That year, I turned 16 and got my driver’s license. Our family car was a dear old prewar Buick, and a dollar fed it three gallons of gas. Give-’em-hell Harry Truman was running for president, but no one thought he could win–except Harry.
I got my first job that summer. The job title was hod carrier, although I worked with a road-construction crew. There was some red tape because I was only 16, but I can’t remember exactly what it was. Before I could work, I had to get a social-security number from an office downtown. All it meant to me was I couldn’t work if I didn’t get one. The work was hard, out on the road in the hot Tennessee sun.
Each paycheck, the federal government took a lot out for income tax and a little for social security. There were mysterious letters on the check stub that meant, but did not say, social security. I remember hearing it was a trust fund for everyone’s retirement, but my father didn’t like it. He was a Republican.
At 16, I thought old age would never come. They could have those pennies each paycheck if they thought it was so important. I forgot about it.
When it was time for college there was no money, so I worked, studied and borrowed for four years. I had a part-time job in a credit bureau. The amount deducted for social security from my paycheck each week seemed negligible. Upon graduation in 1954, I was drafted like every other guy my age, and for the next two years the army paid my premiums.
By the beginning of the tumultuous ’60s, I was halfway through seminary. I found out that when I became a minister the government would count me as self-employed even though the Episcopal Church would be my employer. I was given the choice of taking social security. If I did, I’d have to pay all the premiums myself. Since I had been paying for 10 years, I decided to go with it. Besides, all my advisers said, “it’s the U.S. government, as sound as the dollar.”
Some time later the retirement age was dropped to 62. Later still, Medicare was added. That began to worry me. How was the government going to pay all those doctors and not screw up the retirement stuff? Washington said not to worry. By this time, I was paving the social-security premiums myself, every quarter, and the amount was getting bigger and bigger.
As the years went by I became a husband, father and, finally, grandfather to five. Since 1962. Washington has considered me self-employed–first as a priest, now as pastoral counselor and psychotherapist.
What started out as a trust fund is looking more and more like a shell game. It’s now you see it, now you don’t. Economists tell me that even back when I was 16 the government was taking my pennies to pay for my grandparents’ social security. They say it as if I were stupid not to have known that. Most folks still think of social security as a trust. Truckdrivers, nurses, even my nephew the stockbroker all say the same, especially if they’re baby boomers. “I wonder if any of the trust fund will be left when I get there.”
Worse still, politicians tell me I should be ashamed for spending my grandchildren’s retirement. It’s a game Congress plays called “Let’s you and them fight.” Some legislators impute me as a selfish predator over my children’s offspring, a kind of grand-childabusing old man. This way they hope they won’t get caught as tricksters and shills at the shell game. This is what pains me the most.
Every year I invest a little money to purchase each of my five grandchildren a share of stock in a toy company. It’s all I can afford. I’m not rich. Even at an early age, they understand when they walk in that store that they own just a little part of it. I want them to learn something about savings, investments and capitalism firsthand. And about trust. And, of course, something to remember me by when I’m gone.
Maybe Congress has been too generous with cost-of-living adjustments, lower retirement ages and other vote-getting goodies. However, members of Congress have carefully crafted rich retirement pensions for themselves out of our taxes.
Close to the Capitol, in the Library of Congress, is the original Declaration of Independence. It counsels against “Government [that] becomes destructive of . . . [our] Safety and Happiness.” Trying to start a fight between me and my grandchildren is very destructive to our happiness and well-being.
This past election, congressional candidates knew they would inherit this problem when they asked us to vote for them. Here was an opportunity to lead us to do what Roosevelt and Churchill asked us to do when I was a youngster, when everything was at stake. We could have been asked to roll up our sleeves, get to work and make some sacrifices. If our political leaders could inspire us with a spirit of integrity and sacrifice, most of us would willingly pay more social-security taxes.
Congress regularly overspends, and each year there is a cry for accountability. At such times, usually on TV news shows, one legislator or another will eventually say that within seven years, people who retire at 65 get back through their monthly social-security cheek all the money they have contributed since they started working. The inference is clear: any benefits I receive after I’m 72 are a form of embezzlement from my grandchildren’s future. This sets one generation against another.
