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    Primaries Are Not the Most Democratic Way to Choose a Presidential Nominee

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    Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by renominating President Biden to face the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in 2024? A nontrivial number of voices in and outside the party seem to think so.But it’s already a mostly moot point. The system Americans use to nominate presidential candidates is not well equipped to make swift strategic adjustments. Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Political parties in most democracies have the power to choose their leaders without going through a monthslong gantlet.The best way for a party to choose its leader is for that party to convene, confer and compromise on a candidate who serves its agenda and appeals to voters. The conventions of the mid-20th century, deeply flawed as they were, were designed for that purpose. If those flaws were fixed, they would be far better than what we use today.Should Mr. Biden run again or step aside? On the one hand, he has stubbornly low approval ratings, and a number of polls show him trailing Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polling a year out is often misleading, and so are job approval ratings in a polarized age. Mr. Biden is old, but so is Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden defeated him last time.Replacing an incumbent president with another nominee is very rare and probably should be. But a convention could do it if necessary. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stepped down at the beginning of the year, and Democrats could realistically expect to find a nominee before Election Day.The system was different then. When Mr. Johnson decided not to run for re-election, he declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”The “and I will not accept” matters. Mr. Johnson was acknowledging that the party might nominate him even if he didn’t run. In 1968, when the decision was made at the national convention, the party could do that. That’s not something it can easily do today.Only a small fraction of states held primaries that year, and most of those didn’t commit delegates. Primaries were a tool to gauge public support, not make the final decision. Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, won no primaries or caucuses. Instead, he won with support of unpledged delegates selected through state conventions — delegates who represented an older, more establishment part of the party.The apparent injustice of Mr. Humphrey winning the nomination without winning primaries was a big part of how we got to our current system. Many members of the Democratic Party felt that their perspectives weren’t well represented by those establishment delegates; their voices were being heard in the primaries and caucuses.The party set out to create a national convention that was more representative of the party, but what evolved was something else, the system we use today — the one that has all but locked us into a candidate almost a year out from Election Day.Early states winnow the field. The next states largely determine who the nominee is. States that vote late in the process often have little effect. Success depends on the ability to stand up a campaign in state after state in the first few months of the year, which in turn depends on the ability to raise money and attract media attention. It’s a process, not a simple decision.This system could produce a candidate who is battle tested by the primaries and otherwise broadly popular. It might also select a candidate who appeals narrowly to a group of dedicated followers, especially in early states, where a close victory can be leveraged into later success. (Think of Mr. Trump in 2016.)In no way does it let party leaders take stock of an awkward situation, such as what Democrats face now (low approval ratings for an incumbent) or, for that matter, what Republicans face (a front-runner facing multiple indictments).Party leaders are not completely helpless. In “The Party Decides,” the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller and I argued that party activists and leaders could exert a lot of influence on their party’s choice — so much so that they typically get their way. When they can agree on a satisfactory candidate, they can help direct resources to that candidate and help that person stay in the race if he or she stumbles. (Think of Mr. Biden in 2020.)But that takes time. It is, at best, a blunt instrument (hence its failure among Republicans in 2016). The nomination is still won in the primaries, and an incumbent is especially hard to replace.Most democracies give far less power than that to a single political leader, even an incumbent or influential former leader. Healthy parties can limit their leaders.Empowering the Democrats to replace Mr. Biden or the Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump would come with costs. A party that could persuade a sitting president to stand down would also have the power to persuade outsiders, like Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump, to not run at all.For some, giving party leaders this kind of influence is unsettling. It shouldn’t be. The job of choosing a nominee is complicated. It involves the strategic trade-off between what kind of candidate can win in November and what kind of candidate represents what the party wants in a leader.Letting the party make these decisions is not inherently undemocratic. Just as voters select members of Congress, who then gain expertise, forge compromises and bargain to make policy, so too could voters select party delegates, who would then choose nominees and shape their party’s platform.Polling and even primaries could continue to play a role. In many years, the voice of the party’s voters might speak loudly, and party leaders would simply heed it. In other years, such as for Democrats in 2008, voter preferences might be more mixed. It’s worth noting that in 2008, Democratic superdelegates (those not bound by the results of any primary) switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after seeing his appeal in the primaries. If all of the delegates had been free to switch, would the outcome have been the same? We don’t know, but in a representative democracy, elected representatives do often listen to voters.In other words, the development of a more active, empowered party convention would not have to be a return to the past. The nomination of Mr. Humphrey in 1968 was a problem, but it wasn’t because the decision was made at a convention. It was because the delegates at that convention didn’t represent the party’s voters.Moving the decision back to the convention would not be a trivial matter. Even if voters and politicians could adjust to the change — a big if — each party would need to select representative and competent delegates. Our experience with representative democracy should tell us that this is possible but far from inevitable.But such a convention would still be superior to the current system, in which a small number of voters in a handful of states choose from a pool of self-selected candidates who have been tested mostly by their ability to raise money and get attention in debates.Both of these systems have a claim to being democratic. But only the first would give the party the kind of agency implied by claims that it is making a mistake by renominating the incumbent.Hans Noel, an associate professor of government at Georgetown, is the author of “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America” and a co-author of “Political Parties” and “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.”Source images by Drew Angerer, Rost-9D, and ajt/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      The Fed’s Decisions Now Could Alter the 2024 Elections

