Ten years ago today, I received a surprise call from Mandeville, Louisiana, from the state’s former governor, Dave Treen. Two days later, on Oct. 29, 2009, Treen was dead. At the risk of too personal and digressive a column, please allow me to explain why I miss Gov. Treen and why it’s relevant today.
Treen, 81, died of a severe lung infection which, at the time he called me, was masking itself as the pain of a wrenched back combined with some mild chest congestion. His voice was raspy; his lady friend (he was a widower) did most of the talking, mainly to say the governor liked some of my recent columns for the Washington Times. I don’t think either of them had any idea he would need to be hospitalized later that day and die so soon after.
His death struck me hard. He represented to me, in a way probably more exaggerated than anyone could merit, a particular ideal of an honorable public servant. Of course, by then, I had seen Treen’s flaws and foibles, but childhood ideals have a way of persisting, and he certainly did deserve most of the good I thought of him.
For those unfamiliar with him, the governor had the reputation as “Clean Treen.” In a state with a long tradition of public graft, Treen was a quietly but persistently crusading reformer. He tried to uproot corruption, balance budgets, integrate high-level state government positions, and save Louisiana’s coastal marshlands before most people realized how badly they were eroding.
My dad had sat on Treen’s living room floor (yes, the floor) in 1962 helping Treen plan a long-shot congressional bid in 1962. My mom pushed me around in a baby carriage in 1964 campaigning door to door for Treen and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. (Treen lost again.) Mom was his campaign scheduler when he almost won another bid for Congress in 1968. Finally, in 1972, after favorable redistricting, he at last won office and remained in Congress until winning a razor-close race for governor in 1979, for which I volunteered with all the avidity a 15-year-old can muster.
All of which explains how I had grown up almost idolizing Treen, the way most kids idolized admirable athletes (as I did) like Willie Mays and Bart Starr. And when first as a political activist and then a journalist, I saw that Treen could be indecisive, stubborn, sometimes grumpy, and sometimes politically purblind — in other words, human — it didn’t detract much from my admiration for him. It also helped that, although I certainly wasn’t around him often, he sometimes went to significant lengths to serve as a mentor, and with great personal warmth, when he could.
There was the time when, completely unbidden, he tried to play matchmaker for me (in an avuncular way) with a lovely and somewhat demure College Republican volunteer to whom he for some reason had decided, without my knowledge, to sing my praises. And the time a decade later when he invited me to his Mandeville home just to talk politics when he heard I would be arriving from two states away to attend a wedding in his neighborhood.
The incident I most appreciated, though, was when I was a young reporter for New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly. My father was then the state’s Republican National Committeeman, and unbeknownst to me, he was working behind the scenes at a state GOP confab to insist that people follow an ethical course on a question the media barely knew existed. Dad couldn’t tell me about it — we had an agreement that I could never use Dad as a source — but the former governor called me, again unbidden, to alert me to the imbroglio and give me a full (off the record) account.
“A young man should know when his father is doing something to be proud of,” he said, or words very much like those. “Nobody will ever give him public credit for it, but your dad is standing tall this weekend.”
Hence, my personal fondness for the governor. I’ve written elsewhere of his more public record, including the gripping moment when he announced that in order to block the significant political momentum of former KKK leader David Duke, Treen would swallow his pride and vote for his own political arch-enemy Edwin Edwards. When it really mattered, and when he could more easily have stayed on the sidelines, Treen himself repeatedly stood tall.
So … other than this week being 10 years since Dave Treen died, what relevance does any of this have today?
The answer lies in what today is lacking. Treen’s essential decency and honor — veteran centrist Louisiana political analyst Clancy DuBos called Treen “an honest, gentle soul who believed in the Christian ethic of repentance and forgiveness” — was of the sort that could inspire youngsters to see political virtue, not just brute political might, as worth emulating.
Sure, I had an unusually personal view of the governor. Yet what that view showed was consonant with the public man, rather than the public man being some poll-tested construct or a popinjay preening for the cameras without regard for dignity, decorum, decency, or duty.
I miss those public virtues for which Dave Treen stood. I keep hoping that someone on today’s scene, even with some flaws, will aspire once again to embody them.
