Sheldon Whitehouse - On Virtues: Quotations and Insight to Live a Full, Honorable, and Truly American Life

Avon, Massachusetts

My family was a foreign service family. As I was growing up, my father was posted to Cambodia, South Africa, Congo, Guinea, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, with stints in New York City at the United Nations and Washington, D.C., at the State Department. Some of the foreign postings were pretty primitive and unpleasant. Some of the nations were at war.

My fathers service made for an interesting childhood. His assignments meant a lot of time for me in boarding school, and an early start on independence. But they also sent a powerful silent message: something was worth it. Something was worth my moms having to worry about not having a decent hospital nearby when I broke my arm, or worry about how wed get the rabies vaccine when my brother got bitten by a street dog (a friends mother died of rabies, so this was not an idle worry). Something was worth not being able to drink the water safely. Something was worth the family separations that safety and schooling demanded.

That something is a big part of what this book of quotations is about. I have gathered them in a little handwritten notebook, bit by bit, over nearly twenty years, as I came across words and phrases that touched on that something.

In my family we never talked about what that something was. It was like a dark staryou only knew it was there by its effect on other things. Perhaps that something was too big to talk about. Perhaps thats why I find it easier to look for that something in other peoples words than to describe it in my own.

I can tell you this. That something has a lot to do with America and what America stands for: with our system of government, and its balance and counterpoise; with our belief in principles above power; with our American sense of journey; with what we mean in the world. It has a lot to do with the rule of law, and to a degree, with the craft of lawyering that brings the rule of law to life. It has a lot to do with the little glimpses into the eternal that adherence to principle provides. And it has a lot to do with the difficulties, frustrations, and defeats that are the virtually inevitable price of working hands-on in our government of laws, and with the political combat that shapes and drives our government and its laws.

And, truth be told, a bit of this book is just picked from the clutter of my own experiences: snippets of poetry and prayer and phrase that seemed particularly telling, evocative or resonanteven some that are just plain silly, since life can be pretty silly sometimes.

Working on this collection has brought back a flood of memories of that early life, and of my father. The earliest memory is sitting at my breakfast table on a sunny morning, I think in Cambodia, looking across the room at my father at a different breakfast table having a different breakfast, reading his newspaper. My time with him was in the evening, when he came home from the embassy, and made his ritual cocktail-hour martini. (This was a lifelong practice, culminating at the end when he took himself off the hated chemo and announced, Enough of that damned stuff, Im going to treat this with a martini.) For me, he stirred together cold milk and a blackcurrant syrup called Ribena in my little cup. To this day, I still love the taste of black currant, and enjoy the happy sound of a cocktail shaker. We would have our drinks together, before I was shuffled off to bed and he and my mother settled down to dinner.

I remember the incomplete and uncertain feeling of our first Christmas without him. Hed been sent to the Congo during the Lumumba Rebellion, and it was dangerous enough there that no family members were allowed. That left my mother and my little brother and me to have Christmas together. My mother tried so hard to make it cheerful that I felt I had to try hard, too, not to let her down. I think I was six.

I remember the unaccustomed sight of my father in the kitchen in our house in Conakry, Guinea. It was afternoon, when the household staff (all spies of the Guinean government) were away. He had bags of groceries from the embassy commissary spread out around the kitchen counters, and was hiding walkie-talkies inside bread loaves to deliver to the embassy families. We had all been put under house arrest by the Guinean government. My father had negotiated permission to deliver groceries to the imprisoned families, and this was how he was going to make sure that everyone could communicate, and how he was going to know that everyone was all rightthat nothing awful was happening. Off he went, with our embassy Wagoneer stuffed with grocery bags and secrets, leaving a son amazed at his fathers capacity for such an intrigue, proud to be in on the secret. I was probably ten.

I think back now, as a parent with the daily worries of life, to my mother, with two boys oblivious to the dangers and cheerfully ready for mischief, and a baby daughter to look after. Get bitten by the wrong dog and its rabies; drink the wrong water and its parasites; swim in the wrong creek and its bilharzia; fall off your bike in the wrong gutter and its infection from the sewage: no milk, no hospital, sporadic electricitynot a mothers dream posting. And we children gave her plenty more to worry about. During a particularly angry demonstration against America and neocolonialism, my little brother Charlie and I climbed up on the roof to get a better view of the crowds surging by either side of the house. Of course we did not tell my mother. All she knew was that suddenly we were nowhere to be found, my father was away at the embassy, and large angry mobs were protesting outside. By the time she found us on the roof, she was nearly as ready to kill us as she was relieved to find us. She scrambled me and Charlie over the wall into the next compound, occupied by a Saudi official, and instructed us in no uncertain terms to go inside his house and not budge until my father returned and picked us up. Charlie and I sat there in near silence, for hours, awkwardly perching on overly ornate furniture, chilly in an overly air-conditioned room, picking at an unfamiliar plate of nut candies the kind Saudi had put out, and contemplating our grim future.

The miseries and hazards of Conakry, Guinea, highlighted my fathers particularly strong sense of duty. He had dated Jacqueline Bouvier. His sister Sylvia had been a bridesmaid in Jackies wedding to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy was now the First Lady and JFK was President. On their way through the snows from their Inaugural Ball, the new President and First Lady had made one stop, at the home of Susan Mary Alsop, my fathers cousin. My father and the President were both Ivy League, combat-hardened, Pacific theater veterans. Were it not for the convention of calling him Mr. President, he and the President likely would have been on a first-name basis. With one phone call, my father could probably have been out of Conakry. It simply was not in him to contemplate making such a call. When duty calls, or danger, be never wanting there, was his lifelong motto.