A Certain Idea of America, page 24
IT APPEARS HE DIDN’T TAKE MY ADVICE
Oops.
IF BIDEN RUNS, THEY’LL TEAR HIM UP
April 4, 2019
Don’t do it, Joe.
Don’t run for president. It won’t work, you won’t get the nomination, your loss will cause pain and not only for you.
And your defeat will be worse than sudden, it will be poignant.
Right now operatives for the other candidates are trying to scare you out of jumping in. We all know that what you intended as warmth is now received as a boundary violation. You addressed this in a video that was crisp and friendly: You never meant to cause discomfort, you intend to change your ways.
But it’s not going away. It will linger, and more will come.
Democratic operatives do not fear you will win the nomination—they think you’re too old, your time has passed, you’re not where the energy of the base is, or the money. But they do not want you taking up oxygen the next six to ten months as you sink in the polls. And they don’t want you swooping in to claim the middle lane. Others already have a stake there, or mean to.
In the past you were never really slimed and reviled by your party; you were mostly teased and patronized. But if you get in the race this time, it will be different. They will show none of the old respect for you, your vice presidency, or your past fealty to the cause. And you are in the habit of receiving respect. Soon the topic will turn, in depth, to Anita Hill, the Clinton crime bill, your friendliness to big business. You have opposed partial-birth abortion. Also, the old plagiarism video will come back and be dissected. It was more than thirty years ago, and for a lot of reporters and voters it will be a riveting story, and brand new.
You backed the Iraq war. That question will be resurrected, as opposed to redebated. It is always fair to redebate it—to be asked, “Why did your generation of Democratic politicians back that war? Looking back, what did you misunderstand?” But it will only be resurrected, and thrown in your face.
You will be judged to be old-school, and insufficiently doctrinaire. The current Democratic Party is different from the one you entered in the late 1960s, not only in policies but in mood, tone, style. Today’s rising young Democrats see no honor in accommodation, little virtue in collegiality.
In the old party of classic twentieth-century Democratic liberalism, they wanted everyone to rise. Those who suffered impediments—minorities, women, working people trying to unionize—would be given a boost. There’s plenty to go around, America’s a rich country, let the government get in and help.
The direction, or at least the aspiration, was upward, for everybody.
The mood of the rising quadrants of the new party is more pinched, more abstractedly aggrieved, more theoretical. Less human. Now there’s a mood not of Everyone Can Rise but of Some Must Be Taken Down. White people in general, and white males in particular, are guilty of intractable privilege. It’s bitter, resentful, divisive.
And it is at odds with the spirit in which your political categories were formed. Actually, your politics always struck me as being like the World War II movies Americans of a certain age grew up on. The American soldiers are in the foxhole in Bataan, and there’s the working-class guy from Brooklyn, the tall Ivy League guy, the baker’s apprentice from Ohio. They’re all together and equal, like the country they represent. When the war’s over they’ll probably stay friends and the Brooklyn guy will be in the union and the Ivy League fancy-pants will be in management, but they’ll quickly forge the new contract and shake on the deal because back when it counted we were all in it together.
That is not the 2019 Democratic Party! This party would note, correctly, that there was little racial diversity in the foxhole, and would elaborate that its false unity was built on intersectional oppressions that render its utility as a unifying metaphor null.
The party’s young theorists are impatient with such gooey patriotic sentiment. America is not good guys in a foxhole to them, it’s crabs in a barrel with the one who gets to the top getting yanked down to the bottom—deservedly.
Your very strength—that you enjoy talking to both sides, that deep in your heart you see no one as deplorable—will be your weakness. You aren’t enough of a warrior. You’re sweet, you’re weak, you’re half-daffy. You’re meh.
At this point you’re not out of step, you’re out of place.
