Saturday, February 24, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
The Post - and Justice Hugo Black
Regular readers know me as a severe critic of many "historical" films, such as Bridge of Spies, Selma, and The Birth of a Nation (by Nate Parker.) I was worried about The Post, the story of Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), and their decision to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers after an injunction stopped the New York Times from doing so, but I was very pleasantly surprised. I knew Hanks wouldn't have the proper GI generation gravitas to play Bradlee, but he did much better than I expected. Streep had a difficult assignment too because Kay Graham simply did not project the strength of her personality (just search youtube if you want proof), but Streep didn't try to make her something that she was not. Some complained that the design of the movie slighted the more critical role of the New York Times (and of Daniel Ellsberg himself), but I didn't. What I really liked, however, was the ensemble cast, the production design, and the very sincere and successful attempt to recreate the atmosphere of 1971. The portrayal of the middle aged men of that generation was accurate, and we saw how they got the job done. Steven Spielberg has usually put a lot of thought and effort into historical films such as Schindler's List and Lncoln, and he did this time, too.
Having said all that, however, today I want to share with my readers what was, for me, the highlight of those tumultuous two weeks: the Supreme Court's decision to let publication go forward, and in particular, the opinion of Justice Hugo Black. Elected to the Senate from Alabama in 1926, replacing another distinguished, progressive southerner, Oscar W. Underwood. Although he was elected with the support of the KKK, Black rapidly emerged as a liberal on everything except race--a southern species that was quite common from the 1930s through the 1950s, until it was driven out of politics in the wake of the civil rights movement. In 1937, in the midst of the court packing crisis, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court, and he was confirmed. Subsequent to his confirmation, the story of his membership in the KKK leaked, causing a sensation. Walter White, the Executive Secretary of the NAACP, declined to join the hue and cry over the news, telling all who would listen that Black was a real liberal who belonged on the court. His judgment was vindicated over the next 34 years.
Black was a liberal on a variety of legal issues, and he joined the unanimous majority in Brown V. Board of Education in 1954 and remained a strong supporter of civil rights thereafter. But his most moving opinions related to civil liberties, and especially to the First Amendment. During the Second World War, when the Congress added an amendment to an appropriations bill forbidding the payment of salaries to three left-wing New Dealers, Black wrote an opinion invalidating the decision. The Founders, he said, knew the dangers of legislative punishments from their study of English history, and had therefore outlawed Bills of Attainder--of which this was one. In the midst of the bitterest period of the Cold War and McCarthyism, Black also argued unsuccessfully that the Smith Act, which was used to convict the leaders of the Communist Party of the US of "conspiracy to advocate" overthrow of the government, was unconstitutional on its face. Later in the decade the court came much closer to his view. In the late 1960s Black did an hour long interview with Eric Sevareid of CBS, one which I regret to find is not available on youtube. Sevareid started the interview by asking Black if recent Supreme Court decisions had made it more difficult to convict criminals. "Of course they've made it harder to convict criminals!" he replied. "But look in the Constitution!" he added, pulling his pocket copy out. "A defendant must be provided counsel! You need a warrant for a search!" And so on. Black, in short, believed that the words of the Constitution, and particularly of the Bill of Rights, meant exactly what they said.
Black was 85 years old and his abilities were failing when the Pentagon Papers case reached the Supreme Court in the summer of 1971. He wrote a separate, concurring opinion providing for publication. It was by far the most moving of the opinions, as readers will see in a moment, and it remains one of my three or four favorite opinions from the whole history of the court. It was also his last opinion. Recognizing that his health was failing, he retired--one of two departures whose seats were filled by Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist. A few months later, he died.
Many years ago, a friend of mine named Tom Kerr, the head of the ACLU chapter in Pittsburgh and a fellow Carnegie Mellon faculty member, told me the story of Black's funeral, which he attended. Black knew, of course, that President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell, who had tried to stop the publication, would attend the ceremony. He left instructions that his last opinion be read in full to conclude the service. It was a fitting summary of his most important views and really of his life on the court, and he movingly concluded it with a bow to Charles Evans Hughes, the first Chief Justice under whom he had served. It put the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a turning point in our history, in the whole context of our history, and it did so in absolutely unforgettable language. This is a big week for History Unfolding. Sometime in the next few days--probably Sunday or Monday--this web page will receive its one millionth visit since I started writing this posts in the fall of 2004. This is a fitting text to mark that occasion. Here it is.
Having said all that, however, today I want to share with my readers what was, for me, the highlight of those tumultuous two weeks: the Supreme Court's decision to let publication go forward, and in particular, the opinion of Justice Hugo Black. Elected to the Senate from Alabama in 1926, replacing another distinguished, progressive southerner, Oscar W. Underwood. Although he was elected with the support of the KKK, Black rapidly emerged as a liberal on everything except race--a southern species that was quite common from the 1930s through the 1950s, until it was driven out of politics in the wake of the civil rights movement. In 1937, in the midst of the court packing crisis, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court, and he was confirmed. Subsequent to his confirmation, the story of his membership in the KKK leaked, causing a sensation. Walter White, the Executive Secretary of the NAACP, declined to join the hue and cry over the news, telling all who would listen that Black was a real liberal who belonged on the court. His judgment was vindicated over the next 34 years.
Black was a liberal on a variety of legal issues, and he joined the unanimous majority in Brown V. Board of Education in 1954 and remained a strong supporter of civil rights thereafter. But his most moving opinions related to civil liberties, and especially to the First Amendment. During the Second World War, when the Congress added an amendment to an appropriations bill forbidding the payment of salaries to three left-wing New Dealers, Black wrote an opinion invalidating the decision. The Founders, he said, knew the dangers of legislative punishments from their study of English history, and had therefore outlawed Bills of Attainder--of which this was one. In the midst of the bitterest period of the Cold War and McCarthyism, Black also argued unsuccessfully that the Smith Act, which was used to convict the leaders of the Communist Party of the US of "conspiracy to advocate" overthrow of the government, was unconstitutional on its face. Later in the decade the court came much closer to his view. In the late 1960s Black did an hour long interview with Eric Sevareid of CBS, one which I regret to find is not available on youtube. Sevareid started the interview by asking Black if recent Supreme Court decisions had made it more difficult to convict criminals. "Of course they've made it harder to convict criminals!" he replied. "But look in the Constitution!" he added, pulling his pocket copy out. "A defendant must be provided counsel! You need a warrant for a search!" And so on. Black, in short, believed that the words of the Constitution, and particularly of the Bill of Rights, meant exactly what they said.
