Buck O'Neil: A Life Well Lived

Buck O'Neil in his later years
(Photo: AP/The Spokesman Review)

I have admired many baseball players over the course of my life, players whose skills on the ballfield were so advanced and refined that watching them was like observing a great artist at work. I loved watching Lou Brock run the bases and Ozzie Smith make acrobatic plays at shortstop. At twelve years old, I saw Steve Carlton pitch during his greatest season ever, when he won 27 games for a last-place Phillies team that only won 59 games all season. A few years later, I admired Hank Aaron effortlessly hit soaring line drives over the outfield wall during batting practice before a game in Philadelphia. Twice in the late 1990s, I saw Mark McGwire hit three home runs in one game, and I witnessed in person ten of his career home runs. There are so many others over the years—Molina and Pujols, Ichiro and Ripken, Jeter and Gwynn. For all the flaws and shortcomings of baseball, it is the grace, beauty, and artistry of the players that compel us to love the game and keep us coming back for more.

But there are certain players in baseball history, just as there are a few special people in history, that I wish I could have spent some time with. Thirty minutes and a cup of coffee, a chance to ask a few questions, to learn from and connect with, if only for a moment. Buck O’Neil was one of those people.

O’Neil died in 2006, at the age of 94. Although I never met O’Neil, like millions of other Americans, I first became aware of him by watching Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary on PBS in the early 1990s. O’Neil appeared on many of the ten episodes in that series and his presence helped make the documentary as grand and meaningful and moving as any film ever made about our national pastime.

O’Neil’s bright and shining personality burst through on Baseball, along with his optimism and hopeful air, and his stories and insights were a highlight of the entire series. His love for the game, for people, for life itself, radiated from his personality. A kind and wise man, he saw America in all its glory even while experiencing first hand its tragic struggles with racial injustice, discrimination, segregation, Jim Crow, and the exclusion of an entire race of men from the Major Leagues.

As the talented chronicler of baseball, Joe Posnanski, wrote in The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (Harper, 2007), O’Neil’s “optimism never failed him. Hope never left him. He always found good in people.” Early in the book, Posnanski tells of sitting in the stands with O’Neil at a game in Houston. At the end of one inning, the Houston right fielder threw a ball into the stands as he was leaving the field. The ball headed in the direction of Posnanski and O’Neil, landing a few rows in front of where they were seated. A young boy of about ten or eleven and a taller man in his thirties both reached for the ball. The tall man, of course, caught the ball and immediately held up his hands as if he single-handedly won the game for the Astros. The young boy sat back down in his seat with a disappointed look on his face.

Posnanski seethed with anger and said, “What a jerk!” O’Neil asked him what was wrong, and Posnanski explained, “That guy down there caught the ball and won’t give it to the kid sitting right behind him.” O’Neil looked towards the seats and saw the man gleefully showing all his neighbors the ball as if he had heroically caught it.

“Don’t be so hard on him,” O’Neil said. “He might have a kid of his own at home.” Posnanski was temporarily humbled. A few minutes later, Posnanski thought again and declared, “Wait a minute. If this jerk has a kid, why didn’t he bring the kid to the ballgame?” O’Neil smiled. “Maybe, his child is sick,” he replied. Yes, Buck O’Neil always found, or at least hoped for, the good in people.

O’Neil was 93 years old when Posnanski traveled the country with him. Buck had lived through a volatile century of American life. He had experienced rejection and denial, restaurants that would not serve him, gas stations that would not allow him to use their bathrooms, hotels that would not accommodate him. And yet, he never let bitterness or anger show its hand. O’Neil forgave more easily than others did. Although he was an excellent player in the Negro Leagues, a slick fielding, good hitting first baseman who once won a batting title, he was never allowed to play in the Major Leagues. Talent was not the issue. Only the color of his skin.

O’Neil also was one of the best managers in the history of the Negro Leagues, managing the Kansas City Monarchs to several pennants from 1948 to 1955. But he never got to manage in the Major Leagues. Although he would become a scout and later a coach for the Chicago Cubs—the first African American coach in major league baseball—he remained relatively unknown until the Ken Burns documentary.

Dozens of times in their travels together Posnanski asked O’Neil, “How do you keep from being bitter?” People all over America asked O’Neil that same question. And whether O’Neil was talking with a cab driver, a journalist, a group of school children, or younger ballplayers, his answer was always the same: “Where does bitterness take you? To a broken heart? To an early grave? When I die, I want to die from natural causes. Not from hate eating me up from the inside.”

Everywhere Buck traveled, from small towns across the South and Midwest, to radio studios in New York City and congressional committees in Washington, D.C., he always shined with positive energy, optimism, and love. He made people happy. And he always wanted a hug – O’Neil was a big hugger. Wherever he traveled, he ran into former ballplayers and other people he knew. Everyone wanted to spend time with him.

What was the secret to Buck O’Neil? How could a man who, at the peak of his career, had his dreams denied unjustly on the grounds of racial prejudice, consistently exemplify grace and forgiveness and positivity? O’Neil never forgot the injustices, the restaurants that refused to serve them, the places where they were not wanted. But for Buck O’Neil, the good in life far outweighed the bad. 

He had a grand time playing the game he loved with some of the best ballplayers of their time. He ate at some of the best barbeque joints in the world, and he knew where you could get a steak that melted in your mouth. He listened to the best jazz in America. He met Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, who played in the hotels and smoky bars the players frequented. “People feel for sorry for me? Man, I heard Charlie Parker.”

After a life in baseball, O’Neil’s mission became teaching people about the Negro Leagues and helping its players receive the recognition they deserved. He promoted the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and argued the case for admitting the best of the Negro Leagues players to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

When O’Neil traveled the country with Posnanski, he was the last of the 1930s Kansas City Monarchs. All of his teammates were long gone, uncelebrated, and Buck wanted to tell their stories to whoever would listen. In one small town, a little place called Nicodemus, Kansas, O’Neil spoke at the town hall and regaled those in attendance with tales of Negro Leagues glory and the great players he played with and competed against. During audience question time, a man asked O’Neil if he remembered him, claiming he had once hit a home run off of the great Satchel Paige in a game against the Monarchs. O’Neil smiled and said it was “good to see you again.”

Afterwards, Posnanski told O’Neil it was remarkable he remembered the man. “I didn’t remember him,” O’Neil said as he leaned back in a chair with his eyes closed. A few minutes later, he added, “That guy didn’t hit a home run off of Satchel Paige. He’s too young. When I played with Satchel, that was the 1940s, that guy couldn’t have been more than five years old. He might not have even been born.” Posnanski asked O’Neil why he pretended to remember the man. O’Neil once again showed the essence of his grace: “In our beautiful memory, we were all handsome. We could all sing. We all had the heart of the prettiest girl in town. And we all hit .300.”

