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      If Trump wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine | Robert Reich

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      Last week Donald Trump said that, if re-elected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”.In other words, if Trump is re-elected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye.His remark made me think back almost a half century ago, to when I was a rookie lawyer in the Department of Justice.The department was in shambles, discredited by the political abuse and corruption of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, the attorney general.To restore trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi attorney general. In naming Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago and the dean of its law school, Ford found someone whose reputation for integrity was impeccable.As Levi said at his swearing-in: “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”Levi set out to insulate the justice department from politics, instituting rules limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decisions.The Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervin, didn’t think Levi’s rules went far enough to protect the department from an unscrupulous future president. Ervin wanted to make the justice department an independent agency with an attorney general appointed by the president every six years and removable only for neglect.At the time, I thought Ervin’s proposal too extreme. I assumed America had learned its lesson from Watergate and would never again elect a president as repugnant as Nixon, willing to sacrifice the institutions of government to his own political ambition.Yet there was some precedent for Ervin’s view. The position of US attorney general was originally viewed as an independent, semi-judicial role – analogous to that of judges.Congress established the office of the attorney general in the Judiciary Act of 1789 – the same act that created the federal court system, as distinct from acts establishing executive departments.In the original draft, attorneys general would be appointed by the US supreme court, not the president. Congress changed this so that attorneys general would be appointed exactly like federal judges.When George Washington appointed the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, Thomas Jefferson referred to him as “the attorney general for the supreme court”.Early attorneys general shared offices with the court. Their budgets were line items under the federal judiciary, not the executive. Originally, the attorney general was not even in line to succeed to the presidency.Even after the attorney general became a key part of the executive branch and the Department of Justice was established in 1870, presidents continued to respect the need for prosecutorial independence.Until Nixon and the scurrilous John Mitchell.But surely, I said to myself at the time, Nixon and Mitchell were the extremes. Edward Levi’s reforms were adequate.Then came the worst offender of all. During his presidency, Trump viewed the department as an extension of his own will – even claiming: “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the justice department.”Trump interfered in the department’s prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, fired the FBI director James Comey for investigating possible collusion between Russia and Trump associates, and demanded that the department reopen a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, described Trump’s efforts to use the justice department for personal gain as “Nixon on stilts and steroids”.Now, Trump threatens that if re-elected he’ll turn the department into his own personal vendetta machine. If there weren’t already enough reason to fear a second Trump presidency, this would be it.Public trust in our governing institutions has already sunk to a new low – due in large part to Trump’s first term, his subsequent big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and now his second big lie that Biden is orchestrating a “witch-hunt” against him.Even if Biden is re-elected, it will be necessary to deal with the damage Trump and his Republican enablers have wrought.Perhaps Sam Ervin’s proposal for an independent justice department should be given more serious consideration.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

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      From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
      Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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      A House Republican wants to prove Biden is compromised – but where’s the evidence?