Black was 85 years old and his abilities were failing when the Pentagon Papers case reached the Supreme Court in the summer of 1971. He wrote a separate, concurring opinion providing for publication. It was by far the most moving of the opinions, as readers will see in a moment, and it remains one of my three or four favorite opinions from the whole history of the court. It was also his last opinion. Recognizing that his health was failing, he retired--one of two departures whose seats were filled by Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist. A few months later, he died.
Many years ago, a friend of mine named Tom Kerr, the head of the ACLU chapter in Pittsburgh and a fellow Carnegie Mellon faculty member, told me the story of Black's funeral, which he attended. Black knew, of course, that President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell, who had tried to stop the publication, would attend the ceremony. He left instructions that his last opinion be read in full to conclude the service. It was a fitting summary of his most important views and really of his life on the court, and he movingly concluded it with a bow to Charles Evans Hughes, the first Chief Justice under whom he had served. It put the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a turning point in our history, in the whole context of our history, and it did so in absolutely unforgettable language. This is a big week for History Unfolding. Sometime in the next few days--probably Sunday or Monday--this web page will receive its one millionth visit since I started writing this posts in the fall of 2004. This is a fitting text to mark that occasion. Here it is.
I adhere to the view that the Government's case against the Washington Post should have been dismissed, and that the injunction against the New York Times should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented to this Court. I believe
that every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, after oral argument, I agree completely that we must affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the reasons stated by my Brothers DOUGLAS and BRENNAN. In my view, it is unfortunate that some of my Brethren are apparently willing to hold that the publication of news may sometimes be enjoined. Such a holding would make a shambles of the First Amendment.
Our Government was launched in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, followed in 1791. Now, for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country.
In seeking injunctions against these newspapers, and in its presentation to the Court, the Executive Branch seems to have forgotten the essential purpose and history of the First Amendment. When the Constitution was adopted, many people strongly opposed it because the document contained no Bill of Rights to safeguard certain basic freedoms. [Footnote 1] They especially feared that the new powers granted to a central government might be interpreted to permit the government to curtail freedom of religion, press, assembly, and speech. In response to an overwhelming public clamor, James Madison offered a series of amendments to satisfy citizens that these great liberties would remain safe and beyond the power of government to abridge. Madison proposed what later became the First Amendment in three parts, two of which are set out below, and one of which proclaimed:
"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments, and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. [Footnote 2]"
(Emphasis added.) The amendments were offered to curtail and restrict the general powers granted to the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches two years before in the original Constitution. The Bill of Rights changed the original Constitution into a new charter under which no branch of government could abridge the people's freedoms of press, speech, religion, and assembly. Yet the Solicitor General argues and some members of the Court appear to agree that the general powers of the Government adopted in the original Constitution should be interpreted to limit and restrict the specific and emphatic guarantees of the Bill of Rights adopted later. I can imagine no greater perversion of history. Madison and the other Framers of the First Amendment, able men that they were, wrote in language they earnestly believed could never be misunderstood: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press. . . ." Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints.
In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.[Emphasis added, DK.]
The Government's case here is based on premises entirely different from those that guided the Framers of the First Amendment. The Solicitor General has carefully and emphatically stated:
"Now, Mr. Justice [BLACK], your construction of . . . [the First Amendment] is well known, and I certainly respect it. You say that no law means no law, and that should be obvious. I can only say, Mr. Justice, that to me it is equally obvious that 'no law' does not mean 'no law,' and I would seek to persuade the Court that that is true. . . . [T]here are other parts of the Constitution that grant powers and responsibilities to the Executive, and . . . the First Amendment was not intended to make it impossible for the Executive to function or to protect the security of the United States. [Footnote 3]"
And the Government argues in its brief that, in spite of the First Amendment,
"[t]he authority of the Executive Department to protect the nation against publication of information whose disclosure would endanger the national security stems from two interrelated sources: the constitutional power of the President over the conduct of foreign affairs and his authority as Commander-in-Chief. [Footnote 4]"
In other words, we are asked to hold that, despite the First Amendment's emphatic command, the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws enjoining publication of current news and abridging freedom of the press in the name of "national security." The Government does not even attempt to rely on any act of Congress. Instead, it makes the bold and dangerously far-reaching contention that the courts should take it upon themselves to "make" a law abridging freedom of the press in the name of equity, presidential power and national security, even when the representatives of the people in Congress have adhered to the command of the First Amendment and refused to make such a law. [Footnote 5] See concurring opinion of MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS,
To find that the President has "inherent power" to halt the publication of news by resort to the courts would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make "secure." No one can read the history of the adoption of the First Amendment without being convinced beyond any doubt that it was injunctions like those sought here that Madison and his collaborators intended to outlaw in this Nation for all time. [emphasis added.]
The word "security" is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged. This thought was eloquently expressed in 1937 by Mr. Chief Justice Hughes -- great man and great Chief Justice that he was -- when the Court held a man could not be punished for attending a meeting run by Communists.
"The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free
assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government. [Footnote 6]"
I will never forget the excitement with which I read those words in a St. Louis newspaper, in the midst of my four months' active military service at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Years later, my friend Tom Kerr heard them read from the pulpit of the National Cathedral, and watched Nixon, Mitchell, and other leading members of the Administration walk out down the middle aisle. They were, he said, purple with rage. Justice Black's words live on.
