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      How Hard Will It Be for DeSantis to Beat Trump? Nixon vs. Reagan in 1968 Offers a Clue.

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      Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida, has entered the presidential race, establishing himself as the most formidable Republican rival to Donald Trump.Mr. Trump, an inveterate liar who tried to overturn the last election, is alienating to a wide swath of voters, and many establishment Republicans have been happy to hunt out alternatives, particularly in Mr. DeSantis. After a rough midterm for Republicans that included the defeat of several Senate candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump, the former president appeared vulnerable.But since then, it has grown clear that counting him out as the likely Republican presidential nominee is foolhardy. Several factors — among them, the intense support he draws from a sizable chunk of the Republican base and his singular talent for commanding media attention — help explain why Mr. Trump holds a commanding position in the primary. History offers at least one parallel for why it will be so difficult for Mr. DeSantis and other G.O.P. contenders, like Nikki Haley, 51, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, and Senator Tim Scott, 57, Ms. Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, to take him down.There was, more than a half century ago, another de facto leader of the Republican Party who reeked of failure. Pundits mocked and dismissed him as a has-been. Rivals across the ideological spectrum no longer feared him and cheered on his slide into irrelevancy.By the end of 1962, few believed there was a future for Richard Nixon, the former vice president. In 1960, he lost one of the closest-ever presidential races to John F. Kennedy, and members of the liberal Republican establishment, including Dwight Eisenhower, were glad to see him fall.After losing to Kennedy, Nixon tried to regroup, entering the 1962 California governor’s race against the well-liked Democratic incumbent, Pat Brown. Nixon, who had served as a representative and senator from the state, was initially expected to triumph and use the governorship as a steppingstone to the presidency. Instead, Brown swatted Nixon away after the former vice president had to endure a bruising primary battle against a Republican who was popular with the sort of movement conservatives who would, in the coming years, seize control of the party.On the morning after his loss to Brown, Nixon famously told the assembled press at the Beverly Hilton Hotel they wouldn’t have him to “kick around anymore.” That November, the journalist Howard K. Smith titled a television segment “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.”In the wake of these humiliations, Nixon’s tenuous comeback hinged on persuading both Republican voters, who could find more attractive warriors for their cause, and influential party and media elites that he in fact wasn’t completely finished. In 1964, Nixon flirted with running for president but backed away. (Mr. Trump, of course, did not feel chastened for supporting weak and beatable candidates in the midterms last year, and instead waited roughly a week to announce another presidential run.)Nixon decided to support Barry Goldwater, the far-right Arizona senator who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president. Nixon’s attachment to Goldwater won him some plaudits with the base of the party — he had been one of the few prominent Republicans to stick with the senator — but didn’t help alter the perception that he was a serial loser. To complete his rehabilitation, in the 1966 midterms, he strategically stumped for anti-Johnson Republicans who were poised to ride the white backlash to the Great Society and civil rights programs.By 1968, Nixon had established himself as a foreign policy maven, having undertaken many world tours in the 1960s, and cast himself as an arch, erudite critic of the Johnson administration.His period of vulnerability was briefer, but Mr. Trump today, like mid-’60s Nixon, has reasserted himself as a party kingpin. Now he, too, is contending with a popular governor from a large swing state.In the 1968 G.O.P. primary, Nixon actually had to outflank three prominent Republican governors — George Romney of Michigan, Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Ronald Reagan of California — who could offer, in the immediate term at least, more allure.Reagan, who had defeated the formidable California Governor Brown in 1966, was actually older than Nixon but had the swagger and ease of a much younger man, marrying the sort of sunny optimism Nixon could never muster with the raw appeal to a growing reactionary vote that Nixon craved.Just as Mr. DeSantis, with his wars on critical race theory, “woke” Disney and Covid restrictions, is trying to outmaneuver Mr. Trump on the cultural terrain that’s always been so vital in Republican primaries, Reagan outshone Nixon with his open disdain for Johnson’s landmark civil rights agenda, the burgeoning antiwar movement and the emerging hippie counterculture. He railed against the “small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy-speech advocates” upending California and successfully demoralized Brown, who remarked, shellshocked, after Reagan’s triumph that “whether we like it or not, the people want separation of the races.”Nixon rebuffed Reagan and the others in one of the last primaries where delegates and party insiders, rather than the will of voters, played a significant role in determining the nomination.Here the present diverges from history. Nixon was far more introspective, methodical and policy-minded than Trump. He was, by 1968, a significantly stronger general election candidate, winning the most votes — Trump has twice lost the popular vote — despite the segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid, which ate into Nixon’s support.But just as a divided primary field worked to Nixon’s advantage, so it may for Mr. Trump, especially if several other candidates become viable. In such a scenario, Mr. Trump may need only pluralities in pivotal early states to take the nomination. His core fan base might be enough. Though Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign was often shambolic, it managed a finely tuned nativist, anti-free trade and anti-globalization message that cut through the noise of a chaotic primary season. In Nixonian fashion, Mr. Trump tapped into his party’s reactionaries and delighted the grass roots.The question is whether Mr. Trump can do it again. One of Nixon’s great political strengths was to assume, even at the height of his powers, the position of the aggrieved — to convince a palpable mass of voters that they, and he, were the outsiders. Genuinely self-made, this posture came naturally to Nixon. Mr. Trump, though the son of a millionaire real estate developer, has nevertheless effectively adopted it throughout his political career, once boasting of his love for the “poorly educated.”Mr. DeSantis enters the fray hoping that Mr. Trump’s many flaws, continuing legal troubles and political baggage ultimately render him weaker than he appears today. But looking at the historical parallel, even Reagan, a once-in-a-generation political talent, could not dislodge Nixon. As Mr. DeSantis’s Twitter-launch debacle suggests, he will need to quickly, and considerably, improve his standing. Perhaps then, with the help of a Trump implosion, can he hold out hope for 2024 — or even, as Reagan’s example suggests, a future presidential run.If 1968 is any guide, Mr. Trump will be tough to beat. In a crowded field, among a hungry younger generation of contenders like Mr. DeSantis, he will have to manufacture anew this kind of populism. He might just do it.Ross Barkan is an author and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.