lincoln’s words that they merit verbatim repetition:

    “To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.
  
        Dear Madam,
  
    I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
  
    Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
  
    A. Lincoln”

Tonight, another President from Illinois, Barack Obama, found himself facing a more complex task than simply offering comfort to a grieving mother.  His mission tonight was to reassure a shocked nation, while at the same time appealing to what President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, so famously referred to as the “better angels of our nature.”

Speaking to an audience of approximately 13,000 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, President Obama managed to strike that delicate balance, at once reassuring the nation, calling us to be guided by those better angels of our nature, and --perhaps most importantly-- offering remembrances of those who fell on that awful morning a few short days ago.

In so doing, the President had to avoid the temptation of partisanship or intemperate rhetoric.  Tonight was not the time to justify his administration, nor was it the time to assign blame.  The President avoided doing either, and he also avoided engaging in the kind of self-referential, self-justifying statements that have emanated from other political figures or pundits in the last few days.  By rejecting such an approach, the President avoided becoming part of a recriminatory exchange that has, thus far, served no purpose beyond further inflaming an already heated dialogue.

It will no doubt be easy in some quarters to dismiss what the President said tonight, or perhaps to take issue with the venue in which it was said, or because --for some-- reflexive opposition to anything Barack Obama says or does has become ineluctable force of habit.  Contrariwise, President Obama’s speech will probably be overpraised in some other quarters; it is always thus in polarized times.

Yet, leaving aside those for whom anything from this President is wrong, “socialist,” or worse, a careful listening to, and analysis of, his speech tonight reveals nothing that we would not expect, nay, demand, from any President in this hour.  While some may be irritated or frustrated by the President’s seemingly effortless ability to deliver an almost pitch perfect address, the fact remains that, for millions of Americans who have grown tired of the endless exchange of anathemas from True Believers of all stripes, the President’s words tonight were indeed soothing balm of Gilead.

For, in the end, the President of the United States is not, cannot be, and must not be, the President of a particular faction or ideology; the President must be the President of all, not merely of political or ideological junkies who batten on the kind of hyper partisanship that seems to have been so much in command of late.  The President must also be the President of that vast middle which seeks to live life in a community where the tribal affiliations of partisanship, ideology, or faction are less important than simply being American together.

To the extent President Obama has been able to remind us of our common Americanness, his speech tonight may be accounted a success.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.