Laura Roslin, Part II
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting
....but Laura Roslin is still shockingly beautiful.
She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come: Laura and Cancer
Roslin’s experience as a sometime cancer patient and sometime survivor helps to shape every part of her story. She learns to live for the day as she embraces her destined role as a dying leader. She trusts and disdains her gods all at once. Cancer will kill her, and it will also change her life.
The first time Laura Roslin dies of cancer, she refuses morpha, so that she can work through her pain. During her illness, the fleet begins to crumble. Things should be going better - power over the fleet has been consolidated under Adama and Roslin; the ships are in better shape than they have been these many months. Yet the Cylon sympathizers choose that moment to begin terrorizing the Galactica, and they can get through to Gaius Baltar. The last few episodes of Roslin’s first bout with cancer display Roslin’s thorough commitment to the future of the fleet. She makes the move on ordering the termination of Sharon’s pregnancy, which she had balked from as long as she thought she would be around to protect the fleet from whatever it would turn out to present, a move which runs in direct contradiction to her aversion to causing unnecessary suffering in general and her philosophical support for reproductive freedom. There’s no question that her actions in those last few days are not any kind of power play, as she has no reason to expect to be around to enjoy it. Yet we see through her final actions that she is thoroughly committed to her leadership, though there is nothing in it for her. Though we spend all of Epiphanies seeing her struggle to wrap up her business within the fleet, we see nothing of Roslin getting her own affairs in order, because she has no personal affairs. She is entirely selfless.
The second time Laura Roslin dies of cancer, it’s after the loss of Earth and the discovery of the new Earth. The second time, after she’s lost the conviction that her death is humanity’s destiny, she gives into it and decides when to stop her treatment. This might be throwing in the towel, or it might be one last seizure of agency in the face of so many impossible decisions. Roslin and the worlds, perhaps fitting the motif of Roslin as mother-goddess, both happen and are destroyed twice. Roslin really does seem to have been the dying leader, and humanity does find the destroyed Earth, but Laura lives to see that dream die.
After the loss of Earth before they’ve even arrived, Roslin decides to stop her cancer treatment. The shocking despair and exhaustion she’s been fighting so successfully all this time crash down on her as she mourns. This second time around, she stops fighting for length of life for the sake of others, and begins seeking quality of life and peace with death for herself. Don’t I deserve to live? she asks Bill, and no one could disagree with her there. It is worth pointing out that though the loss of Earth is the emotional blow that leads her to bow out of the presidency and life, she also waits until Lee has proven himself to her several times over, particularly in Revelations, before she is willing to relinquish the burden of protection of the fleet to him. It’s not just despair and fatigue, it’s also that she has someone to pass the torch to rather than letting it blow out. Somehow throughout her guardianship of humanity, Laura finds herself, and she’s not willing to lose that along with the illusion that she can lead the people to safety.
Roslin could easily be given Cain’s eulogy, though I cannot imagine she would want such a thing in so many words. She died knowing that her people were safe, and that her mission had been accomplished. She found a successor, acceptable if noticeably less of a badass, and left a changed, more hopeful world behind her. Maybe that’s all she can ask; maybe it’s more than most of us can ask, really. But there’s more to her story. Laura dies only after having enjoyed her last few months; after having found genuine love rather than discovering the unfortunate truth that her love was a lie and letting herself destroy and be destroyed by it. Her last words are not of regret, or shame, or fear, but wonder at the beauty of their new corner of the universe. So much life. And though her breath rattles in her lungs, she could be talking about herself and the vital, powerful way she’s lived every moment she’s had.
Her husband is respected at the city gate, he takes his seat among the elders of the land: Laura Roslin and Bill Adama
What is perhaps most deeply beautiful about the relationship between Laura Roslin and Bill Adama is that it is a genuine partnership, even from the very beginning when they are not particularly fond of each other. Laura and Bill clash, they defy and betray each other, they disagree and sometimes fight unreservedly. And they respect and love each other deeply. Because their leadership styles are so true to themselves, the two characters balance each other similarly both personally and professionally. Laura is pragmatic while Bill is romantic; Laura considers the community at large while Bill regards the people closest to him as paramount; Bill is ruled by his heart and Laura by her head. But they share a fierce patriotism, dedication to their goals, ability to snap in and out of their work personas, and openness to romantic affections.
