A Certain Idea of America, page 5
And then of course the insurrection of January 6, the prime example of this new, strange era.
Connected are Ginni Thomas’s texts to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days after the 2020 election. They capture two characteristics of radicals on both sides, now and maybe forever. The first is that they have extreme respect for their own emotions: If they feel it, it’s true. The other is that they tend to be stupid, in the sense of having little or no historical knowledge or the sense of proportion such knowledge brings.
The texts were revealed last week by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS News, and you have seen them. In the days after the election, Mrs. Thomas warned Mr. Meadows of “the greatest Heist of our History.” There’s proof: “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states.” There will be justice: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators…are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” “Do not concede,” she warned him. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.”
This is a person who lives in the heart of the Washington establishment and had no proof for any of the wild things she was saying. But when you’re a conspiracist, every way you look there’s a grassy knoll. Naturally the chief of staff wrote back. “This is a fight of good versus evil.” “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.” He appears to be patronizing her and speaking in a way thoroughly in line with Sinclair Lewis and the great American tradition of hucksters wrapping their con in the language of Christian faith.
But it’s worth noting the focus of their obsession, the continued belief in some quarters that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election. Joe Biden won not closely but by seven million votes, and every challenge was thrown out of court, including by Trump-appointed judges.
Here we should remember the man who may well have had a presidential election stolen from him, but who ended a stop-the-steal movement before it could take off. It was 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon versus Senator John F. Kennedy. It was the closest popular vote in the twentieth century, with Kennedy receiving 34.2 million votes and Nixon 34.1 million, a margin of barely one-sixth of a percentage point. Widespread fraud was suspected in Illinois and Texas, which had enough electoral votes to be decisive.
Nixon’s biographers haven’t usually agreed with his political views—they’ve mostly been fascinated liberals—but virtually all speak with respect of this chapter in his life. The best treatment is in John Farrell’s very fine Richard Nixon: The Life. “In Chicago, election fraud was a work of art,” Mr. Farrell writes. On that nail-biting election night Mayor Richard J. Daley called Kennedy in Hyannisport and said, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.”
As for Texas, everyone knew what Robert Caro later established, that Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee, had the state wired, with credible charges of ballot-box fraud going back to 1948.
Theodore White, the journalist who helped invent the mythos around JFK, wrote in 1975 that no one will ever know who won in 1960, but, in Illinois and Texas, Democratic “vote-stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale.”
Nixon believed the election was stolen. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen wanted him to challenge the results. Nixon thought it could take months and might not succeed, but his thoughts went deeper than that. In the Cold War, the nuclear age, unity at home and abroad was needed. Young democracies looked up to us. If they thought our elections could be stolen it would hurt the world’s morale.
The New York Herald Tribune had launched an investigative series, but Nixon talked the reporter into stopping it: “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”
In Evan Thomas’s brisk Being Nixon: A Man Divided, he reports that the GOP wise man Bryce Harlow urged Nixon to challenge, but Nixon said no: “It’d tear the country to pieces. You can’t do that.”
So he didn’t. On January 6, 1961, Nixon presided over the formal certification of his opponent’s election. “This is the first time in one hundred years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent,” he said. “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”
For once his colleagues gave that complicated man his due, with a standing ovation that wouldn’t stop until Nixon took a second bow.
History went on and took its turns. Nixon came back and won the presidency in 1968. But when you read all this you wonder, Why can’t self-professed patriots love America like that now—maturely, protectively? And how important it is to know something of history, to know it so well you can almost trust it. Instead of just feeling what you feel and making a hash of things.
ON THE DEATH OF A QUEEN
September 8, 2022
“For the British people, Victoria was more than an individual, more even than the queen,” Robert K. Massie wrote in Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. “She was—and had been as long as most of them could remember—a part of the fabric of their lives. She embodied history, tradition, government, and the structure and morality of their society. They trusted her to remain there, always to do her duty, always to give order to their lives. She did not disappoint them. In return, they gave her their allegiance, their devotion—and their esteem.”
We all knew it was coming yet it feels like a blow. A mighty presence has passed, one who meant more to us perhaps than we’d noticed.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth II surpassed Victoria’s (1837–1901) in September 2015. For the vast majority of her people, she was the only monarch they had ever known. Her life spanned almost a century, through wars, through empire and its decline, through every cultural and political shift. And in all that time she was a symbol of continuity, stability, and soundness.
