Robert Reich's father was a Republican but would have hated Trump

Robert Reich - My father died 10 years ago today. I still miss him.

Ed Reich was a good man. He was a loving husband and father. He was loyal and kind to his friends. He worked hard, six days a week. He contributed to his community.

Ed Reich would have loathed Donald Trump.

That’s not because my father was a liberal Democrat. In fact, for most of his life he was a Republican. He began voting Republican in 1936. The first time he cast a vote for someone who became president was in 1952 when he voted for Dwight Eisenhower. He didn’t give up on the Republican Party until it nominated Richard Nixon in 1968.

But my father hated bullies. He fought in World War II against Hitler.

When I was a boy, whenever my father saw the image of Senator Joseph McCarthy on our tiny television screen, he yelled “son-of-a-BITCH!” so loudly that I hid under the couch. (It took me years before I learned that “son-of-a-BITCH” was not a Yiddish word.)

He thought anyone who had to bully someone else to feel good about himself was despicable. If they did their bullying through politics, they were doubly despicable. In my father’s mind, political bullying had led to the Holocaust.

My father admired people who stood up to bullies, such as Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, whose Declaration of Conscience speech on June 1, 1950, condemned McCarthy’s tactics and defended the right to criticize, protest, and hold unpopular views and beliefs.

My father also admired CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, who exposed McCarthy, and Army counsel Joseph Welch, who during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 asked McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”.  More

Every generation has its bullies, some worse than others. And every generation has its heroes who stand up against the bullies.