The head of a presidential library resigned this week after a tug-of-war with the Trump administration over gift selection and a sword for King Charles III, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Todd Arrington, a career historian who previously held posts with the National Park Service and National Archives and Records Administration, said he stepped down on Monday under pressure as director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home.
In an interview with CBS News, Arrington said he was told on Monday, “Resign — or be fired.”
“Apparently, they believed I could no longer be trusted with confidential information,” he said. When asked what specific confidential information he’d shared, Arrington said it was “about the sword” and an unrelated matter.
Arrington’s departure came after he resisted taking an original Eisenhower sword out of the library’s collection to give to King Charles last month during President Trump’s unprecedented second state visit to the United Kingdom.
Four U.S. officials involved in the lavish royal visit were unaware that the library director had left his job, and said the White House played no role in his exit.
King Charles III and President Trump inspect the Guard of Honor during the State visit by the President of the United States of America at Windsor Castle, Sept. 17, 2025, in Windsor, England.
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
In a statement last month, Buckingham Palace didn’t specify which sword was given to the monarch, but noted that Charles was given a replica, saying the gift “symbolizes profound respect and is a reminder of the historical partnership that was critical to winning World War II.”
A former Army general, Eisenhower possessed several swords, including a Sword of Honor given to him in 1947 by the city of London for his role as allied supreme commander during World War II, an honor saber gifted to him by the Netherlands in 1947, and his West Point officer saber.
It is not clear who specifically requested the sword. First lady Melania Trump personally decided which gifts to give Queen Camilla, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and their children, a senior administration official said.
Officials at the State Department who compiled an array of gift options for the first couple, sought an Eisenhower sword to reiterate the significance of the U.S.-U.K. relationship since World War II, sources said. But Arrington argued against giving away an artifact that had been accepted as a donation and had become the property of the American people.
Arrington told officials he could help find an alternative gift, but sources say State Department officials persisted. The library’s team offered to help find a replica.
Ultimately, West Point provided a Cadet Saber from the military academy.
Arrington said he never spoke with anyone at the White House, but only with officials in the Foreign Gift Office at the State Department and other colleagues at the National Archives.
Some in the Trump administration were unhappy with Arrington, sources said.
NARA didn’t reply to requests for comment, nor did the Eisenhower library, but both entities began operating Wednesday with limited staffing due to the shutdown of the federal government.
Two sources close to the matter said no one said anything to Arrington about being upset about not being able to have a museum piece — the conversations before the U.K. trip about finding a substitute for the real sword were polite and tension-free.
One administration official said Arrington was believed to have spoken critically about the president and the administration — something Arrington strongly disputes.
“That is 100% incorrect,” he said. “I never said a bad word about anybody. I talked to colleagues about trying to find a sword or artifact, something we could give to them for the president to give to the King, and at no time did I disparage anyone.”
“If someone in the administration said that I disparaged the administration, that was never communicated to me,” he added.
The White House plays no formal role in hiring or firing directors of presidential libraries that are part of the National Archives system. The duty of hiring library directors falls instead to the archivist of the United States, who oversees NARA. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is serving as acting archivist, and James Byron, a senior adviser to the archivist, is running day-to-day operations for NARA.
Arrington started in August 2024 as director of the Eisenhower library, in Abilene, Kansas, one of 16 presidential libraries or museums operated by NARA, including those that will be built for Mr. Trump and former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The president’s son, Eric Trump, announced this week their family plans to one day construct the Trump library and museum in Miami.
Arrington said the other reason cited for his ouster is tied to the construction of a new building for the nonprofit Eisenhower Foundation on the grounds of the Eisenhower Library.
The 52-year-old said he is less than five years away from retirement eligibility and is hoping to find a new job at a different federal agency.
But, he said, “If there’s any way for it to happen, I’d return to this job in a heartbeat. I love the job, I love the people, I love the history. I never in a million years wanted this to happen.”
Ed O’Keefe is CBS News’ senior White House and political correspondent reporting for all CBS News platforms. He’s part of the team covering President Trump and covered all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency. From the White House to the campaign trail, O’Keefe’s reports stretch from the politics of the moment to how policy enacted in Washington affects the nation and the world.
Several squadrons of U.S. fighter jets made a hero’s homecoming Friday, arriving in Virginia after a tense nine-month deployment in the Middle East. They were part of a strike group with the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier confronting Iranian-backed Houthi militants. Charlie D’Agata has details.
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SpaceX is working with the National Reconnaissance Office to build a classified system of swarming spy satellites, according to a report published by Reuters. And while the $1.8 billion contract was reportedly signed in 2021, news of the program’s ties to NRO just leaked on Saturday—a great reminder that it’s entirely possible for some tech companies to do highly classified work for years without the public learning about it.
Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their View
The new satellite spy network is being built under SpaceX’s Starshield unit, which also manages Starlink satellite internet. The program is described by Reuters as consisting of, “hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits.”
The five sources of information on the new program aren’t named in the new Reuters article, though one anonymous source is quoted as saying that “no one can hide” from the new satellite system.
The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with U.S. intelligence and military officials, the sources said. In principle, that would enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe, aiding intelligence and military operations, they added.
[…]
The Starshield network is part of intensifying competition between the U.S. and its rivals to become the dominant military power in space, in part by expanding spy satellite systems away from bulky, expensive spacecraft at higher orbits. Instead a vast, low-orbiting network can provide quicker and near-constant imaging of the Earth.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of a new satellite program being developed by SpaceX in February, but Reuters was the first to provide new information about the customer for what sounds like an incredibly powerful new spy system.
SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk have received criticism over the past two years as the billionaire has expressed skepticism that the U.S. should be involved in helping Ukraine during its fight against Russia’s invasion. The war started in Feb. 2022 and has killed tens of thousands on both sides, but Musk has become vocally opposed against the U.S. continuing to help its ally with intelligence and weapons. That would appear to be a big problem for the U.S. military establishment, since Ukraine is so dependent on Starlink satellite internet for command and control in the battlefield.
Musk infamously denied Ukraine use of Starlink to mount a counterattack of Russian forces in Crimea, a story told by his biographer Walter Isaacson, that was awkwardly walked back at Musk’s insistence after the book was published. But whatever actually happened in Crimea, there appears to be nervousness within the Pentagon about how reliant the U.S. military has become on Musk. And the leak of this latest contract between SpaceX and NRO proves the public probably doesn’t know the half of it.
As Reuters explained in the new report on Saturday:
The network is also intended to greatly expand the U.S. government’s remote-sensing capabilities and will consist of large satellites with imaging sensors, as well as a greater number of relay satellites that pass the imaging data and other communications across the network using inter-satellite lasers, two of the sources said.
NRO was formed in 1960 on the heels of some major failures by the U.S. Air Force to get a military satellite program up and running. The shoot down and capture of U-2 pilot Gary Powers by the Soviet Union in May 1960 was a highly embarrassing international incident for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, which made it obvious the U.S. needed to get some proper mechanical eyes in the sky that couldn’t be shot down by adversaries.
The establishment of NRO in 1960 was an attempt to make the nation’s spy satellites an independent agency that could service U.S. military customers and U.S. intelligence agencies without causing turf wars. Giving an agency like CIA, for example, sole control of spy satellites could lead to unnecessary internal competition with other agencies. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s science advisors thought about it at the time.
While a system of swarming satellites deployed by U.S. intelligence may sound futuristic, it’s important to remember U.S. imaging capabilities are already incredibly advanced and frankly make the 1998 surveillance thriller Enemy of the State look like a documentary. As just one example, the existence of ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 gigapixel camera developed by Darpa and BAE Systems, was revealed in a January 2013 episode of the PBS documentary “Rise of the Drones.”
The ARGUS-IS could provide images of an entire U.S. city, while allowing users to zoom in on any part and see enough detail to capture someone waving their arms. And it’s a pretty safe bet that the realities of U.S. spying capabilities in 2013 were much more advanced than what the public was allowed to see on PBS. The mind boggles to think what kind of resolution America’s eyes in the sky can get a decade later, to say nothing of how SpaceX’s swarming satellites might change the game in low Earth orbit.
The new report from Reuters says roughly a dozen prototypes for this new swarming system have been launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets alongside other satellites presumably with civilian purposes. But that kind of thing is far from new. As Gizmodo reported back in 2017, NRO was intimately involved in the design of NASA’s Space Shuttle, even if we still don’t know many details about the payloads NRO was hitching a ride to get into space. Same as it ever was, it seems.
The truth is, Europe only has itself to blame for the morass. Trump has been harping on about NATO’s laggards for years, but he hardly invented the genre. American presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower have complained about European allies freeloading on American defense.
What Europeans don’t like to hear is that Trump has a point: They have been freeloading. What’s more, it was always unrealistic to expect the U.S. to pick pick up the tab for European security ad infinitum.
After Trump lost to Biden in 2020, its seemed like everything had gone back to normal, however. Biden, a lifelong transatlanticist, sought to repair the damage Trump did to NATO by letting the Europeans slide back into their comfort zone.
Even though overall defense spending has increased in recent years in Europe — as it should have, considering Russia’s war on Ukraine — it’s still nowhere near enough. Only 11 of NATO’s 31 members are expected to meet the spending target in 2023, for example, according to NATO’s own data. Germany, the main target of Trump’s ire, has yet to achieve the 2 percent mark. It’s likely to this year, however, if only because its economy is contracting.
