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John Gardner Memorial Service
New York City
April 17, 2002
Eulogy By Bill Moyers
I met
John Gardner in 1965 when I was very young and he was very wise.
Over the years I never grew younger but he seemed always to grow
wiser. He was remarkable in that respect. Scotty Reston, the New
York Times Chief in Washington, befriended both of us. Take him
as your mentor, Scotty told me, and you will see how to live the
greatest number of good hours.
It took me awhile to grasp the full implication of that advice,
but as we worked together – I as a white house assistant and
John as secretary of health, education, and welfare — and as
I read his books for insight and his life for instruction, I came
to see what scotty meant. Here was a man who “saw the present
right” and marched to it, without conceit or self-deceit. Feeling
the past and anticipating the future, he nonetheless lived in the
meantime. The meantime, he believed, is our field of encounter,
the hinge on which hope turns, the one chance we have for happiness,
service, and meaning.
So he was, in his own words, “always studying, always trying,
always wondering.” he built meaning into his life because there
was no other way to achieve it; meaning doesn’t come in the
genes, he said; you compose it. You compose it out of your own past,
out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind
as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding,
out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you
love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.
The ingredients are there, he said; you are the only person who
can put them together into the unique pattern that will be your
life.
That’s
what John Gardner believed. That’s what John Gardner taught.
And that’s what John Gardner did.
“He thinks like a saint,” one white house aide once said
of him. “no,” said Lyndon Johnson, “he thinks like
a good republican. They’re harder to find than saints. And
besides, one is all you need.”
They were the right two at the right time. Johnson, impetuous, imperious,
impatient; gardner, reflective, righteous, resolute. Both were radical
middle-of-the-roaders who believed in widening the road into a broad
boulevard of opportunity so more people could travel it.
One memorable summer evening – we sat on the south lawn of
the White House – the six of us: Lbj and Lady Bird, John and
Aida Gardner, Judith and me, both of us barely thirty. I just listened
that evening, listened to one man who understood power and politics,
and another who understood process and programs; equality was no
stranger to their political discourse and it was clear to me both
intended a fair and just america. Lyndon Johnson knew how to create
opportunity; John Gardner how to fulfill it. One night, after sargent
shriver proved uncharacteristically slow in filling new regional
positions created for the office of economic opportunity, the president
said to me: “if those regional poverty jobs are not filled
this week, I’m going to take back the super grades and give
them to John Gardner for the office of education.” I wrote
shriver with the message and no sooner was the letter read than
the jobs were filled; no one doubted gardner would have grabbed
them up in one fell swoop. Joe Califano remembers Lbj telling him
that “if Gardner doesn’t slow down spending [on hospital
construction] we’ll have another 1929.” no wonder his
department got more than one hundred pieces of legislation through
congress, or that he was soon supervising programs that affected
195 million americans.
Sadly, their collaboration and aspirations were orphaned by war.
On the very next day after announcing that he was sending ground
troops to vietnam, the president stood in the rose garden to announce
he was appointing John Gardner to head of hew. Whatever happens
in vietnam, the president said, we’ll not fail to pursue the
great society. That was so for awhile. But two years later John
went to the Lbj ranch in texas to plead for larger appropriations
for health, education, and welfare. The president had to turn him
down and cut even more from the budget as it was. Gardner responded
with a muted anguish that pained the president. As he was about
to get out of the car…Lbj put his arm around him and said,
‘don’t worry John. We’re going to end this damned
war and then you’ll have all the money you want for education,
and health, and everything else.” it was not to be. Less than
a year later John Gardner would tell the president, in an emotional
private meeting, that he was resigning. “I believe you can
no longer pull the country together,’ he said to Ibj. But in
an election year “you deserve the total support of every cabinet
member and a cabinet member who doesn’t think you should run
shouldn’t be in the cabinet.”
That’s the kind of man this was. He gave up his position but
not his principles or passion. And in the files of the Lbj library
in austin there is a letter from John to the library director, harry
middleton, written in the late 70s and commenting on various critiques
of the great society programs. John remained hopeful. ‘I see
a society learning new ways as a baby learns to walk. He stands
up, falls, stands again, falls and bumps his nose, cries, tries
again – and eventually walks.’ not in gardner’s america
would anyone stick to crawling. The weakest would be helped to their
feet; business might be all about the economics of competition,
but to him our civic and political culture was about the ethos of
cooperation. His greatest fear was that america would be a great
nation full of talented people with enormous energy who forgot they
needed each other.
It’s been said he was a romantic. He had, after all, dropped
out of stanford intending to become a novelist, until he tried writing
one. But he had also been a marine corps captain during world war
two, and marines are not easily duped by illusion. His parents had
separated before his birth, and he never forgot the brokenness of
things. He knew the brokenness of things, but believed in wholeness.
Civil rights, education, campaign finance reform, medicare public
television, the White House fellows – common cause – all
bore his mark, and his mark was all about healing.
I remember that he told us, when he came to washington in ’65,
that “what we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities
disguised as insoluble problems.” a man who knows that, knows
the score and is unafraid of it. I was fortunate to meet him so
young and to know him so long. He taught me that the best way to
live is to imagine a more confident future, and wake up every day
to do whatever one can to bring it about. Asked about his legacy,
he replied that he would like it not to be another John Gardner
but thousands of John Gardners – all working to improve the
quality of life in america. Thanks to him, there are. Emerson, who
was Scotty Reston’s source, must have had the likes of John
Gardner in mind when he wrote: “to finish the moment, to find
the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest
number of good hours, is wisdom."
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