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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      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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      Former Iran Hostages Are Divided on Jimmy Carter and a Sabotage Claim

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      A report about a covert effort to delay their release until after the 1980 presidential election drew anger, resignation and disbelief from the survivors of the crisis.They are the last survivors of an international crisis that hobbled Jimmy Carter’s presidency and may have cost him re-election. Many are now in their 80s.With the former president gravely ill in hospice care, some of the 52 Americans who were held hostage in Iran for 444 days are looking back on Mr. Carter’s legacy with a mix of frustration, sadness and gratitude.Many feel neglected by the government, which has paid them only about a quarter of the $4.4 million that they were each promised by Congress in 2015, after decades of lobbying for compensation, said their lawyer, V. Thomas Lankford. Some endured physical and mental abuse, including mock executions, during the hostage crisis. About half have died.Jimmy Carter preparing to address the American people from the Oval Office on April 25, 1980, on the failed mission to rescue the Iran hostages.Associated PressLast week, their ordeal was thrust back into the news with the account of a covert effort to delay their release until after the 1980 presidential election in a bid to help the campaign of Mr. Carter’s Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.A former Texas politician, Ben Barnes, told The New York Times that he had toured the Middle East that summer with John B. Connally Jr., the former Texas governor, who told regional leaders that Mr. Reagan would win and give the Iranians a “better deal.” Mr. Connally, a former Democrat turned Republican, was angling for a cabinet position.Mr. Barnes, 84, said that he was speaking out now because “history needs to know that this happened.”He told The Times that he did not know if the message that Mr. Connally gave to Middle Eastern leaders ever reached the Iranians, or whether it influenced them. Mr. Connally died in 1993. Nor was it clear if Mr. Reagan knew about the trip. Mr. Barnes said Mr. Connally had briefed William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in an airport lounge after the trip.The account stirred anger among some of the former hostages, while others dismissed his story of election sabotage as not credible. They are a diverse group that includes former diplomats, retired military officers and academics, and members of both major political parties.“It’s nice that Mr. Barnes is trying to soothe his soul during the last years of his life,” said Barry Rosen, 79, who was press attaché at the embassy in Tehran when it was overrun on Nov. 4, 1979. “But for the hostages who went through hell, he has not helped us at all. He has made it just as bad or worse.”Mr. Rosen, who lives in New York, said that Mr. Barnes should have come forward 43 years ago, given the decades of speculation about political interference.“It’s the definition of treason,” he said, “knowing that there was a possibility that the Carter administration might have been able to negotiate us out of Iran earlier.”Kathryn Koob, 84, of Waterloo, Iowa, who was the director of an Iranian-American cultural program when she was taken hostage, said, “If somebody wanted to be so cruel as to use us for political gain, that’s on their conscience, and they have to deal with it.”That Mr. Connally could have been engaged in political skulduggery was hardly shocking after Watergate, said John W. Limbert, 80, who was a political officer at the embassy when he was taken hostage.“It’s basically just confirmation of what we strongly suspected all along,” Mr. Limbert said. “We should not be surprised about this in American politics — people willing to stoop to anything.”He credited Mr. Carter with showing patience during the crisis, even if voters blamed him for mishandling the showdown with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader whose followers stormed the embassy after the Carter administration admitted Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the deposed shah of Iran, to the United States for medical treatment.“He basically sacrificed his presidency to get us out alive,” Mr. Limbert said.But Kevin Hermening, a certified financial planner in Mosinee, Wis., who was a Marine Corps sergeant guarding the embassy, said that he did not believe Mr. Barnes’s account and that, even if it were true, the effort would not have influenced his captors.“The Iranians were very clear that they were not going to release us while President Carter was in office,” said Mr. Hermening, 63. “He was despised by the mullahs and those people who followed the Ayatollah.”And Don Cooke, 68, of Gaithersburg, Md., a retired Foreign Service officer who was vice consul at the embassy, called Mr. Barnes’s account “mildly amusing.”It suggested, he said, that there were “these other dark forces that were sabotaging our efforts to get these hostages free, and I just don’t buy that.”Mr. Cooke still blames Mr. Carter for the crisis. He said the president should have cleared the embassy of its personnel before he admitted the shah or have refused to allow the shah to enter the country.When Mr. Carter flew to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany to greet the freed hostages, Mr. Cooke said he snubbed the former president, staying on the phone with his parents as Mr. Carter put a hand on his back. He handed the phone to Mr. Carter, who spoke to his mother.