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      The state of the economy will affect voting next November, and the Federal Reserve may find itself in a delicate position, our columnist says.What’s happening in the economy now will have a big effect — perhaps, a decisive one — on the presidential election and control of Congress in 2024.To a remarkable extent, the economy is what matters to voters, so much so that one long-running election model relies on economic data to produce accurate predictions without even considering the identities, personalities, popularity or policies of candidates, or the strategies, messaging or dirty tricks of their campaigns.Right now, that model, created and run by Ray Fair, a Yale economist, shows that the 2024 national elections are very much up for grabs.The economy is strong enough for the incumbent Democrats to win the popular vote for the presidency and Congress next year, Professor Fair’s projections find. But it’s not a slam dunk. Persistent — though declining — inflation also gives the Republicans a reasonable chance of victory, the model shows. Both outcomes are within the model’s margin for error.It means small shifts in the economy could have an outsize influence on the next elections. That could put the Federal Reserve in a hot spot, even if the central bank tries to avoid it.The Fed strives to be independent. But policymakers’ decisions over the next 12 months could conceivably decide the elections.The Fair ModelProfessor Fair’s pioneering U.S. elections model does something that was fairly radical when he created it in the 1970s.It analyzes politics without really considering politics.Instead, Professor Fair focuses on economic growth, inflation and unemployment. With a few tweaks through the years, he has used economics to analyze elections since 1978, based on data for elections going back to 1916.What he’s found is that the economy sets the climate for national elections. The candidates and the political parties must live within it.Professor Fair makes his econometric models available on his website as teaching tools.“I encourage people to plug in their own assumptions and see how that will change the outcome,” he said.Professor Fair doesn’t even try to predict final election results. Just for a start, he doesn’t do state-by-state tallies or electoral college projections, or examine the potential impact of third-or fourth-party candidacies.But what his model does extremely well is provide a standard, historically based framework for understanding economic effects on the popular vote for the two main American political parties.What the model is showing is that the economy’s surprisingly strong growth and low unemployment since the start of the Biden presidency have already helped the incumbents considerably, while the uncomfortably high inflation levels during the period have helped the Republicans. Based on the history embedded in the model, if these critical economic factors shift, there’s room for a decisive change in the popular vote. But probably not much room.The Inflation EffectThere was jubilation on Wall Street over the past week over the positive news about inflation. The overall Consumer Price Index for October dropped to 3.2 percent annually from 3.7 percent the previous month — and from a peak, in this business cycle, of 9.1 percent in June 2022. At the same time, core inflation, which excludes fuel and food prices, fell to 4 percent in October, the smallest increase since September 2021.Inflation is still running well above the Fed’s target of 2 percent, but it’s declining, and traders are assuming that, at the very least, Fed officials won’t need to raise interest rates at their next meeting, in December. And there’s more.The Wall Street consensus, which is captured by the futures market, is that further encouraging inflation news will be coming, and that the Fed will start lowering rates by the spring. The sooner the Fed acts, this thinking goes, the more likely it is that a significant increase in unemployment — and a full-blown recession — can be avoided.There are political implications.Because interest rate cuts have lagged effects on the economy, the sooner such cuts occurred, the more likely it would be that the economy surged before next year’s election. An increase in economic growth in the first nine months of an election year — without a spike in unemployment — would help the presidential incumbent’s party, Professor Fair’s model shows. (If Republicans controlled the White House now, strong economic growth would help them more than it does the Democrats, history and the Fair model suggest.)On the other hand, a decline in inflation won’t help the Democrats much at this stage, Professor Fair said, because high inflation has already been baked into the vote prediction — and, presumably, into voters’ consciousness. The model averages the first 15 quarters — or 45 months — of a presidential administration, and we are already in the 11th quarter of the Biden presidency.For the overall inflation effect to diminish considerably, the basic math requires actual sustained deflation — a continuing fall in prices — in the months ahead. Historically, that has only happened during major economic declines, accompanied by soaring unemployment, as was the case in the Great Depression. A major recession would probably mean a Democratic debacle next year.A Looming NightmareBut a major recession in the next 12 months is not the consensus view among economists or in financial markets.Instead, a more benign prospect beckons. The probability of a “soft landing” — a decline in inflation without a recession — has grown in most forecasters’ estimations.But for the political outlook and for the Fed, the timing is tricky.A growth surge that is not accompanied by a big increase in unemployment would help the incumbent party, and large rate cuts by the Fed might well set off more economic growth. But the Fed will be reluctant to start reducing interest rates while inflation is still above 3 percent. Instead, as long as inflation is high, the Fed has vowed to keep interest rates “higher for longer,” and, in effect, it already has.Since July, short-term rates have stayed above 5.25 percent, mortgage rates are still above 7.5 percent and consumer borrowing is straitened. The longer this goes on, the greater the chances of a calamity in the financial system. Yet if the Fed eases interest rates too soon, and sets off another wave of inflation, the damage to its already tarnished reputation as an effective inflation-fighter would be severe.So the Fed is in a difficult spot. If the central bank doesn’t start to lower interest rates by the summer, it could be reluctant to do so at all in the autumn, because it would inevitably be seen as taking a partisan stance.As Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of the research firm Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in an online discussion, “there’s a lot hanging on the timing” of the inflation data in the weeks ahead. If the inflation issue isn’t resolved soon, he said, we will have to deal with “the nightmare of whether the Fed wants to be starting a shift in the policy cycle as the election approaches.”Incumbent presidents always want the economy to look great on Election Day. The one case in which it is well documented that a president put pressure on a Federal Reserve chairman to cut rates — and the central bank did so — involved President Richard M. Nixon and Arthur F. Burns in late 1971 and 1972. Mr. Nixon didn’t limit his improper actions to browbeating the Fed. There was also the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the subsequent cover up. An investigation revealed the secret White House taping system — which recorded Mr. Nixon’s rough treatment of Mr. Burns.But there is substantial evidence of other instances of presidents and their emissaries trying to influence the Fed, without success. President Donald J. Trump repeatedly berated the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, for not lowering rates sufficiently. President Lyndon B. Johnson bullied William McChesney Martin to the point of physically manhandling him. And Paul Volcker revealed that, in President Ronald Reagan’s presence, James Baker, the chief of staff, told Mr. Volcker that the president “wants to give you an order”: Don’t raise rates as the 1984 election approaches. Mr. Volcker said Mr. Reagan looked on silently.In an oral history, Mr. Volcker said the meeting occurred in the White House library, not the Oval Office, probably to protect the president. “Whatever taping machines they had were probably not in the library,” Mr. Volcker said. “I didn’t want to say that we were going to raise rates,” Mr. Volcker recalled, “because we weren’t so as near as I can recall, I said nothing.”Mr. Powell has said he considers Mr. Volcker to be a role model. Generous and forthcoming in private conversations, Mr. Volcker was sometimes taciturn in public. It will be wise to emulate that reticence at critical moments in the months ahead.The Fed needs to be seen as independent and tough, and to squelch inflation, as Mr. Volcker did. Then, quite likely, it will need to cut rates aggressively to help the economy.The calendar may not cooperate. The tougher the Fed is now, the more delicate its position will become as the election approaches. More

