he had squandered the golden moment

One person not often seen on the streets, at the Superdome, or on a rescue boat of any kind was Mayor Ray Nagin. Occasionally he’d pop up inside the Superdome, clinging to the exit doors, then disappear. Since the storm had approached the Crescent City, Mayor Nagin had been cloistered in the Hyatt, lording over the Superdome. From the get-go he was terrified for his own personal safety. And for good reason. At the storms peak, many of the windows of the Hyatt blew out. The high-rise was a jagged, ripped concrete-and-steel monstrosity, swaying in the feverish winds. Frightened, Nagin refused to make City Hall a command center. Terry Ebbert, the New Orleans director of Homeland Security, ostensibly ran the city. I went over to the Superdome numerous times, Ebbert recalled. I didn’t carry a weapon. I walked all around without a real problem.

Unlike Ebbert, Nagin was apparently repelled by the idea of speaking at the Superdome, to offer the evacuees both information and a morale boost. He refused to give a pep talk, blaming the city’s communications breakdown for his decision. His primary post-storm initiative was to get a generator hooked up to the elevator so he wouldn’t have to walk all those stairs. A timid Nagin had squandered a historic opportunity for a bullhorn moment. With a touch of guts he could have walked over to the Superdome with Teddy Roosevelt exuberance and tried to calm the jittery crowd. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, riots broke out in thirty-one American cities, but Robert F. Kennedy, shirtsleeves rolled up, fearlessly marched into the midst of an angry African-American mob in Indianapolis, easing their confusion and hurt with words of uplifting encouragement. RFK had seized the golden moment that Maureen Dowd wrote about. At the Superdome in New Orleans, scared citizens needed Nagin. But he feared that if he mounted a soapbox at the Superdome, he’d get shot, lynched, or bloodied up. He made the costly mistake of viewing the displaced persons as malcontents. He had squandered the golden moment, putting his own personal safety ahead of those poor and elderly in trouble.

Douglas Brinkley

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. HarperCollins 2007. p.66, 67

requires such depth of oppression

The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Tambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, and the Usuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers, the Robert Sobukwes of our time – men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath its soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamonds.

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Back Bay Books. 1995. p. 662

actions that are unpopular

As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular or whose results will not be known for years to come. There are victories whose glory lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win them. This is particularly true of prison, where one must find consolation in being true to one’s ideals, even if no one else knows about it.

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Back Bay Books. 1995. p. 390

the garden as a metaphor

In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the result. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates, he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed. 

I wrote Winnie two letters about a particularly beautiful tomato plant, how I coaxed it from a tender seedling to a robust plant that produced deep red fruit. But, then, either through some mistake or lack of care, the plant began to wither and decline, and nothing I did would bring it back to health. When it finally died, I removed the roots from the soil, washed them, and buried them in a corner of the garden. 

I narrated this small story at great length. I do not know what she read into that letter, but when I wrote it I had a mixture of feelings: I did not want our relationship to go the way of that plant, and yet I felt that I had been unable to nourish many of the most important relationships in my life. Sometimes there is nothing one can do to save something that must die.

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Back Bay Books. 1995. p.490

few among us would have qualified

We were soon transferred to the Johannesburg Prison, popularly known as the Fort, a bleak, castle-like structure located on a hill in the heart of the city. Upon admission we were taken to an outdoor triangle and ordered to strip completely and line up against the wall. We were forced to stand there for more than an hour, shivering in the breeze and feeling awkward – priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, men of middle or old age, who were normally treated with deference and respect. Despite my anger, I could not suppress a laugh as I scrutinized the men around me. For the first time, the truth of the aphorism “clothes make the man” came home to me. If fine bodies and impressive physiques were essential to being a leader I saw that few among us would have qualified.

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Back Bay Books. 1995.  p. 200, 201