Years later, I wrote of the George W. Bush administration https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/books/review/peter-bakers-days-of-fire.html 1/n

My own role in the administration was both brief and modest, as I describe here. https://www.amazon.com/Right-Man-Inside-Account-White/dp/0812974905 Yet because the administration is so widely perceived as unsuccessful, it feels cowardly to remark this truth, as if I were looking for some kind of personal exit.

For me, the most enduring effect of the Bush years - from the recount through 9/11 to the 2008 financial crisis - was to push me to think harder and deeper about US social divisions and the need to reknit the bonds of American social solidarity. 3/n

All very well to pay rhetorical tribute to "unity" on 9/11 anniversaries. Where people need that unity most is when they lose jobs or fall ill. 4/n

That terrible day 18 years ago is stamped on my memory. "These colors don't run," said the t-shirts. But the Secret Service orderd my colleagues and me to run out of the White House complex, and we did. I still feel that shame, and the shame of the failures that set us running.

I came away from my Bush experiences with two resolutions

1) Never to let any group do any iota of my thinking for me. If I lacked the expertise to think something through for myself, then I wouldn't have an opinion about it at all.

6/n

2) To devote more of my own personal political thinking to the question of what citizens of a modern nation owe each other. Which is why the headline that is on my mind this day pertains not to the past, but to the present

When my father passed away in 2013, a very wise friend said to me something I've thought about ever since. "The dead don't go away. They are always present. They just don't have a future." 8/n

Inevitably, the impress of 9/11 must fade. My youngest daughter was born a month afterward. She will vote for the first time next year. Her generation will have its own memorial days. 9/n

We can't bequeath our memories to them, and it would be oppressive if we could. Instead, let's bequeath them a better country, where fewer die by the gun and more have care when they need it. END