I had a good idea recently. Stop hyperventilating about Donald Trump and focus instead on American history; really focus. It is helping me and I highly recommend it. There is, of course, so much to hyperventilate and worry about, something new every day: Russian interference in the election and the President’s obvious unconcern, his rejection of the high moral vision expressed in American foreign policy for two and a half centuries and replacing it with a starkly different vision articulated by two top presidential advisers, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal: “The President embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” That is a very different and harsh vision which David Brooks described as “moral decoupling…morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self interest.” Near the top of my worry list are continuing attacks on the media, “fake news” and “alternative facts” that have created a truth crisis and which enable the government to operate in a fact-free zone in matters of enormous consequence such as climate change. Also near the top of my list of concerns is the utter absence of grace, gracefulness and humility. There is no laughter, no music, no joy.

So I’m trying to focus on history. Let historian David McCullough be your mentor. Read his superb biographies of Harry S. Truman and John Adams and be reminded of how great American leaders emerged at critical times and how external threats inspired their greatness.

Add Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton to understand again the brilliance of our nation’s founders. Hamilton came from such humble and unpromising beginnings, orphaned at a young age – his father abandoned his wife and children, his mother died holding him in her arms, sailed from St. Croix to New York City through the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, Hugh Knox, was a brilliant thinker and writer, George Washington’s Aide de Camp in the Revolutionary War, led troops in battle, wrote a majority of the Federalist Papers and was the architect of the American banking system and economy. When you finish the book, see Hamilton, the hip hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. If you can’t afford tickets (our children gave us tickets for Christmas) listen to the C.D. Best of all, listen, see the play, listen again. Not only will you have new appreciation for the people who birthed and nurtured our new nation but, I suspect, you will be absolutely captivated by Miranda’s and McCarter’s Mozartian genius.

Return to David McCullough’s The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, published this year, a collection of the author’s speeches. There are fifteen of them and I found each one interesting, informative, warmly human and, in my current malaise, inspiring and hopeful. McCullough reminds us what an intellectual giant Thomas Jefferson was; “He read seven languages. He was a lawyer, surveyor, ardent meteorologist, botanist, agronomist, archeologist, paleontologist, Indian ethnologist, classicist, brilliant architect. Music, he said, was the passion of his soul, mathematics the passion of his mind. Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence and the unparalleled words,

“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. That to secure these rights, Governments are

instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

McCullough reminds us that “Never, never anywhere had there been a government instituted from the consent of the governed.”

To the graduates of Union College, Schenectady, New York, McCullough described Woodrow Wilson’s painful choice to lead America into the First World War…”Against all tradition, America was to become embroiled in conflict and resolution far beyond its borders. The American part in World War One proved decisive. And there could be no turning back, as Wilson knew. America had responsibilities in the world…Power is not the point, responsibility is the point and at the heart of responsibility are always moral choices.”

My hope for the future is renewed by President Harry S. Truman’s farewell address to the country which McCullough recounts. It was 1953, at the beginning of the Cold War. Americans were concerned about the future and frightened. Families were building bomb shelters for protection from the nuclear attack that seemed imminent. School children were practicing “Duck and Cover” huddling under their desks for protection. President Truman said: “I have a deep and abiding faith in the destiny of free people. With patience and courage, we shall move on into a new era.”

We did, and thanks be to God, with patience and courage, we shall.

John M. Buchanan