With polls narrowing, Nixon enlisted the help of Anna Chennault, a Washington hostess and lobbyist, to open a back channel to South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu. “Hold on,” she told Thieu. “We are gonna win.” In other words, scuttle the peace talks and, when Nixon is in office, we’ll get you a better deal. Haldeman’s notes at the time include this damning sentence: “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” which he wrote while on the phone with his boss.
Nixon may have thought that the proposed peace talks were a ploy to give the Democrats a boost ahead of Election Day, but Johnson and his team genuinely believed that there was potential for success. As Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser, put it, “We have the best deal now we can get.”
With transcripts of Chennault’s phone calls to Saigon provided to him by the FBI, Johnson was convinced of Nixon’s involvement. He said to Republican senator Everett Dirksen, “It’s despicable.… We could stop the killing out there. But they’ve got this … new formula put in there—namely, wait on Nixon. And they’re killing four or five hundred every day waiting on Nixon.” And he added, “This is treason.”
But there was no definitive proof of Nixon’s involvement, and Johnson felt he couldn’t risk revealing his surveillance of both Nixon and the South Vietnamese. He also had to factor in his concern about how the resulting scandal might affect efforts to end the war.
Nixon went on to win the 1968 election, despite his egregious violations of the Logan Act, which makes it a crime for unauthorized Americans to enter into negotiations with a foreign power. In other words, he cheated. The killing of Americans and Vietnamese continued for another seven years, the promising peace plan Johnson had been on the verge of securing unsalvageable. On Nixon’s watch, twenty thousand more Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians died. It turns out he would face impeachment for the wrong crime.
* * *
Worried that Nixon could face criminal charges after his resignation due to the Watergate break-in and cover-up, Ford pardoned him on September 8, 1974, writing that “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost.” The decision was controversial at the time, and many critics accused Ford of making a “corrupt bargain.” Despite Ford’s protestations to the contrary, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told The New York Times in September 2018 that Ford’s pardon of Nixon “set a precedent that presidents are superhuman and not held to the rule of law like other people. [Pardons] are supposed to correct travesties of justice.”
But time continues to heal all powerful white men’s wounds. In 2001 Ford was presented with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for “his courage in making a controversial decision of conscience to pardon former President Richard M. Nixon.”
In her presentation of the award to the former president, Caroline Kennedy said, “For more than a quarter century, Gerald Ford proved to the people of Michigan, the Congress, and our nation that politics can be a noble profession. As president, he made a controversial decision of conscience to pardon former president Nixon and end the national trauma of Watergate. In doing so, he placed his love of country ahead of his own political future.” And he also set the terrible precedent that, if you commit crimes while you are president, there will be no consequences. I think it’s safe to say this is a precedent we have all come to regret.
It should not be lost on us that at the same ceremony, Congressman John Lewis, who literally risked his life in the fight against racial inequality, received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for Lifetime Achievement.
* * *
And the lack of accountability continued into the twenty-first century, well before Donald took office.
After his election, President Barack Obama indicated that he most likely would not authorize an investigation into the Bush administration’s torture of terrorism suspects. Reasons Obama gave in an interview with NBC News included the desire to not seem vengeful (as if seeking justice for crimes that violated the Geneva Conventions could reasonably be said to constitute revenge); not spend the new administration’s “time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one”; appease the powers that be at the CIA, who strenuously opposed any inquiries into the torture program, in order to avoid making them feel like the administration was “looking over their shoulders”; and, the most misguided rationale of all, “to look forward as opposed to looking backward.”
Obama’s recalcitrance in this matter helped, in the words of Adam Serwer, writing for The Atlantic in March 2018, to “entrench a standard of accountability that stretches from beat cops to CIA officials, one in which breaking the law in the line of duty is unpunishable, but those suspected of a crime—particularly if Black, Muslim, or undocumented—can be subjected to unspeakable cruelty whether or not they are ultimately guilty.” Failing to hold accountable those in whom a great deal of trust and power has been placed turns on its head the whole notion that “with great power comes great responsibility.” In America, that is almost never true and, more consequentially, it is almost in diametric opposition to the truth of how things really work. The more power you have, the fewer consequences you face.
Like Ford, who failed to hold prior crimes to account, Obama committed two egregious mistakes in failing to hold prior crimes to account. In the United States during the two years between 2007 and 2009, the value of homes plummeted, the stock market crashed, and unemployment rose to 10 percent. All told, Americans lost $9.8 trillion in wealth, while stock market losses totaled $8 trillion, putting the entire global economy at risk of collapse.
