We Will Carry On - by John Pepper

November 9 – Incredibly, worryingly, Donald Trump was elected to be the 45th President of our Nation last night.

Volumes will be written about this campaign and how he won and Clinton lost.  It took an unimaginable confluence of circumstances for a man rejected by much/most of his own party, representing by his own words and actions values and a character which would not even have allowed him to be interviewed by a major corporation and who parents would have warned their children to ignore as being a bigot and mean to win this election.

I hate to say it but, above all, this was, in my view, a rejection of Hillary Clinton and what she was seen to represent.  The accusations of her being self-interested, part of the establishment and a continuation of the “Clinton era” and “crooked,” repeated again and again, did their job.  The e-mail controversy and accusations about the Clinton Foundation, which has done so much good, the insertion of the FBI at the last minute, the dislike of Obama (framed as Obamacare) and the belief that Clinton would be more of the same all added up to a gut-level reaction of, “We don’t trust her, we don’t like her and we’re ready to try something different even though we know he is unprepared and we are very worried about his temperament.”  What an act of frustration and desperation on the part of a large percentage of the American people.

What’s especially sad for me is that, in her heart and mind, I believe Hillary is not only a highly intelligent, careful thinker but a thoroughly caring, decent person.

What troubles me the most about Trump by far, and it troubles me to my bone, is that the character he has lived throughout most of his life and expressed in the campaign is so utterly antithetical to what we seek for ourselves and teach to our children.  He has disrespected others, taken advantage of them; it has been about him.  

When we say at P&G and about life in general that it all comes down to “people and values,” we mean it.  And we are right.

Fortunately, we are a big and strong and diverse country.  My hope is that, in spite of so much of his campaign rhetoric and (ill-informed and dangerous) proposals, he will disavow many of these cynically advanced proposals act to bring the country together in spirit and policy.  I hope he will follow the path of Lincoln and bring a few strong Democrats into his inner circle and cabinet.  He needs to make some substantive and highly visible moves like this.

I hope people like Paul Ryan will be able to influence him with positive ideas which the Democrats can align with, like infrastructure investment and sensible tax reform.  I hope he avoids “doing harm,” like walking back the good parts of Obamacare.

For Francie and me, our blessings remain undiminished and incredibly positive, above all because of our wonderful family our closest friends.

We will carry on, trying to do what is right and helping others where we can.  There is no other way.  We will remember my favorite six-word Winston Churchill speech:  ”Never, never, never, never give up.” in doing what we believe is right.

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I would add these short thoughts:  (from three days later)

1. In illustrating how enormous transformational events can arise out of seemingly small decisions, I believe that, if Hillary Clinton had not decided to use her own personal e-mail address, she would be President of the United States today.  From that decision, came genuinely inappropriate use of the account for classified information which, even if not hurting the nation’s security or rising to the level of a criminal offense, provided all the fodder necessary to allow an unending media onslaught surrounding her untrustworthiness.  This was magnified manifold by her overly protectionist response to the fact she had done this; not speaking straight about it at the beginning; seeming to dismiss it.  The mistake of a lifetime.

2. Without watering down a single bit of my revulsion at the despicable traits of Trump, including his attitude toward women and people of other ethnicities and his disregard for the truth, I have to plead guilty to the fact that, to some extent, I allowed my revulsion to these aspects of the man to blind me to the effectiveness of his technique and, more importantly, to stop me from adequately empathizing with the underlying legitimate concerns of many people who were supporting Trump. Yet, I, none of us, can allow this acknowledgment to stop us from continuing to stand up for what we believe and continuing to denounce the kind of mean, erroneous assertions Trump (and others) made.  

3. Nor should we, as some commentators and politicians will suggest, simply “forget all of those things he said.”  Yes, we should go in with an open mind to see what he does and hope for the best, but we should hold him strictly accountable for the values we believe in, not just by having him stop saying bad things, which he will may well do for political purposes, but in the actions that he takes that show that he is truly working on behalf of all the American people.  And that he stands against the worst instincts which he has helped fuel that can impact us all in terms of belittling or castigating some “other.” We cannot allow uncivil and untruthful behaviour to be “normalized”. 

4. I don’t think our country has ever been so split.  Oh,  at the time of the Civil War, the difference between those who believed in slavery and those who didn’t, that was a bigger, and at least more substantive, split.  And there were certainly big splits between those who believed in the New Deal in the 1930s and those who didn’t.  But this goes very deep in terms of values.  Both political parties have a tremendous job in front of them in identifying who their leaders will be and what their platform for the future will be.  As I have said for many years, this Nation needs a unifying vision which a great majority of our nation can embrace.  It has to go well beyond bumper stickers like “Make America Strong Again” or “We are Stronger Together.”

In the midst of this unexpected Presidential election result, let me emphasize the joy and satisfaction to be taken from the passage of Issue 44 by an overwhelming 62/38 margin, which will provide quality pre-K on a means-tested basis to Cincinnati’s three- and four-year olds and provide funding to support the significant initiatives in our Cincinnati Public Schools to strengthen the education and college- and job-readiness for all our students.

We worked on this for years.  It is the culmination of a dream of mine and so many others.  I’ve seen no example of the different parts of the community coming together on behalf of a major project than this.  Now, we come to the all-important phase of execution.

Also, I was delighted to see the good things that happened in Hamilton County.  They reflect in part the enormous work done by the volunteers, many of whom lived in our house, led by Katie Gladstone.  Hillary Clinton ran 10 points ahead of Trump in historically Republican Hamilton County.  Statewide, she lost by 10 points.  A remarkable result.  We saw Democrat Denise Driehaus elected as County Commissioner and a new judge, and Aftab Pureval, a P&G employee was elected Clerk of County Courts.

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John Pepper is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, former chair of the Yale University Corporation, and the driving spirit and most generous supporter of the founding of the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.  He is one of the most serious readers of American history anywhere in the orbit of those of us who study the broad fields of slavery, abolition, and their legacies.  John wrote these posts on November 9 and 12, 2016.