God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The Senator asks McAllister, Sylvia, and Mushari if he missed the warning signs of Eliot’s psychological deterioration. The Senator believes that because he has spent his life telling people that their problems are their own fault, it would be wrong not to apply the same thinking to himself.

He recalls Eliot’s most traumatic experience near the end of the war. Eliot led his unit into a clarinet factory in Bavaria, which was rumored to hold Nazi soldiers. Eliot unwittingly killed three unarmed firefighters while storming the building. The youngest victim was a teenager. Ten minutes later, a distraught Eliot lay in front of a moving truck to kill himself, but the driver saw him and stopped in time.

Eliot recovered in Paris, where he met Sylvia. Sylvia tells the Senator that she loved Eliot immediately. The Senator remembers when Eliot gave a $10,000 check to a poet named Arthur Garvey Ulm. Ulm wanted to express the truth without financial burdens stifling him, so Eliot paid him to tell the truth with his writing. Ulm struggled to find a topic of interest and asked Eliot about his favorite poem. Eliot claimed his favorite poem was a sign written on a bar’s bathroom wall: “We don’t piss in your ashtrays, / So please don’t throw cigarettes in our urinals” (89).