"In order to..."

Think clearly. Slow down.

Greetings from London, a favorite place (especially for Sanity Goddess), though I’m not feeling all that jolly. In fact, I find myself very much, and only semi-explicably, in the dumps. Great to be here, of course; there are things to do, friends to visit, Arsenal football; but the Brits seem swirling down the same drain as we, collapsing in a heap of idiot populism. The Labour and Conservative parties are spent forces; the anti-immigrant, protectionist Nigel Farange has all the energy and may well be the next prime minister. There is a paleo-left Green Party still pining for the failures of socialism. Sound familiar? If the good news is that Farange, unlike Trump, is not entirely insane, that is wispy sustenance.

I’ve been reading several books about more admirable times. And one crucial book, to be published in June, Courage Can Save Us by Rye Barcott, about politicians trying to be admirable in this time. More on that in a few paragraphs.

First, let me tell you a story. In the summer of 1974, Richard Goodwin hired me as the deputy Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine. Dick was already a legend, of course, the author of some of the most famous, moving speeches delivered by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. I’m reading a book about Dick now, a magnificent memoir called An Unfinished Love Story, written by his widow, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. It brings back the vigorous flush of Kennedy idealism, the special sauce in which I marinated as a teenager, a time when we believed, with Thomas Paine, “that we have the power to begin the world over again.”

Does anyone feel that way now?

That summer, 1974, we were about to overthrow Richard Nixon. I was heading to ground zero, Washington, DC. There was to be dancing in the streets. The “revolution” we had celebrated, the end of racial segregation, the end of a criminally foolish war in Vietnam, was about to be realized. But Goodwin had a different mission for me, delivered from the depths of Ethel Kennedy’s swimming pool:

“Tax reform!” Dick said in his gargly voice, impinged by eternal cigars.

“Hunh?” I responded. The instruction seemed as irritating as the executive in The Graduate who counseled young Benjamin Braddock, “Plastics!”

“Tax reform?” I asked.

“Yeah, the House Ways and Means Committee is marking up a tax reform bill this summer and I want you there, every day, learning how they do it.”

“But Nixon’s going to be impeached,” I said. “I want to write about…”

“Oh, Hunter’s coming in tomorrow to do that,” Goodwin said, dispositively. Hunter was, of course, Hunter S. Thompson—an account of our adventures that summer will have to wait for some other ‘stack. Like the rest of my generation, I was eager to read Hunter on the tragicomedy—”My mother was a saint!”—about to unfold. (In the end, Nixon hurtling toward disgrace boggled Hunter—but that, too, is a story for another time.)

But, tax reform? In Rolling Stone? “Look, you’re new in town,” Dick explained. “You don’t know how the place works. Taxes and appropriations.are at the heart of the beast. You need a quick-course in how they do it. It is called sausage-making here.” It appeared a drop dead boring assignment in that revolutionary moment.

But I went, every day. Stood on line, waiting for the hearing room to open; stood on line with a fancy array of corporate lobbyists—Gucci Gulch, as it would soon be named by Jeff Birnbaum and Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal. There were also a few intrepid journalists. Most notably, Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, who would become a lifelong friend. He was there every day, too. I learned an incredible amount that summer, I got to know members of Congress and their staffs; I got to watch the oil and mining and real estate lobby boys massage the law to their liking. (They were almost all boys at that point, but women were very much on their way.)

But tax reform? In Rolling Stone? It never would happen…except for something extraordinary. And there it was: the Committee’s Chair was a fellow named Wilbur Mills, from Arkansas, who had a flagrant efflorescence of a nose, which he had earned the old-fashioned way. Wilbur completed the summer by driving his car into the Tidal Basin, accompanied by a stripper named Fanny Foxe aka The Argentine Firecracker.

By the time my piece, the “Fanny Foxe Memorial Tax Bill” was published, Goodwin was gone as Rolling Stone’s Washington Bureau Chief, replaced by, well, me. But Dick had taught an essential lesson, about learning the system and traditions, the Ways and Means—the culture—of Washington. It was a conservative lesson, at a time of radical idealism. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who soon took over Goodwin’s role in my DC schooling, would later say:

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

Over time, Moynihan became more skeptical about the limits of the liberal part of the equation. As did I, especially as we slid into a flash-bang era of media celebrity and mediocrity. Fanny Foxe in the Tidal Basin became a metaphor: sensationalism was how you snuck substance into print. Woodward and Bernstein had brought Nixon down the old-fashioned way—the Goodwin way—by expending tons of shoe leather, by reporting and reporting and reporting some more. Two sources for every fact! But Bob and Carl were supplanted by a less patient generation of reporters, operating in a snake pit of technological transformation—the newspapers slowly died, the three broadcast networks were supplanted by 1000 channels of cable; and then cable was supplanted by the internet, and then, by a gazillion substacks and podcasts. Society fractured; your culture became your choice. And most important of all: Skepticism—essential for a journalist—was replaced by cynicism as the default position in the news business. Skepticism moved too slowly. Cynicism was an easy sell; it was hip. I’ve said this before: cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre. Mario Cuomo called it “ice-skating.” I would be asked, by editors and civilians alike: What’s your take on…whatever? In other words, what’s your sound bite? What’s your elevator pitch? Not, what’s your thinking? And certainly not, what have you learned about the arguments on both sides of the oil depletion allowance? Can you explain it to our readers? In English?

(I was sufficiently clever to survive in “take” world, but tried to base my “takes” on persistent, street-level reporting. I didn’t have all that much confidence in my cleverness.)