The work/romance relationship between the two characters is deeply intertwined. Often, they’ll discuss the most pressing issues of the fleet in the most comfortable and domestic of settings, with Laura reclined on her couch or Bill’s bed with him seated comfortably right beside her. Similarly, their first (on-screen, YEAH, OK, KIDS) kiss comes after she officially promotes him to Admiral of the Colonial fleet. Even the first hint to their mom-and-dad partnership comes at a time when they’re deeply suspicious of each other: they’re more suspicious (rightly, as it turns out, and not just because she is in fact a Cylon) of the newly-reawakened Ellen Tigh and they fall into a powerful, wordless partnership over a woefully uncomfortable family dinner.
Time and again, we’ll see the two characters balance each other and affect each other’s decision-making, almost always for the better. Bill’s esteem is a marker of Roslin’s progress as a leader; Roslin’s trust in Bill emphasizes the distance between the Cain-like Bill of the miniseries who would have wasted the Galactica in a suicide mission and the dedicated protector of the fleet he becomes. They have a touching penchant to give each other credit for their kinder instincts - each of them will claim that the other is the party responsible for the continuation of Athena’s pregnancy. Every day is a gift. From you.
This isn’t insinuation that their relationship is solely one of convenience. At their best, the two characters have a strong and lovely compatibility and sweet affection for each other. But Roslin’s life is completely about the mission for most of the show, and Bill isn’t much different. Though they’d be compatible even without being forced into close proximity under normal circumstances, for these two characters to be able to be together at this point in time under these circumstances, they need to compress work and romance closely indeed in order to connect at all.
When these two characters do get a moment to take a breather together, they share a comfortable, sensual closeness, where they relax as determinedly as they do everything else. Unfinished Business shows us Laura and Bill, decidedly not the President and the Admiral, sneaking away from the New Caprica groundbreaking ceremony to smoke up, serenade each other, and talk about their desire to live in the moment. And probably, other things, but the camera respects their privacy.
After New Caprica, their relationship changes, becomes slightly more textual and awkward all at once. Their feelings for each other will never vanish, however, and will only grow stronger with time. At the beginning of S4, Roslin is semi-openly living with Bill as she receives her cancer treatments from Cottle. When Roslin is on the vanished base star, Bill admits that he cannot live without Laura, and Laura is thrilled to be able to tell Bill she loves him. Their partnership only grows tighter after this experience, and the fleet thinks of the two of them as the sole centralized Colonial authority.
As Laura faces cancer, she and Bill become emotional caretakers for each other, partners in carving out a few spaces to pretend that they have just a little more time. When they sit together at Callie’s funeral, Laura starts to give Bill instructions for her own, a most final gesture of trust and inclusion; a gift and a terrible burden. They meet over mysteries, occasionally dipping into Roslin’s New Caprican stash, craving the closure and catharsis that comes after a protagonist sleuths out and eliminates a containable adversary. It’s something they both enjoyed before everything as entertainment and is a nod to the maturity of their relationship, between these people who have loved and lost, and then lost everything, and still stood up to come together. After the mutiny arc, when their romance is so well-known and accepted across the fleet that Zarek knows that his lie about Roslin’s death will devastate her. Roslin lives the last few months of her life - the time she has truly felt at home - with Bill.
Her children arise, and call her blessed: Laura and Billy, Lee, and Kara
Roslin, even before the attack, seems to have had no family of her own. Her happy family died tragically, and she seems never to have had or planned to have her own children. And yet, she is undoubtedly the series’ mother figure, more so even than the biological mothers we meet. She is the mother-protector to all of humanity. Her children in the forms of humanity do beg for her blessing time and again, whether treating her as a literal plea to their gods or as a political show of legitimacy. On a more personal level, Laura has relationships which in many ways appear familial with Billy, Lee, and Kara.
Billy
Billy is Laura’s assistant before the fall, and becomes something of a chief of staff for her after she becomes the president. For the first few seasons, Billy is Laura’s only family and last connection to the old world. It appears that they had a positive, professional relationship before the attacks, which quickly became closer and more important with the attacks. Billy is the person Laura trusts, in front of whom she’ll snap in frustration at Bill, and close enough to tease her about the beginning stages of her flirtation with Adama within the first few episodes.
