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      In Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial Spouse

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhite House MemoIn Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial SpouseA new book reveals how the former first lady not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade Lyndon B. Johnson to stay in office.Lady Bird Johnson in 1961. The first lady kept a diary, but she ordered that a part of it be kept secret for years after her death.Credit…Associated PressMarch 11, 2021Updated 9:51 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — He had been president for only two years, but that night in fall 1965 he had had enough. Lyndon B. Johnson had spiraled into depression, and from his hospital bed after gallbladder surgery, he talked of throwing it all away and retreating into seclusion back home in Texas.To a visiting Supreme Court justice, he dictated thoughts for a statement announcing he was indefinitely turning over his duties to Vice President Hubert Humphrey while recovering from fatigue. “I want to go to the ranch. I don’t want even Hubert to be able to call me,” he told his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. “They may demand that I resign. They may even want to impeach me.”Eventually, Mrs. Johnson coaxed him through that period of doubt and despair, enabling him to complete the final three years of his term. The episode was hidden from the public, and although Mrs. Johnson documented it in her diary, she ordered the entry kept secret for years after her death. But a new book reveals the full scope of those once-shrouded diaries as never before, shedding fresh light on the former first lady and her partnership with the 36th president.The diaries reveal how central Mrs. Johnson was to her husband’s presidency. She not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade him to stay in office at critical junctures, advised him on how to use the office to achieve their mutual goals, guided him during the most arduous moments and helped chart his decision to give up power years later.While she is remembered largely as a political wife and businesswoman with impeccable manners, an easy laugh, a soft Texas lilt and a quintessentially first-lady-like White House portfolio promoting “beautification” efforts, the diaries make clear that Mrs. Johnson behind the scenes was also a canny political operator and shrewd judge of people.“The pre-existing image is one of two-dimensionality and stiff-upper-lipness and not a hair out of place,” said Julia Sweig, who spent five years researching the diaries for the biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” set to be published on Tuesday. “But when you get into this material, you see what a rounded, multidimensional human being she is.”Mrs. Johnson began her diary shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy vaulted her husband to the presidency in November 1963, and she dutifully kept it up through the end of their time in the White House in January 1969. She released carefully edited excerpts in a 1970 book titled “A White House Diary,” but some portions remained sealed until long after her death in 2007 at age 94.Ms. Sweig, a longtime Washington scholar, learned about the diaries from a friend and became captivated when she visited the Johnson presidential museum in Austin, Texas, and stepped into an exhibit that featured Mrs. Johnson’s voice from the taped diaries describing the day of the Kennedy assassination. The first lady’s voice was activated by a motion detector, so Ms. Sweig repeatedly stepped in and out of the museum room to hear the diary entry over and over.She then embarked on a project examining all 123 hours of tapes and transcripts, the last of which were not released until 2017, combined with other research to produce the biography and an accompanying eight-part podcast, “In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson,” produced by ABC News, that features Mrs. Johnson’s voice narrating her time in the White House. (The fourth episode airs on Monday.)“It’s very unusual to find such an unexcavated and contemporary record of such a recent period of history that we thought we knew and understood about a presidency that we thought we knew and understood,” Ms. Sweig said.President Lyndon B. Johnson with Mrs. Johnson in 1963. She advised her husband through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War.Credit…Associated PressJohnson scholars said Ms. Sweig’s examination of the diaries flesh out the popular understanding of that era. “She fills out this picture now that we have of the Johnson presidency,” said the historian Robert Dallek, who spent 14 years researching two books on Lyndon Johnson.Born Claudia Alta Taylor in a small East Texas town, Mrs. Johnson was a force in her husband’s political career from Congress to the White House. She advised him through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War, and she helped figure out how to handle the arrest of a close aide and used her beautification program to promote an environmental and social justice agenda.Perhaps most consequentially, she steered her husband through his inner turmoil. As early as May 1964, six months after taking office, he contemplated his departure by not running for election in his own right that fall. Mrs. Johnson drew up a seven-page strategy memo as well as a draft letter forgoing election to show him what it would look like. But she told her diary, “I hope he won’t use it,” and encouraged him to stay