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      We Were Wrong About President Biden

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      When I saw President George W. Bush aboard Air Force One during his first year in office, I finally fully got it — why an erstwhile cutup and goofball so strangely suited to the ordeal of a presidential campaign had put himself through one, losing sleep, tempting heartache, risking humiliation. On this airborne ego trip, he had a bed, and I don’t mean a seat that flattened into one. He had an office, with a desk bigger than those of some earthbound executives. Aides carried papers to him. Aides ferried papers away. They called him “Mr. President.” He’d upgraded from his old surname, as illustrious as it was, to a kind of divinity.There was no doubt that he’d seek a second term of that, though he chafed at certain obligations of the presidency and palpably yearned for his Crawford, Tex., ranch.I never flew with President Barack Obama. But I visited him in the White House several times. I went once with more than a dozen other well-known journalists, including the MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow; I went another time with a half dozen fellow columnists, including my Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague Maureen Dowd. Our stature didn’t change the quickness with which we snapped to attention when he walked into the Roosevelt Room, the raptness with which we hung on his every syllable. His every syllable mattered: He was the leader of the free world, with more authority than anyone else in the richest and most powerful nation of them all. He could see awe in almost every face that turned toward him, as almost every face did.There was no question that he’d try to hold on to that for eight years, despite signs and chatter that he and Michelle Obama disliked much about the gilded goldfish bowl of White House life.And there should never have been much mystery about what President Joe Biden, who released a video announcing his re-election campaign early Tuesday, would decide. A person doesn’t just saunter away from adulation and affirmation on a scale this monumental — at least not the kind of person who wanted them enough to pursue the presidency in the first place.Over the past six months, many of us commentators have weighed in on whether Biden, who, at 80, is older than anyone at the Resolute Desk before him, should seek the Democratic presidential nomination again. We weren’t so much putting odds on his course of action as we were assessing his energy, his acuity, Democratic voters’ preference for an alternative and the party’s smartest strategy for keeping Donald Trump and the MAGA conspiracists at the gate.But that discussion made sense only if there were an actual possibility that Biden would step aside, so we were implying as much. And we were fools.Maybe that’s too harsh: By dint of his age, we had reason to wonder if he’d be battling health-related challenges that would make his circumstances and calculations fundamentally different from Bush’s, Obama’s or those of many of his other predecessors over the past half-century.But the idea that he’d coolly examine his favorability ratings (“Dammit, Jill, I just can’t seem to crack 50 percent!”), despair of Republicans’ ceaseless torture of him and his kin (“It’s malarkey!”), glance around at younger Democratic politicians itching for their day and decide to call it quits: That’s laughable. That’s malarkey. It contradicts the very appeal of the job. It disregards the nature of those who find it so very appealing.The people willing to accept the invasive scrutiny and exhausting odyssey en route to the White House believe at some level that they belong there or keenly crave reassurance of that. They’re not sated by the next best thing. They’re after peak recognition, the apex job and the view of the world from that summit — a world now at their feet.“Most of them had this ambition from grade school,” Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian, told me. “Others have appetites that grew with the eating. Regardless, there is something extraordinary — not normal — about desiring this much power.”I’d bet a great deal that the rush of that power — more than safety from criminal prosecution, more than the opportunity to use the White House as a profit center — is Donald Trump’s greatest motivator as he makes another run at the office. There’s no magnitude of personal wealth, no amplitude of fame, that confers the sort of bragging rights that the presidency does.The only presidents over the past century who could have run for re-election and chose not to — Calvin Coolidge in 1928, Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 — had served more than one term already, because they’d begun their presidencies by finishing out the terms of predecessors who had died in office. There’s a reason for that, and it’s a precedent that every modern president is aware of.“History is such that it would be taken as an admission of failure if you didn’t run again,” Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser on presidential campaigns for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, told me. “Either you think you succeeded in the first term and you deserve a second one or you think you failed in the first term and you want to do better.”In which category does Biden belong? “I think he thinks he’s been a great success,” Stevens said. “I agree.” Regardless, Stevens said, the presidency is difficult to surrender. “Being able to change history is intoxicating.”Bush was proving the doubters, including his own parents, wrong. Obama was living the kind of dream that was out of reach for his father. Bill Clinton was a glutton for approval, forever supping at the nearest and largest buffet. Trump was — is — Trump, who judges every day, every hour, by some cosmic analogue to Nielsen ratings. The presidency is always the most watched program.And Biden? The unlacquered oratory, “Scranton Joe” moniker and daily Amtrak schlep to the Capitol that he made during his decades in the Senate give him the unpretentious aspect of a journeyman toiling humbly in our service, unattached to and unimpressed by all the pomp of the office.But we lose track: He announced his first campaign for the presidency in 1987, when he was just 44, apparently confident even then that he could lead the United States of America as well as anyone else. While that bid ended early and disastrously, amid allegations and then an admission of plagiarism, he ran for the presidency again two decades later, when Obama ended up prevailing and choosing him as a wingman.We forget about the sting of rejection that Biden must have felt when, after serving loyally as Obama’s vice president, Obama essentially tagged Hillary Clinton to succeed him. We forget about how Biden pressed on after humiliating finishes in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in early 2020. That determination suggests a robust self-regard and potent yearning.And when we dwell on his age, we focus on what it may or may not mean for the vigor he brings to the job and for the degree of confidence in him that voters will feel. But there’s another facet of it: He waited for the presidency longer than anyone else. That must make his time in office all the sweeter.Biden is also propelled by his obvious — and correct — conviction that the moral corruption of the Republican Party makes the stakes of continued Democratic control of the White House as high as can be. He surely sees himself as the party’s best hope for that. A part of him is indeed doing this for us.But he’s doing this for himself, too — for a validation without rival, an exhilaration without peer. There are people to whom those feelings wouldn’t matter. They’re not the people who go around pleading for votes.(This article was updated to reflect news events.)I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).Source images by Drew Angerer/Getty Images and Getty Images Europe, via Irish Government, via Getty Images. More

