Retired teacher, Helen Nichols from Nebraska, decided recently to let out all of her frustrations against George W. Bush in a book. It’s titled, Open Letter to George W. Bush: Including a Great Number of Select Quotations.
She’s onto her second book as we speak. Here’s Helen…
What inspired you to write Open Letter to George W. Bush?
I didn’t set out to write a letter initially. It was actually something out of character for me to do. Ordinarily I’m a very private person, especially when it comes to politics.
I first began collecting quotations about two years ago in a small spiral notebook. I did it for the same reasons my older daughter and her husband watch “The Daily Show�—for therapy and release, a sort of antidote to what was (is) going on. The quotations helped me deal with my growing anger and grief over the changes rapidly transforming our country. If someone a few years back had predicted that the United States would change so drastically in such a short time, I would not have believed it possible.
I began to wonder why more people weren’t aggressively questioning those changes, especially the war in Iraq. Helen Thomas asked that question in a recent editorial—why more clergy and others weren’t speaking out about this war as many had during the Vietnam War. I’m sure numerous church leaders have given many sermons on the theme that we all believe in the same God, but Helen Thomas is right—there hasn’t been a huge public outcry from our religious leaders about the war—or about rising inequality in America or torture or secret overseas prisons.
Karl Rove’s “Politics of Fear� seemed to be working beautifully for the Bush administration—even in our places of worship. Patriotism and docility eventually over the past few years became—if not synonymous—somehow linked in many people’s minds it seemed. I heard and continue to hear over and over again from our friends and acquaintances, “We are afraid to speak out.�
Among the many quotations in my notebook, there is one by the late Carl Sagan from Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, published in 1997:
“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient
for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the
long term.�
One day while reading that quotation again I paid closer attention to it and thought more deeply about what it meant, and then I decided I no longer wanted to remain silent. I imagined one of my four grandchildren saying to me sometime in the future, “You had the opportunity like everyone else to speak up but you didn’t. Why?�
At first I thought I would take the “safer approach� and type up the quotations in my notebook and send them to President Bush. My friends and acquaintances aren’t the only ones who have experienced fear of this administration. I felt that way each time I sent letters to the editor of our local newspaper criticizing the Bush administration. I had the foolish notion that the president would find inspiration in the quotations, perhaps even experience some kind of eureka moment in which he would suddenly stop and question his actions. Most of [the quotations] are from his predecessors and other political leaders.
But then I decided he probably wouldn’t find them as inspiring or therapeutic as I had. Some of them would no doubt have made him angry. What I needed was interstitial material. To make it more interesting and appealing—I hoped anyway—I decided to put it in the form of a letter.
Finally, after completing the letter, I decided not to send it at first. It was ridiculous for me to think he would ever read it. I reasoned that if he wouldn’t meet with Cindy Sheehan—whose son Casey was killed in Iraq—and listen to what she had to say, why would he listen to a nobody from Nebraska criticizing his political practice? I didn’t want to throw it away; it had taken me months to write. That’s when I decided to publish it as an open letter.
Have you always been political?
I first became real interested in politics when John F. Kennedy ran for president. I wasn’t yet old enough to vote in 1960, but I followed the election with great interest on my family’s black and white TV.
He was a charismatic leader, which is what I believe people find so appealing in Barack Obama. I hope he will run for president in ‘08. He may lack seniority, as some people have pointed out, but we probably have more years of combined seniority on Capitol Hill now than we’ve ever had before and look what a mess our nation is in. A president with charisma who speaks the language of diplomacy is exactly what we need in the White House.
President Kennedy was a skillful diplomat. “We must never negotiate out of fear,� he said, “but we must never fear to negotiate.� I was a junior in high school when the Cuban missile crisis occurred. I remember sitting in Mr. Grossie’s typing class, tapping the keys along with twenty or so other students, trying to stay in tempo with the Big Band record he had chosen for that morning. (That was his teaching method for speeding up our words-per-minute rate). And I remember thinking it was idiotic for us to be typing in sync with that old fashioned record when we were all going to die —along with every other living thing on earth.
I felt anger and sadness over the unfairness of it, that everyone in that typing class would not have the opportunity of beginning the life we had been anticipating sixteen or more years. I feel a similar mixture of anger and grief when I see almost nightly on the “Lehrer News Hour� the faces of men and women—many of them look like kids to me—who have lost their lives in Iraq.