There will be, mostly but not only in Britain, a surge of sentiment as if a big page has been turned and we very much don’t want it to turn—we don’t want to get to the end of that book, don’t want to close it.
Her virtues were old-school virtues.
She accepted her life with grace. When she became queen at twenty-five she recognized it as her duty and destiny. She was a member of a particular family and the heir to a particular throne. She had a duty to the people of her country and would sacrifice a great deal—privacy, leisure, some faint sense of control of one’s life—to meet it. She represented the permanent over the merely prevalent.
Sally Bedell Smith, in her great biography Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, quoted the British journalist Rebecca West, who observed that the monarch is “the emblem of the state, the symbol of our national life, the guardian of our self-respect.” But it was more than that too; you didn’t have to be English to appreciate what she was doing.
She did what she said she’d do. After her father’s death, she met with the leaders of Britain at St. James’s Palace. In a clear voice she declared, “By the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty…. I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples…. I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” She did, and everyone watching over the years could see it.
She gave it everything she had. She was conscientious, serious-minded, responsible. Every day but Christmas and Easter Sunday and wherever she was, she directed her energies to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers, Foreign Office cables, budget documents, intelligence reports. She was deskbound as long as needed, often working into the evening. After that the private audiences, public events, consultations. She didn’t flag.
It wasn’t about her. The important thing was the institution, the monarchy, and its responsibility to its subjects. She wanted to be a queen the country adhered to and was proud of, so she maintained dignity. She knew her role. She didn’t show moods or take sides, never tried to win the crowd, didn’t attempt to establish a reputation for wit or good nature. She was in her public dealings placid, as a great nation’s queen would be. “She has been, as someone once said, the light above politics,” Ms. Smith said Thursday on CNN. “Even when I’d watch her at royal events she would hesitate to clap or smile because she didn’t want to show favoritism. She has wanted to be a force for everybody and a glue for the nation, and that sort of exterior has been important.”
She was a woman of faith. At her 1953 coronation in Westminster Abbey, the most important moment happened outside of television range. It was when the archbishop of Canterbury poured holy oil and anointed the new queen, “making a sign of the cross on the palms of each of her hands, her forehead, and exposed upper chest,” Ms. Smith wrote. (Victoria hadn’t allowed her archbishop to touch her chest.) Elizabeth felt that the anointing “sanctified her before God to serve her people.” Her friends said it was the anointing, not the crowning, that made her queen.
She understood her role. She was the longest reigning monarch in British history, a continuous thread to the past. Decades passed but the thread remained and never broke, which suggested things would hold together, and everything in the end would be all right. She understood that in the tumultuous twentieth century the idea of continuity itself was a gift to her country. She had to be reliable, and was.
Because of all this, when she entered the room, Britain entered the room. Majesty entered, something old and hallowed and rich in meaning, something going back to tribes that painted themselves blue and forward to the Magna Carta. It was mysterious, but I saw it once: She entered a hall full of voices and suddenly, silence. It was only a few years ago, but I realized that in a time when personal stature is mindlessly thrown off or meanly taken, hers had only increased.
There is something so touching in the way she had begun in the past few years to laugh and smile so often, to show her joy, her simple pleasure in being there. You saw it in pictures taken this week, which showed her seeing off an old prime minister and seeing in a new one, wearing a plaid skirt and long gray cardigan, holding her cane and laughing merrily. I think of how moved I was by the clip a few months ago of the queen and Paddington Bear, in which she divulged what she kept in her purse—a marmalade sandwich. The royal band outside struck up Freddie Mercury, and she kept time with a spoon on her teacup. I didn’t know when I saw it why it moved me so much, and realized: because my mind was saying, Don’t go old friend, we’ll miss you.
The great of Britain have been talking for years about how sad it will be when she departs. They’re about to be taken aback by how deep and pervasive the mourning is. Britain is braced for hard times; people won’t easily lose such a figure of stability and continuity. “King Charles” will sound strange on the tongue.
And they loved her.
Now I am imagining the royal funeral, the procession, the carriages of state going slowly down the Mall, the deep crowds on each side. The old will come in their chairs and the crowd will kindly put them in front, the best view, to wave goodbye to their friend, with whom they had experienced such history together.
Requiescat in pace, Elizabeth Regina.
A GREAT MAN GOT ARRESTED AS PRESIDENT
April 6, 2023
We need a palate cleanser. It is Easter (whose theme is resurrection and salvation), Passover (freedom and remembering), and Ramadan (devotion). So let us go back to affectionate days and men of stature.