Roslin considers Billy something of a son and protégé (a sweet, functional version of the relationship Bill seems to have hoped to have with Lee). During Sacrifice, when Bill worries about Lee and Tigh about Ellen, Laura claims Billy as the closest thing she has to family, and their bond is as apparent to the other characters as it is to the audience, as neither man challenges her on the strength of their bond. This is particularly poignant in retrospect when we find out Roslin’s background. Billy isn’t just the only family Laura has since the attacks, he’s the closest thing to family she’s had in years. When she is ill and expecting to die, she ensures that Billy is in on all of her meetings with Baltar, implying that she trusts him with the future of the fleet. In Home, Bill claims that Laura has suggested that Billy reminds her of Adar, and believes that he will follow her as president someday. (Lee eventually will take Billy’s place in this with Laura, just as he does with Dee.)
Billy, for his part, cares for, respects, and likes Laura. Billy’s family did die in the attacks, and so his jolt into the complete aloneness of the few survivors is cushioned by the apparently collegial but distant relationship he has with Roslin. He feels respected and safe enough to challenge her judgment calls from time to time, but he almost always ends up aligned with her, and never stands in her way. Billy looks honestly torn up when he decides not to leave with Roslin after the jailbreak and overjoyed to be reunited with her without recriminations in Home, where the Roslin-Billy reunion gets as much beauty and emotion as the Bill-Lee reunion. Because Billy isn’t military and therefore doesn’t have to be privy to the decisions Roslin makes with Adama, it’s possible that he somewhat keeps the picture of her the main cast has shattered during the second season as, fundamentally, the competent, peaceable Secretary of Education. Even if it’s some level of self-deluding idealization, both Billy and Laura seem to appreciate that connection to the old world and Roslin’s old self.
Lee
Laura and Lee have what is perhaps my favorite platonic relationship on BSG. Like all relationships on the show, and I’d argue more than most, this one has its ups and downs, and genuinely beautiful payoff. Lee is Roslin’s sole line of defense during the attack, the first to recognize Roslin’s authority in the miniseries and is key to incorporating the military into Roslin’s Colonial government. The lady’s in charge. This leads to the collegial relationship they’ll have in the first season, supported when Lee becomes the liaison between the military and the civilian government. Lee, not Bill, is the first person besides Billy to find out about her cancer. She tells him directly and asks for his discretion, which he gives unreservedly. This will turn around most dramatically in Crossroads, when we discover Laura’s cancer has returned during Lee’s cross-examination of her at Baltar’s trial. Lee, not Bill, will be by her side as she gives the order to make the jump to Earth, and she will choose him as her successor.
On a personal level, the analogy to a familial relationship is perhaps the strongest between these two characters. Due to Roslin’s relationship with Bill Adama, she’s in some ways an effective stepmother to Lee, and this seems to be recognized by all three characters. Laura knows Lee particularly well, and trusts him in a way she doesn’t even seem to entirely trust Bill. Bill and Laura talk about Lee with familiarity, with Bill even allowing Laura to criticize Lee to him. Lee looks up to Laura even when he is disillusioned with her, speaks to her more familiarly and directly than any other member of the Quorum, and seems to truly want to earn her esteem and approval.
In KLG, Lee breaks ranks for the first time, and, in characteristic Adama drama fashion, holds a gun to Tigh’s head to try to stop the kidnapping of the president. He’s brought to the brig after Roslin, and tells her his father has been shot. Laura apologizes, and Lee says he didn’t do it for her (she doesn’t owe him an apology) and says it was for nothing, but Roslin knows that isn’t true. Laura: You took a stand. Lee: And now look at us. He shrugs it off because he’s in shock, but the exchange changes Lee. It gives him external validation of his conviction that a stand is worth taking no matter what. He’ll eventually go on to do so at Laura’s expense more than once, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s helped him set his feet on his path more than anyone else ever has, and Laura never seems to regret it. Even in jail, fighting for her office, her civilization, and her own very life, Roslin is first and foremost a teacher, even to this traumatized, bitter young man.
From there, things get rocky. Lee takes the planned assassination of Cain particularly hard, Laura having until this point been the embodiment of his idealization of civilian authority and his Mommy Issues all wrapped into one stylish package, and at the time he’s too young and too messed-up to see things through to their logical end the way Roslin can. Roslin is Lee’s last illusion of a just and peaceful world. He will have to learn to accept and admire her as she is, not as the idealized tenant office of the presidency, before he can truly commit to the work of building a just and peaceful world out of their wreckage of a society.
