Politics & Power Quote by Morley Safer

The line lands like a raised eyebrow on live television: a reminder that adulthood, especially civic adulthood, means holding two ideas at once. Morley Safer isn’t offering absolution so much as puncturing a national habit of moral bookkeeping, where private virtue is treated as the currency that buys public legitimacy. “You can be a great president and be ridden with flaws” is a compact argument against the purity test. The follow-up - “Of course we know that” - is the sharper blade. It implicates the audience in a shared, almost embarrassed knowledge we routinely pretend not to possess, especially when scandal is profitable and outrage is easy.

Safer’s intent reads as journalistic realism with a moral edge: separate performance from personality without turning scrutiny into sanctimony. Coming from a broadcast reporter who watched presidents up close, it carries the fatigue of someone who has seen myth-making upend accountability in both directions: hagiography that ignores damage, and takedowns that ignore governance.

The subtext is also a warning about narrative convenience. We like presidents as symbols, which makes it tempting to compress a complicated tenure into a single character verdict: good man, bad man. Safer rejects that shortcut. Greatness, he suggests, is not a halo but a ledger of consequences - policy, war, rights, catastrophe managed or unleashed - coexisting with ego, vice, misjudgment, sometimes cruelty. The “of course” dares us to stop acting shocked when the human shows through, and to do the harder work: judging leaders by what they do, not by the comforting story we want them to be.