Hand in Hand for America

Today, November 17, Barack Obama and John McCain will meet to discuss how to work together to solve the overwhelming problems facing the United States. The news comes as a breath of fresh air to Americans who have been exhausted and disgusted by years of vicious partisan politics.

It may seem to some that this meeting between the president-elect and the senator is an historic one. And it is. But John McCain will not be the first statesman to set aside his personal disappointment to work for the betterment of America.

When Dwight Eisenhower was nominated as the Republican candidate for president, he beat Sen. Robert Taft, son of President William Howard Taft. Taft’s lifelong dream had been to follow his father into the White House. But Bob Taft had served with a rigid integrity that refused to allow him to bow to expediency. He took stands that were politically unpopular, and it cost him the presidency. (See his chapter in John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.) He once remarked that “tact was for people who knew they were wrong.”

Despite the loss of his party’s nomination, Taft felt personally responsible to prepare Congress for Ike’s extensive new legislative program. Three weeks after Eisenhower was sworn in as president, Senator Taft went to Augusta, Georgia to confer with him. Afterwards, the two avid golfers went out for a few holes of golf. It was during this game that unsettling symptoms hit this powerful man. By the seventh hole, his hip hurt, and he was having trouble breathing.

Before long, Senator Taft was in the hospital where, after exhaustive tests, it was determined he had a rare form of cancer. In eight weeks Taft would be dead. He would work almost until the end. Before he died, the senator insisted, “I’ve got to snap out of this in a hurry now! Eisenhower needs me.”

It takes men of extreme patriotism to set aside egos and get on with the business at hand. John McCain, too, has always been a man of extreme patriotism. As a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he survived five and a half years of beatings, solitary confinement, starvation, dysentery and unset broken limbs, in torment the rest of us cannot bring ourselves even to imagine.

His comment upon returning to the States? “If I have to leave the Navy, I hope to serve the Government in some capacity…I had a lot of time to think over there, and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life—along with a man’s family—is to make some contribution to his country.” The entire country knows how hard John McCain has worked. And his contribution is to continue.

Go, John. This country needs you. Come together with President-elect Obama, and help heal this country.

Siblings of Barack Obama

For years, Doug Wead and I have been researching the siblings of the U.S. presidents for the third in the trilogy of the lives of presidential families. The first one was All the Presidents’ Children, and the second was The Raising of a President, about the parents. Both were fascinating to research, and I found special favorites that touch me, even now, years after publication.

I thought the lives of presidential siblings would be a yawn. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It has been like thumbing through some National Presidential Enquirer. Drunkards and wastrels, patriots and preachers and poets.

Now, with the election of the most astounding political year ever upon us, we looked at the siblings of the candidates. Does Barack Obama have any siblings? What do his siblings do? Where do they live? Who are they?

Frankly, I had to make a chart (as I did to figure out which of George Washington’s siblings were born to whom.)

Obama’s siblings offer a completely different challenge.

First of all, he has no full siblings. But half siblings? It’s hard even to figure out how many there are.

As we know, Barack Obama’s mother was Stanley Ann Dunham, who was a white woman from Kansas, completely committed to improving the lives of people who had no hope. (Those of us who were in the Peace Corps or who work in international relief and development know exactly how passionate she was. It requires passion to do that work.)

His father was Barack Obama, Sr., a Kenyan goat-herder who managed to get to the United States, study at the University of Hawaii and at Harvard, and eventually become a Kenyan government economist.

The couple met and married in Hawaii, and Barack, Jr. came along, only to be left behind by his father when he was two, when his parents divorced.

Now comes the chart.

I. Before Dad Obama came to the U.S., he had a wife in Kenya named Grace Kezia.

1. Malik Abongo (Roy) Obama

2. Auma Obama (Grace Kezia was pregnant with Auma when Dad Obama left for the U.S.)

3. Abo Obama (born after Dad Obama returned to Kenya)

4. Bernard Obama (perhaps) (See #V below.)

II. Ann Dunham Obama and Barack Obama, Sr.

1. Barack Obama, Jr.

III. Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro and Lolo Soetoro

1. Maya Soetoro Ng

IV. When Ann and Barack Sr. split up, he went to Harvard, where he married a woman named Ruth Nidesand and took her back to Kenya. Drunk, he beat her and visited his first wife, so Ruth divorced him.