After the demise of the Negro Leagues, once the Major Leagues accepted integration, O’Neil worked as a scout for the Chicago Cubs, traveling the American south in search of talented, Black ballplayers. He discovered and signed future All-Stars Lou Brock, Lee Smith, and Joe Carter, and found other diamonds in the rough, like Oscar Gamble. He observed the game more comprehensively than other scouts. As Posnanski described while sitting with O’Neil in the stands at Minute Maid Ballpark in Houston in 2005:

Buck watched everything—warm-ups, batting practice, pitchers throwing in bullpens, on-field conversations. Buck liked watching players jog in the outfield and he liked to see which player retrieved the most baseballs at the end of batting practice. In baseball, Buck said, anyone can spot the star. But the best scouts looked for the future star, the starlet in a drugstore. And to find those, Buck said, a scout had to look for small moments of grace.

O’Neil knew all the players who transitioned from the Negro Leagues to the Major Leagues, and he knew all their stories. Everyone, of course, remembers and celebrates Jackie Robinson, but another Black player who signed a major league contract in 1947 was Willard “Sonny” Brown, who signed with the St. Louis Browns. Unlike Robinson, who had the support of most of his teammates and played for a really good team in a relatively liberal part of the country, Brown’s teammates openly despised him. His manager rarely spoke to him. Not surprisingly, he struggled during his short stint in the majors, hitting only .179. After a month, he was sent back to the Negro Leagues.

Of course, today no one remembers Sonny Brown. But O’Neil had a story about Brown as important as that of Robinson’s triumphant career. On August 13, 1947, the St. Louis Browns played the Detroit Tigers in a double header. Brown did not start in either game, but late in the second game, he was sent to pinch-hit against future Hall of Fame pitcher Hal Newhouser. Because Sonny was not expecting to pinch hit, he quickly borrowed the bat of Jeff Heath, the Browns’ most powerful slugger. Sonny crushed the first pitch he saw to dead center field. The center field fence at Sportsman Park was 428 feet away, and Sonny’s drive hit off the number “4”. Sonny ran full speed and, by the time the ball reached the infield, he had an inside-the-park home run.

But when Sonny made it back to the dugout, he was met with silence. As he sat down, he watched as Jeff Heath took the bat Sonny had borrowed and smashed it against the wall, a moment of pure hatred. When O’Neil told this story to groups of school children, he always asked them, “What is the lesson of that story? He hit a home run and the man broke his bat. What is the lesson of Willard Brown?” Typically, the children sat in silence, not sure what to say. O’Neil answered for them. “The lesson, children, is that it wasn’t easy.”

The Baseball Hall of Fame first admitted a few of the great Negro Leagues players in the 1970s—Satchel Paige in 1971, followed by Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard in 1972 and Cool Papa Bell and Oscar Charleston a few years later. For years, O’Neil felt strongly that his friend, Hilton Smith, who pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs, deserved Hall of Fame honors. According to O’Neil, Smith was one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived. Before he died in 1983, O’Neil promised Smith he would do everything he could to get him into the Hall of Fame. It took eighteen more years, but in 2001, O’Neil’s efforts paid off as the Hall of Fame veterans committee agreed that Smith deserved recognition. After it happened, O’Neil visited Hilton Smith’s gravestone in Kansas City. “Hilton, you’re a Hall of Famer,” he said.

“I wish he had lived to see that day,” O’Neil told Posnanski. “He was a little sad at the end of his life, just a little. Thought he had been forgotten. I wish he had lived to hear them say, ‘You were great. You were one of the greatest ever.’ But I’m sure he heard it.”

It was not until 2006 when the Hall of Fame finally acknowledged just how comparable in talent the Negro Leagues were to the Major Leagues in those days. After a comprehensive, MLB-funded study into the history of Black baseball, a special committee of baseball historians and scholars selected 12 additional Negro Leagues players and five executives for admission. Although Buck O’Neil was on the list of 39 finalists (out of 94 names initially considered), he was not among the inductees.

If O’Neil was disappointed, he never let on. He was happy for the players who made it, for they had finally been officially recognized as great players, equally deserving of the Hall of Fame as were the great stars of the Major Leagues. These Black players who never had the chance to play in the Major Leagues belonged in the same gallery as Babe Ruth and Stan Musial, Lou Gehrig and Walter Johnson. For O’Neil, it was not only about immortality, it was an apology. Most of these men were no longer alive and would never know about the belated recognition. But for Turkey Stearnes, Willie Wells, and Leon Day, who each received phone calls for which they had waited a lifetime, thanks were owed to Buck O’Neil’s unyielding efforts over the years.

O’Neil could not help but be disappointed about not receiving the same recognition. It is difficult to imagine anyone more deserving, anyone who had done so much for baseball and the Negro Leagues over the course of his life. He died a little more than two months after Stearnes, Wells, and Day received their phone calls.

Although he was admitted to the Hall of Fame posthumously in 2022, it is easy to feel sad that O’Neil did not receive the recognition when he was alive. But he would have dismissed anyone who felt sorry for him. He played baseball because he loved it, and because the Negro Leagues allowed him to make a difference in the world, to change the world for the better. For O’Neil, as described by Posnanski, baseball in the Negro Leagues was “a little bit rougher, a little bit sweeter, a little bit faster, a little bit cooler, and a little bit more fun than anything Buck ever saw in Major League baseball.”

Posnanski was with O’Neil when Buck learned he had not been admitted to the Hall of Fame. Posnanski angrily said he wanted to interrogate the committee members and ask if their hearts were still beating. O’Neil ignored Posnanski’s outburst, and asked out loud, “I wonder if they will ask me to speak?” Flabbergasted, Posnanski asked, “How could you think about speaking there after they snubbed you like that?”

“It would give me a chance to talk about these great players … to tell the story again,” O’Neil replied. Seeing that Posnanski remained upset, Buck put his arm around him and said, “Think about this, son. What is my life about?”

Buck O’Neil touched the lives of more people than I will ever meet. He opened our eyes to the struggles and pride of the men who played in the Negro Leagues. He helped those who at one time had their dreams crushed or doors slammed shut, feel happier about life and count their own blessings. He taught us that we go further in life with generosity and kindness than anger and hate. That is what his life was about, to help us see the good in people, and to hope and dream and live for a better world.

Seeking Autumn in a Troubled World

Alverthorpe Park, Abington, Pennsylvania (October 2026)

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” wrote Canadian author L. M. Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables. October is when I am drawn to the outdoors, when the crisp air caresses my face and sun radiates across a sky so blue you get lost in it. Autumn is a time of renewal. Its natural beauty, a gift from God, provides temporary respite from a troubled world. As the leaves change color, they are reborn with a new sense of purpose before gently falling to earth and replenishing the soil. If only life were so orderly and decent.

Two Octobers have passed since I retired from my career as a lawyer and investigative consultant. I hoped that retirement would slow things down, allow for more reflection and make room for all that I overlooked in younger days. But time slows for no one, and life continues to pass ever so quickly. Our children grow older and lead independent lives. Memories of youth recede ever further into the distant past. But I have no regrets. The increased freedom to pursue life on my terms, to read and write and travel, spend time with Andrea and our respective families and friends, to reflect and renew the body and mind, are everything I hoped and imagined.