The truth is, Europe was lulled back into a false sense of security by Biden’s warm embrace. Instead of going on a war footing by forcing industry to ramp up armament production and reinstating conscription in countries like Germany where it was phased out, Europe nestled itself in Americas skirts.
As tensions heighten in the Middle East amid the escalating Israel-Hamas war, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced late Saturday that the U.S. will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf, as well as send additional air defense systems to the region.
Austin also said that he has placed additional U.S. forces on “prepare to deploy orders,” but did not detail how many. Austin earlier this week ordered 2,000 troops to be prepared to deploy to the Middle East.
The latest decision followed “detailed discussions with President Biden on recent escalations by Iran and its proxy forces across the Middle East,” Austin said in a statement.
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend Austin had announced was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — will instead be heading to the Persian Gulf, Austin disclosed Saturday.
Austin also said he ordered a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, to the Persian Gulf as well.
The moves come as U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have seen an increase in attacks by Iran-backed Shia militia groups in the days since Hamas militants invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7.
The USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group was deployed from the western to eastern Mediterranean two days after that attack.
Before reversing course Saturday, Austin last weekend said the Eisenhower strike group would join it in the eastern Mediterranean in an effort to “deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts toward widening this war following Hamas’ attack on Israel.”
Hamas’ attack on Israel left at least 1,400 people dead and 3,500 wounded. More than 200 people were taken hostage, included several Americans, two of whom were freed Friday.
The death toll from Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza is at least 4,385, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with more than 13,000 wounded.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
BERLIN — News this month that the number of German soldiers declaring themselves conscientious objectors rose fivefold in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine created little more than a ripple in Germany.
For many Germans it’s perfectly natural for members of the Bundeswehr, the army, to renege on the pledge they made to defend their country; if Germans themselves don’t want to fight, why should their troops?
Indeed, in Germany, a soldier isn’t a soldier but a “citizen in uniform.” It’s an apposite euphemism for a populace that has lived comfortably under the U.S. security umbrella for more than seven decades and goes a long way toward explaining how Germany became NATO’s problem child since the war in Ukraine began, delaying and frustrating the Western effort to get Ukraine the weaponry it needs to defend itself against an unprovoked Russian onslaught.
The latest installment in this saga (it began just hours after the February invasion when Germany’s finance minister told Ukraine’s ambassador there was no point in sending aid because his country would only survive for a few hours anyway) concerns the question of delivering main battle tanks to Ukraine. Germany, one of the largest producers of such tanks alongside the U.S., has steadfastly refused to do so for months, arguing that providing Ukraine with Western tanks could trigger a broader war.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also tried to hide behind the U.S., noting that Washington has also not sent any tanks. (Scholz has conveniently ignored the detail that the U.S. has provided Ukraine with $25 billion in military aid so far, more than 10 times what Germany has.)
Germany’s allies, including Washington, often ascribe German recalcitrance to a knee-jerk pacifism born of the lessons learned from its “dark past.”
In other words, the German strategy — do nothing, blame the Nazis — is working.
Of course, Germany’s conscience doesn’t really drive its foreign policy, its corporations do. While it hangs back from supporting Ukraine in a fight to defend its democracy from invasion by a tyrant, it has no qualms about selling to authoritarian regimes, like those in the Middle East, where it does brisk business selling weapons to countries such as Egypt and Qatar.
Despite everything that’s happened over the past year, Berlin is still holding out hope that Ukraine can somehow patch things up with Russia so that Germany can resume business as usual and switch the gas back on. Even if Germany ends up sending tanks to Ukraine — as many now anticipate — it will deliver as few as it can get away with and only after exhausting every possible option to delay.
Much attention in recent years has focused on Nord Stream 2, the ill-fated Russo-German natural gas project. Yet tensions between the U.S. and Germany over the latter’s entanglement with Russian energy interests date back to the late 1950s, when it first began supplying the Soviet Union with large-diameter piping.
Throughout the Cold War, Germany’s involvement with NATO was driven by a strategy to take advantage of the protection the alliance afforded, delivering no more than the absolute minimum, while also expanding commercial relations with the Soviets.
In 1955, the weekly Die Zeit described what it called the “fireside fantasy of West German industry” to normalize trade relations with the Soviet Union. Within years, that dream became a reality, driven in large measure by Chancellor Willy Brandt’s détente policies, known as Ostpolitik.
Joe Biden, eager to reverse the diplomatic damage inflicted during the Trump years, reversed course and has gone out of his way to show his appreciation for all things German | Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
That’s one reason the Germans so feared U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his hard line against the Soviets. Far from welcoming his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” demand, both the German public and industry were terrified by it, worried that Reagan would upset the apple cart and destroy their business in the east.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell a couple of years later, West German exports to the Soviet Union had reached nearly 12 billion deutsche mark, a record.