Friday, February 16, 2018
The Shape of Water, a film of our times
Last week, in an attempt to check off the remaining films on the list of Oscar nominees, I went to see The Shape of Water, by Guillermo Del Toro. I'm not terribly impressed by this year's list and my two favorites for the year--The Big Sick, a great film about immigrants, and The Florida Project, a harrowing piece of social realism--were not nominated. I am not going to discuss The Shape of Water primarily as a film, although I will have to give away the plot. It held my interest as a thriller and included several fine performances. I don't know much about Del Toro's background--he wrote, as well as directed--but it struck me that the film reflected almost perfectly the new left wing world view, based upon identities, that now dominates our campuses, much of the liberal media, and a good deal of the Democratic Party. Almost without exception, each character's moral worth is determined by their demographic characteristics.
The film is set in the fall of 1962 (the Cuban missile crisis briefly enters in) inside a secret U.S. government research facility that seems to be working on questions relating to the effort to put men in space. The protagonist of the film, Elisa Esposito (played by the wonderful actress Sally Hawkins), is part of the custodial staff, and a mute. Her inability to speak makes her sufficiently marginalized to be the film's hero. Her best and indeed her only friend at work is Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who happens to be black. Zelda, as she lets Elisa and the audience know several times, is married to a stereotypical mid-century man who never helps with housework or talks to her very much. Of him, more later. Eventually it turns out that it is only her dual, "intersectional" status as a minority--both a woman and black--that makes her so sympathetic to Elisa.
Elisa's only other friend in the movie lives next door to her upstairs from a movie palace--Giles, played by the excellent Richard Jenkins. Giles is an artist who is still working on drawings of white bread American families for ads, but his work is no longer being accepted, for reasons that are not initially clear. The most likely reason emerges as the film goes on: Giles is gay. When he makes a very tentative advance towards the manager of a nearby dessert cafe, he is immediately thrown out and asked not to return. The same cafe turns some black patrons away without serving them.
The drama in the film comes from the arrival at the institute of "Amphibian man," as he is known in the credits, whom the US military has managed to capture somewhere in the Amazon basin. He is under the care of security man Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). The government--and more specifically the military--are interested in Amphibian man because they think he might have natural abilities from which astronauts might benefit, but they quickly decide that he has to be killed, instead. Strickland is literally a comic-book villain with no human feeling and a particular contempt for Elisa--whom, at one point, he also harasses sexually. Meanwhile, Elisa has gotten close enough to his tank to see the humanity in him--which none of the white males in charge, of course, can do--and to fall in love with him. Amphibian man is also being stalked by two Soviet spies, one of whom has infiltrated the research group. They also decide that he is a threat who must be killed, but the covert spy--the only white male in the film with a heart--has a change of heart and eventually collaborates with Elisa in a plot to help Amphibian man escape, stash him in her apartment, and wait for the water in a local canal to rise to the level that will allow him to escape into the ocean and swim home. Elisa's other confederate in the escape is, of course, the gay Giles.
The film takes things to the next level after the escape, when Elisa, already in love with Amphibian man, has sex with him. This struck me as a paean to sex "outside the binary," as the saying now goes. Strickland the bad guy gets on to their trail thanks to Zelda's husband, who turns out to be a craven coward, suggesting that not even black straight men can be trusted. Eventually the couple outwits, outlasts and outplays the bad guys, and do indeed swim off to live happily ever after in the Amazon basin, leaving the wicked, white-male dominated US of the early 1960s to stew in its own wretched juice. One can believe, as I do, that all deserve equal rights, without believing that the United States for most of its history has been ruled by an evil white patriarchy, concerned above all with its own hegemony.
The reason that I did feel The Shape of Water was worth this post is that the world view that it embodies--that of an evil white patriarchy oppressing virtuous women, minorities, differently abled peopled, gays, and perhaps transgenders as well--not only dominates campus humanities departments and diversity bureaucracies today, but is constantly popping up in the op-ed pages of major newspapers as well. "This is an administration," wrote Lindy West in yesterday's New York Times, "that campaigned, explicitly, on a promised return to some mid century mirage of American 'greatness,' when white men ruled unfettered and the rest of us resumed our places on the spectrum between poverty and servitude." That is exactly the vision of the 1950s and early 1960s on display in The Shape of Water, and it is the image that young people are getting from their college experience, too. One would never know that that was an era in which young families could afford to buy homes, in which the prison population was a fraction of what it is today, in which the working and middle classes were gaining, and in which 91% marginal tax rates made it impossible for billionaires to emerge who would dominate our politics. None of that, however, seems to be very important to many of today's liberals.
In the course I taught for many years, Generations in Film, I nearly always used the 1958 classic, Twelve Angry Men about a jury charged with judging the guilt or innocence of a young Hispanic charged with murdering his father. Every member of the jury is a white male--but for nearly two hours, they argue violently about what should be done about the case. The clear message of the movie is not that there is anything particularly virtuous about being a white male--virtue lies in ones beliefs and actions, one's openness to evidence and one's capacity for tolerance. Today much of the left believes in a world where virtue or the lack of it is defined by skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
Another glimpse of this new ideology came from the last season of the tv series Transparent, when the younger sister Ali--now studying gender--speculates that among all those silenced or marginalized by "the patriarchy"--women, gays, minorities, those outside the binary--must be the new Messiah. Indeed, the new ideology resembles certain strains of Christian thought--strains which argued that "the last shall be first," and that the poor are the guardians of virtue among us. But that is a subject for another time. I do not believe a functioning free society can be built on moral scheme that specifically links virtue and vice with demographic categories. Meanwhile--to state the obvious--the new ideology, whatever one may think of it, has no resonance at all among a very large number of our fellow citizens. And since we live in a democracy, their votes count as much as anyone else's.
"
The film is set in the fall of 1962 (the Cuban missile crisis briefly enters in) inside a secret U.S. government research facility that seems to be working on questions relating to the effort to put men in space. The protagonist of the film, Elisa Esposito (played by the wonderful actress Sally Hawkins), is part of the custodial staff, and a mute. Her inability to speak makes her sufficiently marginalized to be the film's hero. Her best and indeed her only friend at work is Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who happens to be black. Zelda, as she lets Elisa and the audience know several times, is married to a stereotypical mid-century man who never helps with housework or talks to her very much. Of him, more later. Eventually it turns out that it is only her dual, "intersectional" status as a minority--both a woman and black--that makes her so sympathetic to Elisa.
