What Courage Costs When the Cameras Are Off

The room at 92NY carried the kind of energy that comes when people show up for something they already believe in but want to hear said out loud. The evening was part of a public life series focused on leaders propelling democracy forward, and it featured Rye Barcott, author of Courage Can Save Us, in conversation with Maryland Governor Wes Moore, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, and Mark Dreiling, a retired Air Force officer who stepped in for Congressman Don Bacon, who could not attend because Congress was voting.

The adjustment turned out to be a gift. Dreiling's presence made the evening personal in ways a sitting congressman's prepared remarks might not have. He spoke about his life-threatening liver disease, a transplant anniversary that fell just days before the event, and his friend and boss Don Bacon's willingness to donate part of his own liver to try to save Dreiling's life. The evening began with mortality, friendship and sacrifice before it ever reached politics.

Courage Is a Choice, and it Has a Definition

Barcott opened with a definition that anchored everything that followed. Courage, he said, is a choice. It is a conscious decision to face risk in service of the common good. It is not instinctual. It is not in service of oneself.

That framing matters because it draws a line between courage and the things that often get mistaken for it: loudness, certainty, combativeness, personal branding. Courage in Barcott's framework requires two things. First, there has to be risk. Second, the risk has to be directed toward something beyond personal benefit. By that standard, a lot of what passes for political bravery in public life falls short. And a lot of what goes unnoticed qualifies.

The book profiles ten contemporary Americans whose courage spans military service, public office, and civic life. The evening traced three threads through their stories: where courage comes from, how it shows up in service, and what it looks like in the hardest moments of political leadership.

The Personal Roots of Public Courage

Both governors brought their formation stories, and both stories carried weight.

Moore described arriving at Valley Forge Military Academy at 13, sent by a mother who had run out of options. He tried to run away five times in his first four days. On one attempt, older cadets gave him a map to the train station. The map was fake and led him to the middle of the woods. They watched his flashlight from a distance. When they brought him back to campus, Ty Hill was waiting.

Hill was the only African American in the school's leadership group. Moore's mother had found him on the first day and asked him to look after her son. He did. Over time, Hill became a mentor, a brother, and a model of what selfless leadership looked like. Moore described Hill as the kind of Army officer he would trust his own children under.

The harder part of the story came later. Hill went on to become a commissioned officer. During the era of "don't ask, don't tell," he told his chain of command his truth and was escorted out of the Army. Moore called it a bad day for the military, because one of its best was forced out for living with integrity. Moore celebrated when the policy was finally lifted and made a point of honoring Hill publicly during the evening, asking him to stand in the audience.

Sherrill's story ran through the Naval Academy and into naval aviation. She wanted to fly from the time she was in fifth grade, inspired by a grandfather who was a World War II pilot. She arrived at the Naval Academy in a class where fewer than 10% of students were women. The hostility toward women in the military was, she said, trained into people through institutional culture: articles in official publications arguing women couldn't fight, standing ovations at all-hands calls when senior officers dismissed women's service, and the shadow of the Tailhook scandal, in which women aviators were sexually assaulted at a defense industry conference.

The moment that stayed with the audience was Sherrill describing her deployment on an aircraft carrier. She was 20 years old. There were roughly 5,000 people on the ship. She was the only woman. Her mother told her not to go. Sherrill reminded her that they're called orders, not suggestions.

What made the story resonate was what happened next. The squadron's commanding officer, whose call sign was Kondo, did not believe women should be in jet squadrons. Sherrill had heard as much. But he gave her work, treated her with respect, and demanded that everyone else do the same. When the ship pulled into port and the squadron planned a night of heavy drinking, Kondo asked Sherrill if she wanted to come, knowing it was probably a bad idea but unwilling to leave a member of his squadron on her own. She found a graceful exit. He was visibly relieved. But the point was that he had been willing to do whatever it took to make sure every person in his command was taken care of.

Sherrill drew the lesson plainly. Good leadership creates the conditions where people can act with integrity. Bad leadership trains fear, exclusion, or silence. The difference between the two is often one person's willingness to do the harder thing.

The final section of the evening moved from formation to the harder question: what does courage look like when you hold office and the risk is your career?

Sherrill described her decision to support the first impeachment of President Trump. She represented a district Trump had won. She had spent months resisting calls to impeach, believing that if the case could not be proven clearly, the process would do more harm than good. When evidence emerged that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Zelensky to manufacture evidence against a political opponent while withholding military aid, Sherrill and a group of colleagues, many of them veterans, concluded it crossed a constitutional line. They wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. Sherrill believed it was the op-ed that moved the Speaker to bring the caucus to a vote.

The part of the story she lingered on was the aftermath. A woman in her district came up to her afterward. The woman said she couldn't believe Sherrill had done it. Sherrill explained her reasoning. The woman looked at her with pity and said: everybody does that. Sherrill described the moment as a dagger. She had served her country for most of her adult life. The idea that voters assumed every politician was engaged in the same behavior was, for her, the deeper problem.

Moore's example of political courage was different in kind but similar in structure. Before running for governor, he served as CEO of Robin Hood, one of the largest poverty-fighting organizations in the country. When he entered the governor's race, polling at 1%, he was told by consultants to avoid the word poverty. It doesn't poll well, they said. Even people living in poverty don't want to hear it. Moore used it anyway, over and over, because he believed child poverty was the moral and practical center of what he wanted to accomplish. He won with more individual votes than anyone who had ever run for governor in Maryland's history.

In his first legislative session, his administration made permanent the Child Tax Credit, passed an expanded earned income tax credit, raised the minimum wage, and launched a place-based anti-poverty investment strategy that now covers 28 jurisdictions across the state. The word the consultants told him to avoid became the policy agenda that defined his governorship.

The evening treated military service with respect and without romance. All three profiled leaders served. Barcott was a Marine. Moore served in the Army, deploying to Afghanistan. Sherrill was a Navy helicopter pilot. Bacon, profiled in the book but absent from the stage, is a retired Air Force brigadier general.

Service clearly shaped how each of them thinks about leadership: in terms of mission, team, consequence and obligation rather than self-expression. But the evening also made room for a quieter truth. Dreiling's remarks about his transplant, about the genius and compassion of others that kept him alive, pointed somewhere else entirely. Courage shows up in hospitals, in families, in the willingness of colleagues to get tested as organ donors. Service is one pathway through which people learn that leadership is about obligation. There are others.

The Chronicle Takeaway

MODA Vi studies cities and institutions as living systems. From that perspective, courage is a civic input, not just a personal virtue. Institutions become healthier when people inside them are willing to tell the truth, take responsibility, cooperate across differences, and accept short-term personal or political costs for long-term public benefit.

Most civic courage will never happen on a battlefield, in a cockpit, or on the floor of Congress. It will happen in meetings, budgets, neighborhood decisions, agency leadership and public conversations. A public official telling residents a project will cost more than expected. A civic leader defending a policy that is necessary but unpopular. A resident showing up and engaging without reducing every issue to ideology.

The question after a conversation like this one is whether our institutions, our communities, and our own habits make enough room for courage to matter when it shows up. The evening made clear that courage still exists, in people like Ty Hill, like Kondo, like a group of veteran legislators who wrote an op-ed they believed might end their careers. The harder work is making sure it has somewhere to land.

The cameras were on at 92NY. The governors were on stage. The audience was engaged. But the stories that mattered most were about what people did when no one was watching. A mentor staying up with a scared 13-year-old. A commanding officer doing the right thing for someone he wasn't sure belonged. A congressman quietly gets tested to donate part of his liver. That is where courage lives most of the time. And it is worth paying attention to.