the course, which he did.At the same time, her strategy memo presciently outlined his eventual course, suggesting he run for election but serve just one full term, then announce in March 1968 that he would not run again.There were moments when he almost upended the plan, as in October 1965, after his gallbladder surgery. There was no particular precipitating event, and he was arguably at the height of his presidency, having passed major civil rights legislation while not yet mired in the worst of the Vietnam War. Indeed, he signed 13 domestic policy bills from his bed during a two-week convalescence at Bethesda Naval Hospital.Yet for whatever reason, he became overwhelmed with the stress of the job one night as Abe Fortas, the longtime ally he had just appointed to the Supreme Court, sat at his bedside. The beleaguered president told his wife and the justice that he could handle “not one more piece of paper, not one more problem,” and he dictated thoughts about how he could escape the burdens of the presidency to Fortas, who wrote them out longhand.“He was like a man on whom an avalanche had suddenly fallen,” Mrs. Johnson recorded. She knew his drastic mood swings better than anyone but had missed this one coming. “So here is the black beast of depression back in our lives,” she told her diary in a section she marked “close for 10 years, and review then.”The diary entry reinforced how important she was to keeping her husband centered. “L.B.J. often let his demons roam with her, knowing that she would quietly ward them off by appealing to his better angels,” said Mark K. Updegrove, the president of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and the author of “Indomitable Will” about the Johnson presidency. “He used her not only as a sounding board but revealed his subconscious to her, including expressing his darkest thoughts that he was trying to work through. She helped to work them out — or exorcise them.”Mrs. Johnson helped exorcise them that fall, but by 1968, she, too, thought it might be time for him to move on. He had a secret ending drafted for his State of the Union address in January announcing that he would not run for re-election, but he was uncertain whether he would deliver it. Before he left for the Capitol, Mrs. Johnson noticed that he had left the secret draft behind, so she rushed over to tuck it in his suit pocket.She then watched from the House gallery as he delivered his speech, not knowing herself whether he would use the secret ending or not. He did not. But then, when it came time for an address to the nation announcing a de-escalation in bombing North Vietnam, he finally issued the surprise declaration. That was in March 1968 — exactly according to the timetable Mrs. Johnson had outlined four years earlier.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Book Review: ‘Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The TimesA Closely Reported Look at Joe Biden’s ‘Lucky’ Path to the White HouseMarch 2, 2021, 11:40 a.m. ETCredit….AmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.About midway through “Lucky,” the journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes describe the concerns that some Democrats had last summer about Joe Biden, by then the party’s presidential nominee: How could they hope to win with “an agenda and a person so bland it made cardboard taste flavorful”?Considering that this agenda and person constitute a driving narrative force in “Lucky,” the line reads like a coded admission that the authors — tasked with parsing the flavor of cardboard over the course of more than 400 pages — had their work cut out for them.Allen and Parnes have published two previous books, both of them about Hillary Clinton, including the best-selling “Shattered,” which recounted how the Clinton campaign bungled what should have been a winnable election against Donald Trump in 2016 by succumbing to incompetence and infighting.Jonathan AllenCredit…Stuart Hovell“Shattered” arrived in the spring of 2017, when bewildered Democrats were still asking what happened. “Lucky” arrives at a completely different moment. A string of tell-alls about Trump’s White House have recounted a level of backbiting and chaos that made the inner workings of the Clinton campaign look like a Swiss timepiece by comparison. Within the last year alone, a pandemic has killed more than 500,000 Americans and the White House demanded crackdowns on protests against police brutality. Less than two months have passed since Trump supporters invaded the Capitol. I’m guessing that a number of readers felt so inundated by the unrelenting news cycle of the Trump era that their receptors for campaign-trail intrigues have been worn down to calloused nubs.It’s understandable that Allen and Parnes would do everything they could to amp up the drama — not an easy feat, given the cardboard. With their new book, they promise to explain “how Joe Biden barely won the presidency.” Biden’s margin of victory — 7 million votes, or 4.5 percent — was considerable by modern American standards. But the quirks of the American system, including the gauntlet of the primaries and the peculiarities of the Electoral College, meant that there were a number of moments when Biden’s chances were nearly sunk — moments that “Lucky” recounts in full.The book reminds us that back in April 2019, when Biden announced he was running, he wasn’t an obvious favorite in a crowded field of Democratic aspirants. (“Lucky” reports that Clinton was so unimpressed with everyone’s prospects that she briefly considered running … again.) Biden