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      “This is a very serious investigation,” James Comer, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, told the rightwing channel Newsmax recently. “The allegations and the things that we’re investigating make Watergate look like jaywalking.”The Watergate scandal needed a whistleblower, John Dean, to bring down President Richard Nixon half a century ago. Republican Comer claims that he, too, has a “highly credible” whistleblower who will provide evidence that Joe Biden has been compromised by a foreign power.Such a monumental allegation from such a senior politician would once have been front page news. Even if Republicans were assumed to have partisan motivations, many observers would have begun with the premise that there is no smoke without fire.However, Republicans’ embrace of former president Donald Trump and his bogus conspiracy theories has turned the default response in Washington to one of skepticism. With the identity of the whistleblower still shrouded in mystery, the burden of proof falls on Comer – and he is yet to deliver.Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, said: “We should always take the whistleblowers seriously but this committee, at least so far, is cheapening the use of whistleblowers because they keep saying that they have found all this evidence for a whistleblower, and I think they even mentioned they might have more, but where is it?”Comer has previously been rebuked by Democratic colleagues for exaggerating the number of whistleblowers that his investigation has. He took his latest claim to national television earlier this month.Appearing on Hannity on the rightwing Fox News network, he said a whistleblower had provided Congress information raising concerns that, during Biden’s vice- presidency under Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017, he was allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.He said: “Senator [Chuck] Grassley and I have reviewed this whistleblower disclosure. We find it very credible. We have a lot of questions about whether the FBI even looked into this.”In a fundraising email to supporters, the House oversight committee chairman added: “It is with a heavy heart that I fear our Commander-in-Chief may be compromised by foreign actors, and I’m going to do everything in my power to deliver the whole truth to the American people.”In a letter that used the word “alleged” three times in the opening paragraph, Comer issued a subpoena to FBI director Christopher Wray for a document that, according to the whistleblower, “describes an alleged criminal scheme” involving Biden and a foreign national “relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” when Biden was vice-president and includes “a precise description” about it.But the FBI this week declined to provide the document. Christopher Dunham, acting assistant director for the FBI’s office of congressional affairs, wrote in a letter to Comer: “The mere existence of such a document would establish little beyond the fact that a confidential human source provided information and the FBI recorded it.“Indeed, the FBI regularly receives information from sources with significant potential biases, motivations, and knowledge, including drug traffickers, members of organized crime, or even terrorists.”Comer has also said he obtained thousands of pages of financial records showing that at least nine members of the Biden family – including the president’s son, Hunter, and brother, James – allegedly exploited the Biden name in their business dealings by accepting money from foreign nationals in China and Romania.The oversight committee chairman followed up with an eagerly hyped press conference this week, stating in an interim report that some Biden family members, associates and their companies received more than $10m from foreign entities between 2015 and 2017.Hunter, a lawyer, received more than $1m from a company controlled by Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the financial records showed no evidence that Biden himself acted improperly or took any official action because of his family’s business affairs. Nor, despite the claims of “influence peddling”, did they demonstrate actual wrongdoing by the Biden family. The press conference was widely ignored or panned.David Brock, president of Facts First USA, a non-profit watchdog, said afterwards: “The reality is we don’t even have a scandal here, much less Watergate.”Humiliatingly, Comer was even given a rough ride on Fox News. Host Steve Doocy told the Kentucky congressman: “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is that – there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”Republicans are under pressure to deliver after winning the House majority last year and promising to use their subpoena power to investigate foreign entities that did business with the Biden family, with a specific focus on Hunter.The effort coincides with an imminent decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.Although Hunter never held a position in the White House, his membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy”. There are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president in any way.The White House has dismissed his investigation as “yet another political stunt”. Spokesperson Ian Sams said: “Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy.”Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, a watchdog monitoring the Republican investigations, suggests that Comer is abusing the term whistleblower.“If they have a whistleblower that’s what he the public would be interested in but, other than them talking about it, I haven’t seen anything materialise from that,” he said.Comer’s office did not respond to a request for comment or further details. More

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      ‘Excessive loyalty’: how Republican giant George Shultz fell for Nixon, Reagan … and Elizabeth Holmes