They won’t share many scenes until the end of S3, Crossroads. Lee chooses Roslin’s testimony as the time to step forward as more than second chair during the Baltar trial. It’s not just that he has knowledge of her kamala tea, but that the two characters have a long enough history that he can recognize the side effects of Roslin’s cancer treatment going on very thin clues indeed. He also, in some ways, sees her as a safe person on whom to test his readiness for the difficulties of being a trial attorney, both as someone who has earned the difficulties he’s about to put her through and (though Lee is so alone, he reaches out to Roslin, even in this cruel, painful way) as she’s the person in his life who’s come closest to accepting him as he is, and so is the one person who might forgive him for doing this thing he knows is impulsive and cruel and wrong. Though it infuriates me that Lee then refuses to truthfully answer painful questions on the stand the way he forced her to, in a way, it's a giant compliment to Roslin - Lee has higher standards for her than he does for himself. She will forgive him, and they’ll grow into a strong and fascinating political team, but this moment is a hard one. At this culmination of such a huge and eventful season, Laura’s and Lee’s big moments are inextricably bound together.
Roslin is crucial to Lee’s eventual development. She’s the one who encourages his interest in politics; starts him in law; adopts him as her advisor for the second time and straightforwardly but kindly grooms him as a successor in the final episodes of the show. In reciprocation, Lee grows into a political and intellectual counterpart to Roslin, checking her instincts towards control and secrecy, and providing her the support, protection, and insight she needs to retain leadership over a fragmented fleet during the dark, chaotic days of the last half-season.
Kara
Laura and Starbuck share sadly few conversations, which, while disappointing, is hardly surprising given their different occupations; however, their often-wordless relationship is layered and worth exploration. Perhaps underscoring their importance to each other though in most ways they don’t speak the same language, their interactions are deeply emotional and frequently casually physical. They hug, impulsively and then emotionally, in celebration at the end of Hand of God. During Roslin’s vision of her own bedside as she’s held hostage on the base star, her mind includes Kara along with Bill and Lee as the maybe-beloved family at her bedside. When Laura leaves her hospital bed to be present at the Galactica’s last stand, she leans neither on her paramour Bill nor her protégé Lee, but in Kara’s arms.
Like Lee, Starbuck takes her first open stand against Bill in KLG for Laura’s worldview; Starbuck for her faith and Lee for her dedication to democracy. Roslin shakes Starbuck’s trust in Adama within the space of a single short scene (as Lee has not been able to do despite their months-long partnership), enough to convince her to get in the Commander’s face about his lie of Earth. It’s Kara who convinces Laura not to airlock Sharon when she returns with the Arrow. Roslin is neither dismissive nor falsely solicitous of Starbuck’s insistence on returning to Caprica for the survivors - her “not right now” isn’t a brush-off, it’s just that a perilous trek through the woods is a really bad time for a dying woman (or anyone, really) to be multitasking. They share even fewer scenes together for a couple of seasons there, but as Roslin’s search for Earth picks up in S4, she’s comfortable calling Kara to her hospital bed for an honest talk.
In this heavily religious show, the six leads splinter into three religious philosophies. Bill and Lee espouse and represent a secular philosophy, Gaius and Six are angels of their single deity, and Kara and Laura are the destined emissaries of the lords of Kobol. They begin their journeys as hopeful skeptics - Laura, as she tells us in Faith, wants to believe in the gods but considers them metaphors for human experience; Kara believes in the lords but until her resurrection insists that she writes her own destiny. Kara and Laura, in the end, have faith in themselves and their interpretations of their experiences, and time and again this leads them to solid faith in each other. Because they are the representatives of the faiths of the dead worlds, they themselves pass across the river Styx in the finale, giving the new world the blessing of the old. The two women become the crucial transitional players in their stage of the cycle of time in which they both so deeply believe.
When it snows, she has no fear for her household: The Enemies of Laura Roslin
Baltar
Though she’d hate to know this consciously, Gaius Baltar is a huge piece of Laura Roslin’s story from almost the very beginning. She initially places some amount of trust in Baltar because she very much has to in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but she finds some suspicion of him awakened when Shelley Godfrey accuses him of his part in the genocide with fabricated evidence. We know Roslin is right, but neither Roslin nor the audience knows why she thinks this until she has a conscious memory of having seen Baltar with Six.