And yet, I am distraught by the troubled state of our country and world. The sources of my despondency are almost always the same. Every day I read of another outrageous, previously unthinkable action or statement from the president of the United States that makes me question the sanity and stability of the American experiment. In the affairs of the nation, and our relationship to the world, we have lost our sense of decency. Comity, diplomacy, social harmony, even common courtesy, have become quaint notions of a bygone era. Kindness is out of fashion. We live in an anything goes society, where the president enriches himself by doing business with the world’s richest oligarchs while dismissing as irrelevant the struggles of average Americans, the future wellbeing of the world, moral principle, and the rule of law.

So deeply has this president betrayed our friends and allies that a recent poll found a plurality of Canadians currently consider the United States an “enemy country.” The president openly betrayed Ukraine, a democracy full of courageous, valiant people fighting for their lives, and he actively aids and abets our perpetual arch enemy Russia. He started a war of choice in Iran, one of the dumbest and most strategically bankrupt conflicts in American history. Meanwhile, our economy suffers the consequences, and there is no good way out. And every day, the leader of the free world talks like an angry mental patient about almost anyone in politics or journalism who refuses to sing platitudes of praise and affection for his every misdeed.

For the first time in history (well, the second counting Trump 1.0), we have a president who appears incapable of saying anything inspirational, of elevating the American spirit. Every president in my lifetime did so, until Trump. I frequently disagreed with Reagan and the two Bushes, but they comforted us in times of distress and uplifted our spirits. They respected the long arc of history and upheld our institutions and constitution. Trump claims to love America yet acts and speaks like a man who truly despises Americans, our system of government, the progression of our history, and what the promise of America represents. The insanity has proceeded non-stop for nearly two years. The sheer absurdity of it all, the lies, the refusal to acknowledge incontrovertible facts, the insistence that black is white, light is dark, has left the world exhausted and dispirited.

It is times like these when it helps to set aside my newspapers and magazines, tune out the noise and chaos, and turn my gaze to the world outside. It is easier to do at this time of year, when summer gently gives way to fall, and the warmth of September shifts to the gradual briskness of a cool October day.

When I was young, autumn represented the start of a new season and fresh beginnings, when the end of summer brought the anxieties associated with a new school year, the excitement of new and renewed friendships, and the anticipation of another phase of life’s journey. Autumn brings memories of walking with my dad to Palmer Stadium to watch a Princeton University football game on Saturday afternoon. It reminds me of taking my daughters on hayrides many years ago at the local pumpkin patch, drinking hot chocolate and apple cider, roasting marshmallows at a campfire, and carving pumpkins at the kitchen table.

Fall brings the crisp morning air, the smell of burning leaves in the distance, the brightest morning sun of the year, and the scent of cinnamon from the oven. It is when we transition into shorter days and reflect on the coming of winter. It is when the World Series stirs the dying embers of summer, and we realize it is time to rake the leaves and await the return of spring, when we will again taste a glimpse of the summer warmth.

There is nothing like a brisk fall day on which to encounter renewed optimism and hope. As the leaves change color and gently paint the ground below, as the first signs of frost blanket the morning grass, the world is filled with wonder. In October, the lake near my house appears calm and inviting to the flock of geese that congregate there before heading south for winter. As golden leaves sprinkled with red and orange reflect off the water, the world’s troubles temporarily fall away. It is a reminder of human resiliency when times are tough, that we somehow find a way to overcome challenges, establish new beginnings, and refresh our spirits. America has done it time and time again. We will do so once more.

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. For me, no season so greatly inspires the desire to open a new book, or perhaps relive a classic like The Great Gatsby, as does autumn. This is the time of year that invites long, reflective walks, a chance to remember the people we have lost, the memories we cherish, to relive the past and appreciate the beauty of what we still have.

Autumn forces us to appreciate the preciousness of life, for each leaf that floats tenderly to the ground has achieved what all of us desire, to grow old gracefully and leave this earth full of light and color and the recognition of a life well lived; a chance to replenish the soil and fertilize and nourish the tree from which life itself originated. If only humanity was so respectful of the cycles of nature and patterns of time. Maybe then, like the blue sky and bright sun on a cool October day, all of us would experience renewal and rebirth, and provide true hope of a less troubled and more optimistic world.

The Urgent Need for Reinhold Niebuhr

Time Magazine cover: Reinhold Niebuhr, March 8, 1948

There was once a time in America when philosophers, theologians, and public intellectuals who thought deeply and critically about the world were respected and uplifted by American society. From 1926 to 1962, influential theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Henry Sloane Coffin, and C.S. Lewis each appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel was frequently quoted in Time, and the magazine did an extensive profile of him in 1956. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared on Time’s cover three times prior to his assassination in 1968. Until the 1990s, Time devoted one page every week to a section on Religion and Theology. It is impossible to know how much this mattered in the halls of power, but for most of the 20th Century, Time was a pillar of the media landscape and one of the most highly read publications in the world.

Time’s attention to religion and theology may have simply reflected a more homogeneous American society, a time when many of our elite institutions were dominated by liberal Protestantism. By the latter half of the 20th century, America had gradually transformed into a more pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and increasingly secular society that paid far less attention to theologians and religious institutions. But before the mid-1960s, Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at the Union Theological Seminary in New York for over 30 years, was among the most influential theologians in modern American history.

Niebuhr wrote and lectured frequently about the intersection of theology, history, foreign policy, politics, and culture. He had a deep sense of history and its importance in explaining the human experience within the larger scheme of things. And he reminded Americans that, even as the most powerful nation on earth, we are but a small and limited part of a wider human story.

Niebuhr was deeply committed to social justice, stemming from his days as a young pastor in 1920’s Detroit fighting the oppressive working conditions on Henry Ford’s assembly lines. He believed deeply in the workings of democracy. Niebuhr’s writings blended a progressive drive for social activism with a deeply conservative skepticism of human perfectibility. He favored bold actions to advance the cause of justice. But he rejected utopian thinking and realistically appraised the human condition as morally ambiguous. His pragmatism appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. Barack Obama once called Niebuhr “one of my favorite philosophers.” Other prominent admirers of Niebuhr included Democrats Hillary Clinton and Hubert Humphrey and Republicans John McCain and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former UN Ambassador to Ronald Reagan.

Although he started out as a Christian pacifist, in the 1930s Niebuhr watched with growing alarm the rise of Hitler and Stalin. He came to view Christian pacifism as an inadequate response to the global threats of fascism and totalitarianism. To address this deficiency, he developed a philosophy known as Christian realism, which examines the world as it is, not as we want it to be. As the United States tilted towards isolationism in 1940, Niebuhr pushed for America to aid Britain in its fight against the Nazis. He championed U.S. intervention in World War II because the future of democracy and the entire world order was under attack.

Niebuhr believed that human beings are by nature sinful, afflicted with excessive pride and a self-preoccupation that frequently results in moral blindness. For Niebuhr, this was an empirical fact rooted in history and experience. Moreover, the consequences of humanity’s proclivity for sin were more damaging when committed by institutions and groups, especially nations.

Although most Americans today are turned off by the traditional concept of “sin” and prefer other words to describe a fallen or lost humanity, Niebuhr’s views resonated in the generation that wrestled with the moral depravity of Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, racial injustice, and economic inequality. When Time put a troubled-looking Niebuhr on the cover of its magazine on March 8, 1948, it accompanied it with the caption, “Man’s story is not a success story.”

