A Fairly Ordinary Act of Fatherhood

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"The president temporarily handing over power to his political enemy? I think it's a fairly stunning act of patriotism ... and a fairly ordinary act of fatherhood."

Will Bailey (Joshua Malina)

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One of the things that I really liked about The West Wing when it was on the air was the way the writers managed to work little history and/or civics lessons into the plots.

I never felt that it was just a TV show or just a drama. There often was, to use a word the real president likes, a teachable moment. (And Lord knows the American public can use a few history lessons.)

It was the best kind of teachable moment, really. It wasn't preachy or condescending. It was entertaining and educational at the same time.

Mind you, the series didn't always do that sort of thing, but it did it often enough, and one of the very best examples of the technique was the episode that aired 10 years ago tonight.

"Twenty Five" was the season–ending episode of the series' fourth season. A week earlier, first daughter Zooey Bartlet (Elisabeth Moss) was kidnapped while celebrating her college graduation. The president (Martin Sheen) and the first lady (Stockard Channing) were told what had happened at the beginning of the episode that aired 10 years ago tonight.

They proceeded to make the kind of mistakes that might be expected from worried parents who happen to be in the public eye 24/7. The first lady, for example, decided, after several hours, to make an appeal to the kidnappers for the release of her daughter. She was dissuaded from doing so when it was pointed out to her that it would send the message to the kidnappers that they had succeeded in creating chaos in the White House.

The president, recognizing that a distraught father is in no shape to manage the affairs of state, decided to temporarily step aside. Such a circumstance has never happened in American history, but the Constitution, with the help and clarification of the 25th Amendment, spells out the line of succession that is to be followed.

As is the tradition when a president dies in office, the immediate successor would be the vice president. But, in the West Wing universe, the vice president had resigned a few episodes earlier, and the office was vacant.

According to the Constitution, if there is no vice president, the next person in line is the speaker of the House. Just one problem there, though. In the universe of the West Wing, the president was a Democrat, and the speaker of the House (John Goodman) was a Republican.

That may have been hard for some people to imagine at the time, given the fact that, in reality, the president and both chambers of Congress were in Republican hands. If such a scenario had occurred a decade ago in the real world, it wouldn't have been a political concern for the president to temporarily hand over power to the House speaker — other than that technicality that prohibits someone from simultaneously holding positions in two branches of government.

But it was a more wrenching decision for the president and his staff in the West Wing.

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It made for undeniably dramatic television. And it set up one of the most understated lines in TV series history when Goodman said to the president's staff, "Relax, everybody. Breathe regular."

That line was delivered after it was clear that the West Wing staff had been experiencing considerable angst over the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Most of them probably hadn't been breathing regular — least of all Toby (Richard Schiff), who had just become a father in a neat, if a bit transparent, secondary story line.

If anyone could understand the president's conflict, it was Toby, and he seemed to alternate between the fiercely defensive father he had just become and the dedicated public servant he was.

"There's no one in this room," he whispered to the president moments before the House speaker took the presidential oath of office, "who wouldn't rather die than let you down."

It was quite a cliffhanger — from a series that re–defined the word.

And it was a well–written story about a scenario we can all hope no president will ever face.

Isaac and Ishmael

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Inspiration comes from many sources.

And, as terrible as Sept. 11, 2001, was, it was a definite source of inspiration — for musicians, for artists and for writers.

Aaron Sorkin, a writer for The West Wing, was inspired by the events of that day to write a special episode of the series. The episode had no real place in the story line, but it served as the unofficial start for the series' third season, and it educated an American public that was ignorant of many of the issues that so enraged the Muslim extremists.

(I have always been frustrated by the public's eagerness to accept simplistic — and ridiculous — explanations for those terrorist attacks, such as "They hate our freedom" or "They hate democracy." In truth, Muslim anger at the West had — and continues to have — far more to do with Westerners' treatment of Islam, its values and its adherents in the Middle East than it has ever had to do with systems of government, here or anywhere else.