had already sought and failed to secure the nomination twice, in 1988 and 2008. He was 76 years old — not even a boomer like Trump, previously the oldest president sworn into a first term, but a member of the Silent Generation. Biden had always rambled and repeated himself, and during the early days of his campaign he was rambling and repeating himself more than ever.Although he brandished his record as a consensus-builder in the Senate, he had a habit of hurling insults at potential voters. At one town hall, as if he were intent on reminding the audience of both his age and his temper, Biden called a young woman “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”But Joe Biden was always a favorite of Joe Biden. One of the themes in this book is how unwaveringly confident he was in his chances — “a great strength and a weakness that could leave him sounding a little self-delusional,” Allen and Parnes write. (Barack Obama, in his recent memoir, describes him as someone who “wasn’t always self-aware.”) Biden believed he could win even during the dark days of the early Democratic primaries more than a year ago, when his campaign was running out of money and he placed abysmally in Iowa and New Hampshire before coming in a distant second to Bernie Sanders in Nevada.Amie ParnesCredit…Chip SomodevillaSure, Biden realized that some progressive voters might take issue with parts of his long Senate record, including his adamant opposition to busing in the 1970s, his treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings and his authorship of the 1994 crime bill. But Biden was banking on his likability, Allen and Parnes say. That, and the hunch that an American populace exhausted by an erratic Trump just wanted someone experienced, steady and familiar at the wheel.He also benefited from a Democratic establishment that was so averse to Sanders that it closed ranks around Biden as other centrist contenders — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar — dropped out of the race. Biden, with his “bland message and blank agenda,” was “not what most Democratic voters had envisioned as a Trumpslayer,” Allen and Parnes write. But a hard-won endorsement from Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a central figure in the Congressional Black Caucus, helped turn Biden’s fortunes around. “Lucky” portrays the Biden campaign as stuck in traffic until Super Tuesday, when it started hitting a string of green lights.This luck persisted through the pandemic, which revealed Biden’s ability to empathize with a grieving public while showcasing President Trump’s determination to do the opposite. As Anita Dunn, an adviser to the Biden campaign, put it: “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him.”It’s a ghoulish sentiment, the kind of candid cynicism that one expects from a political ticktock like this. But it also highlights something else. Amid all the fund-raising, the polling, the minute movements of the horse race enumerated in this book, people were dying. Americans were suffering. California was burning. The world, in other words, was happening — all while enormous political energy and billions of dollars got sucked into the maw of endless campaigning.A future researcher will undoubtedly find it useful to have a page and a half of exacting detail about what everyone was thinking when a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head during the vice-presidential debate, or to learn how Biden’s people insisted on watering down one of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s jokes during the Democratic convention. Given how the American political system currently works, the granular politicking ably recounted in “Lucky” is a necessity — but what becomes unintentionally clear is how wasteful so much of it is.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionShould Black Northerners Move Back to the South?Campaigning in GeorgiaCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.March 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTHE DEVIL YOU KNOWA Black Power ManifestoBy Charles M. BlowLeading up to the 2020 presidential election, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown and other grass-roots activists successfully registered an unprecedented number of Black voters in Georgia who had been stymied in the past by voter-suppression tactics. Their work brought key victories to Democratic candidates in the state and demonstrated the political power of Southern Black women.Georgia’s recent presidential and Senate elections are relevant to the argument of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” There are two Black Americas, he says. One is the world of those who remained in the postslavery South. The other is inhabited by those who fled the South for refuge in what he terms “destination cities” across the North and West during the Great Migration. But these cities are now broken, according to Blow, and the Great Migration has been a “stinging failure.” Blow, a son of Louisiana who recently moved back south — to Atlanta — says Black Americans must bridge this divide.In what he believes would be “the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow calls for African-Americans to reverse-migrate south, to collectively dismantle white supremacy by using their ancestral homeland as a political base. He imagines a New South where “our trauma history is not our total history.” That Black people have been returning south for at least the past 40 years, he adds, demonstrates that there is fertile ground for his idea in the