An objective assessment of human history supports Niebuhr’s beliefs about the nature of man. One need not be a Christian theologian to recognize that humanity is deeply flawed. My Jewish father-in-law, a professor of anthropology and psychology, often said (only half-jokingly) about the human race when he was alive, “We are a rotten species.” However one phrases it, the essential truth remains, human beings are by nature blinded by self-interest and morally indifferent to injustice, even if we have the capacity and desire to do good. It is why moral leadership is so important in institutions and in nations.

Following the war, Niebuhr was an early proponent of Cold War strategy as a necessary deterrent to Soviet expansionism. But he became increasingly disillusioned with the excessive use of American power throughout the world and was an outspoken critic of American hubris and overreaching arrogance. In the Irony of American History (1952), Niebuhr warned against the dangers of imperialism and exaggerated claims of American virtue:

A nation with an inordinate degree of political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism which does not understand the limits of man’s wisdom and volition in history.

Imperialism is a perennial problem of human existence; for powerful nations and individuals inevitably tend to use the weak as instruments of their purposes.

Niebuhr believed that America’s certainty of its own righteousness led to the tragedy of Vietnam, which he called “the most pointless, costly, and bloody war in our history.” He wrote presciently about the hazards of America believing in its own inherent goodness. To confidently assume that we alone have the capacity to eliminate evil and spread freedom in the world, clouds our judgment in the exercise of military and economic power. The complexity of the world requires a great deal of humility; American myths and illusions distort our self-understanding as a nation.

Having supported American efforts in World War II and the early stages of the Cold War, and having lived through and witnessed the horrors of the twentieth century, Niebuhr agreed that war was sometimes necessary to confront evil. He cautioned, however, that the exercise of military power must be a measured undertaking and not part of a holy crusade. Any decision to engage in war must be made with a sense of human tragedy and a profound concern for innocent human life. He warned that envy and pride would lead to our downfall.

Toward the end of his life, Niebuhr developed a close friendship with his Morningside Heights neighbor, Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. Like Heschel, Niebuhr’s theological thinking was greatly influenced by the Hebrew prophets. He shared with them a belief that morality and politics are closely connected and that the fate of the earth rests on humanity.

It was why Niebuhr recognized the imperative of a vital democracy in a free society. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” Niebuhr wrote, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” According to Richard Crouther, professor of religious studies at Carleton College and author of Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2010), “Like most of us, Niebuhr knew in his heart that we must affirm and appeal to a higher moral order amid the daily challenges of our individual and collective lives. What gives depth to his teaching is the constant appeal to history and the facts of our experience as limited humans who are surrounded by the crises of a troubled and perplexing world.”

Perhaps Niebuhr is too complex a thinker for America in the 21st century. But America could certainly use his wisdom and guidance today. On September 22, the president of the United States stood on the podium of the United Nations and threatened to “annihilate” the Iranian people and drive them “into hell with no chance of survival.” It was not the first time Trump had threatened to annihilate an entire civilization. The irony of such a statement before this international body, created in response to the bloodiest and most violent conflict in human history to promote world peace and international cooperation, should not be lost on anyone.  

Niebuhr would have been horrified by President Trump’s willingness to threaten friends and upset alliances cultivated and nurtured through 80 years of diplomacy and mutual trust. He would have condemned this administration’s military adventurism and unilateral exercises of power to suit its own ends—the U.S. war of choice in Iran; the unprovoked military invasion of Venezuela; Trump declaring “to the victor belong the spoils” to justify his claims on Venezuelan oil reserves; the illegal and extrajudicial killings of 227 civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; the president’s threats to invade Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Oman; his military strikes on seven other countries in the past 18 months; and his utter disregard for international law and diplomacy.

It would have been unthinkable in Niebuhr’s time for a U.S. president to tell The New York Times, as Trump did, that the only limit on his power is “my own morality, my own mind—it’s the only thing that can stop me.” Indeed, no modern president would have so easily dismissed international law and norms established by the United States and its allies after World War II to maintain world stability and prevent another world war.  

Niebuhr would have spoken prophetically against Trump’s repeated lies that human-caused climate change is a “hoax,” most recently spewed by Trump at the United Nations. Niebuhr believed that, only when humanity has the moral will and practical wisdom to assume responsibility for the consequences of our collective actions, will we have the capacity to protect the earth, and with it, all of humanity.

Niebuhr also would have recoiled at the absurdity and arrogance of Trump’s insistence on the geographical designations “Lake of America” and “Gulf of America” and his promise to “make America great again.” Niebuhr was harshly critical of American idolatry and blind patriotism. He rejected unreflective assertions of America as the “greatest country on earth,” which disregards how America empirically compares to other countries on such things as universal access to health care, income inequality, and other matters of economic and political justice.

Niebuhr embraced American idealism and the ability of American democracy to correct past injustices at home and excesses abroad. But he was suspicious of “true believers,” people who never have doubts. For Niebuhr, an element of moral doubt was necessary for self-awareness, for people and nations. He was concerned about “a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America” that could eventually lead us astray.

As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a great admirer of Niebuhr, once wrote: “History is the best antidote to delusion of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control for the nation as well as the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives.”

It is unlikely that Trump is acquainted with the intellectual legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and his pivotal role in shaping twentieth-century American thought. But the modern world desperately needs Niebuhr’s moral wisdom to counter Trump’s celebration of power over principle, personal ego over morality, and raw self-interest over international law.

At the end of The Irony of American History, Niebuhr ominously warned what can happen to a great nation blinded by overreaching pride, arrogance, and moral blindness:

For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory.

The Football Dilemma

St. Augustine High School football, New Orleans, Louisiana

No sport inspires the passions and loyalties of Americans more than football. From September through December, Friday night lights dominate the American landscape, when the local high school football teams suit up to play their cross-county rivals. In hard-luck towns across America, high school football provides a unity of purpose, a place where the glory days of old are re-lived by aging men with aching bodies, and the struggles of everyday life are temporarily set aside to enjoy the youthful athleticism of young men who provide hope of a glorious future. Black or white, liberal or conservative, Christian or atheist, nothing brings people of diverse backgrounds together, or promotes community unity better, than football. From the forgotten towns of rural America to neglected inner-city housing projects, the local football field is where the American Dream comes true.

Like many young American boys then and now, football was the sport that most competed with my love of baseball and basketball. Every fall, starting in grade school and throughout my high school years, I looked forward to watching football on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. My friends and I played flag football games in the backyard and on the school fields of my youth. We played Strat-O-Matic Football in the basements and family rooms of our childhood homes (see “Strat-O-Matic Memories: The Football Years”). I looked up to the star football players who walked around town with varsity jackets on their backs and pretty cheerleaders by their sides.

The popularity of football is why high schools across the country devote disproportionately large percentages of their limited capital and operating budgets to sustain high-end football programs, even in poor communities that cannot afford a full-time librarian or consistently underperform academically. Although the child poverty rate in Valdosta, Georgia, exceeds 33%, and although 84% of school-aged children in the district are considered economically disadvantaged, the school district recently spent $15 million on a new 83,000-square foot indoor training facility that includes a 100-yard turf field, offense/defense meeting rooms, and an expanded kitchen. Similar examples can be found in every state and region of the country. From small, economically-depressed towns in western Pennsylvania, to poorly funded, working-class communities throughout rural Texas, under-resourced communities pour money into their local high school football programs as if they are non-negotiable budget priorities.

