February is the birth month of two of our greatest presidential storytellers –- Ronald Reagan on February 6 and Abraham Lincoln on February 12.

In their day, both these presidents were harshly criticized for being “nothing but” storytellers. People who had no sense of humor called Lincoln a buffoon because he liked to tell funny stories, and Reagan was satirized as a president who spent all his time in quest of the perfect anecdote. But in the end, the critics didn't matter. Being great storytellers helped both Lincoln and Reagan sell their policies to the American people, and added greatly to their personal popularity. Both were better chief executives because of it.

Telling a good story can be an extremely effective way of making a point. It can also be very shrewd politics. President George W. Bush, for example, remarked famously in 2003, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

A remark like that is a good sound bite, and it serves its purpose for the moment. But it’s also the kind of remark that can come back to haunt you. Did President Bush really mean to be taken at his word in this particular instance? Did he really mean that every time somebody in this country stumbles and skins a knee that the government has to rush in with iodine and a band-aid? If Mr. Bush really did mean what he said, he was being wildly unrealistic; and if he didn’t, he was being a hypocrite.

Ronald Reagan also addressed the question of what government should do when people are hurting, but he did it more astutely. He told a story. In an address to the Tennessee State Legislature in 1982, President Reagan said this:

“I grew up in the Depression. I watched one Christmas Eve as my father opened what he thought was a greeting from his employer, only to find out it was a pink slip and that he no longer had a job. I know the humiliation that every family feels when the head of the household can’t find work, and I know there are times when only government can help.”

What’s instructive about this story is that President Reagan identifies powerfully with the unemployed, because of what his own family went through during the Depression. But at the same time he doesn’t create an open-ended federal entitlement. He says that there are times when only government can help; he doesn’t commit the government to addressing every misfortune.

It’s the people who say that Ronald Reagan was “nothing but” a storyteller who are the real political naifs. Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

In honor of Black History Month, I'm going to share a story that I read many years ago. I do not recall exactly where and when, but I will never forget the story itself.

The story takes place in a bookstore sometime during the early part of the 20th Century. A young black man was lovingly fingering a copy of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres –- Henry Adams’ learned and eloquent study of art and life in France during the Middle Ages. It was a beautiful book; but alas, the young man could not afford to buy it.

He was about to turn away with a sigh when he noticed that there was someone standing behind him. It was W.E.B. Du Bois, the famed author, intellectual and civil rights leader. Du Bois was the first African-American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In a magnificent gesture, Dr. Du Bois offered to buy the book for the young man on one condition –- that he would promise to read it.

Du Bois was a radical in the civil rights movement of his day –- a fiery genius. In 1903, he wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” But he saw nothing wrong with a young black man improving his mind by reading a book about European civilization. He did not warn the young man against dead white males and the evils of a Euro-centric curriculum. He did not tell him that striving for academic excellence was “acting white.” He did not launch into a chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” –- as Jesse Jackson did while parading through the campus of Stanford University back in the late 1980s.

No, he did none of these things. He bought the book for the young man on the condition that he would read it.

Du Bois could admire Henry Adams’ erudition and graceful prose style as warmly and enthusiastically as I can –- and do –- admire Du Bois himself as a writer. How could any writer not admire a man who could craft so felicitous a paragraph as this one, from The Souls of Black Folk:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

“So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.” There’s a lesson here, I think, for Americans of all races. In the end, we are all members of the same race –- the human race. In the end, what matters is not the color of our skin, but the depth of our understanding, the breadth of our sympathy, the strength of our moral convictions and the dedication with which we cultivate our talents.

February 12 is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, a man “both steel and velvet,” in the words of his biographer, Carl Sandburg.

When we think of Lincoln, we usually think of his velvet side. We think of the Lincoln who allowed the defeated Confederates to keep their horses for spring plowing after Lee’s surrender. We think of the Lincoln who closed his second inaugural address by saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all…” We think especially of the numerous cases where Lincoln exercised his power to pardon. During his presidency, he personally reviewed over 1600 cases of military justice, eagerly pardoning soldiers condemned to death for desertion or sleeping on duty if he could find the slightest mitigating circumstance.

Yet if Lincoln had not had as much steel as velvet in his character, he could never have made the hard decisions necessary to bring a bloody civil war to a victorious conclusion. Historian Eliot Cohen shows us a little-known example of Lincoln’s steely side in his book, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime.

According to Professor Cohen, Lincoln feared –- with good reason -– that there were officers in the Union army who opposed his policies and favored a compromise peace with the South. Lincoln recognized the danger of covert opposition within Union ranks, and dealt with it accordingly.

One instance involved a certain Major John J. Key, the brother of one of General McClellan’s closest aides. Just after the Union victory at Antietam in September of 1862, a fellow officer asked Major Key why General McClellan had not pursued and destroyed General Lee’s retreating army. Major Key replied: “That is not the game. The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise peace and save slavery.”

When Lincoln heard of Key’s remarks, he summoned him to the White House and demanded to know if he had actually said the words that had been imputed to him. When Key could not deny the charge, Lincoln immediately dismissed him from the service, saying that it was “wholly inadmissible” for anyone expressing such views to hold a commission in the United States Army.

