In its stories filed from the American hinterlands beyond New York or Washington, the New York Times can take on a certain high-minded voice. Often, in dispatches on either the weighty or evocative, the Times will bring us news of whichever conflict or quirky trend its correspondent has deigned to focus on, replete with an incredulous, anthropological undertone: Look what these people are doing in their natural habitat away from the big city! Isn’t it (pick one) strange/charming/quaint?
Inside Sunday’s Times was a story that could have been labeled “Hartford Journal.” The quirky development: the conspicuous absence of disgraced former Governor John G. Rowland’s visage from the collection of governors’ portraits in the Museum of Connecticut History in Hartford. (The three-term governor, embroiled in a corruption scandal and under threat of impeachment, abruptly announced his resignation last year, later pleading guilty to a conspiracy charge.)
While most of the governors from recent centuries claim a portrait, the Times wrote, “There is no portrait of Mr. Rowland, however. Nor, given the bitterness of his political legacy, is there momentum or money to commission one.”
Imagine — 16 long months after he left office, seven months after his disappearance into the federal slammer, and there is still no popular movement afoot in Connecticut to put his picture on the wall. What’s wrong with those people?
That didn’t stop the Times, of course, from setting off on a treatment of “the cumulative weight of the past that fills the room” where the “grave faces” of Buckingham and Ribicoff reside, on the informal process used for commissioning portraits, and on what Rowland’s well-heeled friends might whip up by way of tribute “if the legislature continued to show no interest in paying for a portrait.”
Puzzling over it all, the Times piece continues: “What may be most striking about Mr. Rowland’s absence from Memorial Hall … is how so few people seem to regard it as an issue, or at least a pressing one.” The House speaker said no one had come to him about it, and one of Rowland’s lawyers “said his client had never mentioned a portrait.” Added another Rowland lawyer, William F. Dow III, who represented the governor during the impeachment inquiry: “This was an issue so far off our radar screen that it didn’t merit a whisper.”
Exactly. This is a tale not only of what has not happened, but also of what is not likely to happen any time soon. As the Times puts it, “[T]he former governor may be more concerned with making plans for what he will do after his release” than with getting his tenure memorialized with an official portrait. Gee. Rowland sounds nearly as strange as the other natives of this far-off province somewhere to the north of Manhattan.
–Edward B. Colby
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.