Still, Roslin realizes she needs Baltar politically, and they come to a tense détente. For a time, Baltar’s glibness in service of his overwhelming desire to be liked helps Roslin to cover over the hard, frank honesty of her public face. She isn’t happy when it looks that she’ll leave the fleet to him when she dies, but she believes that he can keep himself in check and be handled by Billy into continuing the most important of her policies. Baltar saves Roslin’s life. For Baltar, this action is all about Six’s command that he save Hera; Roslin similarly considers Hera to have saved her life, not Baltar. Baltar turns against Roslin and teams up with Zarek to defeat Roslin in the election.
Baltar seems to crave Roslin’s approval (even more than he wants to be admired by people at large), and almost never gets it. Head Six convinces him to hand over a nuclear bomb to Gina in part because he’s hurt by Roslin’s uncomplimentary assessment of him in what she intended to be her final letter. When the Cylons imprison her during the occupation, Baltar swings by for a chat about the morality of suicide bombings and then uses his small shred of pull to have her released in comfort. He confesses all as he’s lying at her mercy on the base star. It isn’t so much about wanting Laura to like him; he’s as harsh and tactless in his assessment of her as she is towards him, and it leads to some truly fantastic conflict between the two of them.
Baltar, not any of the Cylons, is the character that forces Roslin to confront the deepest of her inner darkness; he’s also the character that somehow gets her to pull back from it time and again. She initially steals the election from Baltar, though she finds it an affront to everything she believes in, but even as her terror of Baltar’s New Caprica grows, she cannot bring herself to go through with it. As rigidly as she draws the lines of personhood between human and Cylon, she considers Baltar to be the gray area between them, the distinction between Baltar and the Cylons in name to her only. She readily allows Baltar to be tortured, first with conventional methods such as sleep deprivation and isolation and then with Adama’s experimental drugs, but she acknowledges that her motives are mixed between the information and rage. She gives him his trial, no matter what it costs her, however little she feels he deserves it. She craves the closure of his death, but she cannot let herself allow it to happen. Baltar pushes in on every one of Roslin’s moral boundaries. He’s a slippery, selfish, deliberately thoughtless traitor, who accidentally becomes the voice of Roslin’s conscience.
Cain
Though Cain is important to Roslin’s story, they only share a few scenes within Cain’s three episodes. Cain is effectively the most frightening aspects of both Roslin and Adama, unchecked by either their better natures or each other. She has Bill’s tendency to prioritize offensive military tactics above all other goals including the survival of humanity, and Roslin’s cool, calculated determination to pursue her goals to their logical ends.
Cain doesn’t respect civilian authority, she doesn’t respect civilian life beyond its value to attack tactics, and the tense hostility between Cain and Roslin shouldn’t be glossed over or romanticized. (Unless that’s your thing, which is completely understandable.) However, it’s worth pointing out that Cain does seem to have some grudging respect for Roslin. Cain, not Adama, proposes a “neutral ground” meeting aboard Colonial One, and Cain does listen to and accept Roslin’s reasoning concerning temporary peace. I have no doubt that Cain would have shot Roslin in a heartbeat if she’d taken over the Galactica and eliminated Adama, but she doesn’t dismiss Roslin out of hand, though she’s not impressed enough to blow Roslin’s head off the minute she gets onto Colonial One (which Cain would have done if she’d damned well pleased).
Cain’s mistake, like everyone else’s, is underestimating Roslin, tipping her hand during the meeting on Colonial One with her insistence on exercising her authority under martial law and openly threatening Adama. (Cain doesn’t issue “warrants” for arrests; it’s pretty clear that the warrant she considered serving Adama was of a far more final sort.) Given this look into Cain’s guiding philosophy, and seeing her own thoroughness and ruthlessness in Cain, Roslin decides that Cain has to die. Though her order doesn’t end up resulting in Cain’s death, Roslin’s decision and explanation for it show her willingness to take preemptive and fatal action in a way that we simply haven’t seen her do before.
