Democracy Watch: When Character Collides With Power, Which Side Should We Choose?

By TOM FIEDLER, Asheville Watchdog

As the title implies, this column is about democracy and the necessity of protecting it against people who seize power and lust for more.

For our democracy to flourish – and in the words of Jimmy Carter to be “as open, as compassionate and as decent as the American people” – we must depend on leaders of good character. This was defined to me long ago as people who seek no personal gain and choose to do the right thing even when nobody’s looking.

Does that describe our highest leadership today?

I raise the subject because of the news this week involving Pete Hegseth and Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. There’s a through line connecting Hegseth; Kelly; his wife, Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords; and a remarkable Asheville research scientist named Nancy Helm-Estabrooks or, relevant here, Dr. Helm Estabrooks, a Doctor of Science and professor emerita at Western Carolina University .

Her academic credentials fill many pages. She is a world-renowned expert on brain-injury speech therapy who literally has written the book on aphasia, a condition in which a fully aware person struggles to find words to express thoughts and to use speech for everyday communication following a traumatic brain injury.

Before moving to Asheville, Helm-Estabrooks, 85, had pioneered therapeutic treatment for countless victims of brain trauma, many through the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center, reputed to be a world leader in that area.

But I’m writing about her also because she knows about the role that character plays in such therapy; she’s witnessed it in Kelly and Giffords. The tragedy that befell Giffords, then a rising-star Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, is well known. A deranged man nearly assassinated her 15 years ago this month in a shooting spree that killed six people and critically wounded Giffords and 12 others.

One of the 30 bullets fired from the killer’s 9 mm semi-automatic pistol (purchased just hours before the shooting) penetrated Giffords’s brain. Her survival was a testament to the miracle of emergency medicine.

Giffords in part attributes her return to public life to Helm-Estabrook and treatments conducted often in Asheville. But Helm-Estabrook told me in a recent interview that she places credit jointly on Giffords’s extraordinary efforts and Kelly’s command of his wife’s recovery process, part of it while preparing for and commanding a space shuttle mission.

“If it had been just another husband – and I know because I’ve seen them – when a woman has aphasia, she usually stays home, her career stops and meaningful activities may come to an end. Mark didn’t let that happen with Gabby.”

That’s character.

Here’s insight into how another woman assessed the character of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Kelly’s antagonist, who calls himself the secretary of war.

That woman is his mother, Penelope Hegseth, whose 2018 email to her son became public during Senate consideration of his Pentagon nomination last year:

Son,

I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made [ex-wife] Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out.

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.

Does character change?

Penelope Hegseth, who wrote the email when her son was going through a bitter divorce from his second wife, later said he has changed his behavior and found Jesus. We can’t know the truth of that, or whether people can change their character as easily as they might change their minds.

But I know that people with character have the humility to show respect to critics as they may be speaking uncomfortable truths. People of character take care not to harm others, even their critics, or to enable others to do so. People with character don’t boast; they don’t make up phony titles to aggrandize themselves.

This all relates to democracy. Why would we, through our votes, establish a democracy that tolerates leaders who lack many or all of those traits? There are too many examples of current leaders who fail this simple test to pack into this column. I’ll limit my focus to where Hegseth falls far short.

Consider first the substance of Hegseth parroting Trump’s allegation that Kelly is guilty of “seditious behavior” and is a traitor who “should be hung.”

Second, consider the very real threat that such a charge poses to Kelly – a threat not unlike the one that led to the assassination attempt against his wife. There’s a story connected to that which may serve as an example of why those who make public statements must consider the possible consequences.

Let me first deal with the substance of Hegseth’s allegation that Kelly committed sedition. What fundamentally did Kelly do? He spoke truth to power. That’s not my opinion. That’s a fact. Kelly, in his position as a senator and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined five other Democratic lawmakers – all veterans of the military or the CIA – in stating that military law requires all uniformed personnel to refuse to obey unlawful orders.

The statement was made in the context of Trump’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops on American streets (since ruled unconstitutional by the Illinois Supreme Court) and Hegseth’s orders to attack alleged drug boats possibly heading to the United States.

Kelly earlier this week sued Hegseth in U.S. District Court to block the attempt to punish him. The betting by smart people is on Hegseth’s attack on Kelly to backfire on him.

“It’s dead on arrival,” Eugene Fidell, an expert on the Uniform Code of Military Justice who teaches at Yale University’s law school, told Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer. “If this ever gets in front of a judge, the judge is going to say, ‘[Expletive] you.’”

Threats against Kelly recall threats against Giffords

The likelihood is this attack may be short lived. Less short lived – and far more dangerous to Kelly – are the potential consequences of Hegseth’s verbal assaults targeting the senator, at a time when physical ones occur with increasing frequency and violence. The assassination attempt on his wife was a shocking harbinger of the violent political climate we live in today.

On January 8, 2011, Giffords had been recently reelected to Congress after a nasty campaign where she had been labeled a radical leftist in her conservative district for supporting Obamacare. A PAC headed by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin ran ads attacking Giffords and 19 other Democrats that featured a national map of their districts targeted in crosshairs as if it were seen through a rifle scope. On her social media page was text accompanying the ad saying, “Don’t retreat. Instead RELOAD.”