1. Mark Ndesandjo

2. David Ndesandjo (was killed in a motorcycle accident.)

V. When Dad Obama returned to Kenya with his new wife, Ruth, he would occasionally go visit his old wife, Grace Kezia. But Grace was also in a relationship with another man. So, when he had her next son, it is unknown which was the father.

1. Bernard Obama

VI. Barack Obama Sr, and Unknown

1. George Obama

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you more about them.

History Detective

As much joy as I felt in the Jefferson Library, I doubled that when I learned that one of my presidential siblings had moved to Missouri in 1820! Now that I live near the University of Missouri libraries (oh, great joy! So many books; so little time!) I haunt the stacks and the files of the Missouri Historical Society Library!

My sibling is Joseph Jones Monroe, the youngest brother of President James Monroe. Couldn’t do a thing in his life except rack up bills that he expected his presidential brother to pay–which President Monroe did, to the detriment of his own family. Finally, enough was enough, and Joseph headed west. It was the time of the Missouri Compromise state, and it was a personal Missouri compromise between the brothers. Joseph would go west, and President James would never, ever again pay any of his brother’s bills.

Joseph went to a town named Franklin, right on the banks (literally, with no flood protection) of the Missouri River. Growing up, my high school played basketball against New Franklin, three miles away. I knew there was an Old Franklin that had been washed away by the river, but I knew nothing more than that. Imagine my delight to find that Old Franklin had been quite the kicking town! Santa Fe Trail started there; Kit Carson rebelled against his apprenticeship to a saddler and took off for parts west at age 16. The famous artist George Caleb Bingham’s father had a hotel there, and a young, 9-year-old George aided the painter of the presidents, Chester Harding, as he painted the only two portraits of Daniel Boone done from life. Ole Dan’l died before they were completed. A land office was opened there to sell all the Howard County land obtained by the Louisiana Purchase. It was a place ripe for duels and shoot-outs and lawsuits–and an Eden for lawyers. Our Joseph Monroe set up shop there, along with future governors and supreme court judges and other Missouri leaders–and Dabney Carr, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law.

Joseph’s son-in-law was a man named Edward Cabell. Edward married Harriett Forbes Monroe back in Virginia and they moved west, landing in the area before Joseph Monroe did. A prominent family, it was a Cabell who was a prime mover with Thomas Jefferson in the founding the University of Virginia. Cabells were governors and senators. Edward’s own sister gave birth to a future vice president of the United States.

Edward and Harriett moved upriver to a town named Chariton, a place where, earlier, the Lewis and Clark expedition had landed. Because the mosquitoes were so bad, they got right back in their boats and moved on! Not a good place for a town. Many of the citizens became deathly ill–or died–from mosquito-borne malaria. Chariton eventually got washed away, too. But while it existed, Chariton was the first county seat for Chariton County, and Edward Cabell was named the first Circuit Clerk, a job he held for 30 years, as well as being named the first County Clerk. In the 1880’s, their son gave a speech to an Old Settlers’ Reunion, and said that for years, his father could carry all the papers of the court around in his hat. He told that his mother had hand-sewn the first Chariton County court books from quires of foolscap.

I traveled to the Chariton County Court House to see those first records. It was truly a trip to hold those 1820 records in my hands. At first, I thought I would be disappointed. The first record book looked like something that had been professionally bound. Then I opened it. There, inside, was the index to that record book, a small foolscap booklet, handsewn. I was holding in my hands what Harriett Monroe Cabell had carefully prepared in 1820. I was holding in my hands history.

