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Walter F. Mondale: We can be vigilant and decisive without giving in to fear Walter F. Mondale Published Dec 10 2001 A foreign correspondent recently wrote that what struck him the most about America was that we all seemed to have a sense of ownership in our country. He's right -- we do own our country.

That's why we all came together, in an instant, on Sept. 11.

That unity is no coincidence. It flows from our American ideals of justice, openness and freedom. That unity is by choice, not by chance. Almost every American generation, when pressed by crisis, has had to renew that choice and defend our ideals -- not only abroad, but here at home.

Abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral, and soldiers fought a war to end it. The suffragists struggled for women's right to vote. The civil rights movement persuaded us that all Americans must be free from discrimination. The women's movement profoundly enhanced opportunities for American women. And, at our best, we have reached out to make American life more open and accepting to everyone.

Roosevelt once said that America's great goal has been "to include the excluded." I believe that's what we have done.

I was a part of the civil rights struggle and served in the Senate when many of the key civil rights laws were passed. I worked under a president who was the first Southerner elected to the office in 120 years -- elected, in part, because a Southerner could finally champion civil rights and bring our nation closer together.

It all came together for me at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Civil rights laws had knocked down the barriers to black and Hispanic participation in sports. And we had recently passed Title IX, over huge objections, which required schools receiving public money to provide equal athletic opportunities for young women.

When I watched American athletes of all colors, men and women, winning one gold medal after another and astounding the world, I saw our nation's long march toward openness and justice being justified right before our eyes. America was the best because we had tapped all of our talent.

The wonderful American historian Stephen Ambrose spoke in Minneapolis recently about the long-term prospects for America vs. Osama bin Laden and his fellow extremists.

America has a great advantage, Ambrose said. In today's world, the trained mind is the most valuable of all assets. In America, we tap all of our talent, while the Taliban and other Medievalists shut it off by closing the door to women, by requiring young men to spend all of their time repeating extremist doctrines by rote, and by suppressing science and debate.

By wasting their good minds, they will fail, Ambrose said.

Just as we saw America prevail at the '84 Olympics by tapping all our talent, we will see our openness and freedom give us the edge in this newer, grimmer challenge.

And we have another advantage.

Roger Cohen, a senior New York Times European correspondent, recently wrote that "Hitler promised the 1,000-year Reich; communism promised equality; Milosevic promised glory. All the West offers is the rule of law, but that's enough."

Under our Constitution, the rule of law has meant that our public officers must be accountable to the law: This idea runs throughout our system.

The House and the Senate account to each other; the Congress to the president, the president to the Congress, both to the courts, and to the American people; a prosecutor to the judge (appointed for life) and jury, and all of it subject to appeal. It is one of the great paradoxes of that document: On the one hand, the Constitution reveals our Founders' abiding faith in democracy -- in the people -- while on the other hand, the Framers were very suspicious of human nature when clothed with unaccountable power. This principle is not a detail; it is crucial to America's phenomenal success.

Our Founders made this very clear in the remarkable Federalist Papers. In them, Madison and Hamilton famously observed: "What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary, but in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself .... A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

Maintaining the rule of law takes a lot of nerve. And over our history we have occasionally lost it during moments of great threat.

In 1798, Congress passed the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. David McCullough, in his marvelous new history of John Adams, wrote that President Adams' signatures on those bills were "the most reprehensible acts of his presidency." During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln abolished the writ of habeas corpus. In World War I, Minnesota established the shameful Public Safety Commission, which held public hearings all over the state to test the loyalty of German-American Minnesotans and remove the doubtful from office. At the beginning of World War II, federal officials arrested thousands of Japanese-Americans and herded them into relocation camps without any credible evidence of disloyalty. During the worst of the Cold War, Joe McCarthy panicked our nation, and during the turbulent days of the civil rights struggle, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided that the Rev. Martin Luther King was a dangerous man who needed to be hounded daily and destroyed as a public leader -- even though King's message of nonviolence may have saved our nation.

In all of these cases, after we had regained our confidence, we could see that we had allowed our fear to get the better of us, and that we had hurt innocent people, compromised our ideals and shamed ourselves.

Today we again have much to fear.

These are tough times and they require decisive action. We must find and punish our attackers, and make clear that aggression against our country will not be tolerated. We must also try to prevent future terrorism, by learning much more about the threats around and among us. We must give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies the resources and authority they need to do these difficult jobs.

But we can be vigilant and decisive without giving in to fear. We can do everything we need to do to protect ourselves within our Constitution, and we will be stronger if we do so. For history has taught us over and over again that the rule of law, openness and tolerance will prevail over injustice, oppression and hate.

It is our great advantage.

-- Walter F. Mondale, former senator, ambassador and vice president, delivered the remarks from which this article is adapted at the Westminster Town Hall Forum last month in Minneapolis.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2001