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ELECTIONS
Excerpts from Byrd's 'Letter to a New President'
"Letter to a New President: Commonsense Lessons for Our Next Leader" by Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., is 173 pages of homespun advice, interspersed with quotations from philosophers, poets and Founding Fathers.
The slim hardcover (St. Martin's Press, $23.95) is packed with tips, intended to be read by the next president on inauguration day. It also contains sharp, sometimes scathing observations of Washington players.
Here are some excerpts:
- On the need for honesty
- On reinstating Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and overcoming a culture of fear:
- On current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
- On the performance of the press:
"The Bush administration, not to put too fine a point on it, built much of its program around a basic commitment to lying. Bush and those around him understood the power of an artful lie to influence and shape perceptions. ... No lie was too egregious or transparent for the administration to have any qualms about repeating it over and over and over in a cynical attempt to make people start to think it might be true. In this tactic, the administration adopted an approach counseled by the father of the Soviet state, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and the fuhrer of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
'A lie told often enough becomes the truth,' said Lenin.
'Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually, they will believe it,' said Hitler."
"This is no time for sweet talk or mincing of words. We must face the stark truth that our nation now faces a crisis as deep and dangerous as any in our proud history. That crisis is not the threat posed by a small band of zealots hiding in mountain caves and brewing up an incoherent cocktail of hate and resentment against us. ...
We must be ever vigilant against homegrown forces that would turn a nation founded on the universal rights of man into one now internationally identified as willing to torture, willing to hold people behind bars with no charges filed, willing to justify almost any extreme action on the basis of a highly warped and irrational view of the world.
Our political leaders must be ever wary of the true dangers confronting the nation, but it has become sadly apparently that the most pronounced dangers we face are the forces that threaten this country from within."
"I have never been shy about expressing my view that our biographies help establish who we are; my own childhood in Wolf Creek Hollow, among hardworking coal miners and their families, shaped the man I am today.
Rice, as a young girl, was a concert pianist, and it seems the instructions she was given remain with her today, infusing her every public appearance: Sit with your back straight, and when the time is right, always give them your most dazzling smile, even if you have just gotten your hands crossed and want nothing more than to crawl under the piano."
"It sounds almost quaint to point it out now, but for most of the history of the presidential news conference, the questions were not screened ahead of time, the way they were for George W. Bush. This president knew what questions were coming, and had a neatly arranged list that told him exactly which reporter to call on at exactly which point in the press conference.
Bush even joked about it at times, as if there were anything funny about gaming the system and cheating the people of their basic rights to have an accountable president.
Reporters of an earlier generation would never have stood for that. There was deep-seated respect among the people of the press. But under Bush, it was accepted as a given, and if reporters tried to buck the new rules and ask a question other than what was expected, then they would not be asked back."