The press too will have certain biases, and not only because they’re thirty and forty years younger than you and would like to see their careers associated with the rise of someone their age. Their bias is also toward drama, as you well know—toward pathos, and the end of something. They love that almost as much as the beginning of something. They can’t wait to write their Lion in Winter stories. “The Long Goodbye.” “The Last Campaign.” “Biden faltered for just a moment when a white-haired woman put her hand to his face and said, ‘I remember you from ’88, Joe. We all do, and we love you.’ ”
And that is apart from those young reporters who consider themselves culture cops, and who enjoy beating people like you with the nightstick of their wokeness.
Why will it be painful to witness all this? Because it will mark the fall of a political figure who was normal. Who knew there was a left over here and a right over there and a big middle. Who went with the flow of cultural leftism but understood the other side’s reservations and signaled that in some way he had some sympathy for them. Who knew politics wasn’t always about absolutes.
This in contrast to the up-and-coming manipulators for whom it is second nature to feign warmth and outreach, but whose every hug is backed by the sharp and crooked finger of accusation. Their engine is resentment, their fuel is unearned self-esteem, their secret is lust for power.
You probably think they’re just girls who need a hug. But their place is not your place.
It would be one thing if you wanted to enter the race to persuade the party on the merits of more-centrist approaches and working with the other side. But is that your intention? You’ve been apologizing for calling Mike Pence decent, and groveling over your “white man’s culture.” If you go with that flow, it will wash you away.
It is hard for the political personality to say no—to more fame, more power, more love. To the history books. It is hard for a man who’s always seen a president when he looked in the mirror to admit he’s an almost-president. It’s hard to get out of the habit of importance.
But you’ll never be unimportant. You’ll be Joe Biden, a liberal lion of the U.S. Senate at the turn of century. A man with a heart, unhated in an age of hate.
That’s not nothing, that’s a lot.
So don’t do it. Wisdom here dictates an Irish goodbye—a quiet departure, out the back door with a wave and a tip of the hat to whoever might be watching.
IMAGINE A SANE DONALD TRUMP
October 20, 2016
Look, he’s a nut and you know he’s a nut. I go to battleground states and talk to anyone, everyone. They all know Donald Trump’s a nut. Some will vote for him anyway. Many are in madman-versus-criminal mode, living with (or making) their final decision. They got the blues. Everyone does. They’re worried about the whole edifice: If this is where we are, where are we going?
I get the Reagan fantasy—big guy with a nonstandard résumé comes in from the outside, cleans out the stables, saves the day. But it’s a fantasy and does not apply to this moment. I get the Jacksonian fantasy—crude, rude populist comes in from the hinterlands and upends a decadent establishment to the huzzahs of normal people with mud on their boots. But it’s a fantasy, and doesn’t apply.
Because Trump is not a grizzled general who bears on his face the scars of a British sword, and not a shining citizen-patriot. He’s a screwball. Do you need examples? You do not, because you’re already thinking of them. For a year you’ve been observing the TV funhouse that is his brain.
I offer an observation from Newt Gingrich, Trump friend and supporter, on David Drucker’s Washington Examiner podcast. Mr. Gingrich lauded Mr. Trump because he “thinks big” and is a transformational character. But he spoke too of Trump’s essential nature. The GOP nominee “reacts very intensely, almost uncontrollably” to “anything which attacks his own sense of integrity or his own sense of respectability.” “There’s…a part of his personality that sometimes gets involved in petty things that make no sense.” He found it “frankly pathetic” that Mr. Trump got mad because Paul Ryan didn’t call to congratulate him after the second debate.
Mr. Gingrich said he hopes this will change.
But people don’t change the fundamentals of their nature at age seventy.
Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.
The party’s leaders accept more or less open borders and like big trade deals. Half the base does not! It is longtime GOP doctrine to cut entitlement spending. Half the base doesn’t want to, not right now! Republican leaders have what might be called assertive foreign-policy impulses. When Mr. Trump insulted George W. Bush and nation-building and said he’d opposed the Iraq invasion, the crowds, taking him at his word, cheered. He was, as they say, declaring that he didn’t want to invade the world and invite the world. Not only did half the base cheer him, at least half the remaining half joined in when the primaries ended.
