‘This is preeminently the time to speak the truth’
The coronavirus epidemic has produced several different kinds of crises. It is of course a public health crisis, first and foremost. But it’s also an economic crisis, an international-relations crisis and a crisis of public morale. Fear is widespread and mounting.
The U.S. has not been here before, but it has been in the vicinity. In some ways, the closest analogy is to the Great Depression.
There was no pandemic, of course, but the economic crisis was incomparably worse. And the crisis of public morale, though also much worse, had similar features.
To get a sense of how leaders of all kinds might handle that part of the crisis, we cannot do better than to travel back to March 4, 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. It may have been the greatest speech in American history — superior, even, to President Abraham Lincoln’s more eloquent, but less consequential, Gettysburg Address.
Roosevelt knew that when a nation is in crisis, a leader needs to speak to people’s hearts, even more than to their minds. He began by emphasizing that a leader’s first responsibility is to one thing above all: the truth. “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he said. [Continue reading…]