NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times about the politics of public mourning.
and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks ofThe number is incomprehensible; more than 100,000 people dead of COVID-19 in the U.S. in just three months. For comparison, that is about one-sixth the number of Americans who died during the four years of the Civil War. It's about a quarter of the number of Americans who died in World War II, again, over four years. And it's almost twice the number of Americans who died during the Vietnam War, which stretched over almost two decades.
BROOKS: Yeah, I guess I'd say tragedies touch us at a deeper level than politics. And at these moments, I think, what presidents do when they're at their best is they step outside their political role, and they just speak to us humans as humans, whether it was Reagan after The Challenger... KELLY: E.J., you reminded me of something that you wrote over the weekend that actually would take us all the way back to the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to dedicate the cemetery there. We asked an NPR colleague to read one of the many stirring lines from that.
KELLY: David, you ticked through a few more recent moments when a president fully inhabited the role of mourner-in-chief . Is there one of those you would steer us to that feels particularly applicable right now? ROBERT F KENNEDY: My favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote, even in our sleep pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.BROOKS: Kennedy took the seriousness of the moment and the feelings of the people he was addressing to a place of empathy and eventual triumph.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: The blunt fact is that every single person in the United States is going to be affected by this program.ROOSEVELT: They are farmers and workers, businessmen, professional men, artists, clerks. They are the United States of America...
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