The following column was written by Dan Lawton, a Milwaukee businessman and bio-tech entrepreneur who lives with his family in Milwaukee. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School.
I canvassed for Vice President Harris and Governor Walz Saturday and Sunday this weekend on behalf of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. On both days I had a piece of paper folded in my back pocket. My father’s obituary.
It described a man, Thomas Lawton, who was born more than a hundred years ago, attended a one-room schoolhouse, was an athlete at the University of Michigan and served as Chief Engineer on the USS Winslow throughout WWII.
It described a man who “was committed to a personal code of honesty, decency and courtesy” whose “good nature and positive outlook served him well throughout his life.”
While it wasn’t written in the obituary I carried, my father was also a life-long Republican, fiercely committed to the ideals of personal responsibility, fiscal restraint and limited government.
So while this talisman of mine – this creased piece of paper in my back pocket – gave me comfort and strength, the case for political alignment requires a little more explanation. A little more explanation because my father was almost always on the right side of the aisle, very often voting against candidates like the one I was now supporting.
But here’s the rub: the brand of integrity exhibited by my father and possessed by so many other men and women of his generation was not – and could not be – formulaic. That would have been too easy.
Their moral code, my father’s moral code, carried with it the necessity of independent judgment, whether or not that judgment ran with or against the current. That wasn’t just a component of their moral temperament, it was its fundamental feature.
And it was this commitment to do the right thing in difficult circumstances that my father carried with him into the 1972 election that pitted Richard Nixon against George McGovern. While his attachment to Republican principles was undiminished, there were threshold issues that were ultimately more important to my father.
As he told me much later, when you looked for a partner, a friend, an employee or a President, there are things that are more important than specific beliefs and, in the case of presidents, specific platforms. Character and integrity in my father’s view overtook the specifics and represented the most important, indeed essential, aspects of human capability.
It was not easy for my father to apply this unyielding and sometimes uncomfortable moral compass in all situations and I’m sure, my father being human, that there were occasions when he let himself down. The 1972 US precedential election, however, was not one of those occasions, despite the personal and professional pressure that was brought to bear on my father to support the Nixon-Agnew ticket.
My father voted for George McGovern on November 7, 1972 and while I did not accompany him into the voting booth, I am sure the execution of that hard decision required no small amount of resolve. And it would be unfair to move the clock forward to 1973 when Agnew resigned and August 8, 1974 when Nixon himself resigned, and to judge my father’s earlier action against those historic validations.
My father was not a fortune-teller and would never claim to have anticipated those cataclysmic outcomes. My father was doing something much simpler, and much more difficult. He was holding himself to his own high standard of conduct. He wasn’t just judging Nixon; he was looking himself in the mirror and asking what sort of man he was. He was judging himself.
That’s why I have this piece of paper in my pocket and why I will carry it with me again when I go back out this week.
