Not Finding Heroes, We Are the Poorer

Shortly after her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote: “For Jack, history was full of heroes. . . . Jack had this hero idea of history.� How quaint she seems, how naive and sentimental. Now Jack frolics in the White House pool with call girls and plots how best to kill Fidel Castro. We listen on the White House phone as Lyndon Johnson bullies, to tapes of Richard Nixon as he swears and vows revenge. We read descriptions of our president’s penis. For us, there are no heroes. That is the deeper meaning of Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot.�

Thomas Jefferson is the president with a slave mistress, Albert Einstein the scientist who mistreated his wife, Mozart the careless genius who liked to talk dirty. Historians remind us that Robert E. Lee was cold, Abraham Lincoln passive, Franklin Roosevelt devious. A recent biography of Mother Teresa asserts that she took money from dictators and mistreated subordinates. Its title: “The Missionary Position.�

There is in some ages a predilection to deny greatness and drag down heroes. We live in such an age. In America at the end of the century, no one is admirable, no one unblemished, no one on a pedestal. Mistrustful of myths, we prefer full disclosure. Skeptical of virtue, we easily find flaws. Instead of educating our children by exemplary lives, we offer them cautionary tales.

It was not always so. “Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,� wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a poem once familiar to generations of Americans. Until World War I, the ideology of heroism was intact and influential in Anglo-American culture. It permeated parlors, schools, farms and factories. It could be found in novels and newspapers and eulogies; in McGuffey’s “Readers� and in the sermons of Phillips Brooks; on statues everywhere, in inscriptions on public buildings and engraved on tombstones. It could be seen in the names parents chose for their children. The ideology of heroism molded Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stonewall Jackson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It shaped Andrew Carnegie, Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who was raised on the book “Great Men and Famous Women.�

Of course Longfellow and his readers knew their heroes were not perfect. Even so, they believed that heroes instruct us in greatness, that heroes remind us of our better and braver selves, that without heroes the American past loses meaning and the idea of historical progress is questioned. They also believed that heroes strengthen the ordinary citizen trying to live decently. Maybe our Victorian forbears were too stuffy and too sentimental, too credulous and too preachy, but today it is the scornful who prevail.

It is easy to blame others: politicians who lie to us and let us down, journalists who obliterate privacy and offer only bad news, an intelligentsia that likes to mock, an entertainment industry that thrives on shock. But we all are complicitous. We have created a culture that is cynical, sneering, leering; a culture in which our children are denied permission to admire. We have given free rein to envy, to our desire to tarnish and tear down; and shortchanged our instinct to emulate, to look up, to admire. Not finding heroes, we have succumbed to scorn.

Perhaps it is inevitable that an information revolution will create the impression that sleaze is omnipresent and nothing is sacred. When all archives are open, all conversations recorded, all secrets told, can anyone be exemplary? Maybe our preoccupation with sex and the intimate life makes nobility impossible. Maybe in a democracy there can be no veneration, nil admirari.

Will our children become such devotees of the dark side that they forget that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, that Mozart composed the C Minor Mass or that John F. Kennedy wrote “Profiles in Courage� and resolved the Cuban missile crisis? In the early part of our century, gossip columnist Walter Winchell quipped: “Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else’s ass.� Could he be right?