“The reason we were released was because Ronald Reagan was elected president,” Mr. Cooke said. “The Iranians were clearly afraid of Reagan. No question about that. And they had every right to be.”Ben Barnes, left, with Lady Bird Johnson and former President Lyndon B. Johnson in Austin, Tex., on Aug. 29, 1970.Ted Powers/Associated PressThe hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, minutes after Mr. Reagan took office.It was the end of an anguished chapter. Network news anchors had kept nightly counts of how long the hostages had been in captivity, accompanied by martial music and “America Held Hostage” graphics. People across the country tied yellow ribbons around trees in a show of support for the hostages.After months of fruitless negotiations, Mr. Carter had authorized a rescue mission in April 1980 that ended in disaster when a helicopter crashed into a plane in the Iranian desert. Eight service members were killed, and their charred bodies were displayed by Iranian officials.In the end, Mr. Carter did not pull off the pre-election “October surprise” that some in Mr. Reagan’s orbit feared. It was only after Mr. Carter’s defeat that his outgoing administration struck a deal that released billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets.Those assets were “the weapon that kept us alive,” said Mr. Rosen, the former press attaché. Referring to Mr. Carter, he added, “I think the thing he did — and did absolutely right — was to free the American hostages without us getting murdered.”The Barnes account cast a new light on these long-ago events, troubling David M. Roeder, a retired colonel who was the deputy Air Force attaché at the embassy. Mr. Roeder said that he had repeatedly told his captors that if Mr. Reagan won, they would be dealing with a “much tougher person.”“I have come to the conclusion — perhaps because I want to — that hopefully President Reagan was unaware that this was going on,” said Mr. Roeder, 83, of Pinehurst, N.C.But, he added, “I gained a great deal more respect for President Carter because I’ve seen what he went through with us in captivity.” More

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      The Iran Hostages, and a Plot to Thwart Carter

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      More from our inbox:Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundWhite Supremacy PropagandaCare at the End of Life“History needs to know that this happened,” Ben Barnes now says of his trip to the Middle East in 1980.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter Is Revealed” (front page, March 19), about an effort to delay release of the American hostages in Iran to weaken Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign:By way of apology to Mr. Carter, Ben Barnes details the mission to ensure that the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran were not released on Mr. Carter’s watch. Mr. Barnes’s candor, though overdue, is welcome, but his apology is somewhat misdirected.While Jimmy Carter might rightly claim that he suffered defeat in 1980 because Ronald Reagan’s campaign engaged in a contemptible plot, he was nevertheless a “second tier” victim.More than 50 Americans were held in terror for 444 days, not knowing whether they would live or die. If, as Mr. Barnes implies, his mission resulted in extending the hostages’ captivity, they stand at the front of the line of those to whom he should apologize.Mark SteinbergLos AngelesTo the Editor:How would President Jimmy Carter have responded to this news that, according to Ben Barnes, the G.O.P. was involved in an effort to thwart Mr. Carter’s efforts to win the American hostages’ release?I was on Air Force One accompanying Mr. Carter in the days leading up to the 1980 election. All efforts were focused on getting those Americans home.Our last hope came when news reached Mr. Carter at 2 a.m., Chicago time, on the Sunday before the election. Learning that the Iranian mullahs had modified their demands, the president put off campaigning and raced back to Washington. Unfortunately, Mr. Carter realized that obstacles remained.Imagine if he’d just learned that a Republican ally of President Reagan had been spreading the word in Arab capitals that Iran should keep the 52 hostages until after he had taken office? Imagine if Mr. Carter had gotten this story just before his final debate with Ronald Reagan? It would have put the G.O.P. challenger on the defensive.Imagine if …Chris MatthewsChevy Chase, Md.The writer, the former longtime host of the MSNBC show “Hardball,” was a speechwriter for President Carter.To the Editor:Ben Barnes’s revelations that political operatives met with overseas governments before the 1980 presidential election didn’t surprise me. The release of American hostages from Iranian captivity a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 was too much of a coincidence.This unwarranted interference in American foreign affairs by private citizens reminded me of Richard Nixon’s intrigues to entice the South Vietnamese government to stall the Paris peace talks in an effort to derail a Democratic victory in the 1968 presidential election.Shame on all those involved for risking American lives to benefit their political ambitions.Paul L. NewmanMerion Station, Pa.To the Editor:Thanks for an important and credible addition to the narrative of the Iran hostage crisis.An addendum: John Connally and Ben Barnes would almost certainly have received a chilly response to their scheme from President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, who was close to President Carter and loyal to him.Moreover, at the time of the trip, Sadat had welcomed his friend, the recently deposed shah of Iran, to Egypt, and the shah died there in July. Thus there is little chance Sadat conveyed the Connally-Barnes message to Tehran, though other Middle Eastern heads of state might have done so.Jonathan AlterMontclair, N.J.The writer is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundOnly a statue of Saddam Hussein remained standing at an Iraqi communications center that was the target of a bombing attack by American forces in 2003.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?,” by Max Fisher (The Interpreter, March 19), suggests that the triggering motive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq will remain unknown.The article says “a critical mass of senior officials all came to the table wanting to topple” Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, “for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification”: weapons of mass destruction.The clear goal was to topple Mr. Hussein. Recall that President George W. Bush desired revenge on Mr. Hussein for an attempt on his father’s life and that he was reportedly advised that only wartime presidents become great.The missing piece of the puzzle is that neoconservative advisers, with an array of reasons for toppling Mr. Hussein, were able to play on President Bush’s personal aspirations to get the go-ahead for the invasion.Richard ReillyOlean, N.Y.To the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” gives plausible answers. Another possible explanation was foretold by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address.He warned of “the unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” telling us, in effect, that those who make money from war and those whose careers benefit from these actions have both influence and a shared interest in military interventions.His words are still worth heeding.Barbara H. ChasinIthaca, N.Y.The writer is emerita professor of sociology at Montclair State University and the author of “Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism.”White Supremacy Propaganda Michael Dwyer/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “White Supremacist Propaganda Soared Last Year, Report Finds” (news article, March 10):The alarming rise of white nationalist vandalism and propaganda, the majority of which is being spread by Patriot Front, is more than offensive — it is often a criminal offense. Legislators, prosecutors and law enforcement should recognize the dangers these attempts to intimidate, recruit and inspire violence pose to American communities.White nationalist activities are occurring nationwide, are coordinated and are often evading accountability in local jurisdictions. The arrest of 31 Patriot Front members preparing to disrupt an L.G.B.T.Q.+ Pride celebration in Idaho last summer should have been the notice federal authorities needed. After the mass arrest, 17 organizations called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Patriot Front.We hope that The Times’s coverage of this disturbing trend adds urgency to the appeal for federal action against these dangerous campaigns of hate. Our local communities — and our democracy — can’t afford to be left to manage this threat alone any longer.Lindsay SchubinerBerkeley, Calif.The writer is the program director for the Western States Center, a nationwide group that works to strengthen inclusive democracy.Care at the End of Life Nadia HafidTo the Editor:Re “Aggressive Care Still Common at Life’s End” (The New Old Age, March 14):As a nurse practitioner in a large hospital, I see this kind of aggressive care all too often.In addition to the physical and emotional stress it places on patients and families, there’s a financial cost, since such care isn’t free.I will never forget an older man who spent his last months in one of our I.C.U.s. His wife not only lost him when he died but also their house, as the cost of medical care made her unable to pay the mortgage.These kinds of nonmedical consequences need to be considered, acknowledged and regularly assessed for. Something else our health care system doesn’t do.Marian GrantReisterstown, Md. More

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      An Untold Story Behind Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Defeat

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      WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.The hostage crisis in Iran hampered Mr. Carter’s effort to win a second term.Associated PressWhat happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.William J. Casey, left, went on to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan administration.Getty ImagesMr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.Mr. Barnes, right, with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. via Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential LibraryMr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.Brief news accounts at the time reported on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describing the trip as “strictly private.” An intriguing note in Mr. Connally’s file confirms Mr. Barnes’s memory that there was contact with the Reagan camp early in the trip. Under the heading “Governor Reagan,” a note from an assistant reported to Mr. Connally on July 21: “Nancy Reagan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” There was no record of his response.Mr. Barnes recalled joining Mr. Connally in early September to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip during a three-hour meeting in the American Airlines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport. An entry in Mr. Connally’s calendar found this past week showed that he traveled to Dallas on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University turned up no documents indicating whether he was in Dallas then or not.Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.Iran released the American hostages minutes after Mr. Carter left office at noon on Jan. 20, 1981.Associated PressJohn B. Connally III, the former governor’s eldest son, said in an interview on Friday that he remembered his father taking the Middle East trip but never heard about any message to Iran. While he did not join the trip, the younger Mr. Connally said he accompanied his father to a meeting with Mr. Reagan to discuss it without Mr. Barnes and the conversation centered on the Arab-Israeli conflict and other issues the next president would confront.“No mention was made in any meeting I was in about any message being sent to the Iranians,” said Mr. Connally. “It doesn’t sound like my dad.” He added: “I can’t challenge Ben’s memory about it, but it’s not consistent with my memory of the trip.”Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.Mr. Reagan welcomed Bruce Laingen, a former hostage in Iran, to the White House in January 1981. Mr. Laingen and 51 other Americans had been held for 444 days in Tehran.Associated PressThe House and Senate separately authorized investigations and both ultimately rejected the claims. The bipartisan House task force, led by a Democrat, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and controlled by Democrats 8 to 5, concluded in a consensus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that stories of covert dealings were not backed by credible testimony, documents or intelligence reports.Still, a White House memo produced in November 1991 by a lawyer for President George H.W. Bush reported the existence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was discovered two decades later by Robert Parry, a journalist who helped produce a “Frontline” documentary on the October surprise.Reached by telephone this past week, Mr. Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Mr. Connally but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.”Michael F. Zeldin, a Democratic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Laufman, a Republican lawyer for the task force, both said in recent interviews that Mr. Connally never crossed their radar screen during the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.While Mr. Casey was never proved to have been engaged in any October surprise deal-making, he was later accused of surreptitiously obtaining a Carter campaign briefing book before the lone debate between the two candidates, although he denied involvement.Mr. Carter meeting with Gary Sick, a national security aide, in the Oval Office. Mr. Sick advanced a theory after Mr. Carter’s loss that a Reagan ally had brokered a deal with Iran for the hostages’ post-election release in exchange for arms.Associated PressNews of Mr. Barnes’s account came as validation to some of Mr. Carter’s remaining advisers. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history. “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”Mr. Connally was a political giant of his era. Raised on a South Texas cotton farm, he served in the Navy in World War II and became a confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, helping run five of his campaigns, including his disputed 1948 election to the Senate that was marred by credible allegations of fraud. Mr. Connally managed Mr. Johnson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, then worked for the ticket of John F. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson. Mr. Connally was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the Navy. He then won a race for governor of Texas in 1962.He was in the presidential limousine sitting just in front of Mr. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire. Mr. Connally suffered injuries to his back, chest, wrist and thigh, but unlike Mr. Kennedy survived the ordeal. He won two more terms as governor, then became President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury and ultimately switched parties. He was a favorite of Mr. Nixon, who wanted to make him his vice president or successor as president.Mr. Connally was indicted on charges of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice in 1974, accused by prosecutors of taking $10,000 to support a milk price increase, but acquitted by a jury.Along the way, Mr. Connally found a political protégé in Mr. Barnes, who became “more a godson than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biography of Mr. Connally. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for college selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Mr. Barnes was elected to the Texas Legislature at age 21 and stood at Mr. Connally’s side for his first speech as a candidate for governor in 1962.Mr. Barnes said he and John B. Connally Jr. met with leaders across the Middle East — though not Iran — to thwart the release of the hostages until after the presidential election.Associated PressWith Mr. Connally’s help, Mr. Barnes became House speaker at 26 and was later elected lieutenant governor, a powerful position in Texas, only to fall short in his own bid for governor in 1972. He urged Mr. Connally to run for president in 1980 even though by then they were in different parties.After Mr. Connally’s campaign collapsed, he and Mr. Barnes went into business together, forming Barnes/Connally Investments. The two built apartment complexes, shopping centers and office buildings, and bought a commuter airline and an oil company, and later a barbecue house, a Western art magazine, a title company and an advertising company. But they overextended themselves, took on too much debt and, after falling oil prices shattered the Texas real estate market, filed for bankruptcy in 1987.The two stayed on good terms. “In spite of the disillusionment of our business arrangements, Ben Barnes and I remain friends, although I doubt that either of us would go back into business with the other,” Mr. Connally wrote in his memoir, “In History’s Shadow,” shortly before dying in 1993 at age 76. Mr. Barnes, for his part, said this past week that “I remain a great fan of him.”Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Connally was running for secretary of state or secretary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Connally was later offered energy secretary but declined.)From left, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Connally and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. Mr. Barnes said Mr. Connally promoted Mr. Reagan to every leader they met on their trip.via Ben BarnesMr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.” More

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      Jimmy Carter Made Me a Better American

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      When the Carter presidency began I was an 18-year-old Rockefeller Republican. By the time it ended, I was so liberal my own grandmother called me a Communist.My transformation may have been the inevitable result of eating the brownies at Wesleyan University, but I think it is more likely that it was Jimmy Carter’s time in the White House — with its remarkable mash-up of triumphs and failures — that helped me better understand my country and myself.As the former president enters the final stages of his senescence, I have been thinking a lot about who I was when I first encountered him, and how the country got where it is today. I am still grateful to Mr. Carter for demonstrating that it is possible to govern with morality, honesty and grace. It would be nice if those values didn’t seem so strangely old-fashioned.But I am still angry at him, too.It was Jimmy Carter who brought the Israelis and Egyptians together at Camp David; who brought about SALT II, limiting the nuclear capabilities of the United States and the Soviets; who urged Americans to embark on a path of moral renewal.But it was also, arguably, Jimmy Carter who gave us Ronald Reagan, the first president who made hating your own government fashionable. In so many ways, the Tea Party movement, the QAnon conspiracy and the Jan. 6 insurrection are all results of what Ronald Reagan started; supporters of each distrust government and find authoritarian figures strangely attractive.I had inherited my parents’ politics before I arrived at Wesleyan in the fall of 1976. (Their track record of G.O.P. support was unbroken from Barry Goldwater to Gerald Ford.) As a first-year student, I watched the presidential debates between Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter on a tiny black and white television on campus. In one, Mr. Ford insisted that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.” In a way I felt bad for him; I knew what it was like to get terrified when you had to talk in front of other people.But then, I wasn’t the president. It gave me pause to consider, for the first time, if it was really a great idea to be led by a man who faltered, sometimes, when the pressure was on.Still, in the 1970s it was possible for entire weeks to pass by without anyone thinking about the president. In my mind’s eye those four years were very much what we had been promised during the campaign: Jimmy Carter would never lie to us. He was so earnest. I can still see him, flickering on a TV, delivering hard truths while wearing a cardigan.I was on a semester abroad in London when Mr. Carter brought about the seemingly impossible — forging a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. I remember how proud I felt. That night I was in a pub in Marylebone, and a stranger, learning that I was an American, bought me a Guinness. “God bless America,” he said. “Greatest country in the world!” He was a little drunk, but still. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a moment like that since.The Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat, left; President Carter, center; and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, at the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.Associated PressCamp David was not enough. In July of 1979, Mr. Carter told my fellow Americans we were suffering from a moral crisis. He called for a moral revival in the country. He said that “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”I was working at the campus radio station that summer. I remember one of the other D.J.s saying, “Damn right.” After the long years of Nixon and Watergate and Vietnam and the staggering effects of skyrocketing inflation, and a shortage of gas, and all the many other ways in which the United States was just exhausted with itself — a moral revival seemed like just the thing.It was not to be. My senior year was dominated by the Iran hostage crisis that began that November. As the crisis wore on, it seemed the consciousness of the entire country was hostage alongside those 52 individuals. It was nearly impossible to have a conversation about anything else. Mr. Carter’s failures were our failures.As Mr. Carter scrambled, new voters like me began to think about alternatives. We wanted an American hero, not an all-too-thoughtful negotiator. California’s progressive candidate, Jerry Brown, had plenty of supporters on campus. So did Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. He came to campus to see his son, Ted Jr., in the fall of 1979. The visit was a zoo. It was like we were being visited by all four Beatles at once.Mr. Kennedy’s campaign sputtered out as quickly as it was briefly lit, but the damage to Mr. Carter was done. Ronald Reagan stopped seeming — to some — like such an impossible joke.That was when it occurred to me that the mirror Jimmy Carter held up to our flaws was not the thing we wanted. We didn’t want a guide to bettering our souls. We didn’t want to sacrifice for the common good. We wanted to be defined by what we owned, and what we wanted to own was as much junk as possible. We wanted to be told that we were great.Sometimes, we wanted people to lie to us.A few days after Ronald Reagan swept the national vote, I moved to New York with a single suitcase and an old Silvertone autoharp. I’d arrived in adulthood having been transformed into a progressive, not only by the liberalism of my Wesleyan education, but also by the ideals on display in the very best moments of the Carter presidency — and the call to action he had believed Americans might embrace. I’d become a Democrat at the exact moment that the wave of progressive politics had crested and begun to recede.It was as if I’d arrived at Woodstock just in time to see all my beatnik pals heading back — not to their hippie vans, but to a fleet of BMWs.I’ll always be disappointed that Jimmy Carter was unable to rally America around the idea of moral renewal. But I am forever grateful for the fleeting glimpses he gave us of the country we might still become.Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan) is a professor of English at Barnard College and a 2022-23 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.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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      Gary Hart: The “New Church Committee” Is an Outrage

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      To legitimize otherwise questionable investigations, Congress occasionally labels them after a previous successful effort. Thus, the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ proposed select committee, which plans to investigate the “weaponization of government,” is being described as “the new Church committee,” after the group of senators who investigated the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other groups from 1975-76.As the last surviving member of the original Church committee, named after its chairman, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, I have a particular interest in distinguishing what we accomplished then and what authoritarian Republicans seem to have in mind now.The outlines of the committee, which Rep. Jim Jordan will assemble, remain vague. Reading between the rhetorical lines, proponents appear to believe agencies of the national government have targeted, and perhaps are still targeting, right-of-center individuals and groups, possibly including individuals and right-wing militia groups that participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.That is almost completely at odds with the purpose of the original Church committee, which was founded in response to widespread abuses by government intelligence agencies. While we sought to protect the constitutional rights and freedoms of American citizens, we were also bound to protect the integrity of the intelligence and security agencies, which were founded to protect those freedoms, too.Our committee brought U.S. intelligence agencies under congressional scrutiny to prevent the violation of the privacy rights of American citizens, and to halt covert operations abroad that violated our constitutional principles. Rather than strengthening the oversight of federal agencies, the new committee seems designed to prevent law enforcement and intelligence agencies from enforcing the law — specifically, laws against insurrectionist activity in our own democracy.It is one thing to intercept phone calls from people organizing a peaceful civil rights march and quite another to intercept phone calls from people organizing an assault on the Capitol to impede the certification of a national election.Rather than weaken our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the Church committee sought to restore their original mandates and increase their focus away from partisan or political manipulation. Our committee was bipartisan, leaning neither right nor left, and the conservative senators, including the vice chair, John Tower, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and others, took pains to prevent liberal or progressive members, including chairman Church, Philip Hart, Walter Mondale and me, from weakening our national security.They needn’t have bothered. We all understood, including me, the youngest member, that attacks on federal law enforcement and national security would not go down well among our constituents. Unlike in the 1970s, today’s threat to domestic security is less from foreign sources and more from homeland groups seeking to replace the constitutional order with authoritarian practices that challenge historic institutions and democratic practices.Among a rather large number of reforms proposed by the Church committee were permanent congressional oversight committees for the intelligence community, an endorsement of the 1974 requirement that significant clandestine projects be approved by the president in a written “finding,” the notification of the chairs of the oversight committees of certain clandestine projects at the time they are undertaken and the elimination of assassination attempts against foreign leaders.Despite the concern of conservatives at the time, to my knowledge, no significant clandestine activity was compromised and no classified information leaked as a result of these reforms in the almost half-century since they were adopted. In fact, the oversight and notification requirements, by providing political cover, have operated as protection for the C.I.A.Evidence was provided of the effectiveness of these reforms in the so-called Iran-contra controversy in 1985-87. The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance covert operations in Nicaragua against its socialist government. Assigning accountability for this scheme proved difficult until a document authorizing it was located in the White House. President Reagan did not remember signing it; however, it bore his signature. This kind of accountability would not have been possible before our reforms were adopted.The rules of the Senate and the House establish what standing committees and what special committees each house may create. The House is clearly at liberty within those rules to create a committee to protect what it perceives to be an important element of its base. And if its purposes are ultimately to protect authoritarian interests, it is presumably free to do so and accept criticisms from the press and the public. It is outrageous to call it a new Church committee. Trying to disguise a highly partisan effort to legitimize undemocratic activities by cloaking it in the mantle of a successful bipartisan committee from decades ago is a mockery.Gary Hart is a former United States senator from Colorado and the author of, most recently, “The Republic of Conscience.”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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      When American History Turns Into American Mythology

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      In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch. Puncturing these myths is a matter of duty and an assertion of expertise. “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.I can claim some experience in this effort, not as a debunker of myths but as a clearinghouse for them. When I served as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles in which experts tackled the most common fallacies surrounding subjects in the news. This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?These questions came up frequently as I read “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The book, which the editors describe as an “intervention” in long-running public discussions on American politics, economics and culture, is an authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre — authoritative for the quality of the contributions and the scope of its enterprise, fitting because it captures in one volume the possibilities and pitfalls of the form. When you face down so many myths in quick succession, the values that underpin the effort grow sharper, even if the value of myths themselves grows murkier. All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects. Carol Anderson of Emory University discredits the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. elections, showing how the politicians and activists who claim to defend “election integrity” are often seeking to exclude some voters from the democratic process. Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University puts the lie to the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions; with its territories and tribal nations and foreign bases, he contends, the country is very much an empire today and has been so from the start. And after reading Lawrence B. Glickman’s essay on “White Backlash,” I will be careful of writing that a civil-rights protest or movement “sparked” or “fomented” or “provoked” a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable. “Backlashers are rarely treated as agents of history, the people who participate in them seen as bit players rather than catalysts of the story, reactors rather than actors,” Glickman, a historian at Cornell, writes. Sometimes the best myth-busting is the kind that makes you want to rewrite old sentences.The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur. “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,” Kruse and Zelizer write. Yet, this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.Sarah Churchwell’s enlightening chapter on the evolution of “America First” as a slogan and worldview, for instance, builds on her 2018 book on the subject. But to address the topic as a myth, Churchwell, a historian at the University of London, asserts that Donald Trump’s invocation of “America First” in the 2016 presidential race was “widely defended as a reasonable foreign policy doctrine.” (Her evidence is a pair of pieces by the conservative commentators Michael Barone and Michael Anton.)In his essay defending the accomplishments of the New Deal, Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, admits that the policy program’s alleged failure “is not a tale tightly woven into the national story” and that “perhaps myth seems an inappropriate term.” He does believe the New Deal’s failure is a myth worth exploding, of course, but acknowledges that there are “many analytical categories of falsehood.” The admission deserves some kudos, but it also might just be right.In Kruse’s chapter on the history of the “Southern Strategy” — the Republican Party’s deliberate effort to bring white Southerners to its side as the Democratic Party grew more active in support of civil rights — the author allows that “only recently have conservative partisans challenged this well-established history.” This singling out of conservatives is not accidental. In their introduction, Kruse and Zelizer argue that the growth of right-wing media platforms and the Republican Party’s declining “commitment to truth” have fostered a boom in mythmaking. “Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,” they write.The editors note the existence of some “bipartisan” myths that transcend party or ideology, but overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right. In an analysis that spans 20 chapters, more than 300 pages and centuries of American history and public discourse, this emphasis is striking. Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. If not, it might require its own debunking.One of those bipartisan myths, typically upheld by politicians of both major parties, is the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism. In his essay on the subject, David A. Bell, another Princeton historian, can be dismissive of the term. “Most nations can be considered exceptional in one sense or another,” he writes. Today, the phrase is typically deployed as a “cudgel” in the country’s culture wars, Bell contends, a practice popularized by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has long hailed the United States as “the most unique civilization in history” and assails anyone who does not bow before the concept. “For Gingrich, demonstrating America’s exceptionality has always mattered less than denouncing the Left for not believing in it,” Bell writes.When exploring earlier arguments about America’s unique nature, Bell touches on John Winthrop’s 17th-century sermon “Model of Christian Charity,” in which the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Puritan community would be “as a city on a hill” (a line that President Ronald Reagan expanded centuries later to a “shining city upon a hill”). The reference is obligatory in any discussion of American exceptionalism, though Bell minimizes the relevance of the lay sermon to the exceptionalism debates, both because the text “breathed with agonized doubt” about whether the colonists could meet the challenge and because the sermon “remained virtually unknown until the 19th century.”It is an intriguing assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial obscurity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) would render it irrelevant, no matter how significant it became to later generations. It is the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and the author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, takes toward Federalist No. 10. James Madison’s essay “foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” Amar writes, in part for its argument that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, almost no one paid attention to Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays that resonated widely during the debates over constitutional ratification, Amar writes, No. 10 “failed to make a deep impression in American coffeehouses and taverns where patrons read aloud and discussed both local and out-of-town newspapers.” Alas, Mr. Madison, your piece was not trending, so we’re taking it off history’s home page.To his credit, Amar is consistent in privileging immediate popular reactions in his historical assessments. He criticizes the argument of Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an antidemocratic document. “If the document was truly antidemocratic, why did the People vote for it?” Amar asks. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working men enthusiastically join massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” Even just in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, however, it seems clear that people in a free society can be rallied to democratic and anti-democratic causes, with great enthusiasm, if they come to believe such causes are righteous.Other contributors to “Myth America” are more willing to squint at the first impressions of the past. In a chapter minimizing the transformational impact of the Reagan presidency, Zelizer laments how “the trope that a ‘Reagan Revolution’ remade American politics has remained central to the national discourse,” even though it “has been more of a political talking point than a description of reality.” (Reminder: Calling them “tropes” or “talking points” is an effective shorthand way to dismiss opposing views.) When Zelizer looks back on a collection of historians’ essays published in 1989, just months after Reagan left office, and which argued that Reagan’s 1980 victory was “the end of the New Deal era,” he does not hesitate to pass judgment on his professional colleagues. “Even a group of historians was swept up by the moment,” he writes.Here, proximity to an earlier historical era renders observers susceptible to transient passions, not possessors of superior insights. If so, perhaps an essay collection of American myths that is published shortly after the Trump presidency also risks being swept up by its own moment. (Incidentally, that 1989 book, edited by the historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and titled “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,” shares one contributor with “Myth America.” Michael Kazin, take a bow.)Zelizer writes that the notion of a revolutionary Reagan era did not emerge spontaneously but was “born out of an explicit political strategy” aimed at exaggerating both conservative strength and liberal weakness. This is another recurring conclusion of “Myth America” — that many of our national mythologies are not the product of good-faith misunderstandings or organically divergent viewpoints that become entrenched over time, but rather of deliberate efforts at mythmaking. The notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms, that voting fraud is ubiquitous, that the feminist movement is anti-family — in this telling, they are myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.But in his essay on American exceptionalism, Bell adds in passing an idea somewhat subversive to the project of “Myth America,” and it separates this book from standard myth-quashing practices. After writing that narratives about America’s exceptional character were long deployed to justify U.S. aggression abroad and at home, Bell posits that notions of exceptionalism “also highlighted what Americans saw as their best qualities and moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.”Bell does not suggest that the belief in American exceptionalism fulfills this latter role today; to the contrary, its politicization has rendered the term vacuous and meaningless. “The mere notion of being exceptional can do very little to inspire Americans actually to be exceptional,” he writes. Still, Bell has opened a door here, even if just a crack. National myths can be more than conspiratorial, self-serving lies spread for low, partisan aims. They can also be aspirational.American aspiration, idealism and mythology have mingled together from the start. In her 2018 one-volume American history, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore wrote eloquently of those self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence — political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty — that the country never ceases to claim yet always struggles to uphold. It is the argument, often made by former President Barack Obama, that America becomes a more perfect union when it attempts to live up to its ideals and mythologies, even if it often fails. The tension between myth and reality does not undermine America. It defines it.In his best book, “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” published in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington distills the tension in his final lines: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” The authors and editors of “Myth America” do plenty to discredit the lies and reveal the disappointments, as they well should. Reimagining myth as aspiration can be a task for historians, but it is not theirs alone.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