On June 30, 2017, the Governor John Winant statue was revealed on the front lawn of The New Hampshire State Library. At its unveiling, J. Brett Grill, the sculptor, said that despite Winant’s hand reaching out, showing his generosity, his eyes are fixed upward to the 2nd floor corner office of the governor. The “idea being that he would keep his eye on all future governors.”
That said, since 2017 he’s only been able to keep an eye on Chris Sununu for almost eight years and now Kelly Ayotte for almost two years. Winant was a Republican governor during the Great Depression. He broke with his party in 1935 when he agreed to become the first chairman of the new Social Security program spearheaded by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. He went on to be a much loved U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain during World War II.
I’ve made a habit to visit his statue when driving through Concord and have often wondered, with his reputation for honesty and kindness, if he came back to life, what he might think our most recent governors and what he might be thinking and hoping for the future. With Sununu, he would notice across the street at its designated spot the governor’s car parked on most weekdays. He’d find him in his office meeting his constituents often talking too much, but with a friendly disposition. I think he would have been disappointed with Sununu’s dishonest reversal on issues like paid family and medical leave as well as voting by college students.
On Ayotte, he would have less to say, even after nearly two years in office, since she’s often missing; an empty designated parking spot and usually not in her office. He’d be wondering, like us, what she has been doing with her time. Having witnessed in his era the horror of Nazi concentration camps, he would have been very disappointed in Ayotte’s slowness in turning down the ICE detention warehouse in Merrimack last winter. When she finally came around, she prided herself if defending the town but was clearly clueless about what the detention center was really about. He would also not find funny her derogatory put downs about Massachusetts.
In summary, I’m pretty certain he’d want to see a change in that 2nd floor corner office. Someone who’s there all the time, who’s honest, hardworking and doesn’t lie. Someone who is smart and experienced and has knowledge on how government works. If one visits Winants’s Concord burial site, his tombstone quotes his last speech weeks before he died:
“Doing the day’s work day by day, doing a little, adding a little, broadening our bases wanting not only for ourselves but also for others also, a fairer chance for all people everywhere. Forever moving forward, always remembering that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts and that where there is no vision the people perish. That hope and faith count and that without charity, there can be nothing good. That having dared to live dangerously we have learned to live generously and, believing in the inherent goodness of man, we can stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.”
I’m not totally sure what John Winant would think, but I bet his parting message to us might be to keep trying with charity and caring and for us to elect leaders who do so and who also have dared to live dangerously. To me, Cinde Warmington is that leader. Being the only Democrat in the five-member Executive Council for four years plus her desire and willingness to run against a first-term governor is my definition of living dangerously.
But as Winant states, one needs to also learn to live generously. Sununu and Ayotte, in spite of all the corporate boards they have collected checks from, have not lived generously. Warmington has lived generously by being throughout her career an honest and caring health care attorney. Winant would recognize that Ayotte’s media attacks ignore the historical content in which Warmington worked in her early career and that Ayotte’s predecessors at the Attorney General Office 25 years ago promoted penalizing physicians for not prescribing OxyContin. He would have called out Ayotte’s dishonesty and hypocrisy.
Nick Perencevich is a semi-retired physician living in Concord.