Elisa's only other friend in the movie lives next door to her upstairs from a movie palace--Giles, played by the excellent Richard Jenkins. Giles is an artist who is still working on drawings of white bread American families for ads, but his work is no longer being accepted, for reasons that are not initially clear. The most likely reason emerges as the film goes on: Giles is gay. When he makes a very tentative advance towards the manager of a nearby dessert cafe, he is immediately thrown out and asked not to return. The same cafe turns some black patrons away without serving them.
The drama in the film comes from the arrival at the institute of "Amphibian man," as he is known in the credits, whom the US military has managed to capture somewhere in the Amazon basin. He is under the care of security man Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). The government--and more specifically the military--are interested in Amphibian man because they think he might have natural abilities from which astronauts might benefit, but they quickly decide that he has to be killed, instead. Strickland is literally a comic-book villain with no human feeling and a particular contempt for Elisa--whom, at one point, he also harasses sexually. Meanwhile, Elisa has gotten close enough to his tank to see the humanity in him--which none of the white males in charge, of course, can do--and to fall in love with him. Amphibian man is also being stalked by two Soviet spies, one of whom has infiltrated the research group. They also decide that he is a threat who must be killed, but the covert spy--the only white male in the film with a heart--has a change of heart and eventually collaborates with Elisa in a plot to help Amphibian man escape, stash him in her apartment, and wait for the water in a local canal to rise to the level that will allow him to escape into the ocean and swim home. Elisa's other confederate in the escape is, of course, the gay Giles.
The film takes things to the next level after the escape, when Elisa, already in love with Amphibian man, has sex with him. This struck me as a paean to sex "outside the binary," as the saying now goes. Strickland the bad guy gets on to their trail thanks to Zelda's husband, who turns out to be a craven coward, suggesting that not even black straight men can be trusted. Eventually the couple outwits, outlasts and outplays the bad guys, and do indeed swim off to live happily ever after in the Amazon basin, leaving the wicked, white-male dominated US of the early 1960s to stew in its own wretched juice. One can believe, as I do, that all deserve equal rights, without believing that the United States for most of its history has been ruled by an evil white patriarchy, concerned above all with its own hegemony.
The reason that I did feel The Shape of Water was worth this post is that the world view that it embodies--that of an evil white patriarchy oppressing virtuous women, minorities, differently abled peopled, gays, and perhaps transgenders as well--not only dominates campus humanities departments and diversity bureaucracies today, but is constantly popping up in the op-ed pages of major newspapers as well. "This is an administration," wrote Lindy West in yesterday's New York Times, "that campaigned, explicitly, on a promised return to some mid century mirage of American 'greatness,' when white men ruled unfettered and the rest of us resumed our places on the spectrum between poverty and servitude." That is exactly the vision of the 1950s and early 1960s on display in The Shape of Water, and it is the image that young people are getting from their college experience, too. One would never know that that was an era in which young families could afford to buy homes, in which the prison population was a fraction of what it is today, in which the working and middle classes were gaining, and in which 91% marginal tax rates made it impossible for billionaires to emerge who would dominate our politics. None of that, however, seems to be very important to many of today's liberals.
In the course I taught for many years, Generations in Film, I nearly always used the 1958 classic, Twelve Angry Men about a jury charged with judging the guilt or innocence of a young Hispanic charged with murdering his father. Every member of the jury is a white male--but for nearly two hours, they argue violently about what should be done about the case. The clear message of the movie is not that there is anything particularly virtuous about being a white male--virtue lies in ones beliefs and actions, one's openness to evidence and one's capacity for tolerance. Today much of the left believes in a world where virtue or the lack of it is defined by skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
Another glimpse of this new ideology came from the last season of the tv series Transparent, when the younger sister Ali--now studying gender--speculates that among all those silenced or marginalized by "the patriarchy"--women, gays, minorities, those outside the binary--must be the new Messiah. Indeed, the new ideology resembles certain strains of Christian thought--strains which argued that "the last shall be first," and that the poor are the guardians of virtue among us. But that is a subject for another time. I do not believe a functioning free society can be built on moral scheme that specifically links virtue and vice with demographic categories. Meanwhile--to state the obvious--the new ideology, whatever one may think of it, has no resonance at all among a very large number of our fellow citizens. And since we live in a democracy, their votes count as much as anyone else's.
"
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Nuclear weapons
During the last two weeks, I read a remarkable book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg's chronicle of his long involvement with US nuclear strategy in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond. Born in 1931, Ellsberg was a child prodigy as a pianist, but as he explained in a documentary about him (and not in this book), he gave up the piano after his mother was killed in a car accident involving his whole family. He went to Harvard in the early 1950s, became an officer in the Marine Corps after the Korean War, and went to work for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, working under contract to the Air Force on problems relating to the use of nuclear weapons. It took him only a few years to begin to have serious doubts about American nuclear strategy, and in the Kennedy year he suddenly found himself within striking distance of the highest levels of the government Regular readers know that I retain a great deal of respect for the politicians and statesmen of that era, whom I still regard as more responsible and intelligent than those of this one, but one cannot read this book without feeling that we were lucky indeed to survive that era.
I am not going to try to summarize the book, but I will try to present what struck me as its most important findings. Its principal contribution is to show how the military ran rings around civilian authority, including successive Presidents of the United States, regarding the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. In the years immediately following our victory in the Second World War, as I found in a short article I wrote more than fifteen years ago, both civilian and military authorities accepted the idea that should war with the Soviet Union occur, we would use atomic weapons to try to secure a complete victory. That strategy, as Ellsberg shows very effectively in a later chapter of the book, grew naturally out of what the British and American air forces had done during the Second World War, when first the British and then the Americans had adopted the strategy of setting whole cities on fire to try to persuade their opponents to surrender. (Although he doesn't spend much time on the results, the strategy was a failure in Europe, and only the A-bombs made it a success in Asia.) But General Curtis Lemay, who had run the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities and who became the head of the Strategic Air Command and then Chief of Staff of teh Air Force in the 1950s and 1960s, naturally regarded atomic weapons as simply an easier way to carry out the strategy he had already used against powerful enemy nations, and civilians did not dissent.