region, intellectually and materially.His is a familiar argument, revitalized by the South’s recent political developments. A genesis for Blow’s Black power proposition could have been the Black Belt nation thesis, proposed by Black Communists in the 1920s, or the agenda of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. But Blow instead builds upon the political thought of the freethinking white hippies who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s with the intent of transforming the state’s conservative electoral politics. They succeeded, he says; young Black people today should follow their blueprint.Seeing Georgia flip blue in the 2020 election became Blow’s “proof of concept,” and for him, one thing now seems clear: The path to lasting Black power is through the vote. Forming a “contiguous band” of Black voters across the South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, in particular — would “upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase” Black citizens’ influence in American politics. The weakness in Blow’s plan is that it requires faith in a political system that has consistently failed Black Americans at nearly every turn.For Blow, however, the reality that Black Northerners have no recourse but to leave is a painful truth that crystallized for him one night in 2015 when he learned that his son, a student at Yale, had been stopped at gunpoint by a university police officer. Stories like this fuel the book’s searing account of police violence, systemic racial disparities and social unrest in cities like New York, Minneapolis and Portland. This is where Blow is at his best.As a historian, I wish he had spent more time exploring the nuances of the Black migration framework the book hinges upon. Blow’s claim that the Great Migration “hit the South like a bomb,” causing an intellectual and cultural brain drain that stunted its growth, rings hollow. It obscures the truth that the region was an incubator of radical political activism — often led by its most disenfranchised citizens — during the Great Migration and beyond. The New South to which Blow is now beckoning people to return was created largely by the Black visionaries and community builders who remained in the rural and urban South.A strength of “The Devil You Know” is its affirmation of Black Americans as a formidable political bloc with whom the nation must reckon. The book is a helpful introduction for those seeking to make sense of fractious political debates about race and voting rights in the South, and the broken promises of American democracy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Kamala Harris Rose — and Rose

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Kamala Harris Rose — and RoseKamala Harris, October 2003Credit…Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Feb. 1, 2021, 2:00 p.m. ETKAMALA’S WAYAn American LifeBy Dan MorainThe daughter of a Jamaica-born father and India-born mother who met in the turbulent world of ’60s Bay Area political activism, Kamala Harris has a social justice lineage that runs deep. In her 2020 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech as Joe Biden’s running mate, she proudly recalled having “a stroller’s eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’” Her maternal grandfather served as a prominent senior government official in the tumultuous politics of postcolonial India. Dan Morain, for decades a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, recounts stories like these in “Kamala’s Way,” and his insider’s view provides a revealing portrait of the people and events surrounding Harris’s rise to political stardom. Morain paints Bay Area Democratic politics as a swampy world where schmoozing with potential billionaire funders and sitting on the right boards were essential to climbing the rungs. He details Harris’s liaison with the self-described “Ayatollah of the Assembly” and former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown. Harris dated Brown in 1994 and 1995, splitting with him after his election as mayor. He was 30 years her senior. But the numerous stories about Brown feel misplaced, distracting from what should have been a tighter focus on Harris herself.Harris’s career took off during the 1990s in an era of bipartisan calls for tough-on-crime measures. As the Alameda County deputy district attorney, Harris spent years as a courtroom prosecutor before she was recruited to a supervisory position with the San Francisco district attorney’s office and then the city attorney’s office. She was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and attorney general of California in 2010, a position she held until she was elected senator in 2016.Harris’s long tenure as a prosecutor in California, a harsh, punitive state, has drawn criticism. In her run for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, Harris called for improving conviction rates and prosecuting serious drug cases to clean up the streets. (The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her candidacy under the headline “Harris, for Law and Order.”) But once elected, she took positions that cost her police support and came out strongly in favor of criminal justice reform. Her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” called for education, drug treatment and rehabilitation. As attorney general, she instituted first-in-the-nation programs to bolster police accountability. Undoubtedly, the most consistent through-line in her career is her unfailing championship of victims of sexual abuse, child trafficking