The Republican Party will now begin the long process of redefining itself, or continue its long national collapse. This is an epochal event. It happened because Donald Trump intuited where things were and are going.
Since I am more in accord with Mr. Trump’s stands than not, I am particularly sorry that as an individual human being he’s a nut.
Which gives rise to a question, for me a poignant one.
What if there had been a Sane Donald Trump?
Oh my God, Sane Trump would have won in a landslide.
Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.
Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious, and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”
Sane Donald Trump would have given an anxious country more ease, not more anxiety. He would have demonstrated that he can govern himself. He would have suggested through his actions, while still being entertaining, funny, and outsize, that yes, he understands the stakes, and yes, since America is always claiming to be the leader of the world—We are No. 1!—a certain attendant gravity is required of one who’d be its leader.
Sane Donald Trump would have explained his immigration proposals with a kind of loving logic—we must secure our borders for a host of serious reasons, and here they are. But we are grateful for our legal immigrants, and by the way, if you want to hear real love for America, then go talk to them, for they experience more freshly than we what a wonderful place this is. In time, after we’ve fully secured our borders and the air of emergency is gone, we will turn to regularizing the situation of everyone here, because Americans are not only kindly, they’re practical, and want everyone paying taxes.
Sane Donald Trump would have spoken at great and compelling length of how the huge, complicated trade agreements created the past quarter-century can be improved upon with an eye to helping the American worker. Ideology, he might say, is the pleasant diversion of the unworried, but a nation that no longer knows how to make steel cannot be a great nation. And we are a great nation.
Sane Donald Trump would have argued that controlling entitlement spending is a necessary thing but not, in fact, this moment’s priority. People have been battered since the crash, in many ways, and nothing feels stable now. Beyond that no one right now trusts Washington to be fair and wise in these matters. Confidence-building measures are necessary. Let’s take on the smaller task of turning around Veterans Affairs and see if we can’t make that work.
Sane Donald Trump would have known of America’s hidden fractures, and would have insisted that a healthy moderate-populist movement cannot begin as or devolve into a nationalist, identity-politics movement. Those who look down on other groups, races, or religions can start their own party. He, the famous brander, would even offer them a name: the Idiot Party.
Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is November 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.
Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.
CHAPTER 6
WATCH OUT
The things that keep a lot of us up at night.
WHAT I WISH OPPENHEIMER HAD SAID
July 27, 2023
Oppenheimer is a serious movie, which comes as a relief—that such a film can still be made and become, as this one has, a blockbuster. It carries within it a compliment, that the audience is able to absorb intellectually demanding material. It assumes you know who Niels Bohr is. It contains a great on-the-edge-of-your-seat sequence on the first use of the atomic bomb, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945. The acting is great, no one’s a dud, and the look and sound are spectacular. It is a film of huge ambition.
But—you saw the “but” coming—it isn’t the movie my mind was hoping for. In my view, which I admit may be peculiar to me, it missed the essence of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s tragedy. That tragedy isn’t what is considered his persecution during the McCarthy era, after he had become famous as the father of the bomb. It was more personal. It was that Oppenheimer, a brilliant man, probably a genius, wanted to be great, and won his greatness at what he fully understood to be a grave cost to the world.
He overrode his qualms and doubts to develop the most lethal weapon in human history, arguing to himself and others that only a weapon so uniquely devastating would convince Japan it had lost the war, thus forestalling an invasion that would yield, by one estimation of the time, one million casualties, of which, obviously, not all would be American. The Japanese would have fought hand-to-hand on the streets and beaches. They would only surrender if Emperor Hirohito told them to do so.
But driving Oppenheimer as I have long read him, and perhaps primarily driving him, is that he wanted to be a great man like his contemporary, the hero of science, Albert Einstein. History provided Oppenheimer with both opportunity and rationale. He would split the atom, create the bomb, bring the peace. But the bomb was—is—a moral horror. So to be great, to achieve his destiny, he had to do something terrible.
