The following is an edited transcript of remarks delivered by Roger Hertog and Senator Tom Cotton at the 2023 Hamilton Award Dinner.
Roger Hertog: By the way, I'm not Cliff Asness, but good evening. I'm Roger Hertog, and let me extend my welcome to the 23rd Annual Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner. Tonight, we honor a man who would make Alexander Hamilton proud. Senator Tom Cotton is not only a man of great intellect, character, integrity, and courage, but most importantly, he uses his blessed gifts to benefit the country he loves. Let me share with you a couple of vignettes, that will provide a deeper understanding of the man we honor tonight. Having grown up on a cattle farm in Dardanelle, Arkansas—God only knows where that is—and yet, a cattle farm, where his beliefs were so commonplace that they needed no label. Whereas his time spent at Harvard University was a great clash of ideas. Upon graduation, as a columnist for the Crimson, the campus daily, Tom wrote a farewell to his readers: "I've never sought to be loved. I wrote against sacred cows, such as the cult of diversity, affirmative action, conspicuous compassion, radical participatory democracy. And to make matters worse, I was a conservative."
After six years at Harvard, Tom escaped, unloved but unscathed, having earned a BA in three years and then a law degree. He once reflected that the only way you could leave Harvard a conservative is if you came that way, if you entered with conservative beliefs. To pay off his education loans, Tom worked in many jobs, including at a DC law firm. A senior partner musing on the young lawyer's gifts, talents, and the great future he had with the firm—one day in 2004, Tom came into his office and said he was thinking about leaving to join the Army. Astonished, the lawyer proceeded to give Tom some fatherly advice: "the Army has plenty of lawyers, they don't need you." Tom replied, "Oh no, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be in the infantry, and I want to become an Airborne Ranger. I want to lead troops in combat." Incredulous, this Harvard lawyer was thinking, "This guy would renounce the law for the Army." The senior partner asked Tom, "Have you talked to your mother about this decision?" The rest, as they say, is history.
After being stationed in Iraq, fighting with the 101st Airborne Division, Tom was angered by an article in the arbiter of all the news that's fit to print—I think you know what comes after this—the New York Times, revealing a secret Bush administration program. I remember reading it on the front page. Masking his rage in sarcasm, Tom wrote to the editor, "Congratulations on disclosing our government's highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program. I apologize for not writing sooner, but I'm a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and I've spent the last four days patrolling one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq. These terrorists we fight don't spring from the soil. They require financing to emplace bombs and mortars. You may think you've done a public service, but you've gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and innocent Iraqis."
This may not come as a shock to you, but the New York Times did not print that letter. But fortunately, a blog, Power Line, did. And Lieutenant Tom Cotton in 2004 became an overnight hero to many Americans. His courage to speak his mind and stand up for his beliefs has echoed through the halls of the Senate since 2015. And last year, he put his thoughts and their philosophical underpinnings in a book about America.
If you haven't read it, I urge you to buy it. You don't even have to read it, but first, buy it, then read it. It's a great book. It's an important book. It's called Only the Strong: Reversing the Left's Plot to Sabotage American Power. Its thesis is that progressives over the last hundred years have deliberately thwarted America's freedom of action in world affairs, because they don't trust it. They don't trust us. They don't believe in what we believe in. In it, he cites a stunning speech by Henry Cabot Lodge, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during Woodrow Wilson's tenure. It's stunning, not only because Lodge said it more than a hundred years ago, but because his inspired commentary is as piercing today as it was then.
Listen to these words. "You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply," said Lodge. "But an American, I was born. American I have remained all of my life. I can never be anything else but an American. And I must think of the United States first. And when I think of the United States first, I'm thinking about what is best for the world. And if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind will fail with it."
