With great power ...

• Author: Kenney, Barbara Allen
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

Having recently read Mark Leibovich's book This Town, I agree with Charles Peters's view in his November/December 2013 column ("Tilting at Windmills") that this insider book fuels greater cynicism due to the fact that the "good guys" remain, in large part, out of sight and unaccounted for. The author writes that "[g]etting rich has become the great bipartisan ideal," leaving the reader with a grim sense that honest men and women are so marginalized in our nation's capital that they warrant hardly a mention.

Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, perhaps Mr. Leibovich should resolve to pick up his lamp and look in new, less celebrated directions and write a se quel, of sorts, that focuses his beam of light on some of those good men and women who are not of that gilded club of insiders but who take less green-lined public pathways. Such a book would show exemplary public servants (and some dogged members of the Fourth Estate) who seek to build a good society based upon worthy values, not valued worth.

Prior to reading This Town, I had just read Team off Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the contrast between...