The financial priorities of the nation’s colleges and universities are even more out of whack. A successful football program at a Division I school requires hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for and maintain an 80,000-seat stadium, first-class practice fields, indoor gyms, and locker room facilities. The head football coaches at top-ranked Division I schools earn salaries in excess of $5 million to $10 million per year. At many state universities, a head football coach is the highest paid public employee in their state. Even some relatively small universities pay their head football coaches over $1 million per year, funding their programs through mandatory (and excessively high) student fees and university budget subsidies.

Football in America is big business. Last year, the NFL recorded $23 billion in revenues. Its commissioner is paid $64 million per year. Each NFL team’s salary cap exceeds $300 million (for player salaries), and the legalization of sports gambling has brought billions of more dollars into the NFL. Team valuations have more than doubled in ten years, and even poorly performing teams are valued at close to $10 billion. Every Sunday (and Monday and Thursday), the NFL commands the nation’s attention on five major networks (ABC, CBS, ESPN, NBC, FOX). College football fills the airwaves on Saturdays. The most elite college players now earn hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars for use of their name, image, and likeness. The games are played in major cathedrals before capacity crowds.

The young men who play the game are adored and uplifted and treated as special people … until they can no longer perform. And then they are forgotten.

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal and reported extensively over the past two weeks has forced me to consider some uncomfortable truths, about American society’s love affair with football, and with my own admiration and draw to the sport. The study shows that the risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by repeated jolts to the head, is far more prevalent than originally imagined.

CTE is associated with the accumulation of thousands of small, sub-concussive hits, not necessarily recognizable concussions. These hits start as early as pee-wee football and accumulate as players progress through high school and college ball. By the time the small group of elite players reach the NFL, many if not most of them have likely already experienced some significant, long-term damage. The brutal physicality of football, the hundreds of violent hits and tackles, the rattling of the brain that occurs on most plays, the incredible speed and size and strength of the players who bring such talent and zeal and beauty to the sport, all contribute to what we are now learning about the medical data.

The study examined 338 brains donated by players’ families between 2008 and 2021 (out of a total of 1,721 players who died), and found that 93% were diagnosed with CTE. To account for selection bias, as most families who donated their loved ones’ brains likely suspected something was wrong, researchers narrowed the study to the 878 players who died between 2016 and 2021. That sample included 235 donated brains, of which 91.5% were diagnosed with CTE. After looking at demographic data and other information from death certificates of all NFL players who died in that time frame, they found that not less than 25% of the players had CTE. Because only a small percentage of the dead players’ brains were autopsied, and because an autopsy is the only way to detect CTE, the 25% figure is the absolute floor, or the lowest possible minimum of CTE prevalence, and assumes that every player whose brain was not autopsied was perfectly healthy, which is extremely unlikely. Medical experts believe the actual rate of CTE could be as high as 97.7%, and is most likely somewhere between the high and low figures.

The symptoms of the disease are devastating. They include memory loss, confusion, uncharacteristic mood swings, increases in erratic and impulsive behavior. It has been found in very young men, including several high-profile former NFL players who committed suicide, suffered debilitating cases of cognitive impairment, and in a few cases committed violent crimes.

Some may argue this is what the men signed up for when they chose to play such a physically violent game that brought them a modicum of fame and money. But how many of the risks were told to the high school teens that were later so aggressively recruited to play at Division I colleges and universities?

For those of us who love to watch football, or who spend money on football tickets and merchandise, how do we come to terms with the knowledge that the high-speed hits, blocks, and tackles we love to watch causes the athletes’ brains to bounce against their skull, each time potentially inflicting little injuries? Or that, when these little injuries are repeated over and over again, the long-term consequences are dire and devastating?

Even by turning on the remote to watch the game are we not supporting what is a multi-billion-dollar industry that glorifies and promotes a game in which the players repeatedly do immense damage to their brains? Can we really say that the 20-year-old man who chooses to play professionally knows precisely the risks he is taking? What about the 13- and 14-year-old boys who are drawn to the glory of Friday night lights?

In the fall of 1973, as a 14-year-old about to start my freshman year in high school, and decades before we knew anything about CTE, I too was drawn to high school football. My mother, herself a high school athlete, was less enthusiastic about the idea. She worried that football was a dangerous sport that could result in serious injury. A few weeks before football practice started, mom quietly purchased a then bestselling paperback book called Meat on the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football by Gary Shaw (St. Martin’s Press, 1972). Shaw played football for the University of Texas at Austin in the 1960s, and his book exposed the brutal realities of the UT football program under Coach Darrell Royal.

Mom handed me a copy of the book one afternoon and said, “You really need to read this.” I recall feeling a bit exasperated at the time, but became genuinely intrigued by the book as I absorbed its contents over the next several days. Shaw’s memoir described the poor medical care, punishing practices, and extreme psychological pressure the players endured. Players were put through practice drills intentionally designed to weed them out, through injury, severe hazing, and humiliation. Players who became injured, including Shaw, were treated as expendable inventory. Many lost their scholarships. The promises made by Coach Royal during recruiting sessions—that they would be looked after, receive a first-rate education, and be treated like family—suddenly vanished. Instead, as the title of the book implied, the athletes were treated like livestock ("meat on the hoof"), used, exploited, and then discarded when no longer useful.

But I was fourteen years old. From my vantage point, high school football was glorious, with marching bands and cheerleaders, pep rallies and stands filled with people on gameday. Football players were looked up to and treated like rock stars. Besides, I failed to see the connection between a football program at a big-time Texas university and the smalltime freshmen program at Hightstown High School.

So, I endured the twice-a-day practice sessions held during the peak summer heat, and learned to hit and tackle and block. The coaches tried their best to turn me into someone I was not, a physically aggressive, angry and ruthless person willing to inflict punishment on others. Throughout the season, the coaches yelled at, intimidated, and humiliated us, believing it motivated us to play harder, hit harder, tackle harder. Although as a tight end and occasional wide receiver, I led our underperforming team in scoring, I learned quickly that football was not for me. I played in fear of getting injured (not a good way to play football), hated playing defense, and held the coaches in disdain. When the start of my sophomore year came around, I opted out.

Yet I understand why so many young men are attracted to football. It is a beautiful game to watch and a fun and exciting sport to play. The adulation and adornment dished out to football players in many communities and schools is hard to ignore. And football offers an attractive avenue for young men in search of meaning and purpose in their lives. Football teaches discipline and a strong work ethic, teamwork and collaboration, leadership skills, and the perseverance and resilience needed to overcome challenges and handle setbacks. But too many young men play the game in the hopes of achieving college scholarships and NFL stardom and the big money attached to it. For some talented high school players, the fame, riches, and glory are there for the taking, or so it seems. For most, it turns out to be a mirage.