The question of America's role in the world continues to be one of the most consequential issues of our time. Senator Cotton's leadership has proven indispensable in this fight, and as he reminds us, only the strong can defend a great nation. I end, as I began, on a personal note, it is said that every senator sees a president when he looks in the mirror. God forbid if this was ever Chuck Schumer, but that's a digression. But it is my sincere hope that the man Tom Cotton sees in the mirror will someday be president. But first, ladies and gentlemen, please stand in honor of the 23rd Alexander Hamilton Award winner, Senator Tom Cotton.
Sen. Tom Cotton: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all very much. Wow. Thank you all very much for the warm welcome. And Roger, thank you for that very kind, one-of-a-kind introduction. I'm going to have to take you on the road after that. Roger, I'm grateful for your many years of friendship and support. I also want to recognize and thank your chairman Paul Singer for his inspirational leadership. I want to thank Paul also for taking a flyer years ago on an unknown and unemployed veteran from Arkansas. And I want to thank your president, Reihan Salam, for building upon the Manhattan Institute's distinguished heritage for a new generation. And I want to add my congratulations to Cliff Asness. It's a true honor to share this evening as the recipient of the Hamilton Award with Cliff.
I nearly didn't make it tonight though. Believe it or not, I'm on jury duty in Little Rock. Seriously, I am. I'm not joking. I have to call the Pulaski County Courthouse each Monday morning to find out if they need jurors that week. They didn't today. I'll confess, I kind of hope I get called. Anything to get away from Chuck Schumer. But I'm afraid, if I do get called, I'll probably be struck from the pool anyway.
If I show up for voir dire and the lawyer asks me to state my name for the record, I'll instinctively just yell "Guilty! Sorry, got overexcited there, Counselor. Tom Cotton." But no, honestly, can you imagine me on a criminal jury? I'm just thinking of the questions we would send back as jurors to the judge from the jury room: "Your Honor, we know the prosecutor charged manslaughter, but we think the facts prove out capital murder. Can we convict of that? And while we're at it, can we also skip the sentencing phase and go straight to the hanging?"
No. I suspect I'll never see the inside of a courtroom in Little Rock this summer. No criminal defense lawyer in Arkansas is eager to have me on their jury. No more eager than the New York Times is excited about having me back on their pages. By contrast, I am very happy and honored to be with you tonight, and I'm deeply honored to receive your Hamilton Award. I'm also grateful that Reihan moved this off of Broadway and canceled the rap and dance competition between Cliff Asness and me. I hear he does a mean version of “Ice Ice Baby.”
Even after the hit musical, I do believe that Hamilton is one of our most underappreciated founders. From fighting alongside Washington, to crafting the Constitution and campaigning for it in New York newspapers, to his famous reports on manufacturers and public finances, Hamilton did much to turn America into a modern dynamic commercial republic. It's fitting that this Manhattan Institute award bears his name, here in his adopted hometown. For your scholars very much walk in Hamilton's footsteps, defending the free enterprise system, self-improvement, and national advancement, through quality education, the rule of law, cultural sanity, and maybe standing out above all else, the Manhattan Institute's work to revitalize America's great cities.
Hamilton himself is a champion of American cities. So am I. Regrettably, some conservatives today would write off our great cities. They mock their struggles. Now, don't get me wrong, Alvin Bragg and Lori Lightfoot and George Gascón richly deserve mockery. But our fellow citizens in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles deserve much, much better than these failed ideologues.
The fine people of this city and Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and so many other great American cities are suffering under the weight of disastrous politics. Schools are failing, infrastructure is crumbling, and businesses and families are fleeing. And underneath it all is a breakdown in public safety and order. And here again, the Manhattan Institute is leading the way, as it always has. And here again, you share Hamilton's concerns. He knew that public safety was the very first object and responsibility of any government. Without safety, there can be no education, no prosperity, no opportunity, no culture, no beauty.
He even warned that if free government proved incapable of providing safety, then a people might abandon freedom sooner than they would tolerate unending fear and danger. Hamilton had no illusions about human nature. "Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," he wrote. He understood that a fundamental duty of government is to restrain men's violent passions and establish public order. Such notions may seem quaint and outdated today to the progressive left, but their enduring truth is sadly seen every day, on your city's streets and subways. Roger mentioned that I grew up on a farm. When I was a kid, my father and I had to bush hog the fields each summer. And now, for those who don't know, a bush hog is a large mower pulled behind a tractor. While my dad bush hogged the fields. I had to clear the fence rows that he couldn't reach.