Key was crushed. In spite of his careless talk, he was pro-Union. In an effort to obtain reinstatement, he collected a sheaf of letters from fellow officers attesting to his loyalty, and asked his former commander, General Henry Halleck, to submit them to the president.

Lincoln had every reason to believe that Key’s contrition was sincere. The testimonials aside, Key had just made the greatest sacrifice to the Union cause that a father could make: his 18-year-old son, a captain of the Ohio Volunteers, had died of battle wounds just two weeks before his petition for reinstatement reached the president’s desk.

Lincoln was moved, but he stood his ground. He wrote the grieving, cashiered major a letter in which he expressed his personal sympathy for the death of Key’s son. But in the same letter he went on to say that there could be no question of restoring Key to the ranks.

Lincoln wrote:

I did not charge, or intend to charge you with disloyalty. I had been brought to fear that there was a class of officers in the army, not very inconsiderable in numbers, who were playing a game to not beat the enemy when they could, on some peculiar notion as to the proper way of saving the Union; and when you were proved to me, in your own presence, to have avowed yourself in favor of that “game,” and did not attempt to controvert the proof, I dismissed you as an example and a warning to that supposed class. I bear you no ill will; and I regret that I could not have set the example without wounding you personally. But can I now, in view of the public interest, restore you to the service, by which the army would understand that I indorse and approve that game myself? If there was any doubt of your having made the avowal, the case would be different …

I am really sorry for the pain the case gives you, but I do not see how, consistently with duty, I can change it.

Professor Cohen says that Lincoln reviewed Key’s appeal a third and final time, two days after Christmas of that same year, with the same result.

Abraham Lincoln is arguably the greatest man that this country ever produced. He is also one of the most complex; a man “both steel and velvet.”

Readers of a certain age will remember a popular TV western called Have Gun Will Travel, which aired from 1957 to 1963. The series starred Richard Boone as a gunman for hire who went by the name of Paladin –- the name given to a knight-errant in the days of chivalry.

Paladin was an unlikely western hero for at least a couple of reasons. First, he lived in a posh hotel in San Francisco. He wore fine clothes, dined in elegant restaurants, gambled and chased women. He took to the dusty trail only as business required. Second, he was extremely well-educated –- as quick with a quote from some classic author as he was with his gun.

I thought of Paladin recently when I got an email from a reader asking my advice. For reasons that will shortly be obvious, I won’t give his name.

“I'm a speechwriter for a major trade association in Washington,” he writes. “I'd like to see a discussion about having to write in defense of policies that one finds objectionable. I've lately found myself in that position more than once. I'd like to know how many of my fellows have experienced this, how they feel about it, what they've done about it, etc.”

I think that’s a very good subject for discussion indeed. Are speechwriters mere hired guns –- or “paid pens” -– who will write for anyone with ready money? Or do we have to be in sympathy with the views of the people for whom we write?

Speaking for myself, I don’t think I’ve ever agreed 100 percent with anyone I’ve ever written for, but I’ve agreed with my clients most of the time. So I was willing to make the occasional compromise as long as I wasn’t asked to sell out completely.

I was willing, in short, to be a mistress but not a whore.

In my opinion, if a speechwriter finds himself having to champion policies he disapproves of more than say, a quarter of the time, he needs to find a new client. Or a new occupation.

The floor is open, readers. I’d love to hear what my fellow practitioners have to say about this question.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an intriguing article on the appeal that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, has for first- and second-generation immigrant students, as they pursue their own equivalents of Gatsby’s green light.

A number of high school students from third-world backgrounds were interviewed for the article, and their uncanny ability to relate to Fitzgerald’s patrician style and lily-white Jazz Age hero should give multiculturalists something to think about.

Some of the youngsters identified with Gatsby’s success. He comes from nowhere, re-invents himself and makes a fortune. James Gatz from the wilds of North Dakota becomes Jay Gatsby, the millionaire with the mansion on Long Island.

Others identified with Gatsby’s early struggle for self-improvement. After Gatsby is murdered at the end of the novel, his grieving father shows up with a tattered copy of a Hopalong Cassidy western that his son had when he was a boy. Written on the last fly-leaf are a series of high-minded resolutions about rising early, working out with dumbbells, reading widely, studying electricity and elocution and –- touchingly –- being better to his parents.

Still other students recognized that Fitzgerald was writing a cautionary tale about the dark side of the American dream: the endless pursuit of “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” One high school student from Jamaica said flatly, “The American dream is not open to everyone.”

Another student, a 14-year-old girl from China named Jinzhao Wang, took a more optimistic view of the green light. “Green color always represents hope,” she said. Ms. Wang’s own green light is to be admitted to Harvard. But that is not her ultimate goal. In her view, “There is a green light beyond the green light.” For her, that means returning to China after she graduates from Harvard, to help her country develop even faster.