And so, a direct line from politicians who were thinkers like Moynihan and moral presences like Bob Dole of Kansas, to mere politicians like Mitch McConnell (his gambit blocking Barack Obama from a Supreme Court appointment helped poison the system)…to utter charlatans like Donald Trump, who invents his own superficialities to skate across…who focuses on the most worst of us, the most selfish, not the best.

The other day, I stumbled across a quote from thee relentlessly banal Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that tickled up against a profundity:

“Mini-[Zohran] Mamdanis [are] popping up all around the country, and they’re openly avowed to socialist Marxist ideology. This is something we have never seen before in American history. This is about moving away from a constitutional republic to a communist utopian ideology. And that’s a dangerous thing for the future of the country.”

Yes, the dilettante lefties are throbbing about. But they are accompanied by a sludge tide of right-wing populist reprobates—Ken Paxton of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Tucker Carlson, Lauren Boebert, Sean Hannity, Johnson himself, etc etc ad infinitum. There are, to be sure, substantive and thoughtful politicians out there, but they are overwhelmed by the fast-talkers. Politics moves at their speed now. Paxton wasted no time in nicknaming his Democratic opponent James “low-t” Talerico. Classy. This pumping of bilge into the lungs of our society is our daily diet of what is laughingly called news. Our seemingly endless appetite for it says something about the future of democracy, and about our shallowness.

Which brings me to Rye Barcott’s very old-fashioned book Courage Can Save Us, a distant homage to John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 10 profiles of military veterans who’ve gone into politics—5 Democrats and 5 Republicans—and created a bipartisan military caucus in the House (37 members) and Senate (11 members) plus three governors. Barcott co-founded that caucus with the late David Gergen. Caveat lector: I hang with the Advisory Board of With Honor, the political action committee that helps fund the election campaigns of caucus members. (The book is also the subject of a Night Owls podcast in the coming days.)

What do Barcott’s 10 heroes have in common? Strong traditional values, especially the most traditional—service and sacrifice for the greater good. They come, for the most part, from America’s gut. Some, like Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, describe themselves as “juvenile delinquents” when they were kids. Others like Nebraska’s Don Bacon grew up dirt poor on the plains of Illinois. Others are like Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, raised his right hand when he graduated from Harvard, just before September 11, 2001. They are all volunteers. Most have risked their careers by taking occasional stands against their party’s orthodoxy. Just being a member of a bipartisan organization can be a dangerous stand nowadays. It is a measure of the peril they face in a time of paralytic partisanship that 3 of the 10 are retiring—the aforementioned Bacon, Jared Golden of Maine and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who was Trumped out of office by a right-wing primary opponent.

There is another thing they have in common, something they learned in the military—an innate sense of discipline, of orderliness, of attention to detail. They can move fast, but only after intense preparation. Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, one of the 10 profiled by Barcott, once told me that he organized every civilian challenge he faced as a five-point military mission statement:

1. Situation — Establishes the operational context, covering enemy forces (their composition, strength, and likely actions), friendly forces, and external factors. Armyopordshell

2. Mission — The focal point of the order. The mission statement answers five questions: Who (the unit), What (the task), When (timing), Where (location), and Why (purpose). For example: “1st Platoon seizes Objective Hill at 0600 on 23 April to prevent enemy reinforcement.” Armyopordshell

3. Execution — Outlines how the mission will be accomplished, including the commander’s intent and tasks assigned to subordinate units. Armyopordshell

4. Administration & Logistics — Covers the general concept of logistics support, supply classes, and a plan for casualty evacuation. FAS

5. Command & Signal — Specifies who is in command and how units will communicate (radio frequencies, call signs, succession of command, etc.).

I especially like the WHY section, which usually includes the phrase “In Order To…” followed by a succinct description. Just imagine Donald Trump composing one of those for the war in Iran, even now.

Wes Moore finds clarity by sitting down and writing out a five-pointer when faced with a gnarly decision. I associate this discipline now, after decades, with the lesson that Dick Goodwin—an Army veteran who also volunteered for service—taught me in the summer of 1974. It seems the precise opposite of the way too many of our so-called leaders do business these days. Donald Trump governs through a series of self-aggrandizing lurch-impulses. The long-term impact of this on our democracy—on funding for research, on the development of a new energy grid, on a health care system already staggering in chaos, on a new generation of military challenges—is unfathomable. I hope it is reversible, but I’m not sure.

The Trumpers are not alone in their sensational superficiality. Those Democrats who say that the recent Supreme Court decision to truncate the Voting Rights Act represents Jim Crow 2.0—they are not only exaggerating wildly, but feeding the prevailing cynicism. What if the end of racial gerrymandering means new coalitions of racial minorities and white moderates to oust the populist extremists? That is what Dems should be building toward now; instead, they bitch emptily and endlessly.

Those Democrats who say—this is becoming a meme—you can’t be an honest billionaire are dismissing the basic engine of freedom and enterprise that has created the most prosperous society in history. Those Democrats who bewail “inequality” are beckoning poverty; inequality, at its extreme, may be a form of sordid selfishness, but inequality—the inequality that creates hopes and dreams—is an essential factor in wealth creation, too. (Wealth creation, by the way, is a very good thing.)

All of which is to say that speed and superficiality are the plagues corroding our society. They are bipartisan. There is a need for longer sound bites; indeed, for sound paragraphs. There is a need for civility and respect;I find the attempts by some Democrats to replicate Trump’s vulgarity pathetic. I miss the Dick Goodwins and Pat Moynihans of the world who believed that wisdom only came with process and discipline, and the acknowledgment of complexities. I’ve found such people in the bipartisan military caucus…and in the pages of Courage Can Save Us. Trump has given us enough of the fierce urgency of now. We need to slow down and contemplate the equally fierce urgency of “In order to….”