Today on the homepage, I conclude my series on Ted Cruz (and me — this is a personal, memoiristic series). An excerpt from today’s installment:
“You’re in the arena,” I remarked to Ted at one point. I suspect he knows every word of that Teddy Roosevelt passage. Cruz is absorbing the blows, and striking them. He is the target of jeers, and the object of cheers.
In 1910, at the Sorbonne in Paris, TR gave a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic.” Here is the famous passage:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Two years ago, I was interviewing Michael Gove, the British writer and politician. Gove was then education minister. (He is now justice minister.) I wrote a series titled, in fact, “Gove in the Arena.” Here is an excerpt from Part I (and I should note that our conversation took place in his office):
I make the simple point that, in leaving his typewriter, or computer, Gove chose to be “in the arena.” … Gove says that he, in fact, quoted TR’s speech in a speech of his own, “about risk-aversion in politics, particularly in public-service reform.”
My gaze is then directed to a portrait on the wall behind me — of TR.
I tell Gove, with a smile, that I think I like TR more as a writer and an orator than as a statesman. The “man in the arena” speech is certainly a rhetorical masterpiece. “He is brilliant and it is brilliant,” says Gove.
Yes.
One more note: I read a fair amount of TR when researching my history of the Nobel Peace Prize. (That president won the prize in 1906, for his mediation in the Russo-Japanese War, among other reasons.) Very few have written or spoken better about war and peace.