The Real Meaning of Noblesse Oblige

My favorite English teacher, a tough, old-fashioned broad named Miss Edna Stewart, spent an entire high school class period discussing the meaning and obligation of noblesse oblige. It was the motto of the National Honor Society, so she was trying to get the ethics of it through our thick skulls. It is the class period I have never forgotten.

Noblesse oblige literally translates to “nobility obligates.” It implies that with wealth, power and prestige come social responsibilities; it is a moral obligation to act with honor, kindliness and generosity.

The term is often used sarcastically, implying that one is a hypocrite by doing a service because one has to, or by being condescending while doing it. My mother used to refer to that kind of attitude as being a “Lady Bountiful,” doing good deeds because you’re special, to make yourself feel better and make others feel bad at the same time.

For citizens of America, true noblesse oblige has nothing to do with high birth, power or prestige. True noblesse oblige is a responsibility for all of us who have been given the benefits of living in a free land, founded on the highest principles. If we, as a country, miss the mark, it is no reflection on the founding principles. It means we have the responsibility to use our energies and intelligence to return to basics and fix it.

When I was in college, I remember the speeches of John F. Kennedy, and how they touched each of us at depth. Every one of us wanted to serve the country, to make it better, to “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Frankly, I felt that same way when I heard Barack Obama’s speech the evening of Super Tuesday. It brought tears to my eyes and made me want to be a better person.

A modern day mystic, Andrew Harvey, is teaching a concept called “Sacred Activism.” It doesn’t mean we all get on board and volunteer to solve one particular problem. What it does mean is that we seek to find the problem that breaks our heart, and then work like blue blazes to fix that. That may mean education, or health care, or violence in our communities, or any of a million other evils.

But it does mean that we enter into that true spirit of noblesse oblige–and do it. It is the only answer for our country, and our world.

First Lady Abigail Adams once wrote to her son, John Quincy Adams, “These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed…The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this… Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherways lay dormant, wake into life, and form the character of the hero and the statesman.”

We do not need to be wealthy, or powerful, or president to be a hero. We merely need to act, with honor, and with a loving and ethical heart.

New book, working title “In the Midst of Greatness.”

The next book is about the siblings of the presidents, and I have been working on the first Virginia presidents for the past few months; went to Virginia and was in heaven in all the homes and museums–and the Jefferson Library. When I came out of the library into the wild freshness of a Virginia winter, I was so filled with joy I wanted to twirl around like Julie Andrews on a mountaintop.

I am continually astounded at how the presidents–and often their families, too–gave everything they had for this country, usually winding up in disastrous debt and dying in poverty. I keep thinking of George Washington’s sister and brother-in-law, Betty and Fielding Lewis. Fielding gave his entire fortune to build an ammunition and gun factory, and died just days after he learned of Cornwallis’ defeat. Betty had little after his death, but what a blessing they learned about America’s victory before he died.

Would I have been willing to give up everything for a new country? Would I have been a sunshine patriot? I don’t know. But I do know that I, too,–and we–have a sacred responsibility to this country…now, more than ever.

Americans choose!

This morning, I headed out of a shop and said, “I’ve got to go vote now.” Before I reached the door, I was filled with elation. I turned back and said, “No, I GET to go vote now.”

On this Super Tuesday, for the first time in history, we have Hillary Clinton, a woman, Barack Obama, a Black American, John McCain, a former prisoner of war, and Mitt Romney, a Mormon. And they are all viable candidates. We, as Americans, get to choose among them, and others. It is an exciting day.

We must vote with our minds and hearts, sincerely choosing what we believe to be the highest and best for our country. We must not be affected by exit polls or any other ruses that might skew our decisions.

Back in 1948, Harry Truman spoke about polls: “These polls,” he said, “are like sleeping pills designed to lull the voters into sleeping on election day. You might call them ’sleeping polls.’” His opponent “keeps handing out these sleeping polls, and some people have been taking them. This doctor keeps telling the people, ‘Don’t worry, take a poll and go to sleep.’ But most of the people are not being fooled.”

I encourage all of us, as faithful Americans, not to go to sleep today. Today, WE get to choose.