“Night Among Heroes” Awards Dinner – Keynote by Denis Hayes posted: 11/18/2009

“Night Among Heroes” Awards Dinner

Thomas Wales Foundation

Keynote Address

                                                                        Denis Hayes

                                                                        November 15, 2008

Well, the election is now over.  George Bush will be out of office and Barack Obama will be President in 65 days, 14 hours, and 23 minutes.

And, as David Letterman said the night following the election, “I think I speak for most Americans when I say, anybody mind if he starts a little early?”

The election seemed to go on for years and years.

We might learn something from our friends to the north. 

On October 14, the Canadian national election was held, returning Steven Harper as Prime Minister.  Campaigning began a few weeks earlier, on September 8. 

Canadian elections remind me of Cialis ads:  If your election lasts more than two weeks, it might indicate a serious problem. . . .

Our elections last a bit longer.  But the years of campaigning do sometimes produce memorable statements. 

Barack Obama saying, ‘We are the change that we seek.’

John McCain saying, ‘I would rather lose an election than lose a war.’

Sarah Palin saying, ‘Do you have this in size 6?’

To the delight of conservationists, Sarah Palin has now been tagged and reintroduced into the wild. 

“We are the change we seek.”   Barack Obama’s mantra will be recognized, at least by those of a certain age, as derivative of Ghandi’s “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”

Tonight we are gathered to pay honor to five heroes who embody with their whole lives the values that they hold.  All have brought about vitally important changes for the better. 

Betsy Lieberman. 

Craig Rennebohm

Chris Fontana

My old friend, colleague, and sometimes alter ego, K C Golden

and this year’s very deserving winner of the Thomas C Wales Award: Harry Schneider. 

Any of these very accomplished people could have, in any given year, been awarded the Wales Award.  But it is particularly fitting that it went this year to Harry Schneider, for reasons I will get to in a couple of minutes.  But as a glimpse of where we are going:

In Bertolt Brecht’s play, “Life of Galileo,” Andrea says:  “Unhappy the land that has no heroes!

To which Galileo replies:  “No.  Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”

America, during the reign of the Bush Administration, became an unhappy land that needed heroes.  And nowhere was this more powerfully true than of our need for courageous attorneys who were willing to stand up and fight back against egregious attempts to cast aside the rule of law. 

So we are gathered here this evening for a night among heroes. . . .

The word “Hero” has its roots in ancient Greece:  

It’s root meaning is “protector,” “defender,” or “guardian.” 

Homer advanced the concept of heroism with heroes like Odysseus—who overcame adversity to prevail against great odds.  Odysseus was an extraordinary man—clever, charismatic, physical—but his most truly “heroic” traits could be aspired to by anyone:  He was courageous.  He never gave up. 

When Giuseppe Garibaldi set about creating the State of Italy, he advertised memorably for “heroes:”  “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions,” he wrote.  (Sounds a lot like a job description for an environmental group!)  Instead, Garibaldi offered “hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death.  Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me.”

Heroism is a state of mind, a quality of action—not necessarily a description of victory.  Sometimes heroes don’t prevail. Les Miserables describes the aftermath of the battle with a song called “Empty chairs at empty tables,” the essence of which is:

“Phantom faces at the window

“Phantom shadows on the floor

“Empty chairs at empty tables

“Where my friends will meet no more

“Here we talked of revolution

“Here it was we lit the flame

“Here we dreamed about tomorrow

“But tomorrow never came.

In the modern world as well, battles produce heroes.  War is a situation that tests the mettle of ordinary people in ways that cannot ordinarily be tested. 

The most heroic soldiers are accorded battle ribbons, tributes to their heroism.  The cream are awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. 

The Medal was recently awarded to a Navy Lieutenant, Michael Murphy, whose SEAL team was bogged down in a firefight in Afghanistan where it was wildly outnumbered. 