Is there any truth to the notion that football is so popular in the United States because it is such a violently physical sport full of risk? Or are we simply oblivious, or unthinking, in our support of what is admittedly an exciting, beautiful game? If it turns out that the rate of CTE among professional football players is as high as 97% (or even 40% or 50%) what are the ethical implications of school boards, college presidents, local media outlets, NFL owners, advertisers and sponsors, and the sports gambling industry supporting and promoting an industry that causes such harm to those who play it? And what about all of us who support the game by watching and rooting for young men as they entertain us in a way that will eventually cause many of them to suffer severe brain damage and disproportionately high cases of early dementia, ALS, Parkinson's disease, and worse?

I am genuinely conflicted by all of this because I continue to enjoy football for the exciting, dynamic, and thrilling sport that it is. I love that football brings people from all walks of life together. And I understand the socioeconomic and cultural factors that play a role in the high percentage of African American athletes who play and dominate football at its most competitive levels. The lure of football as an opportunity to open doors to a better life, to riches and fame, is compelling and difficult to resist, especially if you are poor and don’t perceive a bright future outside of football. But it is sad. Only a select few are good enough to make it, and even then, based on the medical data, it does not seem worth it.

It is not for me to tell anyone whether or not they should play football, or root for football, or support the game financially. But I hope that any young person considering playing the game today will take a long, hard look at the evidence and ask themselves, is the glory of Friday night lights really worth it?

Jacinda Ardern: Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Leader

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
Tufts University, April 2024 (Photo: Alonso Nichols, Tufts Now)

As someone who studies and reads a lot of books and articles about political leaders, I have come to identify certain traits that are essential to positive and uplifting leadership. These include intelligence, wisdom, empathy, courage, the ability to listen to different points of view, understand people’s needs, acknowledge uncertainty, respect science and not be afraid to consult with experts, and prioritize the public interest over political advancement. In an ideal world, the best leaders also inspire kindness and decency in others. Although few people in history fit all these criteria, I believe that a genuinely compassionate and intelligent leader can govern a nation with kindness, empathy, and honesty while protecting the country’s interests and functioning as a trusted neighbor in the world community.

We live in a world dominated by oligarchs and strongmen. In the United States, we have a president who celebrates UFC fights and aggressive masculinity, demeans reporters, especially female reporters, and laces every speech and interview with insults and name calling. Our Secretary of Defense preaches that elevated levels of testosterone are the true measure of a man and essential to a warrior ethos while he systematically eliminates women from positions of senior leadership. From Russia and North Korea to dozens of countries in both hemispheres, political leaders frequently exemplify the worst traits of humanity.

Jacinda Ardern was a different kind of leader. As Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she proved that an effective leader need not sacrifice her humanity. Her honest, humane, and compassionate governing style was frequently described as an “antidote to Trumpism” and her popularity around the world reflected the sentiment. She was living proof that a head of state can be empathetic, sensitive, kind, and still be strong enough to lead a great nation with a proud history.

Recently, I finished A Different Kind of Power (Crown Publishing House, 2025), Jacinda Ardern’s refreshing and candid memoir about overcoming insecurities and self-imposed feelings of “imposter syndrome” to become the third woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ardern was only 37 when she became prime minister, the youngest person ever to hold the country’s highest seat of power. Her memoir, and the excellent CNN documentary “Prime Minister” released a few months later, depicts an ordinary, unassuming woman who became a consequential and highly effective national leader in difficult and challenging times. I came away from both with a sense of hope, for they confirmed my belief that kindness, decency, and compassion truly can make a difference in leadership at the highest levels of government.

A key ingredient of Ardern’s popularity and effectiveness as prime minister was her authenticity. She is extremely relatable. The daughter of a police officer, she learned at an early age that the ability to communicate, to use words effectively, was essential to establishing public trust. In New Zealand, police officers do not routinely carry guns. They are considered citizens in uniforms whose authority derives from the consent and cooperation of the community. As a young girl, she once saw her dad in uniform surrounded by a hostile group of men in leather jackets. As she walked across the parking lot, her father noticed her approaching. “Keep walking, Jacinda,” he said in a calm voice. Although she did as told, she worried about his safety. Later that night, her dad explained, “Jacinda, my words will always be the greatest tool I have.” It was a valuable lesson to her, and one she would use in later years.

As someone who grew up in a Mormon household, she valued its keen sense of community and understood from a young age how much personal connection mattered to people. Through its missionary work, she became comfortable with striking up conversations with people she did not know. Although she would later move away from her Mormon faith when it increasingly conflicted with her personal values, especially concerning the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, she always respected how loving and kind the people in her church were, and how focused they remained on service and charity.

Ardern developed an early interest in public policy and debate but never imagined herself capable or tough enough to run for public office. “I was the worker who quietly and steadily got things done,” she writes. “My elbows weren’t sharp enough; my skin was too thin. I was idealistic and sensitive.” And yet, she had witnessed two women become Prime Minister of New Zealand and the thought never crossed her mind that her gender would preclude her from becoming involved in politics. When she interned for a Labour Party MP during college, she fell in love with it. Parliament “was a place where laws changed and problems were fixed,” she recounted. Politics, when done right, could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for the better. And it could address issues that mattered to her, like poverty and inequality, climate change, repairing past injustices to indigenous populations, and advancing women’s reproductive freedoms.

When Ardern first became a Member of Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 2008, however, she experienced a crisis of confidence when the opposition verbally attacked her during a hard-edged debate on the Parliament floor. She figured the only way to cope was to toughen up, to develop thick skin and roll with the punches, so she sought the advice of a fellow Labour MP, a veteran politician known for his hardcore tactics. “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda,” he advised. “You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care. The moment you change is the moment you’ll stop being good at your job.”

Ardern resolved to remain true to herself. When she talked with groups of students, Ardern frequently asked them to describe what they think leadership requires. The students consistently used words such as “angry” and “aggressive.” Ardern would never be that kind of politician. “I didn’t want to choose between being a good politician and being what I considered a good person.” And she learned from exchanges with certain members of the opposition that “it was possible to disagree with your opponent without getting personal.” 

It turned out that Ardern’s empathetic style indeed was an effective way to lead and govern. In March 2017, the Labour Party selected Ardern as its deputy leader. She shared Labour’s vision “that our country be a place where everyone has a roof over their head and meaningful work, where education is free, where children live surrounded by creativity, not poverty, where we lead the world on environmental issues” and build a country “even better than the way we found it.”

Five months later, she was unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role when Prime Minister Andrew Little resigned following Labour’s poor showing in the polls. With national elections coming, Ardern ran a campaign of positivity and Labour’s popularity rebounded. In October 2017, when the New Zealand First Party agreed to a coalition with Labour, Ardern became New Zealand’s third female prime minister.

Only days before, unbeknownst to the public, Ardern discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter Neve was born eight months later. Although she was criticized for being selfish, for trying to have it all, she showed that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “the job of looking after a country’s people — and the mix of love and steel required to personally care for a child — might just go hand in hand.”

Before her swearing in, a journalist who Ardern had respected since she was eleven years old, asked her, “What is it you want to do?” She said what immediately came to mind. “I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.” In her memoir, Ardern explained further:

Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naïve, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.