Young Ms. Wang seems to be wise beyond her years. The Declaration of Independence names the “pursuit” of happiness is one of the inalienable rights of humankind. It does not guarantee that we will run fast enough to catch up to it. Happiness is elusive. We are more likely to attain it if our “green light” is an objective bigger than our own personal satisfaction.

The Clinton and Obama campaigns recently traded charges of “plagiarism” with regard to their respective candidates’ political rhetoric.

Top advisors to Sen. Clinton said that in a recent speech in Wisconsin, Sen. Obama lifted lines from a speech given last year by his friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

"Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama told the Wisconsin audience. "'I have a dream' -- just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' -- just words? Just speeches?"

Patrick used similar language during his 2006 governor's race to counter similar charges from his GOP opponent. "'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words? Just words?" Patrick said. "'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' -- just words? 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' Just words? 'I have a dream' -- just words?"

The Clinton campaign posted companion video clips on YouTube to illustrate the similarities between the two speeches.

In reply, Sen. Obama said that he hadn’t complained when Sen. Clinton said, “It’s time to turn the page”, or that she’s “fired up and ready to go”, or otherwise used language used by him.

I’d say that this is a tempest in a teapot, since the language used by all three politicians is so clichéd that it can scarcely be claimed to have originated with any of them.

The “just words” refrain, for example, has a pedigree that goes back decades –- I think it goes at least as far back as Sen. Hubert Humphrey. As I recall, when Sen. Humphrey was accused “over-promising” in his campaign speeches during the late 1960s, he replied to the effect that the Declaration of Independence was an over-promise; the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was an over-promise; the Boy Scout Oath was an over-promise. And so on. Doubtless other politicians had used the same kind of rhetorical device before.

Gov. Patrick himself dismissed the plagiarism charge against Sen. Obama with a laugh. “It’s an elaborate charge and kind of an extravagant one,” he said. “It’s not like he’s writing a law review article or a book or something like that.”

Just so. The Hillary folks had better lighten up. Charging Sen. Joe Biden with plagiarism back in 1987 may have forced the Delaware senator to withdraw as a candidate for president, but Barack Obama will not be knocked out of the running so easily.

Conservative pundit William F. Buckley, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was one of the heroes of my adolescence.

George Will once said, "before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, before there was Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was William F. Buckley."

Will was right. Incredible as it may seem now, there was a time in America when many took it for granted that no thinking person could be a conservative. To identify yourself as a conservative then, as I did during my teen years, was to be instantly dismissed as an Archie Bunker. But then I could always refer my snooty liberal classmates to Bill Buckley: Yale graduate, syndicated columnist, magazine editor, prolific author and dazzling talk-show host.

Buckley was a phenomenon. He was a man who could sail across the Atlantic on his own yacht, ski with the smart set in Gstaad, play Bach on the harpsichord and yet still attract a mass audience. He actually managed to make his use of exotic words part of his appeal. Comedian Jack Parr once quipped that whenever Buckley was on TV, the whole Parr household would gather around the tube with a bowl of popcorn and a dictionary.

Buckley could do more than argue on equal terms with the best liberal minds of the day. He possessed a stiletto wit and was liable to make his adversaries appear pompous and absurd when they least expected it. On one occasion, he challenged economist John Kenneth Galbraith to a debate on the free market. Galbraith agreed, but requested an alternative date for the encounter. He was sorry, he said with a touch of condescension, but he had a previous commitment; he had been invited to lecture at the University of Moscow. Buckley pretended to be impressed and then asked, with studied innocence, “What do you have left to teach them?”

Small wonder that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called Buckley “the scourge of liberalism.” He was that and more. He was an intellectual who could say that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard. He could also say of liberals that they are always talking about the importance of hearing other points of view –- but then, they are always a little bit surprised to discover that there are other points of view.

Even in old age, Buckley retained the air of an enfant terrible. Deep down, he was still the precocious scamp who, at the age of six, wrote an indignant letter to King George V demanding that Britain pay her war debt.

The obituaries have been studded with some of the best of Buckley’s scintillating remarks. One of the most often quoted is from1955, when he launched National Review. In the first issue of his magazine, he said that to be conservative was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” He was kidding. He was a serious thinker despite his flippancy, and understood that a true conservative is not opposed to real progress. What he did oppose –- fiercely, brilliantly and relentlessly -- were the ideologues and social tinkerers who sought to limit individual freedom in the name of “social justice,” “equitable distribution of income,” “non-threatening speech” or some other high-sounding abstraction that in reality masked an itch to control.

For that reason, the quote by which I best remember Bill Buckley was not original to him. It was from the Soviet dissident writer Illya Ehrenburg. Buckley used it often in his speeches, including the speech he gave on the one occasion, over 30 years ago, when I met him in person. As I remember, the quote goes like this: “When the whole world is paved over, a single blade of grass will spring up –- and the asphalt will part.”

When he started out as a conservative gadfly, Buckley was like that single blade of grass. Today there are scores, even hundreds, of conservative opinion-makers –- in print, on the radio, on TV and throughout the blogosphere. They are the real measure of Bill Buckley’s influence on American politics. The pity is that none of them can do the job with the same blend of erudition, culture, humanity and sheer fun that he did.