The question of strategy became much more urgent in 1949, when the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb of their own, and we found out that they had been privy to the idea of an H-bomb or "superbomb" thanks to their spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked at Los Alamos. I did not know that not only J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had run the Manhattan project, but also most of our top nuclear scientists, had opposed the immediate development of the H-bomb after the Soviet explosion, both for technical reasons and because many did not regard such an enormously powerful weapon--a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs--as a usable weapon of war. I did know that George F. Kennan of the State Department--who was a friend of Oppenheimer's--had written one of his most brilliant papers opposing the H-bomb development himself, on the grounds that nuclear weapons could never serve a positive military purpose, and were therefore useless to a power like the United States. Neither Kennan nor the scientists, however, got anywhere, and development went ahead.
Ellsberg reveals that by the late 1950s, our plans for fighting the Soviet Union with hydrogen bombs were so closely held that no civilian, including the Secretary of Defense and President Eisenhower, had ever seen them. They were referred to as the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, a name chosen to conceal that they laid out the operational plan for war against the Communist bloc, not just a nuclear order of battle. And those plans, Ellsberg discovered when he got authority to ask some questions about them, called for the obliteration of the USSR, the satellite states of Eastern Europe, and Communist China. He interviewed the major commanders in the Pacific and discovered to his horror that there was no plan for fighting the Soviet Union without fighting Communist China. When he asked a leading Admiral about this, the admiral replied, in effect, that only an irrational President would think of fighting one of the major Communist powers without leaving the other alone. This raised, for me, another big question, however, which Ellsberg did not directly address.
I learned a lot about military planning for was with Communist China while researching
American Tragedy and more information has come out since then. Whether such a war broke out over the Taiwan straits (as it threatened to do in 1954 and 1958) or over Southeast Asia (as it seemed likely to do over Laos in 1960-1), our military assumed that it would rapidly escalate to all-out war involving nuclear weapons, beginning with attempts to take out the Chinese Air Force. But Ellsberg's stories raise the question of whether, at that moment, the military would have wanted to make an all-out attack on the USSR as well. The answer might easily be yes. I feel quite sure, incidentally, that Lyndon Johnson understood what the consequences of Chinese intervention in the Vietnam War would be, and that that was why he was so determined not to provoke the Chinese to intervene in the conflict.
Ellsberg was even more interested in issues of command and control. He eventually was told that the President had authorized subordinate commanders far from Washington to undertake nuclear war in certain circumstances, for instance, if war appeared to have broken out and communications with Washington had broken down. Ellsberg doesn't seem to know, or perhaps he has forgotten, that 20 years ago, in 1998, the National Security Archive published a remarkable series of documents showing exactly how President Eisenhower had in fact delegated that authority--documents he did not get to see at the time. I remember circulating the announcement of that publication to my War College colleagues under the subject heading, "The Real Wing Attack Plan R," a reference to Dr. Strangelove. As Ellsberg also makes clear, this was only one of several plot lines in that film that he found uncomfortably close to reality when it came out. He had also discovered that the military had never trained pilots in returning to base from their fail safe points after being ordered into the air in a crisis, and he became convinced that many would not return, certainly if they did not for any one of a number of reasons receive an order to do so, but would proceed to their targets.
Any war with the USSR, it was assumed, would lead to an all-out pre-emptive attack on its presumed nuclear capabilities, its industrial plant, and therefore, its people, together with simultaneous attacks in Eastern Europe and China. The Air Force estimated that the attack would kill more than two hundred million people. When the Kennedy Administration came into office, Ellsberg was spending a good deal of time in Washington, and he got to brief McGeorge Bundy, the President's National Security Adviser, on what our war plans looked like. It was around that time that satellite reconaissance discovered that the USSR did not have between 500 and 1000 workable ICBMs, as the Air Force had insisted, but rather somewhere between two [2] and four [4] that were operational. It turned out, Ellsberg discovered, that both Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Kennedy had strong personal reservations against initiating the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances. They proved that during the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK in particular was determined to avoid war precisely because it was so likely to become nuclear war. (It was as it happened even more likely than he knew: we now know that the Soviet troops in Cuba would have used tactical nuclear weapons at once if a US invasion had taken place.) But no President--not Kennedy, not Johnson, or Nixon or Ford or Carter or Reagan or Bush I--had the nerve to order the Chiefs to rewrite their plans for nuclear war along more reasonable lines. That, to me, is a very frightening piece of historical data.
One reason that some Presidents did not cut back on nuclear options was that they believed nuclear threats had brought benefit to the United States. Both President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles insisted that the Chinese Communists had agreed to make peace in 1953 because of threats to use nuclear weapons against them, and Ellsberg seems to believe that such threats took place. He doesn't seem to have read an excellent article from the 1990s by the historian Roger Dingeman that showed that there is really no evidence either that there was such an explicit threat or that it led to the breakthrough in negotiations, which came shortly after the death of Stalin. Ellsberg also writes that an international peace activist whom he knows heard from Xuan Thuy, one of the Vietnamese Communist negotiators in Paris, that Henry Kissinger, by 1972, had threatened the North Vietnamese 13 times with the use of nuclear weapons. This raises very interesting questions. I have read Kissinger's own verbatim accounts of those conversations and I am quite sure that those accounts do not include such an explicit threat. Nor did such a threat ever come up in Kissinger's taped reports to Nixon when he returned from Paris. That does not prove, however, that the story is false--we would have to see the North Vietnamese records of those conversations to be sure.
It turns out, by the way, that Ellsberg was an important source for David Halberstam's 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, which was written at the same time that Ellsberg was arranging for the leak of the Pentagon Papers and then preparing his defense. Two stories from Halberstam--of a leading McNamara aide (who turns out to have been Adam Yarmolinsky) reporting that neither McNamara nor JFK would ever begin the use of nukes, and another one about the number of Minuteman missiles that the Administration wanted to build--reappear almost verbatim, but with more specific attribution, in The Doomsday Machine.
