Remember the dead

Last week I loaded up some friends and took my first trip to Washington, D.C. We picked an exciting time to go.\nSnippets of conversations in Capitol Hill restaurants were studded with names like Scooter Libby and Harriet Miers. Tourists and suit-sporting regulars stood together on sidewalks to gawk at news that an arrest warrant had been issued for deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. All of downtown D.C. was abuzz with talk of scandal and presidential incompetence.\nBut it wasn't like that everywhere. The mood was more solemn in Arlington National Cemetery. Cell phones were off. Camera shutters that never stopped chattering at the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument were silent. Even rambunctious little kids were dumbstruck with awe. There's just something about 290,000 dead Americans all in one place that gives a sense of quiet sobriety.\nSince my travel partners were law students too, we visited the resting places of several Supreme Court justices. We saw Harry Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, William Brennan, Warren Burger and Oliver Wendell Holmes buried near each other, just a stone's throw from William Rehnquist. We saw Arthur Goldberg buried next to Earl Warren. Then we saw Bobby Kennedy's grave and JFK's with its eternal flame.\nAs I saw these graves, I asked myself an unsettling question: Did these guys know what their legacies would be?\nDid Blackmun realize when he wrote Roe v. Wade that people would still be arguing about it three decades later? Did JFK know people would remember his flaws and infidelities along with his triumphs? Better yet, what would they have done differently if they'd known?\nAs I mulled this over, we made our way to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. From there, I looked out on row after row of white headstones. In the distance, back across the Potomac, I could see the Capitol.\nAll of a sudden, it occurred to me that maybe for a few weeks the entire federal government should just set up shop in Arlington. They could caucus among gravestones, maybe hold committee hearings by a fountain and vote on the amphitheater stage.\nSurely then they'd realize that in 10 years — or 20 or 100 — their graves, in Arlington or elsewhere, will be visited by a new generation of Americans. Those new Americans will snap photographs of tombstones and pass judgment on the legacies of the dead with trite epitaphs.\nAnd what will those new Americans say? What will they say then about DeLay and George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Bill Frist, Libby, Miers, and the rest? And why don't any of these leaders seem to care?\nThe inscription on JFK's tomb is fitting: "History will be the final judge of all our deeds." I know I'm young and naive, but that one thought scares the hell out of me — the prospect that even 100 years from now, I might still be judged for what I do today.\nIf it scared our leaders half as much, I'd just bet we'd have a more open, honest and respectable government.