and domestic violence.These actions, and Morain’s admiration for Harris’s “skill and charisma, her intelligence and grit, and her willingness to fight hard,” are tempered by Morain’s view that Harris’s ambition and national sights led her to “be both innovative and cautious,” sometimes acting as a trailblazer and other times holding her fire: “She took strong stands or she stood mute on the important criminal justice issues of her day.” Though balancing both sides, he seems to agree with the critics he cites who viewed her as “overly cautious.”Morain paints Harris as a pragmatic, ambitious politician who “took positions when she needed to and when those stands might help her politically,” but who was also “adept at not taking stands when doing so was not politically necessary.” Despite his inclusion of stories that show Harris’s warmth outside the limelight, his biography is not fawning. Nor is it very personal. Morain was not able to interview Harris or her family, but says he relied on “dozens of sources” with “firsthand knowledge.”This book is unlikely to satisfy readers enamored of the nation’s barrier-breaking vice president, who may find Morain’s judgments at times unduly critical, and his use of phrases like “brusque and antagonistic style” and “brash confidence” as distinctly gendered. At the same time, “Kamala’s Way” could appeal to aficionados of California politics who want a better understanding of the high-powered political world where Harris’s national star rose.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Regnery Publishing Picks Up Senator Hawley's Book

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAs Biden’s Inauguration Approaches Pressure Mounts on Some Trump AppointeesRegnery Publishing picks up Senator Hawley’s book after it was dropped by Simon & Schuster.Jan. 18, 2021, 11:47 a.m. ETJan. 18, 2021, 11:47 a.m. ETSenator Josh Hawley of Missouri sitting in the House Chamber before a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesRegnery Publishing, a conservative publishing house, said Monday that it had picked up a book by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, after Simon & Schuster ended its contract to publish it in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.Mr. Hawley had come under criticism for challenging the results of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory and was accused of helping incite the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. His book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” is scheduled to be published this spring, Regnery said.Thomas Spence, the president and publisher of Regnery, said in a statement that the publishing house was proud to stand with Mr. Hawley. “The warning in his book about censorship obviously couldn’t be more urgent,” Mr. Spence said. His company’s statement said that Simon & Schuster had made Mr. Hawley a victim of cancel culture.Most major publishers, including Simon & Schuster, one of the “Big Five” book publishers in the United States, publish books across the political spectrum. But Simon & Schuster said it called off its plan to publish Mr. Hawley’s book after the Capitol attack.“As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat,” Simon & Schuster said in a statement. The company declined to comment on Regnery’s accusations.After his book was dropped, Mr. Hawley described it as “Orwellian.”“Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition,” he wrote in a post.In recent years, Regnery’s best-selling authors have included Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, and Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Mr. Hawley’s book is about technology corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon and their political influence.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics Forever

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics ForeverMartin Luther King Jr. under arrest, Oct. 19, 1960.Credit…Associated PressAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNINE DAYSThe Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 ElectionBy Stephen Kendrick and Paul KendrickThe African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights is replete with dramatic and harrowing stories, many involving intimidation and threats of violence from white supremacist defenders of the status quo. One of the most consequential of these stories is the subject of “Nine Days,” a compelling narrative written by the father-and-son team of Stephen and Paul Kendrick, co-authors of two previous books on race, law and politics.The story begins in mid-October 1960 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration (his first) in a Georgia jail cell and ends three weeks later with John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in the most competitive presidential election of the 20th century. Kennedy’s razor-thin triumph depended on several factors ranging from his youthful charm to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ability to pad the Democratic vote in Chicago. But, as the Kendricks ably demonstrate, one crucial factor in Kennedy’s electoral success was the late surge of Black voters into the Democratic column. In all likelihood, this surge represented the difference between victory and defeat in at least five swing states, including Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, ensuring Kennedy’s comfortable margin (303 to 219) in the Electoral College.This last-minute shift was precipitated by two impulsive phone calls: one from John Kennedy