06/08/2026
On Holding Two Truths at Once
Throughout history, great artists, scientists, and statesmen have illuminated the world with their work, leaving a public brilliance so bright that the darker corners of their private lives remained, for a long time, in shadow. Their public gifts were real. So were their shadow sides. The question is whether we are able to hold both.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while enslaving more than six hundred people. Picasso made transcendent art while describing the women in his life as either goddesses or doormats — and treating most of them as the latter. John F. Kennedy inspired a generation with his vision of public service and simultaneously used the power of his office to conceal a pattern of predatory behavior toward women. Martin Luther King Jr. summoned the moral conscience of a nation and, in private, was a deeply flawed and often faithless husband. Gandhi preached nonviolence and simplicity while conducting himself toward his wife and vulnerable women and girls in ways that historians now widely condemn.
The list goes on. Franklin. FDR. Lennon. Miles Davis. Hemingway. Tolstoy. Churchill. Mailer. Feynman. Edison. The pattern is consistent enough that it deserves acknowledgment: public greatness does not promise perfect virtue, and perfect virtue does not promise public greatness.
The ability to create beauty, to organize people toward justice, to change how the world works — none of it guarantees how a person treats those closest to them. In fact, there's a credible argument that the very traits that make someone extraordinary in public life — intensity, self-certainty, an almost unlimited capacity to pursue a vision — can make them difficult or harmful in private ones. Narcissism and remarkable achievement are not opposites. They can be, and often are, the same coin.
I raise all of this not to excuse anyone, but to ask a different question entirely: what do we actually want from the people we entrust with leadership?
Graham Platner has been criticized for things he wrote years ago, during what he has described as a period of untreated combat PTSD following deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The words were ugly. He has said so himself, repeatedly and without hedging. He didn't minimize, didn't spin, didn't blame the opposition for surfacing them. He acknowledged them and explained the circumstances — not as a get-out-of-jail-free card, but as honest accounting.
More recently, private information about his personal life — leading to the kind of internal work that people undertake with professional support, in confidence, as part of becoming better — was disclosed publicly for political purposes. That information belonged to him and to his wife Amy. It was not ours. And the fact that it revealed a man actively doing the hard work of self-examination should give us pause about what we think we're entitled to know, and why.
My own father was deeply loved and admired by those outside our family — and rightly so. He raised my sister and me to fight for justice and fairness. Inside our home, he didn't always live up to what he taught us. He was complicated, as most people are. I don't think he should have been loved any less for his great qualities. I do think we owe it to ourselves — and to each other — to grow up enough to hold both things at once: to accept the good that people are able to do, without excusing the rest.
What I'm asking for is not lower standards. It's more honest ones. See people as whole human beings. Respect what they are genuinely able to offer. Hold them accountable when something rises to an actual violation — of law, of the public trust, of the people they serve. And recognize that a private life, including the private work of becoming a better person, is not a campaign document. It belongs to the person living it.
The leaders who have served us best were rarely the ones with the tidiest histories. They were the ones who brought their full selves — scars and all — to the work of making things better. That is what we should be asking for. That is what we should be willing to see.
Valerie Tate
Belfast, Maine