It has been noted that the first and only previous American president to be arrested was Ulysses S. Grant. He was arrested in 1872, while president, for “fast driving” his two-horse carriage not far from the White House. The arresting officer, William West, was a Union Army veteran, a black man a few years on the police force. There had been complaints men were speeding their horses in the “aristocratic” part of town. One day Officer West stopped the president, whom he recognized, and gave him a warning. “Your fast driving, sir…is endangering the lives of the people who have to cross the street.” The president apologized.
But the next night, patrolling at Thirteenth and M Streets, West saw a slew of carriages barreling down the street at high speed, with the president in the lead.
West held up his club. Grant got control of his horses and asked, abashed, if he’d been speeding. In 1908, when the story broke in Washington’s Sunday Star, West said Grant had the look of a schoolboy caught in a guilty act. He reminded Grant of his promise to stop speeding. West told Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
Grant did something he hadn’t done much, which was surrender. He invited West into his carriage and drove to the station house. On the way they talked about the war. West had been at the evacuation of Richmond. Grant said he admired a man who does his duty. At the station house Grant put up twenty dollars and stayed long enough to be amused by friends, also hauled in, who were protesting their arrests. Days later word reached him that West’s job might be in danger. Grant dispatched a quick message to the chief of police, complimenting West on his fearlessness and making clear he hoped no harm would come to him. None did.
In coming years they’d greet each other on the street, talk about horses. West served another twenty-five years in the department, distinguishing himself in detective work. He didn’t tell the story of arresting the president until he’d retired. The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed the account a century later.
Last year at this time we wrote about Grant, recounting his role in the most history-drenched Holy Week in U.S. history, the seven days in 1865 that spanned the end of the Civil War, the stillness at Appomattox, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
More can be said. A thing that always fascinates is a quality Grant had that left close observers balancing in their minds two different and opposite thoughts. One: There is nothing special in this plain, quiet, undistinguished fellow. The other: He is marked by destiny; something within him encompasses the epic working out of fate, even of nations.
The obscure former soldier and unsuccessful farmer would become, over two or three years, the only indispensable man in the Union after Lincoln. Then, all worlds conquered, he would lose everything in a cascade of misfortunes that yielded…a final and transcendent human triumph.
That famous story, from Ron Chernow’s still-splendid Grant:
On Christmas Eve in 1883, Grant, hale and prosperous at sixty-one, was dropped off at his Manhattan town house. Pivoting to give the driver a holiday tip, he slipped on the ice, fracturing his hip. Pleurisy followed; arthritis “crept up his legs”; he was bedridden and then had trouble walking. Grant had earlier formed a business partnership with the “Young Napoleon of Finance,” twenty-nine-year-old Ferdinand Ward, a financial genius who was, alas, the Sam Bankman-Fried of his day. His profits were revealed as nonexistent; in the spring of 1884 Grant found out he was ruined, broke, his public reputation severely damaged. A few months later—“When sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions”—he bit into a piece of peach and cried aloud in pain, thinking he’d swallowed a wasp. The feeling of fire in his throat wouldn’t go away, and months later he was told it was cancer.
Now he summoned everything he had to do that he’d long refused to do, write his memoirs. He did it for money, so his wife and family would be secure.
He wrote sitting up in a chair, his legs on a facing chair, with a wool cap on his head, a shawl at his shoulders, “a muffler around his neck concealing a tumor the size of a baseball.” After he ate or drank he required opiates, but opiates clouded his mind so he wrote long days without eating or drinking. Yet the words flowed, “showing how much thought and pent-up feeling lay beneath his tightly buttoned façade.” He wrote 275,000 words of “superb prose” in less than a year.
The first sentence—“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral”—has the compressed beauty of his battlefield dispatches. He died on July 23, 1885, three days after he finished the manuscript. The unexpected masterpiece became a publishing phenomenon.
Mark Twain, who published it, watched Grant’s funeral procession for five hours from the windows of his office on Union Square. Afterward he joined William Tecumseh Sherman for drinks and cigars at the Lotos Club. They talked about the marvel and mystery of Grant’s personality. Sherman thought his close friend had been a mystery even to himself. He had no peer as a military genius—“Never anything like it before”—but he wasn’t steeped in the literature of war, of strategy and grand tactics. He was nothing like the purified, prissy Grant emerging in the newspapers. “The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories!” He roared at off-color tales. “Grant,” said Sherman, “was no namby pamby fool; he was a MAN—all over—rounded & complete.”