The precipitating cause of this crisis was the bursting of the housing bubble, but other causes included a decades-long trend of banking industry deregulation, which opened up the opportunity for people who historically had not been able to afford conventional mortgages to be approved for riskier loans. From 2003 to 2007, these so-called subprime mortgages went from representing 6 percent to 14 percent of all mortgages. The increased availability of cheap mortgages led to an increased demand for housing, which peaked in 2006.
The catch was that, beginning in 2004, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, which most new homeowners had not expected. In 2003, the rate was 1 percent, but by 2006 it had climbed to 5.25 percent. As rates continued to rise, housing prices began to slide, until the debt owed on millions of new and refinanced mortgages was greater than the values of the homes themselves. Homeowners found themselves trapped between mortgage payments they could no longer afford and houses they could no longer sell. When the housing bubble burst, the stock market collapse quickly followed.
Lost income, lost productivity, and lost assets led to a loss of approximately seventy thousand dollars in lifetime income for every American. By 2010 there were a total of 3.8 million foreclosures. Some people recovered, but many never did, thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s decision not to hold the banks accountable.
JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America paid thirteen billion and seventeen billion dollars in fines, respectively, yet Eric Holder’s Justice Department claimed it could find no evidence of wrongdoing. Besides, as Holder said, these financial institutions had become so large that it was “difficult for us to prosecute them.” The infamous “too big to fail” argument has led to a situation in which many Americans struggle within a system rigged against them and for the banks, which have gotten even bigger, gaining in excess of $2.4 trillion in the years since they almost destroyed the world’s economy and actually did destroy the lives of countless people.
* * *
Some of the most egregious crimes in American history weren’t crimes at the time or were sanctioned government policy, like the forced relocation of one hundred thousand Native Americans during Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears and the domestic slave trade in the decades after the international slave trade was abolished. But it is only by confronting these atrocities, sanctioned or not, that we can put t
his country’s history—and where it’s led us—in perspective. By not having that information at our disposal, or by having it sanitized, we do ourselves a disservice. Even small acts of whitewashing skew history in a way that fails us. The website for Monticello, Jefferson’s sprawling plantation, refers to him as a “patriarch of an extended family at Monticello, both white and black,” which is an odd way of describing the enslaved children Sally Hemings bore him.
Such inquiries do not demonize those who make mistakes. But if we fail to ask the questions, we are likely to make more egregious mistakes because we don’t acknowledge the original ones. We should not talk about the founders of this country without talking about which of them were enslavers, which ones actually supported the idea of owning other human beings, and yet we do. That’s the first thing we should know about them, and then we can judge the rest accordingly.
Even Abraham Lincoln, considered our greatest president, struggled to accept the equality of Black Americans, despite believing they should be free. As Frederick Douglass remarked in his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II because of rampant xenophobia that was aimed directly at American citizens who were of Japanese descent and looked like the enemy. His New Deal largely excluded Black Americans from the economic opportunities afforded white Americans, effectively shutting them out of the middle class. Racist policies pursued by many government organizations under his watch worsened the already bad problem of housing segregation, which forced Blacks into crowded, substandard living situations.
Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities or crimes or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them.
Ironically, the fear of being associated with past transgressions often leads to silence about them. As we see with child abuse, sexual assault, and mental illness, which often go unreported, shame can be a powerful silencer.
Failing to acknowledge the fact that the original sins have not been atoned for, acting as if the recompense is firmly in the past, adequate and complete, is to perpetuate the injustices and pave the way for future transgression and brutality. Cruelty and bigotry and white impunity are built into the system. And by remaining silent about historical truths, couching them in euphemisms, or rewriting them altogether, we ensure that the system will not change.
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was followed by the presidency of Andrew Johnson, who not only halted the momentum of Reconstruction but also seemed determined to undermine the very purpose for which the Civil War had been fought. Reconstruction was followed by the backlash of Jim Crow and the reenslavement of Blacks under the system of peonage; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was followed by the backlash of the “war on drugs” and the resulting mass incarceration of Black men; Obama’s presidency was followed by the backlash of Donald’s “election” (which, even if history proves he didn’t win on the merits, was much closer than it ever should have been).
In administration after administration and across centuries and decades, crimes—against decency, against democracy, and against humanity—have been committed by presidents, legislators at all levels of government, the judiciary, and ordinary Americans without punishment, reprisal, or justice for the victims. Then Donald came along and left all of them in the dust.
PART II
Here There Be Monsters
CHAPTER 3
American Carnage
It’s fitting that it rained on January 20, 2017. It’s fitting that Donald would later lie about the rain. The gloom that emanated from his “American carnage” inauguration speech felt like a threat, a road map for his administration, not an assessment. This threat had been foreshadowed by his chilling pronouncement at the 2016 Republican convention: “I alone can fix it.” I didn’t take him seriously at the time (it was just Donald, after all), but people who understood the peril much better than I—people like Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Sarah Kendzior, and Malcolm Nance—certainly did.
