PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

One of the toughest government jobs these days is the one former Army General John Kelly holds in Washington, D.C.

He is chief of staff to a person, President Donald Trump, who has no chief other than his own ego.

So, the media watches Kelly and looks for any misstep in his work. One of those alleged missteps occurred when Kelly, in a Fox News interview, called Confederate General Robert E. Lee an “honorable man.”

He also observed that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had made them stand.”

Despite a crescendo of media criticism – how could an official call a slave owner honorable – Kelly got it right. Facts, not perceptions, tell that story.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Jay Winik, author of “April 1865” and “1944” and historian-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, did everyone a service by providing a list of facts to buttress the image of Lee, not to mention Kelly’s comments.

Here is the list, with all due credit to Winik, from whom I quote:

• Lee’s lineage was impeccable. His father was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, the celebrated Revolutionary War general and close friend of George Washington. Lee himself descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, who later became an ardent Confederate, was none other than Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and, through adoption, of George Washington himself.
• Lee agonized over whether to fight for the Confederacy. As war loomed, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the new Union Army, a position he had always coveted. Despite being an avowed Federalist who longed for compromise to save the Union, Lee, like so many others, gave in to the permanency of birth and blood. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,” he wrote a friend, “save in defense of my native state.” Instead he became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, while predicting that the country would pass “through a terrible ordeal.” He was right.
• Still, he was never much of a hater. Like Lincoln, more often than not Lee called the other side “those people,” rather than “the enemy.” Nor was it clear that he loved war itself. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” With words that could have been uttered by Lincoln, Lee talked of the cruelty of war, how it filled “our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”
• Nor was he fond of slavery, once describing it as “a moral and political evil.” True, he did benefit from slavery. But in 1863, one day after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lee went a step further than Thomas Jefferson ever did and freed his family slaves, fulfilling the wishes of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And in 1865, as the Confederacy stood on the throes of destruction, Lee supported a dramatic measure to put slaves in uniform and train them to fight, which would have effectively emancipated them.
• Upon the conflict’s close, Lee gave a forceful interview to the New York Herald in which he strongly condemned Lincoln’s assassination and claimed that the “best men of the South” had long wanted to see slavery’s end. Later he declared, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”
• Arguably his most powerful statement about race relations came at war’s end in St. Paul’s Church, the congregation of the Richmond elite. To the horror of many of the congregants, a well-dressed black man advanced to take communion, and knelt down at the altar rail. The minister froze, unsure what to do. Lee knelt down next to the black man to partake of the communion with him.
• Finally, Lee’s greatest legacy was not in war, but in peace. Lee went to great pains to heal the bitterness that cleaved the country after Appomattox. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S.

Winik’s conclusion was that Lee “embodied in countless ways the poignancy and tragedy of Civil War.”

So, it was right for Kelly to compliment Lee. Based on the facts, not the perceptions, of Lee’s life, he was a patriot who opposed slavery even though, for reasons of place and birth n the South, he fought for the Confederacy.

Facts vindicate Kelly.