to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern for her jailed husband’s safety; the second from the candidate’s younger brother Robert to Oscar Mitchell, the Georgia judge overseeing King’s incarceration. Arrested on two minor charges — participating in a student-led sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta and driving with an Alabama license after changing his residency to Georgia — King was thought to be in grave danger after a manacled, late-night transfer from an Atlanta jail to a remote rural facility in Klan-infested DeKalb County, and soon thereafter to the state’s notorious maximum-security prison in Reidsville.Coretta King, panic-stricken that her husband might be murdered or even lynched, contacted Harris Wofford, a friend and longtime civil rights advocate working on Kennedy’s campaign. Along with Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and the Black journalist Louis Martin, Wofford was part of a campaign initiative charged with expanding the Black vote for Kennedy by offsetting the senator’s mediocre record on civil rights — somehow without alienating the white South.On Oct. 26, after consulting with Wofford, Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King. The conversation was brief, but the message was powerful: “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.” When Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager, learned what had happened, he was furious, fearing this was a liberal stunt that would destroy his brother’s chance of winning the South. But after cooling down and realizing that the die was cast, he called Judge Mitchell to plead for King’s release on bail.Mitchell agreed, King was soon released and on the last Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign blanketed the nation’s Black churches with a flier later known as the Blue Bomb. The choice was clear, the bright blue flier insisted: “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.No brief review can do full justice to the Kendricks’ masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 “October Surprise” that may have altered the course of modern American political history. Suffice it to say that any reader who navigates the many twists and turns and surprises in this complex tale will come away recognizing the power of historical contingency.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Book Review: ‘Saving Justice,’ by James Comey

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sU.S. Attorney James Comey in his office, December 2002.Credit…Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 10, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETSAVING JUSTICETruth, Transparency, and TrustBy James ComeyIn his second debate against Joe Biden last October, Donald Trump inadvertently stated his philosophy of life. The issue was refugees. He said that “low I.Q.” immigrants were the only ones who abided by the law and showed up for their refugee status hearings. A week or so later, The Washington Post reported a similar statement Trump made when he admitted to stiffing his creditors on a Chicago high-rise. He said the chicanery made him “a smart guy, rather than a bad guy.”A smart guy, according to Trump, is someone who is wise enough to cheat. Stupid people abide by the law and attend their refugee status hearings; smart ones abscond. Stupid people pay their debts; smart ones stiff their lenders and dare them to sue. Stupid people believe their elected officials; smart people know the game is rigged. The most distressing aspect of Trump’s enduring appeal, even in defeat, is how many Americans seem to agree with him.The former F.B.I. director James Comey is appalled. In his second attempt at a memoir, “Saving Justice,” there is a story about a small-time drug dealer named Vinnie who is placed in the federal witness protection program. Vinnie begins his new life, falls in love and gets married. The trouble is, Vinnie also was married in his old life. He now has two wives, which makes him a bigamist, which is a crime. “The Department of Justice has an obligation to tell defendants and their lawyers bad stuff about the government’s witnesses,” Comey writes. This is true, even if the “bad stuff” has nothing to do with the facts of the case — Vinnie’s testimony can convict a major drug dealer — and even if the revelation might ruin Vinnie’s new happiness, since Wife No. 2 doesn’t know about Wife No. 1. “I felt sorry for Vinnie in that moment,” Comey concludes. “But the truth was more important than his pain.” We never learn the fate of Vinnie’s marriages or the case in question — he is, after all, in the witness protection program — but Comey hammers the larger point: “The Department of Justice could not accept anything short of the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”Comey’s view of justice — both the concept and the department — is ecclesiastical. U.S. attorneys are members of a sacred order. They make an unequivocal vow to tell the truth, and they do so with a certain style: “They were almost always younger than the other lawyers and stood straighter, buttoned their jackets more quickly, answered more directly, met deadlines and admitted what they didn’t know.”In other words, they are the precise opposite of Donald Trump, who demanded “loyalty” rather than “honesty” from Comey, and fired him as director of the F.B.I. “Saving Justice” is a slight and repetitive book, but not an insignificant one. Comey revealed the crucial moments of his confrontation with the president in his 2018 memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.” They