In his concluding chapters, Ellsberg laments that US and Russian arsenals are still large enough to trigger a nuclear winter and end human life on earth, and that they are once again increasing. To eliminate the threat of worldwide nuclear catastrophe, he would like to ban land-based missiles. (As things now stand, the US government claims the right to deny Iran and North Korea such missiles, but without, of course, renouncing our own.) He wants a Congressional/scientific investigation of nuclear winter, to cripple the miltary-industrial complex; and dismantle the Russian and American and Chinese and other doomsday machines, their nuclear arsenals. These are the kinds of proposals tht got a serious hearing at least in intellectual and some political circles 40 years ago, in the wake of Vietnam, but they have little resoance today. Ellsberg knows that neither the current Congress and Administration or another Democratic Congress is likely to pursue such policies, but he takes comfort from the fall of Communism, which proved the possibility of unimaginable, revolutionary change. I cannot share his optimism.
Despite all the horrifying data in this book, the fact remains that Eisenhower and Kennedy and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Nixon and Mao and all the rest avoided a nuclear exchange throughout the period of the Cold War. That was, I continue to believe, an era of relatively enlightened statesmanship, driven on both sides by high ideals. Yet we no longer live in such an age. The men and women who were even teenagers or young adults at the time of Hiroshima--like Ellsberg--managed to keep the genie in the bottle. Now however they are almost gone, and future generations will discover whether more nuclear war did in fact become inevitable at the moment that the first bombs went off.
I am not going to try to summarize the book, but I will try to present what struck me as its most important findings. Its principal contribution is to show how the military ran rings around civilian authority, including successive Presidents of the United States, regarding the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. In the years immediately following our victory in the Second World War, as I found in a short article I wrote more than fifteen years ago, both civilian and military authorities accepted the idea that should war with the Soviet Union occur, we would use atomic weapons to try to secure a complete victory. That strategy, as Ellsberg shows very effectively in a later chapter of the book, grew naturally out of what the British and American air forces had done during the Second World War, when first the British and then the Americans had adopted the strategy of setting whole cities on fire to try to persuade their opponents to surrender. (Although he doesn't spend much time on the results, the strategy was a failure in Europe, and only the A-bombs made it a success in Asia.) But General Curtis Lemay, who had run the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities and who became the head of the Strategic Air Command and then Chief of Staff of teh Air Force in the 1950s and 1960s, naturally regarded atomic weapons as simply an easier way to carry out the strategy he had already used against powerful enemy nations, and civilians did not dissent.
The question of strategy became much more urgent in 1949, when the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb of their own, and we found out that they had been privy to the idea of an H-bomb or "superbomb" thanks to their spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked at Los Alamos. I did not know that not only J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had run the Manhattan project, but also most of our top nuclear scientists, had opposed the immediate development of the H-bomb after the Soviet explosion, both for technical reasons and because many did not regard such an enormously powerful weapon--a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs--as a usable weapon of war. I did know that George F. Kennan of the State Department--who was a friend of Oppenheimer's--had written one of his most brilliant papers opposing the H-bomb development himself, on the grounds that nuclear weapons could never serve a positive military purpose, and were therefore useless to a power like the United States. Neither Kennan nor the scientists, however, got anywhere, and development went ahead.
Ellsberg reveals that by the late 1950s, our plans for fighting the Soviet Union with hydrogen bombs were so closely held that no civilian, including the Secretary of Defense and President Eisenhower, had ever seen them. They were referred to as the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, a name chosen to conceal that they laid out the operational plan for war against the Communist bloc, not just a nuclear order of battle. And those plans, Ellsberg discovered when he got authority to ask some questions about them, called for the obliteration of the USSR, the satellite states of Eastern Europe, and Communist China. He interviewed the major commanders in the Pacific and discovered to his horror that there was no plan for fighting the Soviet Union without fighting Communist China. When he asked a leading Admiral about this, the admiral replied, in effect, that only an irrational President would think of fighting one of the major Communist powers without leaving the other alone. This raised, for me, another big question, however, which Ellsberg did not directly address.
I learned a lot about military planning for was with Communist China while researching
American Tragedy and more information has come out since then. Whether such a war broke out over the Taiwan straits (as it threatened to do in 1954 and 1958) or over Southeast Asia (as it seemed likely to do over Laos in 1960-1), our military assumed that it would rapidly escalate to all-out war involving nuclear weapons, beginning with attempts to take out the Chinese Air Force. But Ellsberg's stories raise the question of whether, at that moment, the military would have wanted to make an all-out attack on the USSR as well. The answer might easily be yes. I feel quite sure, incidentally, that Lyndon Johnson understood what the consequences of Chinese intervention in the Vietnam War would be, and that that was why he was so determined not to provoke the Chinese to intervene in the conflict.
Ellsberg was even more interested in issues of command and control. He eventually was told that the President had authorized subordinate commanders far from Washington to undertake nuclear war in certain circumstances, for instance, if war appeared to have broken out and communications with Washington had broken down. Ellsberg doesn't seem to know, or perhaps he has forgotten, that 20 years ago, in 1998, the National Security Archive published a remarkable series of documents showing exactly how President Eisenhower had in fact delegated that authority--documents he did not get to see at the time. I remember circulating the announcement of that publication to my War College colleagues under the subject heading, "The Real Wing Attack Plan R," a reference to Dr. Strangelove. As Ellsberg also makes clear, this was only one of several plot lines in that film that he found uncomfortably close to reality when it came out. He had also discovered that the military had never trained pilots in returning to base from their fail safe points after being ordered into the air in a crisis, and he became convinced that many would not return, certainly if they did not for any one of a number of reasons receive an order to do so, but would proceed to their targets.