Giffords was holding an outdoor “Congress on the Corner” gathering where constituents could speak with her without an appointment.

A gunman took direct aim at Giffords, spraying bullets into her and the surrounding crowd. It wasn’t known if he had seen the PAC ad or other attacks like it. But his hatred of politicians and his fixation on Giffords emerged during the investigation.

Palin claimed the crosshairs were meant to be those in a surveyor’s scope – a claim undermined by use of the word “RELOAD” in the text. She said she was horrified by the slaughter, but never said she regretted using violent imagery in the ad.

Giffords spent weeks fighting to survive in Tucson and Houston hospitals. Kelly was at her bedside except when he was undergoing training at NASA’s Houston headquarters before commanding the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor.

He left no doubt that while training for the mission, he also had full command of his wife’s rehabilitation. That full command led him to Asheville and Dr. Nancy Helm-Estabrooks.

On the day before Giffords was to be released from intensive care to begin treatment for aphasia, Helm-Estabrooks received an email from a NASA account. It was Kelly asking her to call him on his private phone.

“He wanted me to fly down to meet Gabby the following Saturday,” she told me. “He didn’t want there to be any hiatus between hospitalization and therapy. That’s how in-command he is.”

She flew to Houston as requested and, that Saturday, sat at the kitchen table with Giffords as Kelly made sandwiches and puttered around the house doing chores, leaving the therapist and client to begin a years-long connection that continues today.

In that initial session, Giffords had limited physical movement and the ability to say only single words that were usually irrelevant to the moment. While struggling to put thoughts into words to describe a picture, Giffords would exclaim the word “chicken” repeatedly, which later became a joke between them.

Helm-Estabrooks recalled being intimidated meeting Kelly because “I had this image of astronauts as John Glenn,” she said.

“Mark is such a strong character. Anybody who gets shot into space is braver than a bullfighter. There’s no one braver than an astronaut because you don’t know what will happen to you. And he had this strong military background [as] a fighter pilot. Mark even looks pugnacious.

“But what’s lost about that is the warmer and human side of Mark, the man who loves a joke and has a sense of humor and doesn’t mind cleaning up after lunch and taking out the garbage. I guess he even does that up in outer space.”

When the president called Kelly a “traitor” and said Kelly “should be hung,” Helm-Estabrooks said, her adult children expressed no concern for Kelly; rather the reverse. “The kids said that from what they’ve seen, the message should be “Don’t [expletive] with Mark Kelly.”

Over several months, Helm-Estabrooks met with Giffords for treatments at her home in Montford, at her cabin in Fairview and at Kelly and Giffords’s homes in Houston and Tucson. Frequently eating in Asheville restaurants, visiting shops and acting as a tourist helped spur Giffords to regain the ability to communicate about routine matters and engage socially.

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Kelly and Giffords’s mother, sister and friends would accompany her, along with congressional staffers, a nurse and security guards. (Helm-Estabrooks said Giffords continued getting death threats almost daily for years after the shooting.)

Although Kelly retired from NASA with its highest honors and from the Navy at the rank of captain (equivalent to full colonel), he retains his command presence and sense of duty to his mission, Helm-Estabrooks said. That begins with supporting his wife and extends through serving as Arizona’s senior senator.

It also includes fealty to the constitution and the oath he took to refuse to obey unlawful orders, which generally means those that shock the conscience – killing innocent civilians, for example – and that could be considered war crimes.

Kelly’s restatement of that oath, explicitly included in the Code of Military Justice, is what Hegseth called “seditious behavior,” which in the military carries punishment up to death. Hegseth is now asking the Navy to bust Kelly down in rank, to cut his pension and to put a letter of censure in his file alleging the statements might encourage soldiers to challenge some orders.

Hegseth’s and Kelly’s service records: a contrast

It’s a mismatch to contrast Kelly’s service record with Hegseth’s.

Democrats have branded Hegseth the least qualified person to lead the military in history. An ROTC graduate who served only in the Army National Guard and never rose to command position, his active-duty assignments included a stint over prison guards at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, and in primarily training assignments at military headquarters in Iraq and Afghanistan, which entitled him to honors for serving in combat zones.

As for actual combat, Hegseth has claimed he narrowly escaped death in Iraq when a grenade struck his jeep but failed to explode.

His personal life has been checkered by allegations of adultery, drunkenness, sexual harassment and an accusation of date rape. He claimed that sexual encounter was consensual yet settled the allegation after paying the accuser $50,000.

I ask again, does personal character matter in politics, elections and democracy?

From her vantage point of working with Giffords and observing Kelly’s role in supporting her, Helm-Estabrooks clearly believes it does. She said she attended a school in Everett, Massachusetts named for Albert N. Parlin, a librarian who wrote an essay titled “Character,” which was read to students at the start of every school year.

She sent me a copy. It concludes by saying that character is “not only the way of wisdom, happiness and success, but the way to make the most of themselves and to be of the greatest service to the world.”

It’s a powerful essay and you can read it here. But I’ve condensed it to a few words: Character is doing the right thing even when nobody is looking.

Use it as a test when you choose your next political leaders.

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Tom Fiedler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and dean emeritus from Boston University who lives in Asheville. His Democracy Watch column appears every other Wednesday. Email him at [email protected]. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Email [email protected]. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/donate.