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John Gardner’s Tree of Life When Edward Steichen, the great photographer, referred to his best friend and brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, he said “when God made Carl, he didn’t do anything else that day.” Well, October 8, 1912, surely was another satisfying day for the creator. I
was deeply honored by Vartan to be invited to remember John Gardner
today and want to report what a deep and stirring experience it
was to pull out my files, and read letters, talk to old friends
and just sit back and recall an unforgettable man for all seasons. I first met John in 1963, when I was a young speech writer in the Lyndon Johnson White House, and, being low kid on the totem pole, they stuck me in the Executive Office building with the staff of some new idea they called the White House Fellows program. John came down often and when we first began to talk, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, “It seemed as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom but had fallen into it.” My connection with him deepened when I joined Carnegie as a staff member and one of my roles was to go to Washington once a month to brief him on what the Foundation was thinking about and also to listen and report back what was on his mind. For me, of course, it was magic but John relished these conversations, I think, almost as a relief from the unrelenting pressures of his day. Here he was far from the protected haven of Carnegie, in what seemed to me a football-field sized office in the Department of HEW, with 100,000 employees, answering to every member of Congress, the press and the horde of lobbyists that populated his new world. Perhaps that was the reason he had a slip of paper tucked into a photograph on his desk with a quote from a French writer: “There are times when everything succeeds. Don’t let it alarm you. It will pass.” And perhaps it was the reason in a commencement address at the centennial of Stanford University, he said to the graduating class. “As many of you know, I returned to the university two years ago, after 50 years in the East. Of course, I had to go through the inevitable period of missing Washington. That took a couple of days.”
For him, being happy was being in the arena. He was not one who dreamed of a lazy retirement. “Storybook happiness involves every form of thumb-twiddling. True happiness involves the full use of one’s powers and talents.” John had a humble and modest demeanor, but let me tell you, he was steel covered with velvet. How did he handle the storm around the issues he cared about, such as the enforcement of the civil rights laws under President Johnson, that often made him personally a target of bitter controversy? John told his graduates at Stanford in 1991 that “You discover that no matter how hard you try to please… some people in this world aren’t going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling, but then quite relaxing.” John and I talked a lot about the challenges of writing, of respecting one’s talent and narrative and poetic impulses, and of carving out the time to do it against all odds. Some critics considered him old fashioned in his language but his books on Excellence and Self Renewal and Leadership were clarion calls to action, built on a bedrock faith in the power of the people to act if they knew the truth. Those values and the elegance of his prose summoned an army of people to join him in a common cause. Sometime, his writing marched with the rhythms of the Old Testament prophet calling us to a higher purpose. Listen to the beat of the music in a Gardner paragraph: “Life isn’t a mountain that has a summit. Nor is it a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score. Life is an endless unfolding and –if we wish it to be--an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities, I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning and sensing and wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.” He
once told me while I accompanied him on one of his daily walks during
a visit to Palo Alto, that while he walked, he always picked a problem
to ruminate over. Sometime he would worry a problem for a long time
until, like an irritated oyster, the pearl of an idea emerged. It
is a well known legend that he often made notes on an envelope,
which he called a “forward pass,” to toss to another to
carry the idea down the field. He was an unconventional thinker
who saw the power of private initiative in communities all over
the country as America’s greatest strength—who believed
that rebuilding community was the great task of a renewed democracy.
I’m certain that ideas like the White House Fellows, the creation
of the Independent Sector and Common Cause, came out of the intellectual
ferment of his long walks and meditations. Walking and thinking
and wrestling with the problems of the world; even John’s relaxation
had to be productive. It is remarkable that this academic and ex-Marine, would come to New York after the war and join something as cerebral as Carnegie Corporation. But John saw the foundation world as few had seen it before him—as an independent center of action, as a place for fresh thinking, as a laboratory for experimentation, as a vehicle for launching daring ideas and a platform for engaging in a dialogue with the nation. He became the very model of the consummate foundation president—a national figure of enormous intellectual prowess and leadership, a writer and a seer, a reformer and a partisan, a dreamer and a builder. The greatest philanthropic lesson I learned from John was to always look at the “power of the idea” and to master “the art of the grant.” John made “education for all “come alive as a central idea, and the nation began to listen. In 1968, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller called him after Robert Kennedy’s assassination to offer John that seat in the U.S. Senate, many of his friends urged him to accept it. We thought he would have made such a great U.S. Senator in the tradition of the wise and deeply respected statesmen throughout American history who guided the nation; that the Senate would be a grand platform for his ideas, and that he would have such a profound impact on the individual senators and upon the Senate itself. Some even dreamed of the presidency for him, because he was the kind of man Americans were looking for—a leader they could trust, with ideals, integrity, a man who could renew America’s faith in itself. I always thought that John’s real reason for turning down a life in politics was imbedded in the creation of Common Cause. He knew the darker truth about high public office. He once said that at HEW “I worked on a lot on problems and kept encountering the same frustrations—bumping my head against the same walls wherever I went” He discovered that “the system was badly in need of repair.” And added that “Money is a hydra-headed monster that will wreck our system if we don’t chain it down.” When he left government and did not return to the university or to corporate boards or even to the lecture and writing circuit, many of his friends were stunned that he would choose to spend his time and energy in what most thought was a hopeless effort to build a grass roots movement to reform government. He launched it with full page ads in major newspapers that were serious essays on the subject of openness and accessibility, on accountability and citizen action, and the power of the people to restrain the influence of special interests through campaign finance reform. What caught your eye was the look of the ad-- no fancy graphics, just a full page of print. It was the Gardner style, signaling serious intent, but he later confessed that he was as surprised as his advertising advisors were that hundreds of thousands of citizens would answer his call to arms. John had founded a new community of concerned citizens who would understand the challenge and work hard to open up government to “an informed public.” He called for “stamina” because he always said that government reform is “no sport for the short-winded.” A Stanford friend once asked him if he ever got depressed or discouraged and John answered “No, I don’t seem to have that gene.” I don’t think he was surprised that it took over thirty years for something major to be done, but it was so fitting that he lived to see the House pass just two months ago the first meaningful campaign reform in decades. John’s
legacy will be in his writing, to be sure, because future generations
will find vision and inspiration and lessons for a life of engagement
and passionate service. But it will also be in the legions of those
who heard his voice, who follow his example, who experienced his
mentorship, his hand on the shoulder, his encouragement. “Friendship
is a sheltering tree” said Coleridge and we all gather today
beneath its branches to say thank you and goodbye. But look closely
at its roots and its silhouette across the sky: John Gardner has
given us… a tree of life.
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