My Personal Constitution

My Personal Constitution

In 1963, John F. Kennedy rallied the people of West Berlin with the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.” At the peak of the Cold War, an American president was telling the German people that we stood with them in the spirit of democracy. We and Western Europe saw ourselves as the “Free World.”

When I served in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, I was inspired myself with that same positive spirit. We were allied with other countries – Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, committed to democratic rule, regular elections, and increasing respect for human rights.

Beginning in the early 1970s, through the 1980s I was engaged with the democratic competition here at home. I refer to the perennial battle between Democrats and Republicans for the Congress and the presidency.

For the past decades, I have been a journalist either for the San Francisco Examiner and then Chronicle or on cable television. In all those years, in politics and in full-time journalism, I have enjoyed the freedom and spirit of American democracy.

Today, in April of 2025, this country’s president has, in three short months, thrown away the historic charts that guided our democratic lives.

We find him forging an economic war with our allies, finding comfort with Russia and the other aggressor countries, those uncommitted to human rights.

We find him demolishing the efforts we so recently made to make our democratic name in the world – for open and free trade, especially among our allies; for economic aid to developing countries in battling the consequences of AIDs; for the truth we told on the Voice of America even about ourselves – which we did even when I would listen as a Peace Corps volunteer to my short-wave radio on the civil rights fight back at home.

And, yes, I remember when we told our friends in Europe and Canada and in Latin America and so recently even among former enemies like Vietnam that free markets and democracy await them here.

Again, we have thrown away our charts – the maps that separated the world from the free people from the bullies. Frighteningly, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and modern Germany are now looking sadly at us as one of the world’s bullies.

There is nothing that made me prouder than to be a Peace Corps volunteer teaching business in Africa, knowing that I was on the side of democracy.

Nor to be a free reporter in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, and I asked a young German what freedom now meant to him.

He was direct: he said it was talking to me.

He was talking about the right to talk openly and publicly about what was for him the prospect of democracy itself.