are rehashed here, but within the context of a larger theme: the national descent from strict, fact-based truth into a feckless mirage of “truthiness,” to use Stephen Colbert’s brilliant formulation. Can an institution religiously devoted to the truth, like the Justice Department, survive in a democracy where vast numbers of people believe that the 2020 election was a fraud?Comey is a curious figure. He is smart, admirable, hard-working — and yet slightly smarmy in his rectitude. He begins each chapter with a quote from sources ranging from Virginia Woolf to Malcolm X to the inevitable Dalai Lama. He tries to leaven his supreme pontification with stories of his own flaws, mixed emotions and humility. His height — 6-foot-8 — makes him testy in cramped spaces. His government salary makes it hard for him and his wife to raise five children. Annoyed, he throws his daughter’s obnoxious talking doll out the window of his automobile (of course, he drives back to retrieve it). His pursuit of transparency is rigorous to the point of myopia.But, of course, he is right: You can’t have a working democracy without an agreed-upon standard of truth. You need a “reservoir of trust” in our institutions if the government’s truth-work is to proceed. Conspiracy theories about the Deep State are debilitating. The Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence community have to be perceived as honest to a fault — even about their own faults.Comey is surprisingly tough on Robert Mueller. He believes Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is devastating, but too complicated for mass consumption. Attorney General William P. Barr spins up a dust storm of inaccuracies while Mueller “chose to submit his unreadable — and unread — report and then go away without a sound,” Comey writes. “He could have found a way to speak to the American people in their language. … Department policy and tradition gave him plenty of flexibility to speak in the public interest. He chose not to, and, in the end, the only voices most Americans heard were lying to them. No truth, no transparency, and Justice paid the price in lost trust.”He should talk. It was Comey’s epic mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email case in 2016 that, arguably, gave Donald Trump the presidency. Comey defends his Clinton actions in both memoirs. He admits only to sins of honesty. The public was clamoring for a judgment. And the F.B.I.’s conclusion, after overwhelming work on the case, was that Clinton had been sloppy but not venal. “If we couldn’t prove bad intent, there was no prosecutable case,” he writes. Comey chose to announce this dramatically, in public, but not without a bone to his fellow Republicans: Clinton had been “extremely careless,” Comey said. He stewed about the adverb, which turned his report into an op-ed. And then, on the brink of the election, he reopened the case. A computer containing more Clinton emails was found in the possession of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose wife, Huma Abedin, worked for Clinton. Now, if there ever was a time for transparency, this was it. Comey could have said: “Look, we found no evidence of criminality in the Clinton case, and I would be very surprised — given the nature of the thousands of emails we’ve read — if this new batch proves otherwise. But we’ve got to look at them, and so we will.” Instead, he sent a damning letter to Congress, announcing that the investigation had been reopened. As Comey might say: No context, no transparency.In fairness, there was probably nothing that Comey could say about the Clinton case that would have stanched the “lock her up” conspiracy-mongering. His battle, and Mueller’s, is against a powerful sludge-tide of cynicism that has been flowing, especially in the media, for 50 years — and, for the past four years, from the White House itself. All politicians are crooked, aren’t they? All politicians lie.If nothing else, Comey has laid out the challenge of the next four years. Joe Biden’s quiet humanity will confront a noisy nation where too many citizens have become so sour that they’ve found solace, and entertainment, in an alternative reality. It will not be easy to lure them away from their noxious fantasies, but fact-based truth is not negotiable.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Mulling Martial Law

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersMulling Martial LawA reader thinks a report that President Trump was considering Michael Flynn’s idea was downplayed. Also: The prison at Guantánamo; cancer care in the pandemic; Black writers; a case of hacking.Dec. 22, 2020, 4:25 p.m. ETMore from our inbox:What Right Do We Have to Guantánamo?Don’t Put Off Medical CareBarriers for Black AuthorsOur Very Predictable PresidentPresident Trump has been in contact with Sidney Powell in recent days, even though his campaign last month sought to distance itself from her as she aired baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems machines.Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Discussed Making Conspiracist Special Counsel” (news article, Dec. 20):This reader is disturbed not to see the following headline on the front page: “President Considers Using Military to Overturn Election.”Have we reached the point where it is not major news when our president mulls a proposal to declare martial law and use the army to override American democracy? Perhaps Donald Trump’s cogitations are now deemed too unhinged to take seriously. Yet for the last four years his bizarre, reality-free tweets have been deemed newsworthy.That Mr. Trump cannot get America’s military to join in perpetrating a coup scarcely makes it a minor matter that a president of the United States has explored the possibility. Equally significant is the nonresponse of Republican officeholders.When Mr. Trump pinned his hopes on judges reversing the voters’ verdict, the attitude of silent G.O.P. leaders appeared to be “not likely to work, but more power to you, Mr. President, if you can pull it off.” Perhaps they have the same attitude toward militarizing American politics.Mitchell ZimmermanPalo Alto, Calif.What Right Do We Have to Guantánamo?  Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Decaying Buildings and Sluggish Justice System at Guantánamo Prison” (news article, Dec. 16):Over the years, there have been discussions over Guantánamo Bay prison and its inmates, but there has not been enough discussion about what right we have to be there in the first place.The colonial treaty we imposed on Cuba in 1903 (modified in 1934) allowed the American use of the base only as a coaling and naval station, which certainly did not include a prison complex. In any case, colonial-imposed treaties should not be viewed as valid.We have long felt that Cuba should be our property. President James Polk offered Spain $100 million to buy the island. President Franklin Pierce increased that to $130 million, while President Willliam McKinley upped the offer to $300 million. When Spain still refused to sell, we invaded Cuba and turned it into a colony or protectorate that lasted until the Castro-led overthrow of Batista in 1959.The 1903 treaty, which we had compelled the occupied Cubans to sign, gave us the naval station in Guantánamo Bay. But we nullified it by violating Article II, which declared that the base was “for use as coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose.” This does not include a prison complex. The real issue is our imperialism.Roger CarassoSanta Fe, N.M.The writer is professor emeritus of political science at California State University, Northridge.Don’t Put Off Medical Care  Credit…iStockTo the Editor:The prolonged Covid-19 pandemic has led to an increase in the number of patients who present with late-stage, previously undiagnosed cancers, and recurrence of a previously diagnosed malignancy.This is probably due to the reluctance of people to seek medical care because of fear of contracting Covid-19 at medical facilities; the closing or reduction in clinical services; the requirement to obtain Covid-19 testing before some medical procedures; and the use of telemedicine without physical examination instead of an actual office visit.It is important that people not defer their medical care during the pandemic. It is especially important that those who previously received a cancer diagnosis continue their treatment and follow-up. Those who experience new or unusual signs and symptoms that may indicate aggravation of their condition or a new ailment should seek medical care without delay.Postponing care or ignoring symptoms may lead to complications and deterioration, making future care more difficult and leading to increased morbidity and mortality.Itzhak BrookWashingtonThe writer is a professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University.Barriers for Black Authors Credit…Cj Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “Just How White Is the Book Industry?,” by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek (Opinion, nytimes.com, Dec. 11):The authors posit that the disparity in publishing rates between Black and white authors is primarily due to the dearth of Black gatekeepers in the industry. In addition, it is critical to understand the systemic barriers that prevent countless Black authors from getting to the gate.Writing a book requires access to critical resources: books as a child, formal classes that teach the craft of writing, a community of writers, the kind of financial support required to write an entire novel with no pay, published Black role models, the insular network of literary agents, among other barriers.Success requires access to an ecosystem of knowledge, networks and support. Until aspiring Black authors are embraced and bolstered at the same rate as aspiring white authors, the literary canon of the future will never be as glorious and impressive as all the people who have a story to tell.Deborah L. PlummerKatherine A. SherbrookeThe writers are authors and board members of GrubStreet, a creative writing center.Our Very Predictable PresidentPresident Trump returning to the White House after the Army-Navy football game earlier this month. Mr. Trump has made few public appearances in the last few weeks.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesTo the Editor:A week ago, our discussion over dinner regarding President Trump and the massive hacking of our government and American industry turned into an exchange of predictions.“I bet he blames China,” I suggested. My husband replied, “He’ll say it’s a hoax.” In our final exchange on the topic, we predicted he might even blame the breach for the election results.So there was no surprise when we read “Trump Shifts Hack Blame From Russia” (front page, Dec. 20), which confirmed we were right on all counts.Mr. Trump’s supporters often say they like him because he is unpredictable. Au contraire, after watching and listening to him ad nauseam for four years, we find him very predictable. And dangerous.Patricia WellerEmmitsburg, Md.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More