When you’re writing a column, it helps if you have something to say.

That glaringly obvious fact is lost on writers who fill their space with words that don’t mean much, but not on Nick Clooney, whose column appears thrice weekly in the Cincinnati Post. It’s true that compared to the rest of us, Clooney has a wealth of experience from which to extrapolate. A native of Maysville, Ky., and a former student at the friars’ St. Francis Seraph Elementary School in Over-the-Rhine, he has been (not in chronological order) a television anchorman, a quiz show host, an author, a talk show host, a radio personality, the host of cable TV’s American Movie Classics and a candidate for Congress. His sister Rosemary was one of the best known popular singers of all time. His son George has achieved stratospheric success as an actor and a director and recently received an Academy Award for his performance in the political thriller Syriana.

That’s a wealth of material for any columnist, but Nick Clooney has never relied on his celebrity or his connections to reach his audience. He has both a point and a point of view. And more often than not, his take on the world and our society is so Franciscan that it’s obvious he feels an affinity for the Friars Minor. “My friends who are confreres of St. Francis, they ‘get’ me,” Clooney said recently in a phone conversation from his home in Augusta, Ky. He writes unselfconsciously about his love for animals in general and for his dog Spags in particular because “they represent absolutely perfect innocence.” His aversion to war stems from his fascination with history and his conviction that each of us is sacred. “I always think, as I believe Francis did, that if you don’t find God in the person next to you, you will never find God.”

More recently, Clooney put himself on the line for his beliefs, visiting refugee camps in the Darfur region of Sudan with son George, then writing a series of columns for the Post on this gut-wrenching experience. It was difficult to read, and most probably, difficult to write. On April 26, he reported: “The most conservative United Nations estimates are these: 250,000 people killed in the last three years, butchered in their homes or on their way to perform household tasks. From a population of 6 million, more than 2 million have been uprooted from their lives, finding shelter in displaced persons camps in Darfur, or as refugees in neighboring Chad. Countless villages were burned to the ground. Livestock stolen or slaughtered. Worse, numberless women raped.”

The horror stories he accumulated about this brutal ethnic conflict were synthesized in an exchange with shell-shocked survivors at a camp on the Kenya-South Sudan border:

Everywhere the Clooneys went, they confronted the same grim reality:  “Desperate people in a desolate land, hanging by a thread to their lives and their hopes, with no one to help them except us.” Many of them beseeched, “You must help us.” Writing about the need for U.S. involvement, Clooney said, “In my lifetime, we came too late to the Holocaust, to Cambodia, to Rwanda. Might this not be the first genocide the world stopped in its tracks, and might not our little group be a small part of it?”

His social conscience, shaped by FDR, a politically active grandfather and his religious upbringing, is unflinchingly Catholic. “We were deeply spiritual all the way back to the peat bogs,” he says of his Irish-American family. At the dinner table, “We always talked about worldwide issues. They (his grandparents) always assumed we were short adults. We talked about the electoral system, Russia, the New Deal, race issues.” An ongoing lesson in global awareness, it nurtured an attitude long espoused by Franciscans:  “Always help those who have less power. Make the person next to you better off.”

Like Francis, he firmly believes in preaching by example, witnessed in his 2004 campaign for Congress. “I thought there might be a possibility I could add a small voice to the debate out there,” says Clooney, who was approached to run for office five times before he finally agreed. Concerns about his family held him back. “My daughter (Ada) had little kids. George was trying to establish himself in his career. My wife was trying to break free of the ‘and his lovely wife, Nina’ image” by creating a niche for herself. “What I knew was that when a person runs, the whole family runs. They have no way of being left out of it.”

In 2004 the timing seemed right, so Clooney took a leave of absence from the Post and announced his candidacy for a seat in the House of Representatives from Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District. He anticipated the mudslinging that followed. “I knew precisely what the other side (Republican opponent Geoff Davis) would do in the current sulfurous political atmosphere,” which was to sensationalize quotes out of context from Clooney’s newspaper columns. Only one thing surprised him. “What I did not expect was that the people who knew me best would believe it.” His refusal to run a negative campaign may have cost him the election.

It was his first and last campaign for Congress. “God, no. Never,” he says emphatically, without bitterness, asked if he would do it again. Those who read him regularly say Clooney returned to his pulpit at the Post with a renewed sense of mission. At 72, he still subscribes to the “anything is possible in America” school of thought. Cynics would call it naïve, but context is everything: In Clooney’s Depression-era boyhood, America’s reputation for decency was untarnished. His columns evoking that distant era are categorized as “nostalgia.” Remember when? Remember who? But there is often an underlying lesson, a truth that bears repeating: War is horrible. Life wasn’t always this easy. There are two sides to every issue.

Accused of leaning to the left in his writings, Clooney has taken as many Democrats to task in print as Republicans. In a recent column, he praised President Bush for his candid assessment of the crisis in Africa. His most incendiary columns deal with politics and the fallout from scandals in government. Asked whether the current wave of corruption is anything new, he says, “By golly, it’s never been this bad. We are in one of the dark periods. What I’m most worried about is our acquiescence to one of the more imperial presidencies we’ve ever had.” And we have no one to blame but ourselves. “We don’t vote. We don’t care. It’s our fault. It’s also Congress’ fault.” He thinks the amount of influence wielded by lobbyists in Washington is “unconscionable and unbelievable. It’s absolutely astounding.” He is quick to condemn encroachments upon civil liberties: “We darn well better settle whether you can spy on any person you choose any time you choose.”

From Clooney’s perspective, one that is tempered by faith in the American system and its people, there is always hope. “The country will survive. It will continue to lurch forward.” But whatever happens, one thing is certain: You can bet Nick Clooney will have something to say about it.

To learn how you can help the people of Darfur, please visit:  www.savedarfur.org/home or sudan.crs.org/.

For the latest news about national and global concerns, visit our Justice & Peace pages
at: www.franciscan.org/JPIC/get_informed.asp.

Nick Clooney’s columns from the Cincinnati Post are archived at:  news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=clooney.