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      Donald Trump, and the Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises

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      Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials.American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary kneed a Black police officer in the groin, just as the president was trying to woo skeptical Black voters. (Roosevelt’s response made history: He appointed the first Black general and created the Tuskegee Airmen.)But the scandal that has ensnared Donald J. Trump, the paying of hush money to a pornographic film star in 2016, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one.The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to at least two other episodes foiling an October surprise. The first was in 1968, when aides to Richard M. Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to thwart peace talks in the closing days of that election. The second was in 1980. Fresh revelations have emerged that allies of Ronald Reagan may well have labored to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter.Richard M. Nixon at the end of his presidential campaign in 1968.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe tortured debate over precisely which election law might have been violated in 2016 is missing the broader point — all three events might have changed the course of history.“There have been three cases at a minimum,” said Gary Sick, a former national security aide to President Carter who for more than two decades has been pursuing his case that the Reagan campaign in 1980 delayed the release of the hostages from Iran. “And if you had the stomach for it, you’d have to say it worked.”The potential criminal charges against Mr. Trump for his role in the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels — falsifying business records to cover up the payment and a possible election law violation — may seem trivial when compared to the prior efforts to fend off a history-altering October surprise.This month, a former lieutenant governor of Texas came forward to say that he accompanied a Reagan ally to the Middle East to try to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election. And notes discovered in 2016 appeared to confirm that senior aides to Mr. Nixon worked through back channels in 1968 to hinder the commencement of peace talks to end the war in Vietnam — and secure Mr. Nixon’s victory over Hubert H. Humphrey.“Hold on,” Anna Chennault, Mr. Nixon’s emissary to the South Vietnamese, told Saigon government officials, as she pressed them to boycott the Paris peace talks. “We are gonna win.”But the chicaneries of 1968 and 1980 were left to historians and partisans to sort out and debate decades later. What separates the allegations against Mr. Trump is that they could make him the first former president to be indicted by a grand jury, forcing him to answer for charges in a court of law.President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam shortly before the presidential election in 1968.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe concept of an October surprise has been around American politics since at least 1838, when federal prosecutors announced plans to charge top Whig Party officials with “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” for paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York for their candidates.Two weeks before the 1888 election, Republicans published a letter from the British ambassador to the United States suggesting that the English favored Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate. It galvanized Irish American voters, and Mr. Cleveland lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison.Just days before the 2000 election, Thomas J. Connolly, a defense lawyer and former Democratic candidate for governor in Maine, confirmed that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while intoxicated in the state in 1976. Some have said it cost Mr. Bush just enough votes to turn a narrow popular-vote victory into one of the most contested presidential elections in American history.What links the allegations of 1968, 1980 and 2016 is the fear that such a surprise would happen. In all three cases, those accused of perpetrating the skulduggery palpably worried that it would..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It is probably as old as campaigning itself,” said John Dean, the Nixon White House lawyer whose testimony before the congressional Watergate committees helped bring to light perhaps the most famous campaign dirty trick of all time. “I’m sure that when campaigns learn of negative stories, they do all they can to suppress them.”The accusations against Mr. Trump are of a different scale than 1968 or 1980. No Americans were left to languish in captivity. No armies remained on the battlefield longer than necessary. No civilians died in napalm conflagrations. Indeed, the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels is hardly the worst accusation leveled against a president who was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extract a political favor, and impeached again for inciting a riot designed to overturn a lawful election that he lost.But because the 2016 election was so close, the suppression of a late-breaking sex scandal just may have delivered the White House to one of American history’s most divisive leaders. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and won the presidency by securing victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 78,652 votes, a smaller total than a sellout crowd at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.The plane carrying freed American hostages arriving at the Frankfurt airport. The hostages had been held in Iran for 444 days.Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, suffered her own surprise when just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, reopened a closed investigation into emails she sent on a private server when she was secretary of state. Given the margin, that alone may have cost Mrs. Clinton the White House.Ms. Daniels’s claim that she had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006 while his wife, Melania, was nursing their only baby had been floating around since 2011, seemingly raising few fears in Trump world. But in early October 2016, that changed when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump described in lewd terms how he groped women.Amid the ensuing furor and defections from some Republican leaders, the effort to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence went into overdrive. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and others feared that a second punch, landing just after the “Access Hollywood” outrage was dissipating, could knock their pugilistic boss out of the presidential race and expose them to legal action.“It could look awfully bad for everyone,” Dylan Howard, the editor of The National Enquirer, wrote in a text to Mr. Cohen, noting that if Ms. Daniels went public, their work to cover up her account of a sexual encounter might also become known.The 1980 election is remembered as a landslide victory, hardly one that seemed vulnerable to a late-breaking course change. But in fact, aides and allies of Mr. Reagan openly feared the release of the hostages in the campaign’s final weeks could re-elect Mr. Carter, so much so that the term “October surprise” is often attributed to the Reagan camp’s trepidations.