The Good Citizen's Reward

While the President serves beer to Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley in the White House today, Lucia Whalen will be at work in Cambridge, pondering the lessons of her phone call to the police last week.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's gaffe in saying the police acted "stupidly," the White House is smoothing over the ensuing national rancor with a photo-op reconciliation for the principals in the confrontation without acknowledging the abuse that has been heaped on Ms. Whalen as a racist.

"If you're a concerned citizen," she told reporters yesterday, "you should do the right thing if you're seeing something that seems suspicious. I would do the same thing."

The tape of her call reveals she told the dispatcher she had “no idea” if two men were breaking into the house, repeatedly suggesting they might live there. She did not mention the men’s race until a dispatcher asked if they were black, white or Hispanic.

“There were two larger men,” she says in the tape. “One looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure,” adding that she did not see what the second man “looked like at all.”

Ms. Whalen also told the dispatcher she was calling 911 on her cell phone at the request of an elderly neighbor who saw the men trying to get into the house.

After becoming a "a target of scorn and of ridicule because of the things I never said, " Ms. Whalen has the satisfaction of having done the right thing while the three principals in Gatesgate now bond and congratulate themselves for overcoming their own questionable actions in the affair.

She probably is not much of a beer drinker anyway.