Page 4A
East Oregonian
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
TIM TRAINOR
Opinion Page Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Too many chiefs?
Personnel evaluations of former
Pendleton Fire Chief Mike Ciraulo,
conducted by City Manager Robb
Corbett and Pendleton Public Safety
Chief Stuart Roberts, provide the basis
for recent reporting in this newspaper.
Ciraulo abruptly resigned his position
last month, though neither he nor
Corbett would comment specifically
why that decision was made.
The evaluations were illuminating.
They made clear that both Corbett and
Roberts thought highly of Ciraulo,
noting that he had inherited a difficult
job and made progress on many fronts.
But the reports also showed they had
disagreements over personnel decisions,
budgets and how city administration is
organized, specifically that the police
chief currently oversees the fire chief.
Somewhere in there, early retirement
became the best option for moving
forward.
There is no debating that Ciraulo’s
biggest accomplishment in his short
tenure is getting a $10 million bond
passed to build a new fire station at the
old St. Anthony hospital site. Ciraulo
was instrumental in passage of the
bond, and we believe it wouldn’t have
happened had he not been on board.
Remember that it wasn’t that long
ago — 2014 — that the city was rushing
toward a $10 million bond to build
a new station and spend millions on
deferred maintenance of city properties.
But at that time the plan for the fire
station wasn’t even clear — the location
and cost were unknown — and a
paperwork error thankfully stopped it
from making it to the ballot where it
would likely have been defeated and
given the city an unnecessary black eye.
Cirualo came in and restored credibility,
helped hatch a clear plan and then
helped the department form a united
front to educate voters.
That couldn’t have happened in 2014,
when the city was cycling one-by-one
through multiple fire chiefs in just a
few years. This lack of stable leadership
led to an underperforming department.
And as Ciraulo’s evaluations suggest,
Corbett and Roberts knew that, too. That
is one reason why Roberts was tasked
to oversee the fire department while
leadership was in flux, even though
he understands that should not be the
EO file photo
Pendleton Fire Chief Mike Ciraulo gives the thumbs up after hearing the unofficial
results that the Pendleton fire bond had passed during a 2016 election night party
longterm arrangement.
What’s done is done, but Ciraulo’s
quick retirement leaves a real feeling
that the city of Pendleton lost a
committed and professional — yet
imperfect — fire chief who filled a
position the city has had a very hard
time doing with any regularity. Maybe
retirement was inevitable in this
situation, but it is not the best outcome
for the city.
It will now be critical for the city of
Pendleton to show voters, taxpayers
and residents that the department is
spending money wisely on the new hall.
Much of the design work is done, but
city administration will now supervise
the doling out of dollars and the
construction process.
Perhaps the ability to work in a
brand new building will attract a mid-
career professional with administrative
experience. If so, they should be allowed
to head the department and continue to
improve the morale and professionalism
of Pendleton Fire.
If not, Roberts and Corbett will have
to do more administrative work, the rank
and file in the fire department may feel
unmoored once again, and the city may
have wished they had found a way to
convince Mike Ciraulo to stay.
OTHER VIEWS
Battling Trump with his dying breaths
S
en. Lindsey Graham once described his
friend John McCain as someone who
would “run across the street to get in a
good fight.”
McCain’s final battle came straight to him.
I’m not talking about the one against
brain cancer, which has kept the 81-year-old
senator at home in Arizona for months and
prompted many friends, including Joe Biden,
to travel there recently to
see him, possibly for the last
time. I’m talking about the
one against Donald Trump.
McCain has waged it
in public remarks since
Trump’s election, including
a speech in Philadelphia
last October, when he
Frank
pushed back against the
Bruni
“half-baked, spurious
Comment
nationalism” that was
gripping too many Americans and lamented
the abdication of America’s moral leadership
in the world.
He wages it in a forthcoming book, “The
Restless Wave,” an advance excerpt of which
includes his complaint that Trump fails “to
distinguish the actions of our government
from the crimes of despotic ones” and that
he prioritizes “a reality-show facsimile of
toughness” over “any of our values.”
The fight isn’t really between two men.
It’s between two takes on what matters most
in this messy world. I might as well be blunt:
It’s between the high road and the gutter.
McCain has always believed, to his core, in
sacrifice, honor and allegiance to something
larger than oneself. Trump believes in
Trump, and whatever wreckage he causes in
deference to that god is of no concern.
“Trump is in every single way the
opposite of John McCain,” Bob Kerrey
told me recently. “He may be the opposite
of every president we ever had.” Kerrey
and McCain both served in Vietnam, they
overlapped in the Senate and they stay in
touch. So Kerrey knows that Trump has
caused McCain no small measure of anguish,
but less because of Trump’s crassness and the
daily tragicomedy of his administration —
this, too, shall pass — than because of “the
impact on democracy.” It could be enduring,
and it could be profound.
That’s why a patriot like him could never
sit this one out.
Trump finds McCain’s biography and
example threatening; that was obvious in an
insult in the summer of 2015, just a month
into Trump’s presidential campaign. At a
forum in Iowa, Trump mocked McCain’s
many years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam
— years during which McCain refused offers
of release because he didn’t want to be a
tool of North Vietnamese propaganda — by
saying: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero
because he was captured. I like people that
weren’t captured.”
