6 min Click here to listen to this article

Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print

Copy Link URL Copied!

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred

For much of my life funerals were, well, funereal, as black as attendees’ attire. Yet in recent decades, I’ve found that I often leave memorial services less mournful than upbeat. They’re inspiring, these so-called celebrations of life, with eulogies not from impersonal priests but from people who knew the dead person best. Tributes are seasoned with humor and paeans to personal character more than professional accomplishments. I walk out thinking not about death but life — especially my own, and resolving to be a better person.

This week I left such a service with a broader resolve: that our nation was once, and can be again, a better country.

The celebration was for the full and varied life of Alan Greenspan, the legendary longtime chair of the Federal Reserve who died in June at 100. The Shakespeare Theater Company’s Sidney Harman Hall was packed with folks from both parties and no party, with VIPs and obscure current and former bureaucrats who’d fed Greenspan’s voracious appetite for data (and gossip). Folks from a time when expertise was valued and policy was deliberated — not dashed off on the whim of one inexpert man.

Greenspan, “a devout Republican” as each eulogist acknowledged, served two decades atop the Fed until 2006. It was a time when Washington frequently was virulently partisan, and yet the two parties could and did come together on policy compromises for the good of the nation.

A former jazz musician, Greenspan turned relatively late to economics. But then he was all-in: He became a policy advisor to then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968, chief economic advisor to President Ford, a broker of a bipartisan compromise for Social Security’s solvency during President Reagan’s first term and, in Reagan’s second, his pick to be Fed chair. Presidents of both parties, each of the Bushes and Bill Clinton, reappointed him.

The Democratic former president Joe Biden was present to honor Greenspan. The current Republican president was not.

Nor was........

© Los Angeles Times