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      “Without Reagan the cold war would not have ended, but without Shultz, Reagan would not have ended the cold war.” This quotation of Mikhail Gorbachev – from the preface of In the Nation’s Service, a biography of George Shultz – now has a bittersweet taste. Reagan died in 2004, Shultz in 2021 (at 100) and Gorbachev in 2022. The cold war is having a renaissance that threatens the legacies of all three.Vladimir Putin has returned Russia to authoritarianism, suspended its participation in the last US-Russia arms control pact and, with the invasion of Ukraine, put the risk of catastrophic confrontation between major powers back on the table.This would have been heartbreaking for Shultz, a second world war veteran who as secretary of state was at Reagan’s side during the summits that ended the cold war. He was a statesman and Republican of the old school who endorsed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He was also complicated.In the Nation’s Service, which Shultz authorised but did not control, portrays a man who loved not wisely. He was loyal to Richard Nixon during Watergate, loyal to Reagan during Iran-Contra, loyal to his party when it was cannibalised by Donald Trump and loyal to Elizabeth Holmes when Theranos, her blood-testing company, was exposed as a fraud.“It’s a thread through his life, excessive loyalty, and it grew out of his service in the marines in world war two, where obviously if you’re in combat your life depends on the loyalty and support of your comrades in the Marine Corps,” says the book’s author, Philip Taubman, a New York Times reporter and bureau chief in Moscow from 1985 to the end of 1988.“But as he carried that on through his life, it was a very strong impulse and so he stuck with Nixon too long.”Shultz, who studied at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became dean of the University of Chicago, was Nixon’s labour secretary and led an effort to desegregate southern schools systems. He was the first director of the Office of Management and Budget before becoming treasury secretary.He resisted many of Nixon’s requests to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate his “enemies” but did give in to the demand to pursue Lawrence O’Brien, a top Democrat. The Watergate scandal engulfed the White House but Shultz did not resign until May 1974, three months before Nixon himself.Speaking at a Stanford University office in Washington, Taubman, 74, says: “I pressed him on this involvement in the Larry O’Brien investigation. I said, ‘I don’t understand how you allowed that to happen and why you didn’t resign at that point.’“His basic defence was he understood Nixon was involved in misconduct and he thought that had he resigned and Nixon had put someone else in the treasury secretary’s job, there would have been less of an obstacle for Nixon to use the IRS in punitive ways. It was a kind of self-congratulatory explanation. He clearly should have resigned before he did.”Reagan brought Shultz into his cabinet in 1982. Shultz hoped to ease cold war tensions but met with opposition from anti-Soviet ideologues.Taubman, who spent a decade writing the book, with exclusive access to papers including a secret diary maintained by an executive assistant, explains: “It was incredibly brutal. It was probably, if not the most ferocious infighting of any postwar American presidency, certainly one of the top two. He just ran into a buzzsaw.“The people around Reagan who set the tone for foreign policy in the first year … were hardliners on the Soviet Union. What they wanted to do was not contain the Soviet Union, which had been the American strategy since the end of the second world war. They wanted to roll back Soviet gains around the world and Soviet influence.”Shultz rarely got to meet Reagan one-on-one. “He was mystified by Reagan and he was puzzled and unsettled by the turmoil in the administration. For a guy who’d lived through the Nixon administration, you’d think he would have been a hardened internal combatant.“He would come back to his office and tell the aide who recorded all this in his diary, ‘I can’t get through to the president. How is it that the secretary of state can’t meet with the president of the United States to talk about US-Soviet relations?’ … It took several years before he and Reagan began to kind of connect.“One of the things that was clear, as I did the research, was just how disengaged Reagan was. There would be decisions taken that he would sign off on and then they would be reversed by people under him. It was incredibly chaotic and he wouldn’t grasp it by the lapels and say, ‘OK, I agree with George, this is what we’re going to do.’ He just let this turmoil fester until the second term.”In February 1983, history was given a helping hand when a blizzard forced Reagan to cancel a Camp David weekend. He and his wife, Nancy, invited Shultz and his wife to dinner. Shultz could see that for all his hot rhetoric about the “evil empire”, Reagan hoped to ease tensions with Russia.“If you’re looking for the key moments in the ending of the cold war,” Taubman says, “you have … the realisation among the two of them that they have in common a fundamental desire to wind down the cold war, the ascension of Gorbachev, his appointment of Eduard Shevardnadze as Soviet foreign minister, and the beginning of real negotiations over a huge range of issues: arms control; issues involving countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola where there was proxy fighting going on; human rights issues, which Reagan felt very strongly about, as did Shultz, which Gorbachev and his predecessors had resisted but Gorbachev eventually began to agree to discuss.”The capitalist Reagan and communist Gorbachev held their first meeting in Switzerland in 1985. Shultz went to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the summit and made sure the leaders kept talking in private. He was pivotal in making another summit happen in Iceland the following year.But again he was deferential to a fault, this time over Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.Taubman says: “Shultz completely understood that the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the space-based missile defence exotic technology, was unworkable but he wasn’t brought into the discussions until the last minute, just a few days before Reagan was going to give his speech about it on national television. He opposed it. He tried to get Reagan to back away.