Believe me, this was dirty and unpleasant work. And you might ask, "Why did you cut the grass that your cattle grazed on? Why didn't you turn it into hay?" And the answer is, we weren't cutting the grass. We were cutting the new growth of bushes and saplings, because the jungle always wants to grow back and the jungle will always grow back, absent intervention. That's what we see happening in too many of America's cities today, as progressive politicians elevate their warped ideology over tried and true policing and prosecutorial methods. George Soros–backed prosecutors simply refuse to enforce the law or even see a depraved criminal as their actual client, instead of the law-abiding public. The results: in Philadelphia, murder is up 63%; in Baltimore, 60%; in New Orleans, 40%; in Houston, 71%, all since Soros-backed prosecutors took office. And the numbers are much worse for other crimes.
Here in the Big Apple, you have not only a Soros-backed prosecutor, you have the ideologues in Albany who ended your cash bail system. The results: murders up 37%, robbery 30%, burglary 46%, and auto theft 150%. I would say that the residents of these and too many other cities are scared to walk out of their homes. But that would understate things, when moms and grandmas fear stray bullets passing through the walls of their homes and striking a sleeping child. As I said earlier, the people of our great cities deserve so much better, and we should help give it to them.
One urgent simple step is to turn every single Soros prosecutor out of office. The people of San Francisco recalled theirs. Little Rock sadly has had our own struggles with crime, but it would've been worse if a Soros-backed candidate had won last year. I'm glad to say she didn't. In no small part, because local leaders generously stepped forward to support a career prosecutor. And one of them was a Manhattan Institute Trustee, Warren Stephens. Perhaps a few of you here tonight could replicate that model elsewhere. Another step is to return to the wisdom of the ancients, by which I mean the Manhattan Institute's work from 20 to 30 years ago.
In most of our living memories, New York was viewed as dangerously unsafe and ungovernable. But tough law and order leaders, like Rudy Giuliani, Ray Kelly, and Bill Bratton, along with America's finest police force, turned it into one of the nation's safest cities. And they did so, in part, by implementing the common sense of the Manhattan Institute. If you stop squeegee men and fare jumpers, you don't just restore order, you also bust a lot of career criminals with outstanding warrants. If you stop suspicious persons on the street, question them, and frisk them, you drive gun-carrying criminals off the streets.
If the police investigate and arrest quickly and prosecutors charge firmly and go to trial promptly, then criminals will fear the consequences. Again, these are common-sense ideas, about which the Manhattan Institute has written and for which it has advocated for decades. Why did so many abandon them? What happened? In some ways, we're a victim of our own success. Crime fell so dramatically in the 1990s and the 2000s that liberals began to claim that these methods were unnecessary, unduly harsh, and yes, of course, racist. Unfortunately, some Republicans got in on the act too, accepting the left's premise and passing misguided soft-on-crime laws, like the First Step Act. This shortsighted way of thinking reminds me of an old story. After several motorists died on a dangerous mountain road, the village elders agreed to post a road sign: “Danger, Winding Road Ahead.”
Years passed with no more accidents. Then one night, a storm blew the sign away. One elder proposed to replace the sign, but another said, "Why would we pay for a new sign when there hasn't been an accident up there for years?" The Manhattan Institute didn't merely post the proverbial sign decades ago, but also pleaded to keep the sign up, even when it hasn't been fashionable to do so. Too many politicians didn't heed your warnings. Now, too many of our cities, once again, seem dangerous and ungovernable. Yet, we know that's not the case from experience. We've seen streets, subways, and parks reclaimed from criminals. We've done it before, so we can do it again. And I'm confident, as it was before, so it will be again soon. The Manhattan Institute will again be leading the way. Thank you all. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.