Any war with the USSR, it was assumed, would lead to an all-out pre-emptive attack on its presumed nuclear capabilities, its industrial plant, and therefore, its people, together with simultaneous attacks in Eastern Europe and China. The Air Force estimated that the attack would kill more than two hundred million people. When the Kennedy Administration came into office, Ellsberg was spending a good deal of time in Washington, and he got to brief McGeorge Bundy, the President's National Security Adviser, on what our war plans looked like. It was around that time that satellite reconaissance discovered that the USSR did not have between 500 and 1000 workable ICBMs, as the Air Force had insisted, but rather somewhere between two [2] and four [4] that were operational. It turned out, Ellsberg discovered, that both Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Kennedy had strong personal reservations against initiating the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances. They proved that during the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK in particular was determined to avoid war precisely because it was so likely to become nuclear war. (It was as it happened even more likely than he knew: we now know that the Soviet troops in Cuba would have used tactical nuclear weapons at once if a US invasion had taken place.) But no President--not Kennedy, not Johnson, or Nixon or Ford or Carter or Reagan or Bush I--had the nerve to order the Chiefs to rewrite their plans for nuclear war along more reasonable lines. That, to me, is a very frightening piece of historical data.
One reason that some Presidents did not cut back on nuclear options was that they believed nuclear threats had brought benefit to the United States. Both President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles insisted that the Chinese Communists had agreed to make peace in 1953 because of threats to use nuclear weapons against them, and Ellsberg seems to believe that such threats took place. He doesn't seem to have read an excellent article from the 1990s by the historian Roger Dingeman that showed that there is really no evidence either that there was such an explicit threat or that it led to the breakthrough in negotiations, which came shortly after the death of Stalin. Ellsberg also writes that an international peace activist whom he knows heard from Xuan Thuy, one of the Vietnamese Communist negotiators in Paris, that Henry Kissinger, by 1972, had threatened the North Vietnamese 13 times with the use of nuclear weapons. This raises very interesting questions. I have read Kissinger's own verbatim accounts of those conversations and I am quite sure that those accounts do not include such an explicit threat. Nor did such a threat ever come up in Kissinger's taped reports to Nixon when he returned from Paris. That does not prove, however, that the story is false--we would have to see the North Vietnamese records of those conversations to be sure.
It turns out, by the way, that Ellsberg was an important source for David Halberstam's 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, which was written at the same time that Ellsberg was arranging for the leak of the Pentagon Papers and then preparing his defense. Two stories from Halberstam--of a leading McNamara aide (who turns out to have been Adam Yarmolinsky) reporting that neither McNamara nor JFK would ever begin the use of nukes, and another one about the number of Minuteman missiles that the Administration wanted to build--reappear almost verbatim, but with more specific attribution, in The Doomsday Machine.
In his concluding chapters, Ellsberg laments that US and Russian arsenals are still large enough to trigger a nuclear winter and end human life on earth, and that they are once again increasing. To eliminate the threat of worldwide nuclear catastrophe, he would like to ban land-based missiles. (As things now stand, the US government claims the right to deny Iran and North Korea such missiles, but without, of course, renouncing our own.) He wants a Congressional/scientific investigation of nuclear winter, to cripple the miltary-industrial complex; and dismantle the Russian and American and Chinese and other doomsday machines, their nuclear arsenals. These are the kinds of proposals tht got a serious hearing at least in intellectual and some political circles 40 years ago, in the wake of Vietnam, but they have little resoance today. Ellsberg knows that neither the current Congress and Administration or another Democratic Congress is likely to pursue such policies, but he takes comfort from the fall of Communism, which proved the possibility of unimaginable, revolutionary change. I cannot share his optimism.
Despite all the horrifying data in this book, the fact remains that Eisenhower and Kennedy and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Nixon and Mao and all the rest avoided a nuclear exchange throughout the period of the Cold War. That was, I continue to believe, an era of relatively enlightened statesmanship, driven on both sides by high ideals. Yet we no longer live in such an age. The men and women who were even teenagers or young adults at the time of Hiroshima--like Ellsberg--managed to keep the genie in the bottle. Now however they are almost gone, and future generations will discover whether more nuclear war did in fact become inevitable at the moment that the first bombs went off.
Friday, February 02, 2018
The Nunes memo
Devin Nunes's memo has been released today with the approval of the White House. Here are my thoughts about the memo as a document and its significance. I predict that it will inaugurate a constitutional crisis that may well leave us with an Administration immune from investigation into its ties with a foreign power.
The premise of the memorandum is that the FBI obstained a series of FISA warrants to listen in on the communications of Carter Page, a somewhat mysterious figure who became part of the Trump campaign during 2016, in late 2016. The memo asserts that the FBI should have told the FISA court that it's request was based on the "Steele dossier" compiled by Christopher Steele (originally at the behest of other Republican candidates, although Nunes naturally leaves that out, but later for the Clinton campaign). It says that Steele confessed his "bias" against Donald Trump during the campaign, and claims that the FBI paid him for his information as well. It also says that the FBI terminated its relationship with Steele, whom it had regarded as a trusted source, because of his statements to media outlets during the campaign.
The problem--which is undoubtedly what has enraged the Democratic minority of the House Intelligence Committee, the FBI, and the Justice Department--is that the memo presents no evidence for any of this at all. It does not tell us what exactly from the Steele dossier was used to craft the FISA application. It does not make clear how such information (if there really was any) was corroborated by other information known to the FBI from other sources. It is entirely possible, based on the memo, that the Bureau wasn't relying on information from the Steele dossier at all. I suspect that will emerge in leaks from the Democratic minority and the FBI in the next few days, but it will never catch up with the original story.
The whole theory of evidence that the memo is relying on, however, belongs on Fox News or in a speech by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, not in a document issued by a House committee. The premise seems to be that since Michael Steele was being paid by the Clinton campaign and did not want Donald Trump to become President of the United States, the FBI had an obligation to disregard anything he said, rather than to act on it. It does not occur to the authors of the memo (on which more later) that a person might become very concerned about the election of a certain person as President because one had received credible information to the effect that that person and his campaign were closely connected to a hostile foreign power. The memo, in short, is presuming that President Trump and his campaign must be innocent, and that therefore anyone who claims otherwise must be guilty of partisan opposition to him. And that is why I believe, although I cannot prove it, that the ultimate source of the memo is Donald Trump and people very close to him.
There is another layer to the way in which the memo is presented. Because it omits any specific information at all about the warrant or its content, it does not include any classified information. But if Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the Committee, were to release information refuting the claims and logic of the memo, he probably would be guilty of releasing classified information. By relying on asserting, rather than demonstrating, its key argument--that the application for the warrant was based on the Steele dossier--the memo makes it harder for anyone to disprove it.