McCain brushed it off. “He never
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the
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express the opinions of the authors and
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mentioned it,” Gen. David Petraeus, who
sits on the board of the McCain Institute for
International Leadership at Arizona State
University, told me. “I raised it with him one
time. I said, ‘I just want to assure you that
everyone I know — and I — regard you as
an extraordinary hero.’ He said: ‘I know. It’s
nothing.’”
It’s all too easy, in the context of Trump,
to idealize political leaders who came before
him and airbrush their flaws. McCain has
his share, including the occasional rashness
reflected in his selection of Sarah Palin as a
running mate in 2008. Did she help pave the
way for Trump? What a cruel irony if so.
But it’s also true that two Republican titans
near the end of their days provide crystalline
counterpoints to Trump — they’re statesmen
to his salesman. One is George H.W. Bush,
the former president, and my colleague Bret
Stephens recently wrote a gorgeous meditation
on the dichotomy of Bush’s versus Trump’s
approach to leadership.
The other is McCain, who presents a
similar dichotomy.
CNN reported Wednesday that Trump,
to answer questions about his health when
he was a candidate, dictated that ludicrous,
half-page doctor’s note that raved about his
“astonishingly excellent” condition. McCain
answered health questions during the 2008
campaign by making several doctors from
the Mayo Clinic available to reporters and
by giving some reporters a look, albeit time-
limited, at pages upon pages of his actual
medical records.
Trump cited bone spurs in his heels to
avoid Vietnam. McCain, a Navy pilot, had
an arm broken and ribs cracked during the
torture that he endured while imprisoned by
the North Vietnamese.
Trump jump-started his political career
with the lie that Barack Obama was born
outside the United States and thus an
illegitimate president. During the last weeks
of Trump’s presidential campaign, he branded
Hillary Clinton a criminal and encouraged
supporters to chant, “Lock her up.”
During the last weeks of McCain’s
2008 presidential campaign, he grew so
concerned about supporters’ hostility to
and misconceptions about Obama that he
corrected and essentially chided them. “He
is a decent person,” he told a man who
had volunteered that he was “scared” of an
Obama presidency. When a woman at that
same campaign event chimed in that Obama
was “an Arab,” McCain told her that she
was wrong. “He’s a decent family man,” he
added.
Trump is never to blame and quick to
malign onetime allies who have grown
inconvenient. McCain never badmouthed
Palin, despite ample reason. “John McCain
doesn’t throw people under the bus for his
decisions,” Petraeus said, adding, when I
asked him how rare that was, “Oh, man, just
look around.”
Trump demands instant gratification.
McCain served for four years in the House
before his three decades in the Senate,
during which he worked his way up to his
cherished post as chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee. He tried — and
failed — to get the Republican presidential
nomination in 2000 before succeeding eight
years later.
Trump invites pity for all the slights he
suffers plus plenty that he only imagines, and
he readily boasts about achievements actual
and hallucinated. “I don’t have a complaint,”
McCain says in his book, which was written
with Mark Salter and will be released on
May 22. He’s grateful, he adds, that he
“made a small place for myself in the story
of America.” A small place. I sometimes
forget, thanks to Trump, what the music of
understatement sounds like.
“There is a scarcity of humility in politics
these days,” McCain writes. I wonder if he
has anyone particular in mind. No, that’s a
lie: All of us know precisely which someone
he has in mind, the same person in his
thoughts when, in Munich in February 2017,
he expressed alarm about an “increasing turn
away from universal values and toward old
ties of blood and race,” about “the hardening
resentment we see toward immigrants” and
about “the growing inability — and even
unwillingness — to separate truth from lies.”
In his new book he calls out Trump by
name, saying that the president’s cries of
“fake news” are “copied by autocrats who
want to discredit and control a free press”
and that his lack of empathy for refugees
is “appalling.” “The world expects us to be
concerned with the condition of humanity,”
McCain writes. “We should be proud of
that reputation. I’m not sure the president
understands that.”
Kerrey said that “history is not going to be
kind to those who were silent” about Trump’s
attack on truth, norms, civility and so much
else. Has McCain been quite vocal enough?
“I think history will say that he was in the top
10 percent of the class,” Kerrey said. “Could
have been higher.”
Donald Critchlow, a professor of political
science at Arizona State University, told
me: “If Trump’s presidency fails, Senator
McCain will be remembered as a Jeremiah
who warned that the party had taken a road
to perdition.” And if it succeeds? Then he is
“part of an old guard” vainly resisting a new
day, Critchlow said.
Either way he has my gratitude. Although
I disagree with many of his political views,
including his too-keen itch for foreign
intervention, that doesn’t prevent me from
admiring him enormously. Nor should it, a
point that he makes in his book.
“I don’t remember another time in my
life when so many Americans considered
someone’s partisan affiliation a test of whether
that person was entitled to their respect,” he
writes, ruefully, adding that while Biden, Ted
Kennedy and other Democratic friends of
his never voted for the same candidate for
president as he did, his friendships with them
“made my life richer, and made me a better
senator and a better person.”
Such grace is unimaginable from Trump.
That’s why it’s so vital that McCain is using
his waning time to model it.
■
Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for
The New York Times since 2011, joined the
newspaper in 1995.
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