He did. That was his tragedy. And, forgive me, a lifetime wandering around quoting “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” wouldn’t assuage the resulting unease.
My deeper criticism of the film is that I expected more of Oppenheimer’s reaction to what happened after the bomb was dropped. Before Hiroshima was bombed, at 8:15 a.m. local time on August 6, 1945, everything was theory—mathematical formulae, observed blast radius, calculations, and estimates. Only afterward would it be known what actually happened. I expected more of Oppenheimer’s absorbing of the facts of his work, more on how his reflections turned and developed.
He would have absorbed this information indelibly through the work of John Hersey. After the bomb was dropped, magazines and newspapers were consumed with stories of what it meant for the war, what a scientific breakthrough it represented, what it portended for the future. In May 1946 Hersey, a thirty-one-year-old journalist, already battle-scarred—he’d been commended for helping evacuate U.S. military personnel from Guadalcanal—was less drawn to the abstract than the particular, to what actually happened in Hiroshima, to its people and infrastructure, when the bomb came. He went there for The New Yorker, stayed a month, and did his own reporting, independently and with little assistance. He wove a narrative around the first- person testimony of six survivors. In August 1946, the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the magazine published Hersey’s work, breaking tradition by devoting an entire issue to it so no one would miss any part.
It was a masterpiece. It has been called the most important piece of journalism in the twentieth century. For the first time people really learned what happened in Hiroshima, and it caused a sensation. You couldn’t hide from yourself, after reading that piece or later the book that came of it, the knowledge of what the A-bomb did. And knowing couldn’t help but affect your thinking.
The writing was straight, factual, matter-of-fact. His British publisher later said Hersey didn’t want to “pile on the agony.” But his plain, simple words said everything: “There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky…. It seemed a sheet of sun.” There was no roar; “almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb.” But they heard it twenty miles away. Clouds of dust turned the morning into twilight. In gardens, pumpkins roasted on the vine. People ran to the city’s rivers. “Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat on to the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached one and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.”
Oops.
IF BIDEN RUNS, THEY’LL TEAR HIM UP
April 4, 2019
Don’t do it, Joe.
Don’t run for president. It won’t work, you won’t get the nomination, your loss will cause pain and not only for you.
And your defeat will be worse than sudden, it will be poignant.
Right now operatives for the other candidates are trying to scare you out of jumping in. We all know that what you intended as warmth is now received as a boundary violation. You addressed this in a video that was crisp and friendly: You never meant to cause discomfort, you intend to change your ways.
But it’s not going away. It will linger, and more will come.
Democratic operatives do not fear you will win the nomination—they think you’re too old, your time has passed, you’re not where the energy of the base is, or the money. But they do not want you taking up oxygen the next six to ten months as you sink in the polls. And they don’t want you swooping in to claim the middle lane. Others already have a stake there, or mean to.
In the past you were never really slimed and reviled by your party; you were mostly teased and patronized. But if you get in the race this time, it will be different. They will show none of the old respect for you, your vice presidency, or your past fealty to the cause. And you are in the habit of receiving respect. Soon the topic will turn, in depth, to Anita Hill, the Clinton crime bill, your friendliness to big business. You have opposed partial-birth abortion. Also, the old plagiarism video will come back and be dissected. It was more than thirty years ago, and for a lot of reporters and voters it will be a riveting story, and brand new.
You backed the Iraq war. That question will be resurrected, as opposed to redebated. It is always fair to redebate it—to be asked, “Why did your generation of Democratic politicians back that war? Looking back, what did you misunderstand?” But it will only be resurrected, and thrown in your face.
You will be judged to be old-school, and insufficiently doctrinaire. The current Democratic Party is different from the one you entered in the late 1960s, not only in policies but in mood, tone, style. Today’s rising young Democrats see no honor in accommodation, little virtue in collegiality.
