The new "Attorney at Large" Column
Cry Me a River
By
Jim Castagnera
My gracious, what a few tears can do! All the pollsters placed Senator Clinton’s campaign deep down in some New Hampshire toilet. Then the sixty-year-old spouse of former-president Bill Clinton, himself a master of emotional manipulation, appeared on TV, her eyes welling up at the thought of not being able to save her fellow Americans from the brink of destruction. Voila! She confounds the pundits and walks away with a crucial win.
[Source: US Secretary of State official website]
If you happen to have a daughter, then you know how powerful a few well-timed tears can be. When God gave men muscles, he (she?) reset the balance of power by creating the tear duct. Just as women have muscles but rarely can compete with men in athletics, we guys have tear ducts, too. The trouble is, we unleash their contents at our peril.
Consider the fate of Senator Edmund Muskie. In the words of Wikipedia, “The collapse of Muskie's momentum early in the 1972 (presidential) campaign is also attributed to his response to campaign attacks. Prior to the New Hampshire primary, the so-called "Canuck Letter" was published in the Manchester Union-Leader. The letter claimed that Muskie had made disparaging remarks about French-Canadians—a remark likely to injure Muskie's support among the French-Canadian population in northern New England. Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie's wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language during the campaign. Muskie made an emotional defense of his wife in a speech outside the newspaper's offices during a snowstorm. Though Muskie later stated that what had appeared to the press as tears were actually melted snowflakes, the press reported that Muskie broke down and cried, shattering the candidate's image as calm and reasoned.”
Winston Churchill never made Muskie’s mistake. Although the English bulldog had plenty to cry about during the early days of WWII, he maintained his pose of dogged determination. While his biographers report that he cried during tear-jerk movies, he stuck with blood, toil and sweat, seldom showing any tears in public. One exception, Historian Martin Gilbert, the great man’s leading chronicler, tells us was that, “he showed exceptional tenderness to Neville Chamberlain (the appeaser he replaced as prime minister), and through the long period of his cancer never neglected to brief Chamberlain on every piece of business. When Chamberlain died in November 1940, Churchill cried at his bier, and reserved one of his most moving speeches for the memorial service. All this was transparently sincere and deeply felt.”
That Sir Winston was judicious in the public display of tears begs the question of whether Senator Clinton can ever get away with the tear-thing again. My personal opinion is that she cannot. Reputedly an ice-queen, Mrs. Clinton melted that image to good effect on election eve in the Granite State. A repeat performance will push the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and swamp her chances.
Incidentally, the male counterpart to female tears may be the temper tantrum. Adolph Hitler resorted to temper tantrums to cow his colleagues. In retrospect, even his speeches may appear to be tantrums, when viewed in the cool light of TV-age politics. The prize for the most famous single tantrum probably goes for all time to a Soviet Cold-warrior. In the BBC’s words, “In 1956 a British prime minister was on the receiving end (of a tantrum). It was a speech to the United Nations by Harold Macmillan that Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev famously interrupted by beating his shoe against his desk before shouting to the US representatives ‘We will bury you.’ Macmillan, in keeping with his reputation for unflappability, responded to the highly irregular shoe-banging with: ‘I shall have to have that translated.’”
In my days as a labor lawyer, I observed --- and always appreciated --- many a fine performance by union presidents and business agents. Reddening their faces at will, these fellows would push back from the table, strut around the room and scream things like, “This is the most egregious termination I’ve ever seen in my 20 years as a union leader.”
I considered these histrionics to be great theater. I think the same can be said of Senator Clinton’s big scene. Union guys who made a habit of haranguing management soon
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