(And, while many Muslims walking the streets of America may have been offended by the sights of casinos, strip clubs and bars, so, too, are people of other faiths — and none, including Muslims, have launched holy wars because of them.)

Apparently, the West Wing story came to Sorkin in a burst of inspiration — it was written, filmed and broadcast within three weeks of the terrorist attacks. And, even now, people mention it to me in conversations about the TV series.

I seldom need encouragement to talk about The West Wing — and I need even less encouragement to talk about that episode, which was titled "Isaac and Ishmael."

As incredible as it is to believe, that episode first aired 10 years ago tonight — when the shock of the September 11 attacks was still fresh.

The episode, as I said, had no real place in the series' timeline — but it did utilize a familiar West Wing technique with parallel stories taking place within it.

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One story involved a group of young people who were visiting the White House. A "lockdown" occurred when it was discovered that a White House staffer's name was the same as a known terrorist.

The group was ushered into the mess hall, where most of the cast members came by and discussed terrorism, racism and religion with the students.

The other story focused on the staffer — who was previously unknown to viewers and never, to my knowledge, appeared in the series again — undergoing interrogation.

In all, I thought it was a great one–hour lesson for Americans who knew little about the Middle East, little about Islam, little about a lot of things, as it turned out.

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Americans had been through — and were continuing to experience — day after endless day of 9/11 footage.

The West Wing gave them an opportunity to learn about something that scared and bewildered them mostly because they still knew so little about it — and, thus, were susceptible to all kinds of .

For that matter, many viewers probably didn't understand the name of the episode, even after it should have been made clear at the end.

The first lady told the story that inspired the title — the story of Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Abraham from the Bible, and how the conflict between Jews and Muslims began.

I am neither Jewish nor Muslim, and I have never had much interest in the origin of their conflict so I wasn't all that different from anyone else who watched this special episode of The West Wing 10 years ago tonight. But watch it I did, and I even learned a few things in the process.

And that was no small accomplishment, given the backlash against Muslims in this country at that time.

There were hints of that backlash in the interrogation of the staffer by the chief of staff. At one point, he made a wisecrack, following an exchange that raised one of fundamentalist Muslims' greatest complaints of Western occupation of Middle Eastern cities and countries:

"You sent an army composed of women as well as men to protect a Muslim dynasty where women aren't even allowed to drive a car," the staffer said.

To which the chief of staff replied, "Maybe we can teach them."

The staffer, frustrated by it all, finally told the chief of staff, "You have the memory of a gypsy moth.

"When you and the president and the president's daughter and about a hundred other people — including me, by the way — were met with a hail of .44–caliber gunfire ... not only were the shooters white, they were doing it because one of us wasn't."

I guess you have to put it in the context of those times and the times that followed. Emotions were running quite high in the United States, and Muslims were the new targets of hate crimes that previously had been almost exclusively mentioned in connection with acts against blacks and women.

There weren't many mainstream Americans standing up to defend the rights of Muslims. Everyone knew they were the enemy. Why, defending the rights of Muslims in America in 2001 would have been roughly the same as saying during World War II that putting Japanese–Americans in those internment camps was wrong.

Relations between non–Muslims and Muslims in this country are better today than they were then, but that really isn't saying much. There really was nowhere to go but up.

There was a lot of anger, fear and suspicion between those groups at the time, which was understandable, I suppose, given what had happened, and much of it has receded. But a significant amount remains because a significant amount has always been there. It was there after the Oklahoma City bombing, when a man of Middle Eastern descent was detained and interrogated for hours — and then released when the real perpetrator, a white Christian, had been taken into custody.

It has taken root.

I'd like to think that The West Wing contributed to the improvement we've seen, and maybe, in its own, small way, it did.

I often wonder, though.

Truly unifying national experiences on television don't happen frequently anymore — and, when they do, it is more often than not the immediate result of an unexpected and terrible event. Consequently, I'm inclined to think that the televised multi–artist concert to benefit the victims of the attacks and their families a few days after the attacks was such a unifying experience.