In the old party of classic twentieth-century Democratic liberalism, they wanted everyone to rise. Those who suffered impediments—minorities, women, working people trying to unionize—would be given a boost. There’s plenty to go around, America’s a rich country, let the government get in and help.
The direction, or at least the aspiration, was upward, for everybody.
The mood of the rising quadrants of the new party is more pinched, more abstractedly aggrieved, more theoretical. Less human. Now there’s a mood not of Everyone Can Rise but of Some Must Be Taken Down. White people in general, and white males in particular, are guilty of intractable privilege. It’s bitter, resentful, divisive.
And it is at odds with the spirit in which your political categories were formed. Actually, your politics always struck me as being like the World War II movies Americans of a certain age grew up on. The American soldiers are in the foxhole in Bataan, and there’s the working-class guy from Brooklyn, the tall Ivy League guy, the baker’s apprentice from Ohio. They’re all together and equal, like the country they represent. When the war’s over they’ll probably stay friends and the Brooklyn guy will be in the union and the Ivy League fancy-pants will be in management, but they’ll quickly forge the new contract and shake on the deal because back when it counted we were all in it together.
That is not the 2019 Democratic Party! This party would note, correctly, that there was little racial diversity in the foxhole, and would elaborate that its false unity was built on intersectional oppressions that render its utility as a unifying metaphor null.
The party’s young theorists are impatient with such gooey patriotic sentiment. America is not good guys in a foxhole to them, it’s crabs in a barrel with the one who gets to the top getting yanked down to the bottom—deservedly.
Your very strength—that you enjoy talking to both sides, that deep in your heart you see no one as deplorable—will be your weakness. You aren’t enough of a warrior. You’re sweet, you’re weak, you’re half-daffy. You’re meh.
At this point you’re not out of step, you’re out of place.
The press too will have certain biases, and not only because they’re thirty and forty years younger than you and would like to see their careers associated with the rise of someone their age. Their bias is also toward drama, as you well know—toward pathos, and the end of something. They love that almost as much as the beginning of something. They can’t wait to write their Lion in Winter stories. “The Long Goodbye.” “The Last Campaign.” “Biden faltered for just a moment when a white-haired woman put her hand to his face and said, ‘I remember you from ’88, Joe. We all do, and we love you.’ ”
And that is apart from those young reporters who consider themselves culture cops, and who enjoy beating people like you with the nightstick of their wokeness.
Why will it be painful to witness all this? Because it will mark the fall of a political figure who was normal. Who knew there was a left over here and a right over there and a big middle. Who went with the flow of cultural leftism but understood the other side’s reservations and signaled that in some way he had some sympathy for them. Who knew politics wasn’t always about absolutes.
This in contrast to the up-and-coming manipulators for whom it is second nature to feign warmth and outreach, but whose every hug is backed by the sharp and crooked finger of accusation. Their engine is resentment, their fuel is unearned self-esteem, their secret is lust for power.
You probably think they’re just girls who need a hug. But their place is not your place.
It would be one thing if you wanted to enter the race to persuade the party on the merits of more-centrist approaches and working with the other side. But is that your intention? You’ve been apologizing for calling Mike Pence decent, and groveling over your “white man’s culture.” If you go with that flow, it will wash you away.
It is hard for the political personality to say no—to more fame, more power, more love. To the history books. It is hard for a man who’s always seen a president when he looked in the mirror to admit he’s an almost-president. It’s hard to get out of the habit of importance.
But you’ll never be unimportant. You’ll be Joe Biden, a liberal lion of the U.S. Senate at the turn of century. A man with a heart, unhated in an age of hate.
That’s not nothing, that’s a lot.
So don’t do it. Wisdom here dictates an Irish goodbye—a quiet departure, out the back door with a wave and a tip of the hat to whoever might be watching.
IMAGINE A SANE DONALD TRUMP
October 20, 2016
Look, he’s a nut and you know he’s a nut. I go to battleground states and talk to anyone, everyone. They all know Donald Trump’s a nut. Some will vote for him anyway. Many are in madman-versus-criminal mode, living with (or making) their final decision. They got the blues. Everyone does. They’re worried about the whole edifice: If this is where we are, where are we going?