“All I know is there’s concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter’s a politically tough fellow, he’ll do anything to get re-elected, and let’s be prepared for some October surprise,” Mr. Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush, said at the time.Ronald Reagan and his campaign feared an October surprise from President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGerald Rafshoon, who was Mr. Carter’s White House communications director and campaign media adviser, said in an interview that he was confident the release of the hostages would have secured the president’s re-election. The polls had been tightening that fall amid rising optimism about the captives’ release. Then Mr. Carter’s position collapsed.“If the little farmer can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah,” Mr. Rafshoon recalled one woman telling him, “I’ll take my chances on the cowboy.”He added: “It’s not that I hold any grudges about those sons of bitches. I’ve gotten on with my life, and so has Jimmy.”Mr. Sick is not so sure a hostage release would have had much impact. “It would certainly have changed some votes, but would Carter have won? He only won one state,” he said. “People who run campaigns get very paranoid and talk themselves into these things.”The election of 1968 is a closer call.Ken Hughes, a researcher at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, whose book “Chasing Shadows” chronicled the Nixon campaign’s efforts to impede peace talks, said Mr. Nixon had a strong lead in the polls over Mr. Humphrey in mid-September. By mid-October, Mr. Nixon’s lead was down to eight percentage points. Then, days before the election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, and the news media began reporting chatter of looming talks to end the war.Again, the candidate who went on to win showed his fears, which were based on Mr. Nixon’s conviction that Democratic dirty tricks in 1960 had denied him the presidency. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” or South Vietnam, Mr. Nixon implored, according to the notes of a top aide, H.R. Haldeman.On the eve of the election, The Christian Science Monitor was preparing an article on the efforts of the Nixon campaign to thwart the peace talks. Mr. Johnson convened a conference call with his security cabinet to seek advice on whether to confirm the story, which he knew to be true from F.B.I. and C.I.A. wiretaps.“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected,” his secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, said of Mr. Nixon on a recorded call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”White House officials said nothing. More

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      To Understand the F.B.I., You Have to Understand J. Edgar Hoover

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      In recent years, as I finished writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I. for nearly half a century, liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I. During the Trump era, they began to see the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic, after a lifetime of viewing it as a bastion of political repression.Public opinion polls bear out this shift in opinion. In 2003, Republicans liked the F.B.I. far better than Democrats did, by a margin of 19 points, at 63 percent to 44 percent. Today, nearly 20 years later, that equation has flipped and then some. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 75 percent of Democrats now have a favorable view of the F.B.I., in contrast to 30 percent of Republicans. Gallup puts the numbers further apart, with 79 percent of Democrats expressing approval and 29 percent of Republicans disapproval.From James Comey’s firing in May 2017 through the Mueller report, the Jan. 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago raid, the F.B.I. has not always delivered on Democratic hopes. But its showdowns with Donald Trump have fundamentally changed its public image.To some degree this switch simply reflects our hyperpartisan times. But the F.B.I.’s surge in popularity among Democrats also reflects a forgotten political tradition.Since the 1960s, liberals have tended to associate the bureau with its misdeeds against the left, including its outrageous efforts to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists. Before those activities were exposed, though, liberals often admired and embraced the F.B.I., especially when it seemed to be a hedge against demagogy and abuses of power elsewhere in government.They pointed to the bureau’s role as an objective, nonpartisan investigative force seeking to ferret out the truth amid an often complicated and depressing political morass. And they viewed Hoover as one the greatest embodiments of that ethic: a long-serving and long-suffering federal civil servant who managed to win the respect of both Republicans and Democrats.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leaving the office of J. Edgar Hoover in 1964. The F.B.I. conducted extensive surveillance of Dr. King’s private life.Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe now know that much of that admiration rested on wishful thinking — and today’s liberals would be wise to remember Hoover’s cautionary example. But for all his failings, all his abuses of power, he also promoted a vision of F.B.I. integrity and professionalism that still has resonance.J. Edgar Hoover was a lifelong conservative, outspoken on matters ranging from crime to Communism to the urgent need for all Americans to attend church. He also knew how to get along with liberals. Indeed, he could not have survived in government as long as he did without this essential skill. First appointed bureau director in 1924, Hoover stayed in that job until his death in 1972, an astonishing 48 years. He served under eight presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.It has often been said that Hoover remained in power for so many decades because politicians feared him — and there is much truth to that view, especially in his later years. But Hoover’s late-in-life strong-arm tactics do not explain much about how he rose so fast through the government ranks, or why so many presidents — including Franklin Roosevelt, the great liberal titan of the 20th century — thought it was a good idea to give him so much power.Hoover spent his first decade as director establishing his good-government bona fides; he championed professionalism, efficiency, high standards and scientific methods. So in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw Hoover not as a far-right reactionary but as an up-and-coming administrator thoroughly steeped in the values of the modern state — a bureaucrat par excellence.Roosevelt did more than any other president to expand the F.B.I.’s power: first, by inviting Hoover to take a more active role in crime fighting, then by licensing him to become the nation’s domestic intelligence chief. Hoover’s agents became known as G-men, or government men, the avenging angels of the New Deal state.Hoover, center, taking aim while giving the Broadway actors flanking him, William Gaxton and Vincent Moore, a tour of F.B.I. headquarters in 1935.Underwood and UnderwoodToday’s F.B.I. still bears the stamp of the decisions Roosevelt made nearly a century ago. A hybrid institution, the F.B.I. remains one part law-enforcement agency, one part domestic-intelligence force — an awkward combination, if one that we now take for granted.It also retains Hoover’s dual political identity, with a conservative internal culture but also a powerful commitment to professional nonpartisan government service. This combination of attributes has helped to produce the F.B.I.’