As everyone knows, Kennedy handled the crisis without launching a pre-emptive missile strike—or we wouldn’t be here today. He didn’t launch a Fear Campaign beforehand either or use a color-coded system to ratchet our fear to even higher levels. He seemed to intuit that our nation’s fear level was already off the chart.
I can only imagine the fear and the nightmares children in America today must experience after hearing our leaders in the White House engaging in yet more fear mongering, or after catching even occasional glimpses of the war on television news programs. I often pull the plug on their fear mongering when my grandkids are around; I won’t watch the news when they’re here at our house.
In this past midterm election our nation witnessed the “political awakening� of millions of our young people—and the re-awakening of older voters. Many young people voted for the first time this last November 7th. Unlike what some of them may have thought, their votes made a difference. People suddenly seemed to realize something Franklin D. Roosevelt said sometime in the ‘30s: “The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.�
Voters of all ages did unusual things this time around, especially for a midterm election. Many raised and/or gave more money than they’d ever given before, digging deep into their pockets. Others knocked on doors or made telephone calls, and still others wrote letters to editors of their local newspapers.
As I mentioned earlier, I did something politically unusual in writing my letter. I had never before during any previous administration even considered the audacious idea of providing a president a critique of his administration. But these have been unusual times, and this has been the most unusual administration I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.
What I have been feeling in recent years, and perhaps what other people have also been feeling, is similar to the culture shock some say they experience when visiting a foreign country and everyone around them is speaking another language. In a short time the Bush administration began deconstructing America and some of the things we stood for, including our ideal of making a better life for everyone, our Constitutional laws and our international treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter regarding torture and our treatment of prisoners of war. America, under this administration, suddenly seemed in a number of ways to me like a foreign country.
What became increasingly obvious, however—especially this past year—was the growing passion and the rising anger of an increasing number of people all across the United States. They seemed to want to say to anyone on Capitol Hill who would listen, “Wait a minute, this isn’t the America I wanted for my children—or my grandchildren.�
We said it on November 7th. Now we’ll see what this new Congress will do and whether it will have the backbone to stop the Bush administration’s abuses of power.
What do you see as being the underlying message of An Open Letter to George W. Bush?
The message I wanted to convey to President Bush is summed up in a quotation in the letter from the highly respected jurist Learned Hand. He was the son and grandson of judges. He lived from 1872 to 1961. He wrote a book in 1959 called The Spirit of Liberty in which he said, “The fathers who contrived and passed the Constitution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.�
President Bush has taken our nation in a different direction from that eloquently stated by Justice Learned Hand. This administration, we discovered, was engaging in secret surveillance of American citizens supposedly protected by Constitutional laws and more recent FISA laws; using a powerful political tool called bill signing statements hundreds of times over while vetoing only a single bill during the past six years; failing to keep a wall of separation between church and state; sending people to secret overseas prisons—among other things.
In my letter I call President Bush’s economic policy a “Welfare Program for the Wealthy.� His cuts in education, job skills training, research grants, and social and economic programs that benefited the poor and middle class have also taken our country in the wrong direction: backwards. The huge wealth gap in our nation is creating economic and social conditions that existed in the 1890s.
I don’t believe our founders envisioned economic power becoming increasingly concentrated among the wealthy the way it is now. Bush’s Welfare Program for the Wealthy, with its billions in tax windfalls making some of them hyper rich, has enabled greater numbers of heirs and heiresses than ever before to live off their wealth and to forego working a single day their entire lives if they so choose.
Given a recent incident, however, I would revise a small part of my book in which I lumped all the hyper rich together and labeled them robber barons. Warren Buffett lives in an unpretentious house about two miles from us among teachers, plumbers, artists, small business owners, and other working families. I owe him an apology: He is no robber baron. He recently donated $40 billion to the Gates Foundation.
Did you send President Bush a copy of the book?
Yes.
Did you get a response?
No. But I did get a nice letter from Al Gore, which I gave to my grandson. One of his hobbies is collecting autographs of living presidents and other political figures. I told him Vice President Gore was elected in 2000, but thanks to one Supreme Court vote he never got the chance to serve out his presidency.
One of the most gratifying letters I received about the book came from a high school teacher in Wisconsin. She wrote to say that she was having her students write letters to President Bush.
Getting back to your question: As I mention in the book, when I told my moderate Republican friend Mary that I was undertaking the project of writing a very long and highly critical letter to the president, she became afraid for me. She believes someone in the Bush administration has added my name to some kind of special list for traitors or non-patriots or whatever they would call such a list if it exists.
