Retribution and Restraint: A President's Fury, A Chief's Counsel
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Bartlet delivers a passionate monologue about the lack of retribution for American citizens, questioning their current actions.
Leo counters Bartlet's anger by asserting that their actions are those of a responsible superpower.
Bartlet expresses doubt about the effectiveness of their past actions, citing historical failures.
Leo challenges Bartlet's belief in deterrence through increased body count, using drug kingpins as an analogy.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Seething righteous fury laced with profound personal bereavement, yielding to cathartic amusement and weary camaraderie
Stands resolute, unleashing a thunderous oration on Roman citizenship and demanding world-shaking vengeance for the plane victims, cites past U.S. failures to fuel his case, reveals intimate grief over Morris Tolliver's newborn, sits exhausted, threatens Leo playfully with a bat, laughs heartily at Coles' threat and praises the aide who found his glasses.
- • Force Leo to endorse disproportionate military retaliation
- • Channel grief into a clarion call for absolute citizen protection
- • Overwhelming force alone deters attacks on Americans
- • Past restraint has invited vulnerability and loss
Steadfast composure veiling empathetic resolve, lightening to affectionate mirth
Methodically closes office doors for privacy while bantering, delivers steady counterarguments on proportionality using historical cautions like Beirut and Charlemagne, acknowledges Morris's tragedy, pivots to four military targets as responsible action, laughs off bat threat and Coles' radio rant, offers Charlie Young as new body man.
- • Rein in Bartlet's vengeful impulses toward measured response
- • Reaffirm institutional restraint as superpower virtue
- • Proportionality prevents endless cycles of violence
- • Superpowers earn respect through responsibility, not raw might
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The baseball bat exists purely as a rhetorical image when Bartlet threatens, half‑jokingly, to 'pommel' Leo—it's a moment of intimate, masculine joking that relieves tension and signals trust despite the earlier furious rhetoric.
The West Wing hallway double doors are explicitly closed by Leo at the start of the exchange, converting the space into a private, controlled chamber where blunt counsel can be given and the President's outburst contained.
The President's metal‑rim reading glasses are the small, human prop that punctuates the exchange: their earlier disappearance is resolved offscreen by an unnamed kid, prompting Bartlet's light, grounding question and a staffing joke from Leo—shifting the scene from rage to tenderness.
The Coles District Radio Broadcast is invoked by Leo as an evidentiary artifact: he reports Coles' on‑air threat to the President's safety, turning rumor into a concrete political problem that requires staff action and shapes the discussion about escalation and optics.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
Leo's office functions as an intimate command chamber where private grief meets public duty: Leo secures the room, converts Bartlet's fury into a policy exchange, and uses the space to issue both tactical options and personal counsel. The office's closable doors and close furniture create compression perfect for moral and strategic pressure.
Beirut is invoked as a historical wound (286 marines) to weigh the moral ledger of retaliation—its mention converts abstract strategy into memory-laden cost and cautions against simple tit-for-tat logic.
Somalia is named as another cautionary example of messy, inconclusive intervention—used to argue that more force does not necessarily produce strategic success and can create blowback.
Nairobi appears in Bartlet's litany of past failures—its invocation compresses prior civilian loss into an argument that revenge is not a neat, lasting deterrent.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
No narrative connections mapped yet
This event is currently isolated in the narrative graph
Key Dialogue
"BARTLET: "Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation?... Where is the retribution for the families and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house!? In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?""
"LEO: "We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.""
"BARTLET: "Which they'll rebuild again in six months." LEO: "So we'll blow 'em up again in six months! We're getting really good at it. It's what our fathers taught us.""