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory reputation, as different groups pick and choose which aspects to embrace and which to condemn.Hoover went on to do outrageous things with the power granted him during the Roosevelt years, emerging as the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left. But many Washington liberals and civil libertarians did not see those abuses coming, because Hoover continued to reflect some of their values as well. During World War II, he distinguished himself as one of the few federal officials opposed to mass Japanese internment, labeling the policy “extremely unfortunate” and unnecessary for national security.After the war, despite his deep-seated racism, he stepped up the F.B.I.’s campaign against lynching in the South. “The great American crime is toleration of conditions which permit and promote prejudice, bigotry, injustice, terror and hate,” he told a civil rights committee convened by President Harry Truman in 1947. He framed white supremacist violence not only as a moral wrong but also as an acute challenge to federal authority.By contrast, he promoted himself as the embodiment of professional law enforcement, the polar opposite of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantes or the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. Many liberals embraced that message, despite Hoover’s well-known conservatism. “If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking that, ‘My God, Hoover is a real liberal!” William Sullivan, an F.B.I. official, recalled. “If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, ‘I’m convinced that Hoover is a member of the John Birch Society at heart.’ ”The height of Hoover’s popularity came during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when he emerged as both a hero of the anti-Communist right and the thinking man’s alternative to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Today, we tend to view Hoover and McCarthy as interchangeable figures, zealots who ran roughshod over civil liberties. At the time, though, many liberals viewed them as very different men.Truman feared the F.B.I.’s “Gestapo” tendencies, but far preferred Hoover to a partisan brawler and obvious fabricator like McCarthy. President Dwight Eisenhower heaped lavish praise on Hoover as the nation’s responsible, respectable anti-Communist, in contrast to McCarthy the demagogue. Both presidents cast the story in terms that might be familiar to any 21st-century liberal, with Hoover as the protector of truth, objectivity and the law, and McCarthy as those principles’ most potent enemy.One irony of the liberals’ stance is that it was actually Hoover, not McCarthy, who did the most to promote and sustain the Red Scare. Long before McCarthy burst on the scene, Hoover had been collaborating with congressional committees to target Communists and their sympathizers, conducting elaborate campaigns of infiltration and surveillance. And he long outlasted McCarthy, who was censured by his fellow senators in 1954. Hoover’s popularity grew as McCarthy’s fell. A Gallup poll in late 1953, the peak of the Red Scare, noted that a mere 2 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of Hoover, a result “phenomenal in surveys that have dealt with men in public life.”Hoover with President Richard Nixon in 1969.Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesAnd with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.Associated PressThat consensus finally began to crack in the 1960s. Hoover’s current reputation stems largely from this late-career period, when the F.B.I.’s shocking campaigns against the civil rights, antiwar and New Left movements began to erode earlier conceptions of Hoover as a man of restraint.Its most notorious initiative, the bureau’s COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program), deployed manipulative news coverage, anonymous mailings and police harassment to disrupt these movements. In 1964, in one of the lowest points of Hoover’s regime, the F.B.I. faked a degrading anonymous letter implicitly urging Dr. King to commit suicide. Agents mailed it to him along with recordings of his extramarital sexual activities, captured on F.B.I. microphones planted in his hotel rooms.Even then, though, key liberal figures continued to champion Hoover and the F.B.I. President Lyndon Johnson, a friend and neighbor of Hoover’s, proved second only to Roosevelt in his enthusiasm for the director. And he urged his successor, Richard Nixon, to follow suit. “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” he told Nixon in the Oval Office in late 1968. “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”Despite such official support, by the early 1970s polls were starting to note that Hoover’s reputation among liberals and Democrats seemed to be in swift decline, thanks to his advancing age, aggressive tactics and conservative social views. “Now the case of J. Edgar Hoover has been added to the list of issues — ranging from the war in Vietnam, to race relations, welfare and the plight of the cities — which are the source of deep division across America today,” the pollster Louis Harris wrote in 1971.While conservatives still expressed widespread admiration for the F.B.I. director, liberals increasingly described him as a danger to the nation. The decline was especially precipitous among coastal elites and university-educated young people. By contrast, working-class white Americans in the Midwest and South expressed support.Today, those sentiments are reversed. According to Rasmussen, the F.B.I. is now most popular among Americans making more than $200,000 per year. Young voters like the F.B.I. better than older voters do. This division is being driven by national politics: When Mr. Trump attacks the F.B.I. as part of an overweening “deep state,” his supporters follow while his critics run the other way.But it also reflects a larger clash of values. Mr. Trump has long scored political points by attacking the administrative state and its legions of career government servants, whether at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department or, improbably, the National Archives. In response, Democrats have been forced to reaffirm what once seemed to be settled notions: that expertise and professionalism matter in government, that the rule of law applies to every American, that it’s worth employing skilled, nonpartisan investigators who can determine the facts.Hoover failed to live up to those principles — often spectacularly so. And today’s F.B.I. has made its own questionable choices, from surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters to mismanagement of delicate political inquiries. But its history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.Beverly Gage (@beverlygage) is a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      U.T. Austin Acquires Archives That Give Insight Into the 1960s

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      Doris Kearns was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University in 1972, teaching a class on the American presidency and starting the book that would mark the start of her extraordinary career as a popular historian, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” when Richard N. Goodwin walked into her office.A legendary speechwriter for presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Goodwin flopped himself down, she recalled, and asked, “Hi, are you a graduate student?”