The Patriot Post® · The Rarest Political Comeback: Repentance

Former Boston city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson is going to prison. Having been convicted on federal corruption charges, she was sentenced last week to a month behind bars and ordered to pay $13,000 in restitution. Yet she remains defiant and aggrieved, lashing out at journalists who have reported on her misconduct. For more than two months after pleading guilty, she clung to her council seat, attending meetings and casting votes as though little had changed.

Her shamelessness is hardly unique. Across the political spectrum, scandal is something to be brazened through, not repented of. Former president Bill Clinton never showed any genuine contrition for the dishonor he brought to the presidency. The current occupant of the White House treats nearly every stain on his record — indictments, impeachments, convictions, even a mob assault on the US Capitol — as a political asset or badge of honor.

Others have been just as impervious to embarrassment.

Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace as governor of New York; now he’s running for mayor of New York City as he maneuvers for a comeback. New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, a Democrat, was indicted in 2015 but stayed in the Senate until 2024, long after any official with a sense of honor would have resigned; convicted of bribery, he now sits in federal prison. South Carolina’s Mark Sanford, a Republican, was exposed in 2009 in a scandalous extramarital affair during his governorship — yet refused to resign and later won three terms in Congress.

Massachusetts has never lacked for examples of such gall. James Michael Curley, convicted during his mayoral term of wire fraud and bribery, spent five months in federal prison — all the while holding himself out as a martyr with no regrets. Ted Kennedy, whose appalling conduct at Chappaquiddick would have ended most political careers, clung to power, retaining his Senate seat for decades. Bill Bulger, the longtime Massachusetts Senate president, never raised a finger to help bring his violent brother, mobster Whitey Bulger, to justice — and shrugged off public outrage.

But not all public figures are so devoid of shame. On infrequent occasions, a political heavyweight chooses a harder, nobler path: accepting blame, showing real remorse, and permanently altering the course of his life. In Jewish tradition, this season is centered on the High Holy Days and the theme of “teshuvah” — repentance, self-scrutiny, and the resolve to change. Repentance is never easy, and for those who live in the glare of public life it may be hardest of all. Which is why the rare examples who meet that standard are so impressive.

One such example was Ulysses S. Grant. As a Union general in December 1862, he issued the antisemitic “General Order No. 11,” expelling all Jews from his military district on the pretext that they were smugglers. The order was quickly countermanded by President Lincoln, but Grant afterward was deeply ashamed of what he had done. He later spoke of the order as his greatest regret and as president went out of his way to demonstrate respect and concern for Jews — becoming the first American president to condemn the persecution of Jews abroad as well as the first to attend a synagogue dedication. All in all, the eight years of Grant’s presidency proved to be a “golden age” in US Jewish history — a remarkable saga of atonement.

Very different but no less admirable was the case of Charles Colson, once the ruthless political enforcer in Richard Nixon’s White House. Convicted in Watergate and sent to prison, he could easily have emerged to resume the game of power. Instead, he underwent a religious conversion and spent the rest of his life building one of the nation’s most influential prison ministries. He devoted decades to helping inmates turn their lives around, earning broad respect from people who had once reviled him as a symbol of corruption. Colson’s humiliation was great, but greater by far were his repentance and self-transformation.

Then there was Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In 1974, his career erupted in scandal after police stopped his car and a stripper leapt from the vehicle into the Tidal Basin. Mills could have chosen to stay in Congress. Instead he resigned his chairmanship, acknowledged his alcoholism, and gave up politics. He sought treatment, remade his life, and spent years working to expand access to alcohol recovery programs. What began as humiliation became a catalyst for service and a lasting effort to help others overcome the demons that had so degraded him.

The pattern is uncommon but incredibly impressive when it happens: A disgraced figure responds to scandal not with truculent arrogance but with humbleness and change. As we enter the High Holy Days amid teachings of repentance and renewal, how much healthier our public sphere would be if more fallen leaders chose the path of Grant, Colson, and Mills — the path of contrition, remorse, and true amendment of life.