“When that failed, he tried to get Reagan to be less grandiose about the objectives – failed in all of that. Then … he got in line, saluted and supported it right through the summit in Reykjavik in 1986 where, had Reagan been more flexible about Star Wars, they might have achieved far-reaching arms control agreements. But Reagan wouldn’t give ground.”Gorbachev visited Washington in 1987 and signed a landmark deal to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan went to Moscow in 1988. The tension drained out of the cold war and Shultz was “indispensable”, Taubman argues. “He was literally the diplomat-in-chief of the United States and he and Shevardnadze were the workers in the trenches who took the impulses of Gorbachev and Reagan and turned them into negotiations and then agreements.”But Shultz’s triumph was short-lived. “He was saddened when George HW Bush came into office because Jim Baker, the incoming secretary of state, and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, decided Reagan and Shultz had gone too far too fast with Gorbachev. They put a pause in relations and that really annoyed Shultz and disappointed him.“He probably was somewhat hopeful under [Russian president Boris] Yeltsin, where things began to look more promising again. Then with Putin he was involved in so-called ‘track two’ diplomacy, where he and Henry Kissinger and some other former American officials would go to Moscow or Beijing and have consultations with Russian and Chinese leaders, talking about things that couldn’t be talked about in official diplomatic channels. He began to realise that Putin was taking Russia back into an authoritarian model.”Shultz’s loyalty was tested again when his beloved Republican party surrendered to Trump, who in 2017 became the first US president with no political or military experience. Trump’s “America first” mantra threatened alliances Shultz and others spent decades nurturing. Yet Shultz was reluctant to speak out.Taubman recalls: “I had a very tough interview with him about this because I knew he was no fan of Donald Trump and that he could see the Republican party was taking a dark turn. So I sat down with him and I said, ‘What are you going to say about Donald Trump? The election’s coming up. Do you feel any obligation to speak out publicly?’“He bobbed and weaved and didn’t really want to say anything and then eventually he said, ‘Henry Kissinger and I are talking about what, if anything, to say.’ A number of weeks later, they did say something. But being somewhat cynical, I’m afraid, I think it was calculated to have minimal impact. They issued a statement on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, which is notoriously a time when everyone’s gone home for the long weekend, saying, ‘We two Republican stalwarts do not plan to vote for either candidate.’“So that’s not bad … but they didn’t denounce Trump and they said, ‘We’re ready to serve if asked, not in an official position, but as an informal adviser to whomever gets elected.’ They sort of punted at that point before the election.“Trump comes into office and increasingly Shultz is concerned about the direction he’s going and the party’s going but he didn’t want to speak up publicly.”Taubman remembers a private meeting in San Francisco, where Trump came up.“Shultz pulls out of his pocket the text of a speech about immigration that Reagan had given, which was a fabulous, wholehearted endorsement of the role of immigrants in American history and how they had continually revitalised the country. He read that text to that group, I think, for as blunt a rebuff of Trump as he could muster at that time.“Then he spoke out later, critically of Trump’s foreign policy. But when all this crazy stuff went down in Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani, of all people, was over there trying to undermine the US ambassador, an outrageous intervention in American foreign policy, he said nothing about it at the time.“He was not unwilling to part company with the party and certainly with Trump but he never chose to take a public stand. I don’t know to this day whether he just didn’t want to anger the president. Probably to his dying day Shultz maintained a respect for the office. Maybe he was just too old to want to engage in a battle with the party and Trump. But there’s no question he and I had private conversations and thought the party had taken a dark turn.”Shultz took a position at Stanford but there was a sour postscript to his career. In his 90s, he threw his weight behind Holmes and her company, Theranos, which promised to revolutionise blood testing. He helped form a board, raised money and encouraged his grandson, Tyler Shultz, to work at the company.When Tyler took concerns about Holmes to the media, she set her lawyers on him and put him under surveillance. Shultz refused to cut ties with Holmes, causing a deep rift in the family. In 2018, Holmes was indicted on charges involving defrauding investors and deceiving patients and doctors. Last year, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.Taubman says: “I think, frankly, he fell in love with Elizabeth Holmes. It was not a physical relationship but I believe he was infatuated with her and she understood that and played on it in a calculating way.“She got him to do all kinds of things to help her put together her board of directors: Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, all kinds of senior national security officials, none of whom knew the first thing about biomedical issues. Then he played a major role in selling her to the media, and suddenly she’s on the cover of Fortune and Forbes. She’s the darling of Silicon Valley.“I learned … that he wanted to talk to her every day on the telephone and she would show up at his parties. He invited her to the family Christmas dinners. It was a shocking situation, especially in retrospect.”Taubman confronted Shultz. “He continued to defend her to my amazement and, frankly, my disappointment. I came at him pretty hard and he would not let go. He wouldn’t disown her. By this point, it was clear what was going on at Theranos. This was the ultimate expression of excessive loyalty.”Shultz’s family is still bitter.“Tyler continues to be hurt by his grandfather’s conduct. Puzzled by it. He attributed it in his own podcast to either colossal misjudgment or, ‘My grandfather was in love with her or he had a huge financial benefit invested in her.’ All of which was true.“It turns out she gave George Shultz a lot of Theranos stock and, at its peak valuation, that was worth $50m, so there may have been a financial motive too. At the sentencing, George’s son Alex [Tyler’s father] testified and talked about how she had desecrated – which is a wonderful word, a very apt word – the Shultz family.”Taubman reflects: “As I was working on the biography in those last years, when I would talk to people about Shultz, there were no longer questions like, ‘Tell me about his service as secretary of state, tell me what he did to end the cold war.’ It was all, ‘What’s he doing with Elizabeth Holmes?’ It stunted his last decade.“It shouldn’t overshadow what else he did. It was a sad coda at the end of his life. When you look back, he was a major figure in the latter half of the 20th century and pivotal figure in ending the cold war. And for that he deserves enormous credit.”
      In the Nation’s Service: the Life and Times of George P Shultz is published in the US by Stanford University Press More

