For many, this is a dispiriting time in our country. Established political norms are crumbling, important institutions are faltering, and leaders from all walks of American life are cowering and capitulating rather than standing up for what they know is right.
America’s friends are shocked and saddened by our disarray and the betrayal of our best values. Responsible and competent governance seems to have vanished. Statesmanship appears to have become an impossible dream.
It’s difficult to identify a current national leader who displays what I believe are the cardinal characteristics of statesmanship: courage, vision, compassion, effectiveness and civility. I contend that of all of these traits, courage is the most important. It is the rocket fuel of statesmanship.
It is gratifying when we do find glimmers of light in the darkness or, to borrow a metaphor from the late Robert F. Kennedy, see ripples of hope.
Most of us don’t look for an example of statesmanship in the U.S. attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York. But we may have found it in Danielle Sassoon. The interim U.S. attorney recently resigned from her post rather than follow an order from senior Justice Department officials that she found cynical, irresponsible and contrary to her oath to uphold justice.
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is seeking dismissal of the criminal charges filed in September against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He was indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions.
The order to dismiss the charges was issued by Emil Bove III, acting deputy attorney general, who said the prosecution of Adams was politically motivated by Joe Biden’s administration and was hampering Adams’ ability to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Sassoon had reasons to quietly go along with the Trump program. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she is young, ambitious and a legal star. A registered Republican with solid conservative credentials, Sassoon is a member of the Federalist Society who clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, whom she describes as a mentor. It was not hard to imagine her rising to the top ranks of Trump’s Justice Department or securing a prestigious judgeship.
Sassoon was sworn in the day after Trump’s second inauguration. She surely knew that the best way to succeed in the Trump administration was to offer the president unquestioned loyalty, even if that meant putting cherished values on hold. She needed to look no further than the Cabinet to observe that the single most important qualification for appointment and success is fealty to Trump.
But she choose a different path.
In response to the order to drop the charges against Adams, Sassoon sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 12 that is both a dense legal brief and a crystal-clear expression of timeless values. It’s the writing of a skilled attorney and a stateswoman.
Sassoon said that agreeing to drop the charges against Adams would be a violation of her professional responsibilities and her values. “I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me.”
Sassoon’s demonstration of courage prompted me to reread Kennedy’s remarkable 1966 speech to students in South Africa. Speaking at the University of Capetown, Kennedy encouraged them to stand up for justice and shun timidity. “Moral courage,” declared the U.S. senator and onetime attorney general, “is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change.”
Then with some of the most stirring words in American oratory, Kennedy told the students — and all of us — that individual courage can be a powerful force for good.
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Sassoon’s insistence on putting the public interest ahead of political loyalty or her personal ambition is the essence of statesmanship. Her courage is both inspiring and necessary in this difficult time. And it sends forth a much needed ripple of hope.
John T. Shaw is director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. Shaw’s columns, exclusive to the Tribune, appear the last Monday of each month. His new book is “The Education of a Statesman: How Global Leaders Can Repair a Fractured World.”
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