I officially became NPR's White House correspondent in January. But the job didn't seem real until Thursday at 3:56 PM, when the President of the United States looked down at a white note card and said "ahhhh, Tamara Keith."
That was my cue to ask a question — my first at a presidential press conference.
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Cowardice comes in many forms, but there's a special sense of shame reserved for captains who abandon ship.
South Korean prosecutors on Friday sought an arrest warrant for Capt. Lee joon-Seok, who was one of the first to flee from the ferry as it sank on Wednesday.
"I can't lift my face before the passengers and family members of those missing," Lee told reporters on Thursday.
The incident came two years after Francesco Schettino, the captain of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia, was charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship — charges he denies. The ship ran aground off the Italian coast in 2012, killing 32 people.
Has the old idea that captains should not abandon ship itself been abandoned?
"I'm kind of flummoxed that a master of a passenger ship anywhere in the world would not understand his obligation extends until that last person is safely off the ship," says Craig Allen, director of the Arctic Law & Policy Institute at the University of Washington.
The Victorian notion that a captain should actually go down with the ship has become archaic. But his or her responsibility extends to executing the evacuation plan that all passenger ships are required to have and practice.
"It comes from the tradition that the captain has ultimate responsibility and should put the care of others ahead of his own well-being in the discharge of his duties," says David Winkler, program director with the Naval Historical Foundation.
Women And Children First
In the middle of the 19th century, there were a number of incidents in which ships foundered and captains and their crews were either celebrated for leading the rescue or reviled for saving themselves while passengers drowned.
One of the most famous involved the HMS Birkenhead, which wrecked off the coast of South Africa in 1852 while transporting British troops to war.
"The captain called the men to attention," says William Fowler, a maritime historian at Northeastern University. "They were to stand at attention on the sinking ship until the women and children — their wives and children — were led off the boats."
The moment was immortalized by Rudyard Kipling as the "Birkenhead drill." Reinforced when Capt. Edward Smith went down with the Titanic, the notion that a captain must stay with his ship became part of folklore.
"A lot of this is candidly still more lore than law," says Miller Shealy, a maritime law professor at the Charleston School of Law.
A Breach Of Duty
In the U.S., case law indicates that a ship's master must be the last person to leave and make all reasonable efforts to save everyone and everything on it.
"It is not just unseemly for a captain to leave a ship," Shealy says. "In Anglo-American law, you would lose your license and make yourself liable."
After Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger crash-landed a flight in the Hudson River in 2009, he twice walked the plane to make sure no one was left onboard before leaving himself.
International standards for sea captains vary. Often, as in the case of Schettino, charges are brought based not on dereliction of maritime duty but for offenses that might pertain on land as well, such as negligence and manslaughter.
In 1991, Capt. Yiannis Avranas not only abandoned the Greek cruise ship Oceanos after it suffered an explosion off the coast of South Africa but cut ahead of an elderly passenger to be hoisted aloft by a helicopter.
"If the master is simply looking out for himself or herself, you've breached your duty both legally and morally, to your ship, your crew and your passengers," says Allen, the University of Washington law professor.
Part Of The Culture
In last year's Star Trek Into Darkness, the bad guy taunts Captain Kirk by saying, "No ship should go down without her captain."
The image of a captain staying with a sinking vessel has recurred again and again, in literature and real life. It remains so potent because of the almost mythic authority invested in ship captains, Allen suggests.
At sea, there's no question about who's in charge, so there's no doubt who is responsible for safety.
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker officially announced this week that he is running for — wait for it — re-election as governor of Wisconsin.
It will be at least six months before he says anything definitive regarding that other office, the oval-shaped one in Washington, D.C.
And that's to be expected.
Governors in both parties routinely run for re-election while keeping coy about the White House — much like Bill Clinton in 1990 and George W. Bush in 1998 and Rick Perry in 2010.
Of course there's no question what's on Walker's mind, long-term. His autobiography is titled Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge — generously expanding his current horizon.
Although just 46 years old, the Wisconsinite has avoided any public vow that he'll serve out his four years if re-elected, and he's wandered as far afield as Las Vegas to court the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who bankrolled Newt Gingrich's last run for the White House.
Walker moved up on a lot of people's short lists after the media love affair with Chris Christie's candidacy got nipped in the bud by Bridgegate. He has some of Christie's potential to span the GOP's internal divide, appealing to both the establishment (as Jeb Bush might) and the hard-core conservative base (as nearly all the other wannabes are trying to do).
But to rise into that role, Walker needs a boost from a robust re-election. And that could get tricky in a swing state like Wisconsin, where pride often goeth before a fall.
Walker's state GOP stands at a pinnacle of success and influence at home and in Washington. As he reclaimed the governorship for his party in 2010, the GOP was also seizing control of the state Legislature. Republicans captured the majority of the seats in the state's congressional delegation for the first time since 1996 and Ron Johnson became the first Wisconsin Republican in the U.S. Senate since 1992.
Since that watershed, Wisconsinite Reince Priebus has become chairman of the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan has been the party's nominee for vice president.
But even this apparent golden age for the party has worrisome elements in the mix. Good times can expose rifts, and recently state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a hard-line conservative from West Bend, announced a challenge to 73-year-old Republican Tom Petri in the state's 6th Congressional District.
Though a good party man, Petri is too mild-mannered a conservative for many in the Tea Party wing. Not long after Grothman got in, the 73-year-old got out, retiring after 35 years in office.
Something of that same insurgent spirit animated a recent 6th District meeting of activists that produced a resolution calling on state legislators to affirm the state's rights — including its right to secede "under extreme circumstances."
In headline shorthand, that became a "secession resolution," but a party committee approved it for consideration by the full statewide GOP convention in May. That prompted lots of media inquiries and forced Walker to dissociate himself from the"secession resolution" forthwith.
It was the second time this month the governor, who has been a darling of much of the right, found himself at odds with some conservatives. The first came when his new 25-year-old campaign spokeswoman, Alleigh Marre, was outed as a supporter of Planned Parenthood and "a woman's right to choose." Walker's allies in the anti-abortion movement erupted in protests. But so far the governor has stood by his aide.
No, Walker has not become some middle-of-the-road pol. To be sure, his re-election would be rooted in his high-profile showdown with public employee unions in 2011 and his renown as a social conservative. But to win a big re-election this fall, he needs to cut into his Democratic opponent's margins among women and independents. That is a tall order against that opponent, Democrat Mary Burke, a woman with a business background.
That could be why Walker, ever "the conservative's conservative," has lately seemed attuned to sensibilities beyond his fan base. He has not shifted on policy but on tone, turning toward "big tent" tolerance. That will not make Walker the national favorite of his party's hard-liners. But the competition to be the most implacable conservative in the 2016 GOP presidential field is already crowded to the point of pointlessness. The better running room for Walker is to be found somewhere between Jeb Bush and everyone else.