Roger Angell was born on September 19, 1920. He has voted in nineteen Presidential elections, the first time in 1944 during World War II, with a ballot for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, posted by mail from the Central Pacific where Angell was serving as a Sergeant in the Army Air Force.
At midnight on Friday, Angell, now a senior editor and staff writer for The New Yorker, posted a column titled“My Vote” detailing his personal feelings about the upcoming Presidential election and his view of the two major candidates. In it he explains why he considers his vote this election to be even more significant than his first.
My country faces a danger unmatched in our history since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, or perhaps since 1943, when the Axis powers held most of Continental Europe, and Imperial Japan controlled the Pacific rim, from the Aleutians to the Solomon Islands, with the outcome of that war still unknown.
Recognizing that he might be accused of hyperbole, Angell takes care to explain why he is motivated to this conclusion. As he acknowledges, he represents “the last sliver of the sixteen million Americans who served in the military in my war.” Although Angell did not personally see combat during World War II, the memory of more than twenty friends he lost to the fighting remains fresh in his mind. He recalls those friends here, along with the names of those who survived the war but lived with the trauma of devastating wounds for the rest of their lives.
While Donald Trump has done more than any Presidential candidate in history to alienate or insult segments of the voting public, for Angell the most singular, defining moment came in August of this year, when an admirer presented Trump with a replica of his Purple Heart, and Trump responded:
Mr. Trump said, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” What? Mr. Trump is saying he wishes that he had joined the armed forces somehow (he had a chance but skimmed out, like so many others of his time) and then had died or been scarred or maimed in combat? This is the dream of a nine-year-old boy, and it impugns the five hundred thousand young Americans who have died in combat in my lifetime, and the many hundreds of thousands more whose lives were altered or shattered by their wounds of war.
Trump’s casual, spur-of-the-moment dismissal of the sacrifices made by veterans was, for Angell, indicative of a much deeper personality flaw, one that called into question anything the candidate might say about his concern for veterans, and mocked the fact that the sacrifices they had made permitted people like Trump to thrive and succeed, long after that terrible war had ended. Angell notes that Trump, born in 1946, would have come of age in the 1960’s when the morality and implications of war were being debated like no other time in history—yet Trump appears not to have paid this issue the slightest bit of attention. Nor would he as a Commander-In-Chief, the most solemn responsibility the Presidency affords.
Angell believes Trump’s arrogant, self-aggrandizing behavior during this campaign, more than anything, has been the best testimony to his utter blindness towards the concerns of anyone else:
Mr. Trump is endlessly on record as someone who will not back down, who cannot appear to pause or lose. He is a man who must win, stay on the attack, and who thinks, first and last, “How will I look?” This is central, and what comes after it, for me, at times, is concern for what it must be like for anyone who, facing an imperative as dark and unforgiving as this, finds only the narcissist’s mirror for reassurance.
Angell understands that the Presidency of this country is not a game, not a Reality show, and not an opportunity to preen in the mirror. A day in the life of an American President is filled with decisions that more often than not demand an instantaneous and considered response, decisions that will ripple for better or for worse through the lives of millions, decisions which keep any President up long into the night:
There are bits of promising news here and there, but always more bloodshed, sudden alarms, and unexpected lurking dangers. The import of the news is often veiled or contradictory, or simply impenetrable. The night wears on, and may contain brief hours of sleep. There’s time to tweet. A new day is arriving, and with it the latest rush of bad news—another police shooting out West, another suicide bomber in Yemen, and other urgent briefings from a world already caught up in the morning’s difficult events. He needs to respond, but the beginning of this President’s response is always reliably at hand: How will I look?
The implications of this type of personality on the most important questions—how to improve the lives of Americans, how to approach questions of war and peace---are in sharp contrast to those of Hillary Clinton, who has already demonstrated her capability to handle them. For, Angell, someone whose consideration and life experience spans over nine decades, the decision is a simple one:
I will cast my own vote for Hillary Clinton with alacrity and confidence. From the beginning, her life has been devoted to public service and to improving the lives of children and the disadvantaged. She is intelligent, strong, profoundly informed, and extraordinarily experienced in the challenges and risks of our lurching, restlessly altering world and wholly committed to the global commonality.
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Ms. Clinton will make a strong and resolute President—at last, a female leader of our own—and, in the end, perhaps a unifying one.
DailyKos member Teacherken also posts on Angell’s piece, with a more personal take here.