“So I earnestly told him all about the presidency class I was teaching, and then quickly realized he was just teasing me,” she said. “We had dinner that night and engaged in conversation about L.B.J., J.F.K., the Red Sox and the ’60s. And I floated home that evening and told two close friends that I had met the man I wanted to marry.”Doris Kearns married Goodwin on Dec. 14, 1975. Among those who attended were Boston Mayor Kevin H. White, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Hunter Thompson.Photo by Marc Peloquin. Courtesy of Doris Kearns GoodwinDick-and-Doris, as they were colloquially known, as if a single entity, married in 1975, raised three boys and dedicated themselves to work that made them luminaries in their fields. He wrote about politics and society; she became the United States’ premier presidential historian on the strength of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Ordinary Time,” (1994) about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and six other best sellers.For decades, the couple kept their archives, including more than 300 boxes of diaries, letters, scrapbooks, memos and speech drafts that Goodwin had saved, especially from his White House days in the 1960s, stored in the two-story barn on their Concord, Mass., property.When he died in 2018, Kearns Goodwin sought an appropriate home for his papers: Spanning 1950 to 2014, they offer unique insight into 1960s policies and debates, and are a comprehensive record of Goodwin’s professional career. On Thursday, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin announced the acquisition of the Goodwin papers for $5 million, with Kearns Goodwin’s own archive donated to live alongside her husband’s.Secret Letters Throughout HistoryFor centuries, people have exchanged information in writing. Science is now casting new light on what was once meant to be private.Cracking the Case: A letter Charles Dickens wrote in a mystifying shorthand style went unread for over a century. Computer programmers recently decoded it.Uncensored: Using an X-ray technique, scientists have revealed the content of redacted letters between Marie Antoinette and Count von Fersen, her rumored lover.Original Encryption: To safeguard their missives against snoops, writers through the ages have employed a complicated means of security: letterlocking.Breaking the Seal: To read the “locked” letters without tearing them apart, researchers have turned to virtual reality.“When I saw how Dick saved everything from his lengthy and notable career, I was blown away,” said Don Carleton, the executive director of the Briscoe Center. “But I also told Doris that it should be a package deal. Doris is a hugely important cultural figure. Her own archive is valuable for scholars studying Lincoln, the Roosevelts, J.F.K., L.B.J. and so much more. I thought they belonged together, in the same building.”What impressed Kearns Goodwin, in turn, was that the Briscoe Center sponsors and facilitates original research projects based on its archival holdings. “I was gratified that Dick’s papers wouldn’t lie dormant at Briscoe in a vault,” she said.The first page of Goodwin’s draft of President Johnson’s “Great Society” speech, delivered on May 22, 1964, at Ann Arbor, Michigan.Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at AustinShe also agreed to serve as an ambassador and adviser for the Briscoe Center, and to lecture periodically at the university. After working for Johnson as a White House Fellow, Kearns Goodwin accompanied him to Texas to work on his memoir; she said she was thrilled to return to Texas Hill Country, where Johnson’s ranch is now a National Park Service unit.Goodwin’s archive encompasses his public service as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, his work as a House subcommittee investigator into the rigged game show “Twenty-One” (a story adapted into the 1994 film “Quiz Show”), as well as notes and memos that show how he helped shape national and international policies during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His archive illuminates critical issues in 1960s history, including Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement.From a historian’s perspective, Goodwin’s speech drafts from 1960 to 1968 are a revelation. His command of history and literature became the cornerstone of Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speeches. It was Goodwin who invented the phrase “Alliance for Progress” to describe Kennedy’s Latin American policy. One draft of a long-forgotten speech in Alaska ended with Goodwin’s line: “It is not what I promise I will do, it is what I ask you to join me in doing.” Years later, material included in the collection shows, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote Goodwin to say that it was this wordplay that her husband recycled in his famous “Ask Not” inaugural address.Goodwin with Jacqueline Kennedy and her lawyer, Simon H. Rifkind, rear, in Manhattan in 1966. Goodwin was for years identified with the Kennedy clan.Jack Manning/The New York TimesThe documents reveal the wide berth Kennedy gave Goodwin. When the president noticed that there wasn’t a single Black recruit in the U.S. Coast Guard contingent during his inaugural parade, he tasked Goodwin with investigating. The resulting memorandum, included in the collection, led to the racial integration of the Coast Guard in 1962.After Goodwin secretly met in Uruguay with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s closest confidant, he drafted a long psychological profile of the Marxist revolutionary for the president. “Behind the beard,” it begins, “his features are quite soft, almost feminine, and his manner is intense.” Among Goodwin’s memorabilia acquired by the University of Texas is a wooden cigar box from Guevara.Che Guevara gave Goodwin this cigar box when they met, in August 1961.Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at AustinGoodwin’s diaries of Kennedy’s assassination brim with ticktock detail. He was among a small group in the White House when the president’s body arrived from Texas. His diary grapples with whether the coffin should be open or closed, the search for historical information about President Abraham Lincoln lying in state in the East Room, and where the 35th president should be buried. Working directly with Jacqueline Kennedy, Goodwin helped to bring to the grave site an eternal flame modeled after the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.In January 1964, Goodwin kept extensive notes during travels with the Peace Corps in East Africa, Iran, and Afghanistan. Then, in March, he was called to recast a speech on poverty for Johnson. Five drafts, all part of the collection, evolved into the special message to Congress on March 19, in which the phrase “war on poverty” struck a responsive chord. Goodwin now had a hot hand, and Johnson sought to bring him to the White House as his domestic affairs speechwriter.Goodwin consulted his friend Robert F. Kennedy about whether he should take the job and recounted the attorney general’s advice in his diary, now at the Briscoe Center. “From a selfish point of view — you can think selfishly once in a while — I wish you wouldn’t, but I guess you have to,” Kennedy said to Goodwin. Although anything that makes Johnson “look bad, makes Jack look better, I suppose. But I guess you should do it. If you do, you have to do the best job you can, and loyally, there’s no other way.”Goodwin, Bill Moyers, and President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, ca. 1965.LBJ Presidential LibraryThe archival material allows students of politics to follow the paper trail from a Goodwin draft to a Johnson speech, then to a Congressional bill, and finally to federal law. Goodwin had become Johnson’s indispensable White House wordsmith. “I want to put him in a hide-a-way over here,” Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk, according to a March 21, 1964, taped White House conversation. “I’d just work him day and night.” So began an extraordinary partnership during the height of the Great Society — a time when the president summoned the Congress to pass one historic piece of legislation after another, legislation that would change the face of the country.Goodwin resigned in late 1965, believing that the energy and focus for the Great Society was being siphoned to the escalating war in Vietnam, as he wrote in his memoir, “Remembering America.” In the months that followed, his friendship with Robert Kennedy deepened. When Kennedy went to South Africa in June 1966, Goodwin helped craft his “Ripple of Hope” speech. (Words from that shimmering human rights appeal are carved on Kennedy’s gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery.) Goodwin joined Kennedy’s campaign for president and was with him in the Los Angeles hospital room when he died.After the assassination, Goodwin retreated to Maine, shattered by Kennedy’s death. Four years later, he met Kearns Goodwin at Harvard, and they went on to become a team of writers, each editing the other’s work.Goodwin in 1968. He called himself a voice of the 1960s — with justification.George Tames/The New York TimesWhen Vice President Al Gore wanted help drafting his presidential concession speech in 2000, after the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount, he turned to Goodwin, still known as one of the most gifted speechwriters in the Democratic orbit.While Goodwin’s papers are a window into the inner workings of important presidencies, the Kearns Goodwin boxes are riveting to scholars with an interest in American history and the writing of it. Her well-organized trove of primary source material for all of her books, including “Team of Rivals” (2005) and “The Bully Pulpit” (2013) are eminently accessible. She saved “all the research and primary sources related to every book I had written,” she said, “from the original idea for how to tell the story, to the interviews, to the early outlines, the primary sources, copies of handwritten letters.”“Oh, how I love old handwritten letters and diaries,” she enthused. “I feel as if I’m looking over the shoulder of the writer. History comes alive!”Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and the author of the forthcoming “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Environmental Awakening.” More

