The Audacity of Hope

nose. For a moment he stood in silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned
upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a
hint of the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer.
I don’t recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes, cascading
out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising, Shakespearean rhythm—the
clockwork design of the Constitution and the Senate as the essence of that charter’s
promise; the dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the
Senate’s precious independence; the need for every senator to reread our founding
documents, so that we might remain steadfast and faithful and true to the meaning of the
Republic. As he spoke, his voice grew more forceful; his forefinger stabbed the air; the
dark room seemed to close in on him, until he seemed almost a specter, the spirit of
Senates past, his almost fifty years in these chambers reaching back to touch the
previous fifty years, and the fifty years before that, and the fifty years before that; back
to the time when Jefferson, Adams, and Madison roamed through the halls of the
Capitol, and the city itself was still wilderness and farmland and swamp.
Back to a time when neither I nor those who looked like me could have sat within these
walls.
Listening to Senator Byrd speak, I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of
me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its
ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had
received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh
County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he
attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he’d been raised, but
which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he
had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard
Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this
would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled
opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political
counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.
I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd’s life—like most of ours—has been the
struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I
realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design
reflect the grand compromise of America’s founding: the bargain between Northern
states and Southern states, the Senate’s role as a guardian against the passions of the
moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect
the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their
peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code,
was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a
whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that
had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet
blind to the whip and the chain.
The speech ended; fellow senators clapped and congratulated Senator Byrd for his
magnificent oratory. I went over to introduce myself and he grasped my hand warmly,
saying how much he looked forward to sitting down for a visit. Walking back to my
office, I decided I would unpack my old constitutional law books that night and reread