Zarek
Tom Zarek, from the first season through to the last half-season, is perhaps the biggest (or maybe even only) human political threat to Roslin. Zarek’s menace to the fleet is both shown directly and paralleled in his threat to Roslin’s consolidation of power in Colonial Day. Though he loses, he establishes himself as a respectable political player rather than a terrorist and forces Roslin to accept Baltar as her vice-president. At the end of S2.5, Baltar is chafing a bit under Roslin’s (all told-accurate, balanced, and if anything uncharacteristically optimistic) assessment of him in her letter to him. But he’s stuck where she can (politically) keep an eye on him, and would never have even thought to challenge her on his own, nor had the political tools to run an election campaign, and would certainly not have had anyone to convince him to contest the election.
Zarek ends up spending a year as Baltar’s vice-president, a rich irony considering that Roslin gave Baltar his start in politics to keep Zarek from that very position. For the entire year of safety on New Caprica, Zarek doesn’t make a play for Baltar’s life the way he might have on Roslin’s during those first few seasons. Because this is Zarek, his failure to carry out an assassination is more enigmatic than any decision he’d eventually have made to do so. It could have been that he simply didn’t want responsibility for the difficult work of getting New Caprica off the ground, especially since it would have tipped his hand about the revolution not being about anything more than Zarek’s personal collection of penis replacements, or it could have been that he knew he couldn’t win out against Roslin in an open contest between the two of them.
Through the catastrophe of New Caprica and later the occupation, Zarek reaps what he sows, unfortunately bringing everyone else down with him. He’s almost as important a symbol to the resistance as Roslin. The enemy of Roslin’s enemy is her friend, though, only now the enemy is Baltar and the Cylons, and so they chat companionably during what they are both sure is the last hour of their lives. While it’s not too surprising that they’d end up on the same side at that moment, the ease of their conversation at a time when they’ve never had a productive conversation and have not had any interactions for months if not over a year. It’s the talk of two people with a mutual, if often grudging, understanding. During the excitement of the firing squad and escape, they protect each other from the enemy with their very bodies, and then split off to lead their respective groups to their ships. They share a moment of mutual affection and good cheer like nothing so much as the pilots after an air battle. Roslin and Zarek are politicians and this is a victory for the revolution and the people, but it’s the camaraderie of equals in the trenches nonetheless.
When they’re back in the air, they are the unquestioned leaders of the political class, and they with Adama make a peaceable agreement that Zarek will step aside and Roslin will resume her office, with Roslin keeping Zarek on as vice-president, where they can keep an eye on each other. Zarek’s approval of the post-exodus secret execution tribunal spurs Roslin to one of her indubitably most wonderful moments, the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Though Zarek respects Roslin, and understands and supports her goals, she wants to save us all; he’s on constant lookout for ways to destabilize her. First he recruits Lee in the hopes that Lee’s innate orneriness will lead him to become something of an opposition party where Zarek can build support. When that doesn’t pan out, and Zarek eventually steps out of line, he’s hauled into Galactica’s brig (just to remind him of what will happen if he ever makes too open a move on Roslin’s dominance), and Gaeta offers Zarek an opening. With Gaeta the commander of Galactica, Zarek could conceivably take control of the government. Indeed, if Zarek hadn’t gone too far with the execution of the Quorum, it could have been a partnership somewhat similar to the Adama-Roslin executive authority. A less tenable one, to be sure, if Gaeta stirred too far from loyalty to Zarek he’d be killed; if Zarek stepped over the line Gaeta could have him killed; but they have the same built-in division of labor as Roslin and Adama.
Zarek loses, for any number of reasons. He tends towards chaos where Roslin tends towards order; he channels antipathy towards Roslin and Adama whereas they command respect and have earned loyalty; he’s reckless where she’s cautious; he’s romantic and overdramatic while she’s practical. Only once Zarek and his dangerous ideas are out of the picture does Roslin feel truly comfortable passing power over to Lee. Roslin had every reason to despise and fear Zarek, but throughout the series he’s a catalyst for her political growth.
Honor her for all that her hands have done; let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
Laura Roslin is: a president. A teacher. A formidable protector. Beloved. A hedonist. A statist. A visionary. A savior. She is the reluctant warrior; the self-sacrificing politician. She is the general who carries no weapon but her mind. She is the childless woman who is mother to all of humanity. She is the martyr who fights for her life. She is the frail and dying hero. She is a woman of noble character, and her worth is far above jewels.