The memo has to be seen in the context of an incident ten months ago involving Nunes, the White House, and the very same investigation, which was described again this week in the New York Times.
The premise of the memorandum is that the FBI obstained a series of FISA warrants to listen in on the communications of Carter Page, a somewhat mysterious figure who became part of the Trump campaign during 2016, in late 2016. The memo asserts that the FBI should have told the FISA court that it's request was based on the "Steele dossier" compiled by Christopher Steele (originally at the behest of other Republican candidates, although Nunes naturally leaves that out, but later for the Clinton campaign). It says that Steele confessed his "bias" against Donald Trump during the campaign, and claims that the FBI paid him for his information as well. It also says that the FBI terminated its relationship with Steele, whom it had regarded as a trusted source, because of his statements to media outlets during the campaign.
The problem--which is undoubtedly what has enraged the Democratic minority of the House Intelligence Committee, the FBI, and the Justice Department--is that the memo presents no evidence for any of this at all. It does not tell us what exactly from the Steele dossier was used to craft the FISA application. It does not make clear how such information (if there really was any) was corroborated by other information known to the FBI from other sources. It is entirely possible, based on the memo, that the Bureau wasn't relying on information from the Steele dossier at all. I suspect that will emerge in leaks from the Democratic minority and the FBI in the next few days, but it will never catch up with the original story.
The whole theory of evidence that the memo is relying on, however, belongs on Fox News or in a speech by the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, not in a document issued by a House committee. The premise seems to be that since Michael Steele was being paid by the Clinton campaign and did not want Donald Trump to become President of the United States, the FBI had an obligation to disregard anything he said, rather than to act on it. It does not occur to the authors of the memo (on which more later) that a person might become very concerned about the election of a certain person as President because one had received credible information to the effect that that person and his campaign were closely connected to a hostile foreign power. The memo, in short, is presuming that President Trump and his campaign must be innocent, and that therefore anyone who claims otherwise must be guilty of partisan opposition to him. And that is why I believe, although I cannot prove it, that the ultimate source of the memo is Donald Trump and people very close to him.
There is another layer to the way in which the memo is presented. Because it omits any specific information at all about the warrant or its content, it does not include any classified information. But if Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the Committee, were to release information refuting the claims and logic of the memo, he probably would be guilty of releasing classified information. By relying on asserting, rather than demonstrating, its key argument--that the application for the warrant was based on the Steele dossier--the memo makes it harder for anyone to disprove it.
The memo has to be seen in the context of an incident ten months ago involving Nunes, the White House, and the very same investigation, which was described again this week in the New York Times.
"Then,
in March, as the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016
election appeared to be picking up momentum, Mr. Nunes set off a bizarre Washington drama
when he made a late-night dash to the White House, and followed up with
a morning news conference in which he claimed that he had been given
intelligence reports that Mr. Trump and his associates were incidentally
swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies during the
campaign.
"Furthermore,
Mr. Nunes charged, the identities of the Mr. Trump and his associates
swept up by the surveillance, which are supposed to be “masked” in
intelligence reports, had been unlawfully revealed in classified reports
at the order of senior Obama administration officials.
"It
turned out that the intelligence cited by Mr. Nunes was given to him by
a pair of senior officials at the Trump White House, and that it had
selectively cited certain incidents to show wrongdoing where none may
have existed. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina,
declared that Mr. Nunes was running an “Inspector Clouseau investigation.”
"The
incident prompted an ethics investigation and forced Mr. Nunes to
recuse himself from the committee’s Russia investigation, a move that
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a committee
member, said almost certainly left Mr. Nunes feeling disappointed."
Rather than doing his job of indepedently overseeing the intelligence community and its relationship with the White House, Nunes was acting as the mouthpiece and shill of the Trump Administration in its efforts to undermine the FBI--efforts which then led to the firing of James Comey. As it turned out, the ethics investigation cleared Nunes and he witdrew his recusal. He has now taken a new and bigger step along the same lines. I do not know, but I would not be at all surprised if the "Nunes memo," like the intelligence he claimed to have discovered last March, had come from the Trump White House in the first place.
President Trump, I think, will now use the memo to argue that the investigation of the Russian connection is fundamentally and irrevocably tainted because it began as a partisan withhunt undertaken by the Clinton campaign through Steele. Indeed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary, has already been saying this for some time. I think the odds are better than 50-50 that the President will fire Robert Mueller, shut down the independent investigation, and fire Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein, who is rather pointedly dragged into the Nunes memo as well. That, I suspect, is why leading Republicans in the last week have been saying that there is no need for legislation to protect Robert Mueller: they know he'll be fired soon. Buoyed by the tax cut, the booming stock market, and continued economic growth, the Republicans, like the President, have talked themselves into the idea that they are on the way to a new era and a great political triumph, and that only an unfair, partisan investigation stands in their way. In addition, it now develops that a great many Republican legislators, including Mitch McConnell,. have received large campaign contributions from Russia-lined interests as well. They too may have a personal interest in shutting down the investigation of Russian influence.
Outrage will break out among the mainstream media and the Democrats if Trump fires Mueller, but the Administration won't care. Will such outrage move large numbers of swing voters to vote Democratic next fall and give the Democrats control of at least one house of Congress? I don't know, but I'm skeptical. The Republicans are betting that the mass of our people are sick of Washington scandals, and they may be right. Having endured Whitewater, Monicagate, Benghazi, birtherism, the WMD controversy, and so much more, our people may just be tired of it all. Once again, the Republicans in Washington are trying to even the score. In 1999 some of them admitted they were impeaching Clinton as revenge for Watergate. But Clinton was acquitted, and now they may be determined to see that Trump gets away with it too.
The President, I suspect, simply has to stop the investigation because it's bound to reveal damaging information about himself and many of those closest to him. That is why he, like Nixon, had to begin trying to stop the investigation right away. Nixon's attempts culminated in the Saturday Night Massacre, after which bipartisan outrage forced him to back down. Trump won't face bipartisan outrage. In our era of all-out partisanship--the fourth great crisis of American national life--he may prevail.
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