With the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming on Monday, the mind turns easily to the subject of heroes. Now, this isn’t about heaping undiluted praise on people, it’s about recognizing real heroes, warts and all.

It’s hard to think of any American who stands taller than Dr. King. Warts and all. And of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, who sacrificed a career to do the right thing. Warts and all.

Strange pairing, I admit. But both hewed true to a mission greater than themselves, a mission to save America. From itself, perhaps. Or at least to improve it.

About that word “hero.” Though the word that came down to us from Latin and Greek meant a person endowed with “great strength or ability” (Merriam-Webster), hero has come to mean courage, too. Someone who has the courage to risk her own safety or welfare to serve others.

Back to Dr. King. On the day (May 17, 1954) that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation by race was unconstitutional, a civil rights movement was already abuilding. But it needed a leader with vision who would be accountable and would hold everyone else to account.

Along came a young preacher in Montgomery, Alabama, to lead a boycott of segregated city buses. From 1954 to 1968, King led the civil rights movement, through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And, like a good general, he didn’t sit on his horse behind the lines directing people. He led from in front.

And he led into places that weren’t always popular. He was shunned and almost run out of Chicago. He tried to unite poor whites and poor blacks to work together in the “Poor People’s Campaign” to end the economic poverty that ground down both groups. But it didn’t take hold.

The late conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote that fundamentalists “shamefully sat on their hands during the civil-rights movement.” That includes millions of poor whites.

And King parted from Stan Levison, a close adviser accused by the FBI of having been active early on in the Communist Party. Levison said later that he had never been a communist, but he had left King’s side to avoid embarrassing the movement.

Critics, not all of them Southern racists, accused King of philandering, and the FBI wiretapped his dalliances in various hotels. The most vehement of his critics loved to call him an “outside agitator,” a label he wore with pride. But he was Southern through and through. He earned a bachelor of arts in sociology from Morehouse College in Atlanta, a bachelor of divinity from Crozier Seminary in Pennsylvania and a doctor of divinity from Boston University.

I would note that while he went north to study, he went right back south, sheepskins in hand.

He was murdered on April 4, 1968, while working to win a contract for striking trash collectors in Memphis. He gave all for others. There is no denying that King was a hero. Warts and all.

For one who considers Dick Cheney the evil prince behind President George W. Bush, it is difficult to see Cheney’s first-born daughter, Elizabeth, as a hero. But she is.

By supporting former President Trump on 93% of her votes in the House of Representatives, Cheney was widely considered an “ultra-conservative,” a label she might not deny. Many other establishment Republicans veered from Trump more than 7% of the time.

But even though she voted twice for Trump, Cheney paid attention to reality. After the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, she turned on Trump and voted for his second impeachment, even knowing the Senate wouldn’t convict and even knowing the congressional Republican leadership was pretending the insurrection was just a tourists’ visit to the Capitol.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, went so far as to say, “Those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” Hundreds of them have been convicted of doing something to break the law.

Cheney said, “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president.” She went on, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

She got that right.

But Cheney isn’t all hero and courage. Her younger sister, Mary, came out in high school as a lesbian. As vice president, her father had been in an administration opposing same-sex marriage, but he and Lynne Cheney, the girls’ mother, supported Mary and attended her wedding in 2012.

Liz Cheney did not and said publicly, “I am pro-life and I do not support gay marriage.” (She recanted nine years later.) But when the time came to stand up to evil, to try to save our democracy, Liz Cheney sacrificed her career, knowingly, for the betterment of us all.

She, too is a hero. Warts and all.

Bob Neal admires Dr. King’s and former Rep. Cheney’s sacrifices to improve America. He fears this may be the year we elect our last president, despite the good work of King and Cheney. Neal can be reached at [email protected].