The issue is trust. If Congress could engender more trust between itself and the electorate this problem could be solved. Compared to the impossible the Allies did in World War II, the social-security crisis should not be that intractable.
I’m portrayed as a selfish predator, a grandchild-abusing old man
title: “It S A Matter Of Trust” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Minta Hager”
The following January, with the New Hampshire primary approaching, my colleague Howard Fineman and I interviewed Bush aboard his campaign bus. The subject turned to his two college-age arrests, one for stealing a large Christmas wreath from a hotel, the other for ripping down the Princeton goal posts after the Princeton-Yale game. We asked if he had ever appeared in court. “I can’t remember,” Bush said. We found out later from his campaign that the answer was no, but we were struck at the time by the Clintonian response. Bush wanted to redeem the baby boomers without first coming to terms with his own baby boomer past.
It’s this unease with his own life story–not the story itself–that comes to mind as voters sort through how to assess the revelation that Bush was arrested for a third time in 1976, not as a frat boy but as a 30-year-old under the influence, weaving his car full of passengers into the hedgerows of Kennebunkport, Maine. Had Bush revealed the story a year or two ago, it would have been a nonissue. Almost everyone has something embarrassing in his or her past, and, as we’re finding out again now, the American public is extraordinarily forgiving. But for all the talk of the Oprahization of politics, Bush somehow missed this essential element of our media culture. The candidate whose signature line is, “I trust the people,” didn’t trust us to be mature enough to handle this information.
His explanation sounds plausible at first. He says he didn’t want to be a poor role model for his 18-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. As applied to the specifics of drug use or excessive drinking, Bush is right: Parents do not have to give their kids chapter and verse of all of their various excesses and mistakes. His instinct here is one that most of us who have kids appreciate.
But arrests are in a different category than simple bad behavior, and Bush seems to have hidden behind his role as a parent. As Katie Couric said on “Today” to Bill Bennett, who was spinning madly for Bush and harming his own reputation in the process, “He’s not running for parent of the year.” The man is running for president of the United States, and voters had a right to know many months ago whether their president, as an adult, had been convicted of a crime, any crime.
Which is the worse example to set for one’s children: That you once did something bad that they shouldn’t do? Or that you withheld information that people needed to know? When his daughters apply for a job–almost any job–they will be asked if they were ever convicted of a crime. Some of the forms specify felonies; others are more vague. The application form for high office is not vague.
Dick Cheney, for instance, was arrested for drunk driving while a college student, a minor matter by any standard. But when President Bush nominated him to be Secretary of Defense in 1989, Cheney revealed the arrests. Should the president, to ask a question much heard during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, be held to a lower standard than other government employees? The whole point of the Bush campaign is to start holding the president to a higher standard, which presumably includes a higher standard of disclosure of relevant facts.
In more than 200 years of American elections, we’ve never before had a “November Surprise.” We have no precedent for assessing the damage of new biographical information about a candidate this close to the election. The polls are of little help, because they can’t convey the complexity of how voters internalize the news. When people say they don’t care, are they telling the truth? Maybe. Ross Perot’s endorsement of Bush may help more than this incident hurts, and the anger on the part of Republicans over the timing of revelation could further energize Bush’s base. If Bush gets the votes of all of the people who’ve hit the road after having a few too many, it’s a landslide.
On the other hand, the burden of this election is on Bush. He has to convince the voters why, in an era of prosperity, they must fire current management and try something new. Unlike Clinton in 1992, who did not try to campaign on character, Bush has emphasized it repeatedly as his major claim on power. He and his backers have tried to portray Al Gore as lacking the integrity necessary for the job. They sound more than a little tinny now when they claim that Gore exaggerating about his dog and his mother-in-law is heinous, but that this bit of Bush’s past is irrelevant.
A long-ago arrest for drunk driving does not, by itself, disqualify someone from being president. Nor does covering it up. If Bush was far ahead, it would not doom his chances. But Bush is not far ahead. If he loses, it will be partly because he didn’t think the country was quite ready to come to terms with the excesses of the baby boomers, after all. And Bush himself wasn’t ready, early in the campaign, to “usher in the responsibility era” with a little more responsibility of his own.