That he would kick off his first full day in office with a lie about the size of the inauguration crowd suited both the man and the occasion. The lies themselves, which seemed to grow exponentially over time and went largely unchallenged by his own party, came to feel like assaults—on our sense of basic human decency, our ideas about America’s place in the world, the belief that our system of checks and balances would see us through. Going forward, we should have—but didn’t—expect to be lied to and gaslighted at every turn.
Once in office, Donald would push the envelope and wait to see how much he could get away with, as he had always done. And if he did get away with it, he’d push even further, because there was no bottom to him—there never had been. What remained to be determined was whether or not the Republican Party, which had mostly lined up behind him during the general election, didn’t have a bottom, either. With the exception of Donald’s being thwarted in his effort to scuttle the Affordable Care Act, thanks to the “no” votes of three Republican senators, there are precious few instances in which he didn’t get his way, whether in setting policy, in stealing from the Treasury to enrich himself, or in inflicting as much pain as possible on as many people as possible.
For the first two years of his term, the worst among us—the nativists, the nationalists, the unrepentant white supremacists—were represented by Republicans who controlled 100 percent of the federal government. This “worst” exists in any society, but one of the purposes of liberal democracy is to contain them and their ability to spread their hatred. Between 2017 and 2019, however, their racism, misogyny, and homophobia metastasized. The general public’s misplaced belief in the inherent soundness of the system and in the good faith of those operating in it created an opportunity for the malignant forces that had gone underground or been pushed to the edges of our civil society to surge and take center stage. The Republican base, their views validated and championed by those at the highest levels of government, became mobilized in a way they hadn’t been in decades. The message to Black Americans in particular was clear: the worst of us will always be better than the best of you, and sixty-two million Donald voters had chosen exactly the right person to make that argument.
The impetus for the Women’s March that took place in Washington as well as in cities around the country and the world the day after Donald’s inauguration was to force an examination of the grievous wound that had been inflicted on half of the population by the election of a man who appeared to have won in part because of, not in spite of, his numerous alleged assaults on women. In retrospect, the march also seems like a last-gasp attempt at collective healing that couldn’t be sustained, because you cannot heal while you’re still being traumatized. After the march, the expectation, or the hope, was that the Republican Party would stop him, but having hope is itself a kind of normalization; if you have hope, you have an expectation that something will change. This misled many people, because nothing did change. Besides, the people who could have acted, if not to oust him (that was a pipe dream) then at least to rein in his worst impulses, benefited too much from having at their disposal somebody as incompetent, grasping, and uninterested in the job as Donald. It was a great stroke of luck for them to have found somebody so manipulable—even more so than George W. Bush—in the Oval Office.
As they had been doing for decades, the Democrats in power continued to misread the character of the Republican Party and its extreme rightward shift. They failed to realize the rules no longer applied; that, indeed, the rule book had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire.
At times it seemed like one of Donald’s main motives was to demoralize those who hadn’t supported him. Almost everything was designe
d to underscore the powerlessness of the Democratic opposition, which, after November 2016, controlled not one lever of power.
The attacks on the press were deliberate—as Lesley Stahl reported that Donald said to her in their May 2018 interview: “I do it to demean you and discredit you, so no one will believe you.” And they were made worse by the fact that many journalists and news outlets, despite being labeled time and again as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” continued to normalize Donald’s behavior, as if his becoming presidential was just around the corner, giving him credit for simply reading off a teleprompter without incident.
During the campaign, ratings kept the media from asking Donald serious questions. At one point he claimed, absurdly, to know more about ISIS than the “generals.” No one bothered to ask how he knew more or what exactly he knew. Donald’s racism, his use of incendiary language, his shredding of norms, his breathtaking and obvious ignorance, and his arrogance in thinking he didn’t need to make sense were all taken for granted. As a candidate, the Republican nominee repeatedly demonstrated he had not read, let alone understood, the foundational document of the country he sought to lead, but the media rarely called him on it. True, it’s never been required of candidates, but no candidate in the history of American presidential elections has ever demonstrated such ignorance of basic civics. Even if the media did on occasion challenge Donald during the primaries and general election, they lent his campaign an aura of importance he hadn’t earned by training their cameras on empty podiums and planes idling on the tarmac, as if waiting for Donald was more important than listening to anything any of the other candidates had to say. The grievous disparity between how he and his opponents were treated—particularly in the general election—was ignored or downplayed.
The Reckoning Page 5