In his "Education," Henry Adams called it "the systematic organization of hatreds." That's an accurate description of what's coming this week with the Ashcroft and Norton confirmation hearings.
Funny that the Adams family (President John Adams and his son President John Quincy Adams, who was the grandfather of Henry) keeps popping up. George Bush the Elder, in a jocular dynastic mood, has taken to calling his son "Quincy," and over the weekend, the New York Times published a pre-inaugural ranch interview with W. in which the President-elect mentioned he was reading a biography of John Quincy Adams: "If [my father]'s going to refer to me as Quincy, I might as well find out what the fellow was all about."
What the fellow was about was a dour, insufferable, high-principled and wholly admirable political puritanism that makes a mockery of today's craven politics-by-focus-group-and-poll. John Quincy Adams could not be accused of doing merely the popular thing; he made a fetish of doing the unpopular thing. I don't say that George W. Bush bears any discernible resemblance to John Quincy Adams, beyond being a WASP son deeply proud and warmly devoted to his father.
But some Adams karma seems to drift through the American political conscience from time to time — a stiffening breeze, or maybe just a wistful reference on the wind. Go back to 1956. Look at the preface to Senator John F. Kennedy's book called "Profiles in Courage." It begins: "Since first reading — long before I entered the Senate — an account of John Quincy Adams and his struggle with the Federalist party, I have been interested in the problems of political courage in the face of constituent pressures, and the light shed on those problems by past statesmen."
Kennedy's book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, stands up well on rereading — should, in fact, be required reading for everyone in politics and the commentariat. It might reintroduce them to the bracing idea of moral independence, the idea of telling popularity, money and the media to go to hell. Kennedy studied the behavior of politicians (Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Robert A. Taft, and others) who took profoundly principled but unpopular stands, even at the risk of their own careers.
Kennedy (or Ted Sorensen, his "research assistant" and speechwriter, whom some have suspected of having been the real author of "Profiles") had, among other things, an eye for the lethal quotation. Some of the quotes still carry a deadly pertinence. I am fond of something young Senator John Quincy Adams remarked in his diary: "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party that not to follow blindfolded the one or the other is an expiable offense... If I cannot hope to give satisfaction to my country, I am at least determined to have the approbation of my own reflections."
That's how I feel when I contemplate, on the one hand, the unclean, unsatisfactory records of Gale Norton and John Ashcroft, and on the other hand, the baying politburo of correctness (NOW and the People for the American Way, and all the rest) that is arrayed against Norton and Ashcroft, ready to throw acid in their faces. What a collection altogether.
But reading has its consolations. "Profiles" is a treasurehouse of old American invective. A veteran senator, instructing an incoming freshman, catalogues his colleagues as they walk down the Senate aisle: "The jackal; the vulture; the sheep-killing dog; the gorilla; the crocodile...."
William Allen White describes the Senate of the same era as "plutocratic feudalism." The description holds. Who could resist Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, who, on the day a colleague in the Senate accused him of being quarrelsome, replied: "Mr. President, sir... I never quarrel, sir. But sometimes I fight, sir, and whenever I fight, sir, a funeral follows, sir."
Do you think there is a politician among us who would fit John Randolph of Roanoke's classic description of Henry Clay?: "A being so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks."
Sometimes the whole system looks and smells like a mackerel by moonlight.