Both the CNN documentary and memoir bring to light private moments that show Ardern’s ordinary humanity as she dealt with terrible bouts of morning sickness and her struggles to breast feed her newborn while balancing the responsibilities of prime minister with her desire to be a present mother to her child. Although she received criticism when she became the first prime minister to take six weeks of maternity leave while in office, most New Zealanders supported her decision, reinforcing a fundamental truth, “that politicians are humans first, and perhaps the public hadn’t lost sight of that.”

Throughout her tenure as prime minister, she displayed top-down kindness as a thoughtful, intelligent leader determined to act when necessary. After a white supremacist carried out two mass shootings on the same day at Christchurch mosques that killed 51 people and injured 49 more, Ardern immediately responded with heartfelt empathy. She mourned and grieved with the Christchurch Muslim community. She hugged and supported them, cried and prayed with them. She made clear the entire nation condemned the attacks and supported them in their darkest hour. Although some of the Muslim victims had come to New Zealand as refugees, this was an attack on “our community,” she said. “They are New Zealanders. They are us.” She received widespread praise from the Muslim and international communities for her personally empathetic response to the shootings.

But words, hugs, and prayers were not enough. Over the next three weeks, Ardern orchestrated and led the passage of sweeping legislation that banned most semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles, and higher capacity magazines from New Zealand, a country with a high rate of gun ownership. Through an amnesty and buyback program, tens of thousands of military-style assault weapons were taken off the streets. Horrified by viral social media posts of the Christchurch shootings, she launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an international commitment to remove and eliminate violent extremist content from the internet. Her tears generated toughness. She would not compromise public safety.

Tragedy struck New Zealand again in March 2019, when a volcano erupted at Whakaari/White Island that killed twenty-two people and severely burned many more. In the following days, Ardern visited with the survivors and family members of those who died and personally thanked the first responders who risked their lives rescuing survivors. When a social media post claimed she was only visiting the community so she could be seen “hugging people,” Ardern acknowledged the criticism bothered her. But she would do nothing differently. “First of all, of course I’d gone,” she writes. “This was a major disaster in our country and I was prime minister. And criticizing me for hugging people? … I would rather be criticized than stop being human.”

Less than a year later, she would be tested in ways never anticipated. “Leadership is a test for which you can only partially prepare,” she noted. “If you’re lucky, the information you need is out there—somewhere, in some form.” But when the world first confronted COVID, there was little information to draw on. As an island nation, New Zealand had some advantages. Twenty days after its first documented cases, her government closed the nation’s borders to everyone except returning citizens and established isolation and tracing protocols. But the pandemic was moving too quickly, and if she did not take more drastic action, the data and science showed that tens of thousands of people would die. That would be catastrophic in a country of five million people. For Ardern, it was not an option.

In April 2020, Ardern’s government ordered a Level 4 lockdown, shutting down most businesses and schools as people sheltered in place. Within six weeks, New Zealand had no new COVID cases. A few weeks later, the government reduced alert levels so people could dine out again, invite neighbors into their homes, and return to the world. For the next two years, New Zealand would have long stretches of normalcy followed by occasional periods of rising alert levels. But compared to the rest of the world, life looked ordinary in New Zealand, as kids returned to school, restaurants were open, and families gathered for weddings and funerals. By the time vaccines arrived and the country had achieved a 90 percent vaccination rate, the crisis in New Zealand had been mostly avoided. While COVID raged around the world, causing millions of deaths (including over 1.2 million in the United States), New Zealand experienced only twenty-five deaths and an infection rate 80% lower than in the United States.

Ardern writes also of the threatening and ugly backlash she faced with a vocal minority of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, fueled by disinformation from the United States. But she defends her actions to this day. “We came out of COVID with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and fewer days in lockdown than nations like the U.K., and during this time our country’s life expectancy actually increased.” That is what leadership is all about.

New Zealand is known for “punching above its weight” on the world stage and Ardern’s diplomatic approach represented New Zealand well within the international community. Domestically, in addition to enacting major gun safety measures following the Christchurch terrorist attacks, she took decisive action on climate change, committing New Zealand to carbon neutrality by 2050. She enacted pay equity and parental leave laws. She launched a mental health initiative and a Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy. Her government reformed the state benefits system to make it more accessible and friendly, built more state housing than any government in the last fifty years, expanded access to childhood education and health care, and invested in violence prevention programs. And for the first time in the country’s history, Parliament decriminalized abortion and advanced the cause of reproductive freedom.

But six years of nonstop work, pressure, anxiety, and crisis after crisis, finally took its toll. Ardern decided to resign from public life in 2023. She had done her best, and that was enough. As she wrote in her memoir:

[W]hen I was prime minister, I saw moments of true darkness. … But there’s an inverse feature to seeing the world at its most brutal, because those are also the moments that show people at their most humane. Those are the moments when I saw that it was possible for people to galvanize behind their collective humanity. Sometimes, those moments are small. Other times, they create a ripple that sweeps across the country.

Ardern continues to work for change and tries to make the world a little brighter. As she told a gathering at Tufts University in 2024, whatever her future holds, “I am going to talk about what it means to be human first, and a leader second, because I think we need more of that in the world.”

Jacinda Ardern is an appealing and refreshing voice in a world that increasingly turns dark and brutal. I hope that her example inspires other men and women of kindness and decency to enter politics and follow in her example. She challenged misperceptions and assumptions about young female leaders. And she proved that common sense combined with sensitivity, compassion, and empathy are towering strengths. We need a lot more leaders like her.

Seeing America Through Other Eyes

As the United States commemorates its 250^th anniversary, it seems appropriate to reflect on what America represents, to us and the world, in 2026. The document we joyously uphold this weekend declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These aspirational words inspired the American Revolution. We are the only nation on earth founded on an idea, an aspirational dream of liberty and equality for all. If there is anything that makes America exceptional, that is it.

That we did not live up to these aspirations for the first nearly 190 years of our young existence, however, should not take away from the ideas those words embraced. The Declaration formed the bedrock of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech on July 5, 1852, which appealed to our nation’s moral conscience and exposed the inherent hypocrisy between its founding principles and everyday governance. Abraham Lincoln used the proposition that “all men are created equal” to formally challenge the institution of slavery in America. Women did not secure the right to vote until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked the founding ideals of equality and unalienable rights as a "promissory note" owed to Black Americans, a moral reckoning that came to fruition in his “I Have a Dream” speech four months later during the March on Washington.

Only when the long arc of the universe finally bent toward justice, with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, did our country begin to fulfill its promise of legal equality for all citizens. But the aspirational power of the words in the Declaration of Independence, what historian Jon Meacham calls “the Promise of America” in our ongoing project to secure a “more perfect Union,” is a beautiful thing worth celebrating.

America is also a nation of immigrants with a complicated past. For the vast majority of Americans whose families at one time arrived on our shores from foreign lands, we view ourselves as a land of abundant opportunity, a melting pot of diverse peoples and cultures united by a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness. Americans proudly proclaim the United States a beacon of hope and light unto the nations, a place where people from all over the world come in search of economic opportunity, personal and religious freedom, and democracy.