In order to make radio contact to request air cover, he would have to go out on an exposed ledge where his radio signal would have a clear line of sight—but where hundreds of Al Quaeda fighters would have a clear line of sight on him.  To try to save his men, he had to go to a certain death. 

This wasn’t a movie.  Lt. Murphy died on that ledge;  he was riddled with bullets while summoning air support.  The Medal was awarded posthumously. 

In a sense, that is the facet of heroism that I want to focus on tonight. 

It is distinguishable from other ways in which the term, “hero,” is commonly misused. 

For example, Michael Phelps and A-Rod and Wayne Gretsky are called sports heroes by their fans.

These athletes all trained very hard, but they have natural gifts that allow them to do things that none of us could do no matter how hard we trained.  They are superb athletes, but it is strange to think of them as heroes. 

A distinguished professor of physics at Stanford once remarked to me that Albert Einstein was his personal hero.   He pronounced it “Einschtine,” just like Albert did.  I later found that Einstein—who utterly changed the way that science views the physical world—was viewed the same way by virtually all of his peers.

Einstein’s brilliance was astonishing, but I am a little confused about why he would be termed a hero.  

Heroism, as I view it, has less to do with genius than with courage.

Heroism has less to do with athletic prowess than with moral virtue. 

Heroism is rooted less in innate ability than in acquired character.  

Most of us are unlikely to win a Nobel Prize in science or an Olympic medal.  Those who win them are often admirable people.  But they have an innate talent that makes their achievements possible.

The Congressional Medal of Honor—and, for that matter, the Nobel Peace Prize—are something entirely different.  They are not awarded to people because they were blessed with an IQ of 220 or who can run 100 meters in 9 seconds.

True heroes may, as a matter of accident, be geniuses, or great athletes.  The extraordinary biochemist and relentless campaigner against the nuclear arms race, Linus Pauling, won both the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize. 

But heroes also can be common people who behave with uncommon valor—and who refuse to quit, whatever the odds. 

Heroism is chosen behavior.

At the bottom of the Wales Foundation web site is the following statement:

“The Thomas C Wales Foundation is dedicated to the promise of ordinary citizens actively helping to create a livable and fair society.”

Every person in this room is capable of the physical and mental feats of a true hero.  Each of you—if you are given, and you seize, the opportunity—has the ability to win the Thomas Wales Award for Passionate Citizenship. 

Teddy Roosevelt, the ultimate man of action, once described this sense of heroism vividly.  (I need to apologize to the women here tonight for Roosevelt’s male-oriented language of heroism, and can only remind you that it was a long time ago.)

“The credit belong to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;  who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;  but who does actually strive to do the deeds;  who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions;  who spends himself in a worthy cause;  who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Teddy Roosevelt might well have been speaking of any of the five heroes we are honoring tonight.  All five deserve our admiration.

As does the Thomas C Wales Foundation for paying them this richly deserved honor.

A hero continues to fight valiantly for what is right, even when it appears that the fight is hopeless. 

It would be almost impossible to create even a fictional character who embodies that principal more than Harry Schneider, tonight’s recipient of the Thomas Wales Award.

He began with a defendant that the vast majority of Americans assumed was a terrorist allied with our nation’s sworn enemies.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan was Osama bin Laden’s driver.  That was his job.  He is not alleged to have set off bombs or formulated strategy. 

Other than driving, his principal duties appear to have been replacing motor oil as necessary and checking the tire pressure. 

At some level, this was sort of like traffic court.

Having failed for 8 years to capture Osama bin Laden, we went after his driver.  As Steve Colbert commented after the trial, “It won’t be long before we track down Ayman al- Zawahiri’s dermatologist.”

The defendant was to be tried by a military tribunal that was so rigged against him that the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo resigned in protest after being told that the trial would not be allowed to produce an acquittal.

A hero continues, even though arrayed against him is the full might of the United States government, up to and including the Commander-in-Chief.

