Observations: Political Decency

The recent killings by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota and the Trump administration’s immediate response to those awful events have led me to reflect on how decent leaders have responded to awful crises in the past.

I find myself thinking about the time in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Cities around the country erupted in uncontrollable violence. Robert F. Kennedy, running for President, was in Indiana giving a couple of campaign speeches. After learning of the killing,  he decided to address the crowd as he reached Indianapolis. 

Speaking off the cuff from a podium mounted on a flatbed truck, Kennedy spoke for about 6 minutes in one of the most powerful speeches in American history. He told the crowd about King’s death. As people screamed in disbelief, he reminded them of King’s commitment to non-violence and compassion. He asked them to “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.” 

And then he quoted the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

As cities around the country reacted in fury, Indianapolis remained calm – a testament to Kennedy’s words.

In 2015, after an assassin had killed nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy for one of the victims. In the course of his remarks, he recited the words of the beautiful hymn “Amazing Grace,” before breaking down, unprompted, and singing the hymn himself. It was an extraordinary act of decency in the face of awful horror.

And now we have the Trump administration’s response to the two terrible killings of peaceful demonstrators in Minnesota. Last month, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, a mother of three. As she was protesting ICE actions, and then began to leave, three shots left her dead. Almost immediately before any investigation had taken place, the Trump administration blamed her for the killing. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem called Good’s involvement an act of “domestic terrorism,” and Vice President J.D. Vance was quick to call her a victim of “left wing ideology.”

More recently, about two weeks ago, ICE agents shot and killed Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. He, too, had been protesting ICE actions – peacefully – but federal officials immediately called him a domestic terrorist carrying a semi-automatic handgun. Photos show him with a phone in his hand, not a gun, but no matter. He was dead.

Politics is persuasion. But for persuasion to have any power, it needs to rely on the truth. The current administration has lost that commitment to the truth. Reflect for just a moment on the unfounded charges, in the last campaign, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about American propaganda in World War II, which was dominated by a “strategy of truth.” This was to counter what Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was doing with German propaganda. In the years that followed, the Voice of America, now shuttered by President Donald Trump, held to the same commitment to truth.

Truth lies at the heart of political decency. Those examples from the past – of Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, to mention but a few – make me long for a time when our political world subscribes to the decency that is so important to us all. 

Allan M. Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.