Mike Magee
Everyone should have a friend like Tony. Back in 1965 when we graduated from High School together in Bronx, NY, I doubt either of us would have predicted that 55 years would pass before we shared lunchtime again. Nor that when we met again, Trish and Joanne would be joining us, or that each couple would have four children, and together 17 grandchildren, or that our concerns for the state of our democracy would align, or that the friendship we’d shared would feel uninterrupted by time, different career paths, and family storylines as we entered our eighth decade.
Back in the 60’s, when we parted, I was only marginally aware that Tony was heading to West Point where he would graduate and be commissioned with a B.S. in engineering. We were not at his marriage to Joanne, nor present to celebrate his MBA from Harvard Business School, nor aware of the years they spent raising their kids and building a successful financial practice in St. Louis, Missouri before moving back to New York City.
We only reconnected in 2019 when I opened an email from Tony, as if no time had passed, congratulating me on the publication of CODE BLUE, and letting me know he had purchased 25 copies for distribution to his clients. Since then we’ve shared meals, passed notes back and forth, and received Tony and Joanne’s special hand-constructed, multi-page Christmas update on the comings and goings of their children, partners and grandchildren.
So I wasn’t too surprised when a parcel arrived in our mailbox on July 4th with a pop-up greeting card and copy of the opening image of Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s May 11, 2026 New Yorker article: “Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?”
“Happy 250th Birthday, America!” read Tony’s greeting in red, white, and blue. His unwritten message – Mike, I want you to read this article! And so I did, with yellow highlighter.
The Harvard professor and staff writer at The New Yorker begins by stating that Thomas Jefferson, described as 33 years old, “red-headed” and “spindle-shanked,” said he was often asked “why he held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal” and that they “secure rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Happiness!” It interested me that Jill drew the reader’s attention to that last word. Was she surprised at the naïveté or optimism that humans in society at the time could hope to be happy?
In the following paragraph she deals with the 5-member committee assigned the job of drafting the statement of independence. It’s gossipy and interesting that a jealous Adams claims Jefferson’s work on the nation’s behalf was cosmetic claiming he simply “clothed (prior notes from the five) in proper Dress.” We learn as well that the claim that Jefferson wrote the draft in a day or two is disputed by historians who say his efforts lasted 17 days. But before that, we learn this snippy bit, that Connecticut’s Roger Sherman and New York’s Robert Livingston were “both lackluster prose stylists.”
My highlighter next picked up a view of Jefferson’s later recollections that “we had no occasion to search into musty records” (meaning past historic independence statements of human societies), but rather “we appealed to those of nature…”, wanting his words to be “the genuine effusion of the soul of our country.” And to reinforce Jefferson’s understanding that (at age 33) this would be his pinnacle moment, Jill shares that the words “Author of the Declaration of Independence” were engraved in his tombstone.”
Jill’s article also lays out Jefferson’s human frailties – that he was a slave owner, that he labeled native Americans as “merciless Indian savages,” and that he passed the blame buck around. Specifically on slavery, he laced it in a soon to be deleted draft, an “assemblage of horrors” and “a market where MEN should be bought & sold” invented by King George III and the British who doubled their sin by offering those very same men freedom if they’d join the Brits in fighting the rebellious colonists.
Franklin’s absolute mastery of prose is highlighted in his adjustment of the well known “We hold these truths…” from Jefferson’s “to be sacred & undeniable” to “to be self-evident.” Quite a turn of phrase.
George III is spared finger-pointing blame for instituting “human bondage,” according to Lepore, “because the passage was so patently absurd as to be embarrassing. . . and its’ erasure marked the beginning of centuries of political attempts to pretend that slavery never happened.” And so, Jill makes sure we hear the words of Frederick Douglas in 1852 “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
On the back of that, we find a Confederacy obsessed with the Declaration’s right of “one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” Jill writes their ”six-word summary of the Declaration of Independence was ‘We can leave whenever we want.” And then she states, “And that idea thrives in the fractures and furies that drive American politics in the twenty-first century, the hatreds and the violence, the appetite for diversion, and the ongoing campaigns – they have never stopped – for schemes of schism…”
While Jill opens with the voice of a 33-year old red-headed, clean shaven boyish 6’2” patriot, she closes with ten words penned by a bearded, prematurely aged 6’4” patriot, just shy of 55 years old, now fourscore and seven years later – “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
So Tony, thanks for the article. Belated Happy July 4th to you and your’s. Give our best to Joanne and the family! Your friend and classmate, Mike.