A hero continues, even though he knows that his final battle will be fought before a Supreme Court that in its most consequential decision overturned the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court, stopped the counting of ballots the way that they had always been counted under Florida law, and then ruled that the ballots could not be counted because the time to count them had expired. 

And even as it elected George Bush President of the United States by a 5-4 vote, it was sufficiently embarrassed by its own crassness to state in the opinion itself that the case was not to be cited as a precedent.  The reasoning used by the Court was to be applied on only this one solitary occasion.

That was the Court in which constitutional aspects of the case would be heard.  But before the case was even heard in Court, our hero was told that—regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, and the trial court decided—his client would not necessarily be released from Guantanamo. 

And still he didn’t falter.  He understood the right thing to do, and he did it. 

Harry Schneider is a member of a profession that is often the butt of cheap jokes.  His actions gave the entire profession a grandeur akin to John Adams acting against self-interest to defend the British involved in the Boston Massacre, or Andrew Hamilton successfully defending John Peter Zenger—or, for the matter, the attorneys of Pakistan heroically standing up against President Musharraf’s attempt to impose martial law on the nation. 

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Harry Schneider—and his colleagues on the Hamdan case, and other attorneys on other cases-standing up bravely for the rule of law.

Let me pull no punches. 

The first decade of 21^st century America was a time of

·      Ginned-up, unilateral, preemptive war, with no effective counter-balance from the other branches of government;

·      Cruelty, degradation, and acts that other civilized nations and the Geneva Convention viewed as torture were routinely employed;

·      Unprosecuted abuses by military forces and highly-paid mercenary contractors, of which Abu Ghraib was only the most visible example—visible only because photographs were posted on the Internet;

·      Almost-unlimited authority to engage in domestic spying under an extreme interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act;

·      Kidnapping of foreign nationals in third countries like Italy without the knowledge or consent of the government;

·      “Extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to Uzbekistan and Turkey and other places where they were tortured and sometimes killed;

·      Promotion, with the concurrence of Congress, of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which sought to strip detainees of habeas corpus;

·      Classification of millions of public documents, mostly because they would cause embarrassment if revealed;

·      A view of executive authority so extreme that the President believed he could essentially act as he wants without restraint by Congress of the Judiciary.  President believes he has more authority than King George believed he had at the time of the American revolution;

·      The use of Presidential “signing statements” to constrain or otherwise torque the intent of laws passed by Congress;

·      Refusal to recognize the International Criminal Court.

·      Giving life-tenure appointments to the American judiciary to youthful ideological zealots

·      Thumbing America’s nose at the entire rest of the world on global climate change. 

The last 8 years of robust financial deregulation have left America an economic basket case and may yet crater the global economy.

We moved from a fiscal surplus to a doubling of the national debt. Our debt is now over $10 trillion—a number too big to fit on the debt clock in Times Square.   A quick thought exercise to put this in perspecive:

·      A million seconds ago was last week. 

·      A billion seconds ago, Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. 

·      A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools. 

Our national debt has increased by 5 trillion dollars over the last 8 years.  That is more debt than we acquired, total, in the previous 200 years.  

Our financial system was swamped by $63 trillion in credit default swaps and other similar instruments that were based on deceptively structured loans that no one would buy until they were sliced and diced into complex derivatives that absolutely no one understood—but that everyone assured everyone else were not risky. 

The true cost of all this? 

It almost cost us America. 

This was the first election when I genuinely feared I might lose my country.

With all of that as preface, here is the heart of my message tonight:

We are not really gathered here tonight to simply honor heroes. 

Their real honor is of their own making. 

They were heroes yesterday; they will be heroes tomorrow.

They would be heroic if we all had stayed at home tonight. 

What the rest of us should be doing, especially now as tonight draws to a close, is focusing our thoughts inward.  We should use this occasion to examine ourselves to see how we stack up. 

Because we all have it within ourselves to be heroes. 

Heroism is chosen behavior. 

Earlier this evening, five certified heroes walked into this room. 

The real goal of this dinner is for 350 heroes to walk out.