I get the Reagan fantasy—big guy with a nonstandard résumé comes in from the outside, cleans out the stables, saves the day. But it’s a fantasy and does not apply to this moment. I get the Jacksonian fantasy—crude, rude populist comes in from the hinterlands and upends a decadent establishment to the huzzahs of normal people with mud on their boots. But it’s a fantasy, and doesn’t apply.
Because Trump is not a grizzled general who bears on his face the scars of a British sword, and not a shining citizen-patriot. He’s a screwball. Do you need examples? You do not, because you’re already thinking of them. For a year you’ve been observing the TV funhouse that is his brain.
I offer an observation from Newt Gingrich, Trump friend and supporter, on David Drucker’s Washington Examiner podcast. Mr. Gingrich lauded Mr. Trump because he “thinks big” and is a transformational character. But he spoke too of Trump’s essential nature. The GOP nominee “reacts very intensely, almost uncontrollably” to “anything which attacks his own sense of integrity or his own sense of respectability.” “There’s…a part of his personality that sometimes gets involved in petty things that make no sense.” He found it “frankly pathetic” that Mr. Trump got mad because Paul Ryan didn’t call to congratulate him after the second debate.
Mr. Gingrich said he hopes this will change.
But people don’t change the fundamentals of their nature at age seventy.
Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.
The party’s leaders accept more or less open borders and like big trade deals. Half the base does not! It is longtime GOP doctrine to cut entitlement spending. Half the base doesn’t want to, not right now! Republican leaders have what might be called assertive foreign-policy impulses. When Mr. Trump insulted George W. Bush and nation-building and said he’d opposed the Iraq invasion, the crowds, taking him at his word, cheered. He was, as they say, declaring that he didn’t want to invade the world and invite the world. Not only did half the base cheer him, at least half the remaining half joined in when the primaries ended.
The Republican Party will now begin the long process of redefining itself, or continue its long national collapse. This is an epochal event. It happened because Donald Trump intuited where things were and are going.
Since I am more in accord with Mr. Trump’s stands than not, I am particularly sorry that as an individual human being he’s a nut.
Which gives rise to a question, for me a poignant one.
What if there had been a Sane Donald Trump?
Oh my God, Sane Trump would have won in a landslide.
Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.
Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious, and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”
Sane Donald Trump would have given an anxious country more ease, not more anxiety. He would have demonstrated that he can govern himself. He would have suggested through his actions, while still being entertaining, funny, and outsize, that yes, he understands the stakes, and yes, since America is always claiming to be the leader of the world—We are No. 1!—a certain attendant gravity is required of one who’d be its leader.
Sane Donald Trump would have explained his immigration proposals with a kind of loving logic—we must secure our borders for a host of serious reasons, and here they are. But we are grateful for our legal immigrants, and by the way, if you want to hear real love for America, then go talk to them, for they experience more freshly than we what a wonderful place this is. In time, after we’ve fully secured our borders and the air of emergency is gone, we will turn to regularizing the situation of everyone here, because Americans are not only kindly, they’re practical, and want everyone paying taxes.
Sane Donald Trump would have spoken at great and compelling length of how the huge, complicated trade agreements created the past quarter-century can be improved upon with an eye to helping the American worker. Ideology, he might say, is the pleasant diversion of the unworried, but a nation that no longer knows how to make steel cannot be a great nation. And we are a great nation.
Sane Donald Trump would have argued that controlling entitlement spending is a necessary thing but not, in fact, this moment’s priority. People have been battered since the crash, in many ways, and nothing feels stable now. Beyond that no one right now trusts Washington to be fair and wise in these matters. Confidence-building measures are necessary. Let’s take on the smaller task of turning around Veterans Affairs and see if we can’t make that work.