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      Did Vietnam peace protests stop Nixon using nuclear weapons?

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      A new documentary about demonstrations against the Vietnam war in late 1969 argues that the hundreds of thousands who filled the streets in Washington and almost every major US city convinced Richard Nixon to abandon a plan to sharply escalate the war, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.The Movement and The “Madman” will air on PBS on Tuesday. Produced and directed by the veteran documentarian Stephen Talbot, it evokes a peak moment of 1960s activism – and the “absolute disconnection” between what Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were “deciding to do and the human costs of it, whether it’s to our own soldiers or [Vietnam] civilians”.Those costs “had absolutely no part of their thinking” said the historian Carolyn Eisenberg. “They don’t care.”Talbot’s sure eye for searing images is matched by a perfect ear for songs. His soundtrack includes anti-establishment hymns by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix and Judy Collins, plus the essential anti-war anthem, I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-To Die Rag, which became world famous after Country Joe McDonald performed it at Woodstock in summer 1969.The one thing the documentary does not do is provide any convincing evidence that the demonstrations prevented the use of nuclear weapons.“It is a serious look at how one major demonstration was organized,” said Thomas Powers, author of The War at Home, a history of the anti-war movement; The Man Who Kept the Secrets, a widely-admired biography of former CIA director Richard Helms; and seven other books.But as far as the idea that “a real danger of the use of atomic weapons was prevented [by the Vietnam Moratorium] – I think that’s just plain wrong”, Powers told the Guardian.Talbot responded that declassified documents about Operation Duck Hook, which laid out options for Nixon, included the possible use of nuclear weapons as well as the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of dykes that would have caused massive civilian casualties.As to whether Nixon seriously considered the nuclear option, Talbot said: “I literally don’t know and I don’t think anyone could say for sure. But it was on the table.”The “madman” of Talbot’s film is Nixon. One thing that is not in dispute is that the president worked hard to convince the North Vietnamese and the Russians he was crazy enough to do anything, including pulling the nuclear trigger, if Hanoi refused his demands to withdraw from the south.As Stephen Bull, a former Nixon aide, explains in the film, his boss wanted the Russians to “think that he was a madman. However, my personal observation was, it was a bluff. He was never going to use nuclear weapons, but he wanted the threat to be out there to force them to the table.”Powers likened Nixon’s threats to use nuclear bombs to Vladimir Putin’s current threats to use such weapons against Ukraine – which Powers doesn’t think are serious either. Talbot agreed that was a possibility.In his memoirs, Nixon wrote: “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging anti-war controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”The other thing the demonstrations almost certainly accomplished was the passage of a law, signed by Nixon in November 1969, which created a draft lottery.On 1 December 1969, every draft-eligible young man born between 1944 and 1950 was assigned a number based on his birth date, from one to 365. The following year, the Pentagon announced that no one with a number higher than 195 would be drafted. A year later that number dropped to 125, then to 95 the year after that.Since everyone in the streets in 1969 was demonstrating in no small part because of an acute desire to avoid dying in what they considered a pointless conflict, the lottery had an immediate effect in reducing the number who felt a sense of urgency about the war.If you had a high enough number, your life was no longer in danger. After the very first lottery, more than a third of those previously subject to the draft no longer felt any imminent jeopardy. So there was less self-interest to propel the anti-war protests.Talbot agreed that the lottery was a direct result of the anti-war demonstrations, and said he included it in an earlier, longer version of his film – but it did not make the final cut. In fall 1969, he was a senior in high school. He went to DC to make his first film, March on Washington, which became his senior thesis when he attended Wesleyan University.“I used clips from my first student film for this documentary,” he told the Guardian.The truth is, while the Vietnam demonstrations did reduce the dangers of the draft, there is almost no evidence they shortened the war. When Nixon took office, 31,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, plus hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. By the time the last American combat troops left in March 1973, two months after the draft was abolished, 58,220 US soldiers had died – plus as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians and 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers.
      The Movement and The ‘Madman’ airs on PBS at 9pm ET on Tuesday and will stream on pbs.org
      Charles Kaiser’s books include 1968: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation More

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
      The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
      TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      What does ‘Watergate’ teach us 50 years on?: Politics Weekly America

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      50 years ago, police in Washington DC arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. What followed was the unravelling of a web of scandals that ultimately ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. What can today’s January 6 hearings learn from Watergate? And had it happened in today’s political climate, would it have played out the way it did? Jonathan Freedland speaks with Garrett M. Graff, journalist and author of Watergate: A New History

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      Archive: All the President’s Men – Warner Bros, The Nixon White House Tapes – Richard Nixon Presidential Library Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More