The West Wing's episode — as remarkable as it was — was a few weeks in the making. The nation's notoriously short attention span had already been diverted to the randomness of the anthrax attacks

Although it was written, filmed and broadcast in a remarkably brief period for such a project, I don't know if "Isaac and Ishmael" was as unifying an experience as I thought it was at the time.

I've never seen the ratings for that episode, but I always felt the audience was rather large. The West Wing was ranked 13th in the country at the end of the 2000–2001 season and appeared poised to keep rising in the ratings.

And, as it turned out, the 2001–2002 season on which the series was about to embark was its best in the Nielsen ratings.

So there is good reason to think that quite a few people saw it when it aired for the first time 10 years ago — and countless others have seen it in reruns and on home video and DVD.

And, of course, there is that imprecise figure based only on my observations at the time — and the people who have mentioned it to me in the years since.

I watched it again recently, and I was amazed by how timely it remains a decade later. There are still things in it that need to be said — and, I suspect, will be needed to be said again in the future

The Stackhouse Filibuster

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"Don't ever, ever underestimate the will of a grandfather. We're madmen, we don't give a damn, we got here before you and they'll be here after. We'll make enemies, we'll break laws, we'll break bones, but you will not mess with the grandchildren."

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen)

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It's hard for me to believe that it was 10 years ago today that one of my favorite West Wing episodes was shown for the first time.

The program was aired about three–quarters of the way through the series' second season — which was a season of incredibly high quality, I must say. And I couldn't imagine what the creators of the series would do for an encore — until later that year, after terrorists hijacked four airplanes and crashed three of them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, postponing the start of the season and inspiring Aaron Sorkin to write "Isaac and Ishmael" for the West Wing.

It aired less than a month after the attacks.

Although it had no real place in the time line of the series, the episode was its highest rated of the year and is still mentioned by people in conversations about Middle Eastern history and conflicts.

That, of course, was still in the future.

On this night 10 years ago, I marveled at the story I saw (co–written by Sorkin, by the way) and literally couldn't imagine how the program, which had long since become my favorite on network TV, could be any better.

As a matter of fact, the series actually did exceed the standard it reached on this night a decade ago a couple of times before the season ended. And it would match or exceed that standard several times before going off the air in 2006.

But at the time, in nearly two full seasons, it was a level the series had rarely achieved, even though it had already developed its reputation for quality writing, acting and, well, everything.

In the episode, the West Wing staffers were anticipating a big congressional victory with their health care legislation that appeared to enjoy bipartisan support and were focusing on their plans for the weekend when an unexpected filibuster began in the Senate.

The filibuster was the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" kind in which a single senator ties up the chamber, which is sort of old–fashioned these days. Modern filibusters tend to be more organized, more coordinated, and they tend to resemble tag–team wrestling matches, but this filibuster, like the one in the old Jimmy Stewart classic, was engineered by a single senator.

That senator was a character named Howard Stackhouse, an elderly senator from Minnesota who had proposed an appropriation to fight autism but had been turned down. That request had been inspired by Stackhouse's love for his autistic grandson, a motivating point that he did not mention, but the White House staffers figured it out, and they rushed to help.

After an impassioned defense of grandfathers, the president told his personal aide, "I want to call senators. We'll start with our friends. When we're done with those two, we'll go on to the other 98."

The story of Stackhouse's improbable battle was told through three characters' e–mails to relatives.

One of the best lines in the story came from C.J. Cregg, the press secretary, who was explaining to her father why she wouldn't be able to attend his milestone birthday party.

"Tonight, I've seen a man with no legs stay standing, Dad, and a guy with no voice keep shouting," she wrote. "And if politics brings out the worst in people, maybe people bring out the best."

There were gathering clouds in the story that would play roles in the series for years to come, and followers of the series could look at that show now and see foreshadowing of future problems with the vice president — and the president's deception about his health.

But few dramatic TV episodes could match "The Stackhouse Filibuster" when it came to inspiration.