The ghosts of essays unwritten

The year slouches to an end, no one mourning its passing, none among us hesitating to turn the calendar page. What lies ahead is more misery in the Middle East, a dispiriting presidential campaign between two old men the country would rather not see compete again, and more debate about what constitutes hate in a country that once liked to use the phrase “good neighbor.”

We columnists, like our neighbors, look to a new year as a blank slate. Over the past several months, I’ve been accumulating notes — scratchings on little shards of paper, typed reminders in my computer files — with material that might someday provide the basis of a column. It’s illuminating to look back and see what never became an essay. Here are some oddments, revealing in their messages, that I never got to use. You might think of them as scraps of holiday wrapping paper:

— I thought I might write a column suggesting that our era, with our complaints about national leadership, is not unique, and use as evidence a 1778 letter to Gov. George Clinton of New York in which Alexander Hamilton bemoaned, “America once had a representation that would do honor to any age or nation. The present falling off is very alarming and dangerous.”

If Hamilton could complain about the “falling off” of leadership only two years after the Declaration of Independence, then we surely have the right to complain 246 years later. The young people of the Revolutionary age — James Monroe was 18, Nathan Hale and Hamilton were 21, Betsy Ross 24 and Thomas Jefferson 33 at the moment of independence — would be astonished that our presidential candidates are more than three-quarters of a century old, worn out and alienating to all but their most ardent adherents.

— I found in Alistair Horne’s captivating 2005 “La Belle France: A Short History” this reflection from Marie-Amelie, the last queen of France: “I do not know where I am anymore.”

This quote from a woman who died in 1866 captured the great transformations underway a century and a half later, when changes in media and manners swept away a world that seemed stable and fixed. This remark became especially poignant when thinking about Joe Biden, who entered the Senate when Democrats Sam Nunn, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Russell Long, Edmund Muskie, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale served alongside Republicans Edward Brooke, Pete Dominici, Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Lowell Weicker and Barry Goldwater. They were giants, bigger than our contemporary figures.

During the year, I had a conversation with my friend Stephen Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington, and in the course of discussing Biden, he said, “He’s operating in a much different world.” There was a column in Marie-Amelie’s remark and in Farnsworth’s observation. Maybe if he’s reelected, I’ll write it.

— I squirreled away this quote in reaction to the 1973 revelation that Richard Nixon had kept an “enemies list”: “Let me make it clear, because I have got to have my partisan moment,” said Weicker, who died this year. “Republicans do not cover up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.”

It’s a pity I never got to use this one. The reigning Republican calls Biden “Sleepy Joe,” labeled his challenger Nikki Haley “Birdbrain,” former Secretary of State James Mattis “the world’s most overrated general,” Barack Obama a “criminal” and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.”

— I still think there’s a good column in historian John William Ward’s characterization of the seventh president in his classic 1955 “Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age”: “The age was not his. He was the age’s.”

Ward, the former president of Amherst College, died 38 years ago, long before the great reevaluation of Jackson, a slaveholder and battler of Indigenous peoples. The description also applies to Donald Trump, who believes he’s the avatar of our age but who is instead a skilled reader of the temper of our times. Virtually alone among American figures, Trump understands the great divides in the country even though he resides on the privileged side of those divides.

— I worry that the historian Margaret Leech was speaking not only of the atmosphere as the Civil War approached but also of our own time when she wrote, in her marvelous 1941 “Reveille in Washington”, “The country was sleeping on a volcano that was ready to burst.”

No one reads Leech, who died in 1974, anymore, but she won two Pulitzer Prizes — the first woman to win a single one in history — and her observations are trenchant and, often, terrifyingly relevant. This year, the term “civil war” became part of contemporary commentary rather than historical reflection — a measure of the parlous nature of our politics and the polarization of our polity.

— If you’re wondering what my approach to columnizing is, you could do little better than to have a look at the Author’s Note at the end of David Halberstam’s 1972 “The Best and the Brightest,” which you might think of as a modern version of Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” At the end of the book, Halberstam, who died in 2007, offered a reflection about the Vietnam era that I thought might be the grain of sand around which the pearl of a column might grow: “So I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions, and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?”

That question haunts me, and perhaps you, as this year comes to an end. What is it about our leaders, about their and our attitudes, the country, its institutions, and above all the era in which we live that has allowed this American tragedy to take place? That is the question I hope we confront next year — in columns like this one, on the campaign trail, at the debates and in the quiet of the polling place.

One more thing: I reserve the right to use these themes, and these quotes. Join me in 2024 to see if I do, and if circumstances justify their use. Happy new year.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.