A Secretary of State

I guess I'll just be all right-wingy today and offer another link to National Review and its item on the passing of Ronald Reagan's second Secretary of State, George Schulz.

I suppose I could be noting this because Schulz represents a professionalism of diplomacy combined with the highest regard for the interests of the United States, something a lot of his successors since 1988 have lacked. And he represented it in a way unlike the ossified self-replicating bureaucracy that so many government agencies and their employees work hard to build.

But really I'm noting it because the former Secretary was the commencement speaker at my college graduation. I was a journalism school graduate and also pretty liberal at the time, so my appreciation of the moment was not what it might have been a little later in life. But I do recall the way Schulz offered a paragraph or so for each school in the university, including my own. He singled us out as having prepared and trained to receive a great trust as the way by which the people's representatives could be kept honest and the people themselves could learn about the world.

Today we might wonder why a Republican Secretary of State would hold the press in such high esteem, but once upon a time we had public officials who understood that they worked for the public and newspeople who understood that a great part of their mission was to serve that same public and make sure our hired employees were doing the jobs for which they were hired.

Not all of the employees thought that way, not even back then (Col. North! Nice to see you again). Nor was the adversarial relationship always comfortable. But the people complaining about the way the newspeople were doing their jobs were pointing out how they were not living up to the standards they'd set for themselves instead of calling them names and herding them around with cordons and rope barricades. And the newspeople themselves saw their jobs as revealing the truth rather than being the Resistance! against an Evil! Dictator! With! Bad! Hair!

It is the way of the middle-aged to remember just enough of their younger years and understand just enough of their current years to draw comparisons unfavorable to the latter. But that way is not always wrong.