Although our reputation as a place of refuge and asylum from a troubled world has been under extraordinary strain for the past 18 months, it is easier to preserve the myth of our own goodness than to reflect on more complex truths. Americans are a proud people. We see ourselves as the premier force for good in the world, for modernization and progress, as the arbiters of peace who stomp out terrorism and provide a pathway to democracy and civilization. Americans have long assumed that our intentions are pure, even if our actions are sometimes imperfect.

The rest of the world has a more nuanced view. They can see more clearly the hypocrisy of what America says and what it does. We leave our footprints all over the world. With over 800 military bases spread across more than 80 countries, we are the largest foreign military presence in human history. American corporate influence spans the globe, dominating international markets, technology, and pop culture. U.S. companies shape everything from global trade and digital infrastructure to local consumer habits worldwide. For some Americans, these are the things that instill pride and render America exceptional.

But for millions of people in foreign lands, a different picture of America emerges. During a talk in New York City in 2012, Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid noted what, to most foreigners, is an obvious truth: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States.” There are “two Americas.”

One need only look to the long, dark history of U.S. covert operations and military aggressions on behalf of autocratic rulers, dictators, and anti-democratic forces in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. “No country,” writes Hamid, “inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people as far away, as America.”  It is something that most Americans think little about. We tend to be insular people. We rarely look outward, rarely consider what other people and countries think of us. And yet, we are surprised to learn that people in other parts of the world do not always perceive us as good and generous as we view ourselves.

Rescue workers at bombing site in Minab, Iran, Feb. 28, 2026
(Photo: Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/Reuters via The Guardian)

Journalist and author Suzy Hansen reflected on these themes nine years ago in a beautifully written book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. Hansen grew up in a small, provincial town on the Jersey Shore and, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about Turkey’s history, culture, and traditions when she first arrived there in 2007. But over the next ten years, through her daily interactions with the people of Turkey, and in her travels to neighboring countries, Hansen developed a deeper understanding of the countries, people, and societies in which she immersed herself.

Living in Istanbul and opening herself to the experiences and perspectives of the people she met along the way created for Hansen an “American identity crisis.” Not because she doubted her inherent Americanness, her love of country and connection to her homeland, but because she re-discovered America through the eyes of the people she encountered in these foreign lands. She felt compelled to re-consider her long-held assumptions and ask why these foreigners knew so much more about her country than she did of theirs, and why she knew so little about how profoundly America had impacted, not always for good, this region of the world.

Hansen recalled one conversation she had with an Iraqi man at a café in 2012. “Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. ‘I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,’ he said. ‘How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?’”

The Iraqi man had seen how U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s prolonged the brutal Iraq-Iran war that resulted in roughly one million casualties. He saw U.S. bombs nearly destroy Baghdad in 1991, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. In 2003, he saw the U.S. invasion of Iraq severely destabilize the country and result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, a deadly, prolonged sectarian civil war, an extensive and costly military occupation, and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS. And all Iraqis despised the U.S. imposed sanctions from 1990 to 2003, which as described by Hansen “destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, ‘We think the price is worth it.’)” Hansen offered this additional assessment:

If as an American I merely ignored, was not incensed or heartbroken by American actions like sanctions, then it must have been because I somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.

At the time, most Americans perceived sanctions as a pressure-inducing tool of international diplomacy and assumed that life under Saddam Hussein was already terrible, which it was. “But what Americans likely didn’t know was that the Iraqi government had for a long time provided its people with adequate health care, schools, and social programs.” In the 1980s, Baghdad University had more female professors than did Princeton as late as 2009. Literacy in Iraq was at ninety percent. As Hansen explained:

While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality. Americans never grasped that Iraqis might have their own idea of what a good life would entail. In the first days of the American occupation [post-2003]—and what would turn out to be the next decade—Iraqis were bewildered that the United States could not even provide them with electricity … In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Saddam got the lights back up within months.

Hansen had many such conversations with friends and acquaintances during her years overseas. The Iranians with whom Hansen spoke in her travels had never forgotten how the United States helped orchestrate the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1951, followed by U.S. support for the Shah and the CIA’s role in training agents of SAVAK, the brutal secret police service known for its severe torture techniques and violence against Iranian citizens and dissidents. Indeed, for most Iranians, “all the tensions that define the relations between United States and Iran today are rooted in the fall of Mossadegh.”

The Shah was a friend of the United States because we viewed him as Western-minded and a strong leader who supported “modernization” and was our ally in the Cold War. But to many Iranians, “modernity” meant American businesses profiting at Iranians’ expense in their country, the U.S. providing weapons to a brutal dictator, extensive poverty, and the terror of SAVAK. “Yet to this day,” as Hansen explained, “when a journalist like myself arrives in a foreign country, modernity is the measurement through which all standards of ‘success’ or goodness are judged, and the rejection of modernity by men such as the Iranian ayatollahs … is reviled as barbarism and backwardness, with complete disconnection from what modernization projects actually meant to that country’s hapless people.”

Hansen quotes Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who has written about how the West has failed to understand the sense of “humiliation” it has repeatedly inflicted on Muslim men. “The real challenge,” according to Pamuk, “is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship.” What drives many of these men “is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.”

Even in Turkey, a “pro-business” and “moderate” Islamic country that has embraced and adopted much of the West’s notions of modernity while avoiding colonialism, the people’s lives have been substantially affected by American actions and policies. One of Hansen’s closest Turkish friends was a woman named Rana, who said that America had defined much of her life in Turkey. As Hansen explained:

For someone like Rana, America defined her life in the broadest terms; it was an American world, with American-made international laws, American wars on her borders, American military bases on her country’s soil, American movies in her movie theaters, American songs on the radio, American monetary exchange rates, American economic policies … and four whole pages devoted to American news in the Turkish newspapers. As we spoke, I could see that foreigners grew up without the very thing that Americans cherished so much about their American selves—their self-made story.

Regardless of how one may judge the successes and failures of American foreign policy, the perspectives conveyed by Hansen offer important considerations and painful truths. Hansen did not intend Notes on a Foreign Country to be an authoritative history of the countries discussed, and there are important countervailing narratives she overlooks or ignores. Written as part memoir, and fused with historical insight and background, Hansen’s writing questions American assumptions of superiority and examines the distance between what America thinks of itself and what it is to the rest of the world.

I feel extremely grateful and fortunate to have lived my whole life in the United States. But I found Hansen's book educational and eye opening because we are a country frequently unwilling to see the world from an unfiltered, non-American lens. It helped me understand more clearly why U.S. assertions of economic and military power rarely end well for the countries involved, and why U.S. knowledge and expertise often fall short in foreign lands.

From American interventions in Vietnam to the Middle East to Latin America, the United States too often asserts its power in countries and cultures we know little about and then makes things worse in the countries it disrupts. Despite our affluence, success, rich democratic traditions, and history, we have a lot to learn from other people, nations, and cultures.

So, as we proudly and joyously celebrate America’s 250th birthday, let us commit to our ongoing quest to achieve a “more Perfect union” and the promise that is America. But let us also recognize that, as strong and powerful and successful as the American experiment has become, we are not alone in this world. We are not superior or exceptional to anyone. And we should consider how our actions and policies may negatively impact people who strive, like all Americans, for a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and equality and justice for all.