After I sent a copy of the book to President Bush, she kept asking for weeks afterward if I had gotten any word from him yet. I told her it was unlikely, as secretive as his administration has been, that he would send me an official letter on White House stationery notifying me that I’m on the list she worries so much about. If I am, I’m proud to be among excellent company far more politically astute than I.
I also sent copies of my book to the Chair and Vice Chair of each state’s Democratic Party about six weeks before the election. In most of them I used a yellow highlighting pen to draw their attention to a quotation from Aristotle’s Politics: “Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own political party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.� I wanted to convey the message that it would be wise for Democrats to follow that bit of ancient advice and take the “high road,� steering candidates away from extreme partisanship and dirty politicking which, if not destroying our nation, was certainly doing nothing to strengthen it. In my opinion they have decided (post-election) to take too high a road. I was disappointed when Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment is not an option.
How do you think President Bush will be represented and written about in American history books to come?
I think that historians, political analysts and writers will be asking a great number of questions about this administration for many years to come. The kinds of questions the old Congress should have been asking all along but failed to do so. I think a question mark will be attached to the Bush administration’s “legacy� for a long, long time—depending, of course, on what this new Congress will do, whether it will begin asking questions and demanding answers and greater accountability and transparency from this administration.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to begin investigation hearings on warrantless wiretapping sometime after the new Congress convenes in January. I hope it will be aggressive in its investigation and will not shrink from its oversight duties. If the new Congress were to initiate a full investigation into the Bush administration’s abuses of power over the past few years, it would finally begin to bring our nation out of the environment of fear this presidency has kept us in for too long.
“Abuse� is a term used to describe the actions of this administration over and over again for the last several years. They violated Constitutional laws, conferring upon themselves lopsided powers our founders never intended for the executive branch—during war or peace. “I am the decider,� President Bush insists. An imbalance of power within the executive branch of our government sets a dangerous precedent for future abuse. How will other presidents choose to interpret their powers as commanders-in-chief if this imbalance is allowed to continue? And from which of our other laws might they choose to exempt themselves?
Under the Military Commissions Act passed in October, President Bush has the power to detain anyone as an “unlawful enemy combatant.� Once arrested that person has no legal right to challenge his detention—or the right to a trial. This further shift in power means that American citizens only have privileges conferred upon us by the president—not rights guaranteed by more than two hundred years of Constitutional law. The Military Commissions Act violates the Third Geneva Convention and thus our Constitution.
Other areas that should be included in a thorough investigation by the new Congress include: Torture scandals and secret overseas prisons. The Bush administration’s failure to respond to a national disaster following Hurricane Katrina. The “misleading� of the American people about the reason for going to war with Iraq. Bush swore to American citizens and to Congress that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That was his administration’s single legal argument for invading and occupying Iraq. Historians will be analyzing that, alone, for some time to come.
When Representative Pelosi said that impeachment is not an option, I believe she spoke for the old Congress and (perhaps) not for the new one. There were exceptions—independent thinkers who did not cringe before our self-appointed royalists in the White House—but, in general, the old Congress lacked the backbone to stand up to the abuses in the executive branch and became, in a way, enablers.
Until November 7th the American people were, generally speaking, hapless bystanders watching the train wreck, with little or no recourse to stop the Bush administration’s abuses of power. Nor were we able in many instances of abuse to persuade the old Congress to stiffen its backbone and do its job—to use its checks and balances powers to require accountability from this administration. But now a new Congress will convene in January. And grassroots political organizations such as After Downing Street and others are continuing to collect signatures for impeachment.
If the new Congress were to decide to proceed with impeachment, it would not be impeaching two mere men: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It would be impeaching a president and a vice president who not once but many times violated their oaths of office and abused the power entrusted to them by the American people. It would send a message to the men and women who will hold those offices in the future that such behavior will not be tolerated.
Impeachment is a powerful political tool whose purpose is to help maintain our republic as our founders carefully and wisely created it—for generations far into the future—and to help protect it from elected officials who would abuse their power in office. If the new Congress will not bring an impeachment resolution against this administration, then the question arises as to whether our government would ever possibly use impeachment again in the foreseeable future. If this administration has not “earned� impeachment according to our founders’ principles and criteria, then perhaps our founders’ notion of impeachment has outlived its time and should be amended or abolished.