Sane Donald Trump would have known of America’s hidden fractures, and would have insisted that a healthy moderate-populist movement cannot begin as or devolve into a nationalist, identity-politics movement. Those who look down on other groups, races, or religions can start their own party. He, the famous brander, would even offer them a name: the Idiot Party.
Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is November 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.
Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.
CHAPTER 6
WATCH OUT
The things that keep a lot of us up at night.
WHAT I WISH OPPENHEIMER HAD SAID
July 27, 2023
Oppenheimer is a serious movie, which comes as a relief—that such a film can still be made and become, as this one has, a blockbuster. It carries within it a compliment, that the audience is able to absorb intellectually demanding material. It assumes you know who Niels Bohr is. It contains a great on-the-edge-of-your-seat sequence on the first use of the atomic bomb, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945. The acting is great, no one’s a dud, and the look and sound are spectacular. It is a film of huge ambition.
But—you saw the “but” coming—it isn’t the movie my mind was hoping for. In my view, which I admit may be peculiar to me, it missed the essence of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s tragedy. That tragedy isn’t what is considered his persecution during the McCarthy era, after he had become famous as the father of the bomb. It was more personal. It was that Oppenheimer, a brilliant man, probably a genius, wanted to be great, and won his greatness at what he fully understood to be a grave cost to the world.
He overrode his qualms and doubts to develop the most lethal weapon in human history, arguing to himself and others that only a weapon so uniquely devastating would convince Japan it had lost the war, thus forestalling an invasion that would yield, by one estimation of the time, one million casualties, of which, obviously, not all would be American. The Japanese would have fought hand-to-hand on the streets and beaches. They would only surrender if Emperor Hirohito told them to do so.
But driving Oppenheimer as I have long read him, and perhaps primarily driving him, is that he wanted to be a great man like his contemporary, the hero of science, Albert Einstein. History provided Oppenheimer with both opportunity and rationale. He would split the atom, create the bomb, bring the peace. But the bomb was—is—a moral horror. So to be great, to achieve his destiny, he had to do something terrible.
He did. That was his tragedy. And, forgive me, a lifetime wandering around quoting “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” wouldn’t assuage the resulting unease.
My deeper criticism of the film is that I expected more of Oppenheimer’s reaction to what happened after the bomb was dropped. Before Hiroshima was bombed, at 8:15 a.m. local time on August 6, 1945, everything was theory—mathematical formulae, observed blast radius, calculations, and estimates. Only afterward would it be known what actually happened. I expected more of Oppenheimer’s absorbing of the facts of his work, more on how his reflections turned and developed.
He would have absorbed this information indelibly through the work of John Hersey. After the bomb was dropped, magazines and newspapers were consumed with stories of what it meant for the war, what a scientific breakthrough it represented, what it portended for the future. In May 1946 Hersey, a thirty-one-year-old journalist, already battle-scarred—he’d been commended for helping evacuate U.S. military personnel from Guadalcanal—was less drawn to the abstract than the particular, to what actually happened in Hiroshima, to its people and infrastructure, when the bomb came. He went there for The New Yorker, stayed a month, and did his own reporting, independently and with little assistance. He wove a narrative around the first- person testimony of six survivors. In August 1946, the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the magazine published Hersey’s work, breaking tradition by devoting an entire issue to it so no one would miss any part.
It was a masterpiece. It has been called the most important piece of journalism in the twentieth century. For the first time people really learned what happened in Hiroshima, and it caused a sensation. You couldn’t hide from yourself, after reading that piece or later the book that came of it, the knowledge of what the A-bomb did. And knowing couldn’t help but affect your thinking.
The writing was straight, factual, matter-of-fact. His British publisher later said Hersey didn’t want to “pile on the agony.” But his plain, simple words said everything: “There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky…. It seemed a sheet of sun.” There was no roar; “almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb.” But they heard it twenty miles away. Clouds of dust turned the morning into twilight. In gardens, pumpkins roasted on the vine. People ran to the city’s rivers. “Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat on to the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached one and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.”
