Politics & Power Quote by Lindy Boggs

Boggs is doing two things at once: pleading for courage and indicting the country for making courage necessary. The line is built on a conditional that sounds like common sense and lands like an accusation: if the President cannot safely visit an American city, then the problem is not logistics, its legitimacy. “Protected” is the key word, blunt and institutional, smuggling in an entire crisis of public order without naming who threatens whom. She doesn’t need to; the vagueness lets the listener supply the menace, which makes the statement travel across factions and news cycles.

The context is a nation still metabolizing political violence and civic unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when public appearances could become flashpoints. Boggs, a Louisiana congresswoman with deep ties to the era’s high-stakes political theater, frames the decision to “come” as a referendum on national cohesion. Her appeal to Hale (almost certainly a staffer or security-minded adviser) isn’t naive about danger; it’s strategic about symbolism. A President staying away concedes territory, not just physically but psychologically, confirming that the social contract has frayed.

Subtext: leadership isn’t only policy, it’s presence. Encouraging him to go is an attempt to force the optics of control and unity back into being. The phrase “very difficult time” is classic political understatement - a soft wrapper around the hard claim that the state’s monopoly on security is wobbling. Boggs’ intent is less to romanticize bravery than to prevent fear from setting the terms of democracy.