I don’t believe that our founders were wrong in any way in their thinking and their writing on this subject. I am hoping there will be enough independent thinkers like Senator-elect James Webb and others in the new Congress who will ask a lot of questions of this administration and inspire more senior members to do the same. Then judge from the answers they get on how to proceed. It was far too early, in my opinion, for Representative Pelosi to rule out impeachment entirely.
I would like to add a little side note before going on: A great worry to me, especially after reading articles by Seymour Hersch, is that some political analysts believe Bush and Cheney are planning to bomb Iran before the next two years end. I don’t know if impeachment proceedings would stop that from happening or not, but perhaps they would be enough of a distraction to slow Bush and Cheney down—until their time runs out.
What do you hope to see happen in the next two years of Bush’s presidency?
I would like to see the Bush administration focus all of its combined reasoning power, spend all of what remains of its political capital, make use of aggressive negotiation and diplomacy—and come up with a plan to bring peace to Iraq. I don’t believe I have ever heard Bush or Cheney use the word peace at any time during their entire administration. Perhaps just saying the word aloud over and over again will help make peace a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some Bush critics and supporters have said that he is at a crossroads now regarding Iraq (and Iran) and what he will choose to do over the next two years is partly predicated upon which father figure or figures he looks to for advice—Cheney or his Dad (and Bush Senior’s political associates like Baker and others in the Iraq Study Group).
In addition to a father figure (or figures) I think he should have a presidential motto to help guide him over the next two years and to help him come up with a plan for Iraq if he doesn’t have one already. There was something he said in his Republican National Convention speech in 2000 that would make an excellent motto: Our nation’s leaders are responsible to confront problems, not pass them on to others.� That’s very similar to Harry Truman’s presidential motto, “The buck stops here.�
That reminds me that in the summer of 2002, Colin Powell warned President Bush against bombing Iraq, citing what he thought was the Pottery Barn Rule: “You break it, you own it.� (A spokesperson at Pottery Barn immediately issued a disclaimer, stating that it was actually their policy to write off broken merchandise as a loss).
Then during the first presidential debate in 2004, John Kerry weighed in with his own version of the Pottery Barn Rule: “If you break it, you fix it.� At the time that brought up a question in my mind—a question that remains unanswered: “Who exactly will own Iraq if this administration doesn’t fix it? Our children? Our grandchildren?�
What do your grandchildren think of the book?
My eight-year-old granddaughter hasn’t commented on it yet. She has said she enjoys writing in her third grade classroom. It’s wonderful how many opportunities children have nowadays to write and to get up in front of a class and speak. No matter what type of work they decide to pursue someday, those are good skills for all young people to possess and to practice.
My eleven-year-old grandson said he is considering becoming a White House political reporter like Helen Thomas when he grows up. I told him he would have to learn to ask “tough questions� the way Helen Thomas did during the Vietnam War and nowadays with the war in Iraq. I told him that too often over the past several years it had seemed as if some in the press were taking a “kid gloves� approach to President Bush during press conferences. For whatever reason, they seemed to be afraid of him and of the vice president. That doesn’t seem to be the case so much anymore.
I told my grandson what Thomas Jefferson would have said to the press earlier on when they didn’t seem to be doing their job the way they were supposed to: “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.� That’s why he would have to learn to ask the tough questions, even if the president or vice president or anyone else he interviews is capable of evoking fear in others.
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i've been lurkiing on this site for quite some time. it's helped me articulate what i've been feeling for quite some time about the politics of this country.
THIS has to be the BEST thing i've read posted in a long time. i WILL be buying this.
thanks
nadine
i've been lurkiing on this site for quite some time. it's helped me articulate what i've been feeling for quite some time about the politics of this country.
THIS has to be the BEST thing i've read posted in a long time. i WILL be buying this.
thanks
nadine
...hmm, it's always tough when one of the children stand up to the abusive parent.
I'll stand with her (by buying her book).
--Darryl Pearce
Ventura County, CA
I could never be a White House reporter. So much completely blatant stupidity flows out of that place that I'd be able to maintain the requisite level of respect for, oh... two months.
Like when Bush said he wouldn't discuss waterboarding because it might give the terrorists ideas about how to circumvent it.
All I could think was "Are you that stupid or do you just think the American people are?"
I have trouble understanding how reporters manage to restrain themselves from saying that more often.
As for the letter thing, I have to agree; at this point, it's really hard to believe our President really cares what the citizens of this country think.
Which is pretty darn depressing, I have to say.