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      To Save His Presidency, Biden Must Tell the Truth About Afghanistan

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      For days now, the news media has likened the chaotic end of our misadventure in Afghanistan, and the awful images of terrified people scrambling onto planes at the Kabul airport, to the final exit from South Vietnam. The comparison is overdrawn; the last American combat troops left Indochina two years before the collapse of the Saigon government.But there is at least one potential parallel between the two conflicts that should have President Biden worried: The last time a war blew up in the face of a Democratic president, it derailed his domestic agenda and stalled the most ambitious social reforms of a generation.To be sure, domestic political concerns should not overshadow the immediate urgency of getting all Americans and the Afghans who worked for them out of Afghanistan. But history shows how adversity abroad has often led to trouble for the governing party back home. Mr. Biden may not be able to save his ambitious legislative agenda unless he understands that lesson from the past.In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democrats secured crushing majorities that enabled them to enact a flurry of landmark legislation: the Voting Rights Act, the bill establishing Medicare and Medicaid, an overhaul of immigration law. It is a feat Mr. Biden and progressive Democrats in Congress today would dearly like to emulate.But Johnson’s decision early in 1965 to send thousands of troops to combat the Vietcong soon halted the momentum of his Great Society agenda and put Democrats on the defensive. A year later, as the war dragged on and protests mounted, Johnson’s approval rating dipped below 50 percent. In the midterm contests of 1966, the Republican Party picked up 47 seats in the House, and Democratic governors in eight states were replaced by Republicans — one of them a former actor in California named Ronald Reagan. By 1968, Republicans had taken back the White House, and Democrats never achieved a progressive policy agenda as far-reaching again.Joe Biden bears far less responsibility for the defeat in Afghanistan than Lyndon Johnson did for the debacle in Indochina. As Mr. Biden mentioned in his address to the nation on Monday, as vice president, he opposed the troop surge ordered by Barack Obama in 2009. He can also claim that he was merely carrying out an agreement Donald Trump signed last year.Furthermore, unlike the Vietnam War, which provoked a long, scorching debate that divided the country far more bitterly and profoundly than the more limited, if longer, battle with the Taliban ever did, this conflict could soon be forgotten. As the public’s attention shifts away from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden’s decision may seem less like a failure and more like a sober, even necessary end to a policy that was doomed from the start.Yet the president and his fellow Democrats face a political environment so daunting that even the slightest disruption could derail their domestic agenda. Even before the Afghan crisis, they needed the vote of every senator from their party to enact their budget blueprint, and Mr. Biden has never had the sky-high approval ratings that allowed Johnson to rule Congress with an iron fist. This week, for the first time, his rating dipped into the 40s. Whatever they manage to accomplish in Congress, Democrats could easily lose their narrow control of both houses in the next midterm elections, especially if Republicans effectively inflame fears about Afghan refugees being resettled in this country.The United States has not had a true majority party for 50 years, and that stalemate, with the enduringly fierce partisanship it engenders, is unlikely to end soon. To pass the big reforms he wants, Mr. Biden will need to describe what he did to end this war better than Johnson explained why he dispatched troops to meddle in another civil conflict in a nation thousands of miles from their homeland.President Lyndon Johnson with Gen. William Westmoreland in South Vietnam in 1967. The Vietnam War derailed Johnson’s domestic agenda.Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ LibraryTwo lessons from Johnson’s downfall are paramount. First, tell the truth, even if it makes you look bad, temporarily. The 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers demonstrated that Johnson lied continually when he lauded the progress the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were supposedly making. By 1966, the press was accusing the administration of creating a credibility gap that only yawned wider as the conflict escalated.All presidents lie at times, but those who admit mistakes, particularly obvious ones, can retain their popularity. This happened to John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and to Bill Clinton when he acknowledged his affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998 (although he benefited more from the Republicans’ failed attempt to throw him out of office).Mr. Biden made a decent start at such truth-telling during his speech this week. But he should give a fuller explanation of why his administration failed to prepare for a Taliban victory that, according to years of intelligence reports, was quite likely.Second, keep the coalition that elected you united in its response to the crisis. Though Johnson had a reputation as a masterful politician, he became despised by millions of his fellow Democrats because of his Vietnam policy. If Democrats in Congress follow through on their vows to carry out extensive hearings into the collapse of the Afghan government, they could provoke a similar intraparty battle.But the president may be able to stave off that kind of public bickering. If he chooses to declassify whatever vital documents exist, in an attempt to convince his Democratic critics that he is serious about revealing why his exit strategy went wrong, it may dissuade them from engaging in their own lengthy investigation.The defeat in Afghanistan, like the one in Vietnam, was a long time coming. Democrats can take steps to prevent such interventions. But if they repeat the errors of their predecessors in the 1960s, they may secure the triumph of an opposition party whose leaders have not stopped lying about the election that drove them from power.Michael Kazin (@mkazin), a professor of history at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming book “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Primary Day in New York: Rain, Short Lines and a New Kind of Ballot

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      New York City voters used ranked-choice voting for the first time in a mayoral race on Tuesday, and many of them took it in stride.Laura Benedek, 75, has not missed an election since she cast her first vote — for Lyndon B. Johnson as president. Seated in her wheelchair on Tuesday, outside her polling place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she flaunted her “I Voted” sticker. More

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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