REMEMBERING “the way it used to be” is a favorite pastime of the people in my tribe. We are the retired, the old people, the people who don’t have to get up in the morning anymore to go to work. Whenever I’m in the Washington Area as I have been this week, the remembering becomes more than a pastime. I am driven by some unseen but keenly felt impulse to go see the places where I once worked and played to know if the paths I once walked are the same today as they were three and four decades ago and if the houses are still there that once guided me to the driveway that led to my own house. Our house in those days was the headmaster’s residence on the campus of Potomac School where I worked. I went back there today by myself just to see how it felt to walk around where people who are now old enough to be members of AARP were once children and adolescents playing and studying all around me when I was a man in middle age. Neither they nor I dreamed a world that is the one we know today. They were the children of government bureaucrats and elected and appointed government representatives from both parties. The children of Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy, both now dead, seemed not to know or care that their fathers were stalwarts in different political parties. When the Watergate Scandal rocked Washington and the nation, the children of principal players on both sides of the political divide studied and played happily together as if it didn’t matter that some of their parents were known as Democrats and some were known as Republicans. When Republican President Richard Nixon ordered his Secretary of State Eliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox because Cox was demanding that certain incriminating tapes be handed over to his office, I remember how the Republican Secretary of State sat in his car all afternoon at a picnic hosted by a family of Democrats and attended by a dozen or so of us who were both Democrats and Republicans and composed his resignation from his high office rather than comply with the President’s order. All of us knew that what was happening was shaking the very foundations of our Republic, but we didn’t know exactly what it was; nevertheless, everybody, Republicans and Democrats, remained cordial at picnics and luncheons and dinner parties and school programs. Republicans and Democrats ate together in the Senate Dining Room while across town at Potomac School and at other schools in the area their children grew up through the childhood years believing that their parents were committed to making our government of the people work for all the people.
We got through those difficult times. We will get through this present unsettled period and will be a stronger nation on the other side of it because we are blessed with a good system that makes compromise possible. Compromise is something we have rediscovered several times since the nation was founded around a remarkable constitution.
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