Free Muzzled by Juan Williams

our reputations ruined, and being excommunicated from the church of other true believers—all for simply telling the truth.

CHAPTER 3
PARTISAN POLITICS
    A S PRESIDENT BUSH AND I WALKED out of the Oval Office, he suddenly pulled on my arm. He wanted to stop and talk for a moment before entering the Roosevelt Room, which was full of White House staff, producers, and technicians waiting for me to interview him.
    “You know I can’t say anything about your book,” he said, referring to
Enough
, a book I had written about the failure to address the nation’s growing culture of out-of-wedlock births, high school dropouts, and acceptance of illegal drug use—especially among poor black Americans. He had sent me a personal letter a few months earlier telling me that he had read it, praising key points. But the president never mentioned the book in public—the kind of coveted, one-of-a-kind endorsement that is sure to draw attention to any book.
    Speaking softly, President Bush said he felt if he gave the book his stamp of approval it might cause people who stood to benefit most from the book—the poor, people fighting poverty, churches, philanthropies, and civil rights groups—todismiss it because they generally disagreed with his Republican politics. His silence wasn’t about the book but about the charged nature of the issues. It was a topic he realized he had to approach with extreme caution.
    About two years later, at a White House lunch with President Obama and other Washington columnists, I had a similar encounter with the nation’s first black president. As the group discussed the recession’s impact on working-class men, the president turned to me, the only black journalist in the room. He said I knew what an economic slump can do to a community—fewer men graduating from high school, fewer men marrying, and more men going to jail—because of my writing about the social breakdown in the black community during previous recessions. Like President Bush, President Obama was familiar with
Enough
and, more important, with the ideas it dealt with, but he too never pushed hard for a direct discussion of those ideas, I believe for fear of antagonizing his liberal political base.
    How could that be? Let me share a brief story with you.
    When Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, in a rare venture into this territory, spoke to a black church about the high percentage of black men failing to be fathers to their children, he found himself immediately targeted as an Uncle Tom by the former presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson. Acting as the enforcer of politically correct speech for liberal politicians, Jackson damned him for “talking down to black people.” Seething under his breath as he prepared to do a TV interview, Jackson was caught on microphone telling another guest that Obama’s violation of politically correct speech made him want to castrate the younger man—“cut his nuts off.”
    With that kind of threat, that kind of retaliating response from one’s own party, it is easy to understand why, at every point on the political compass, from the political right wing to the political left wing, from President Bush to President Obama, politicians agree to keep silent on major debates in today’s political atmosphere. Both men were aware of the severe price to be paid—scorn, vilification, and being shunned by one’s own party, if not converted to a political eunuch—by any leader who plunges into a charged national debate on a particularly sensitive topic.
    But I would argue that this period of American history, with its politically correct silences—its widely felt fear of saying the wrong thing—is at strong odds with a tradition of great debate that has historically defined national politics. The history of the United States has been consistently highlighted by a series of essential political debates. From the founding of the country through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two world