That’s why Germany’s handling of Ukraine isn’t a departure from the norm; it is the norm.
Germany’s dithering over aid to Ukraine is a logical extension of a strategy that has served its economy well from the Cold War to the decision to block Ukraine’s NATO accession in 2008 to Nord Stream.
Just last week, as the Russians were raining terror on Dnipro, the minister president of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, called for the repair of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was blown up by unknown saboteurs last year, so that Germany “keeps the option” to purchase Russian gas after war ends.
One can’t blame him for trying. If one accepts that German policy is driven by economic logic rather than moral imperative, the fickleness of its political leaders makes complete sense — all the more so considering how well it has worked.
The money Germany has saved on defense has enabled it to finance one of the world’s most generous welfare states. When Germany was under pressure from allies a few years ago to finally meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP spending target, then-Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called the goal “absurd.” And from a German perspective, he was right; why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Of course, the Germans have had a lot of help milking, especially from the U.S.
American presidents have been chastising Germany over its lackluster contribution to the Western alliance going as far back as Dwight D. Eisenhower, only to do nothing about it.
The exception that proves the rule is Donald Trump, whose plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Germany was thwarted by his election loss.
Joe Biden, eager to reverse the diplomatic damage inflicted during the Trump years, reversed course and has gone out of his way to show his appreciation for all things German.
Biden’s decision to court the Germans instead of castigating them for failing to meet their commitments taught Berlin that it merely needs to wait out crises in the transatlantic relationship and the problems will fix themselves. Under pressure from Trump to buy American liquefied natural gas, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed in 2018 to support the construction of the necessary infrastructure. After Trump, those plans were put on ice, only to revive them amid the current energy crisis.
By virtue of its size and geographical position at the center of Europe, Germany will always be important for the U.S., if not as a true ally, at least as an erstwhile partner and staging ground for the American military.
Who cares that the Bundeswehr has become a punchline or that Germany remains years away from meeting its NATO spending targets?
In Washington’s view, Germany might be a bad ally, but at least it’s America’s bad ally.
And no one understands the benefits of that status better than the Germans themselves.
Five decades after his death, J. Edgar Hoover still haunts the FBI. His nearly 48-year reign as its director, from 1924 to 1972, has come to symbolize the dangers of a stealth domestic police-and-intelligence agency in an open society. Hoover is widely seen today as an autocrat who used secret surveillance and other illegal means to control politicians and infiltrate and disrupt domestic political groups in the service of his conservative worldview. No operation confirms this verdict more vividly than the FBI’s wide-ranging electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in a threatening letter to King accompanied by tape recordings of romantic trysts—an effort designed to drive King from the civil-rights movement or induce him to commit suicide.
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In her masterful, 732-page biography of Hoover, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, the Yale historian Beverly Gage carefully chronicles all of the major abuses committed by his FBI. She also shows that the prevailing image of Hoover as a “one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission” is a distortion. Hoover emerges instead as a still-flawed figure, yet more team player than solo villain. He understood that his success depended on public approval, which he was adept at building. Just as crucial was high-level support for his actions (covert as well as overt), under liberal and conservative administrations alike, which he worked assiduously to secure. Hoover’s pragmatism helped curb, at various junctures, his dogmatism and extremist tactics.
Hoover was also significantly aided, Gage notes, by a mid-century consensus, which he reinforced, on the need to confront threats to the state—primarily Nazis, communists, and gangsters. When the aging Hoover targeted civil-rights activists, Vietnam protesters, and other 1960s radicals, he ventured onto much more contested political terrain. An appeal to nonpartisan principles could no longer justify his actions, especially after the bureau’s secret and often abhorrent methods began to leak. Within a few years of Hoover’s death, in 1972, his apolitical aura was gone, his reputation was ruined, and his organization’s credibility was destroyed.
The subsequent reforms of the bureau—which made it independent of political actors, more beholden to law, and more transparent—sought to remove Hoover’s taint and reclaim public confidence. Yet the FBI in the Donald Trump era (not yet over) has been denounced as politically biased often enough to fuel worry about a crisis of legitimacy. First came the head-snapping denunciations of the bureau by different halves of the country when its director, James Comey, announced his decisions not to recommend prosecution in the Hillary Clinton email imbroglio, then to reopen the investigation 11 days before the 2016 presidential election, and then to clear Clinton two days before the election. Sharply partisan reactions to the bureau’s investigations of Trump’s many law-skirting and norm-defying activities have followed.
Gage’s penetrating account of Hoover’s career, especially his many long-eclipsed triumphs, offers a well-timed and sobering perspective as yet another institution in our fractured country struggles to maintain trust. Hoover worked hard—and successfully for many decades—to construct a bureau that was widely seen to embody nonpartisan vigilance. It’s an achievement that the modern, embattled FBI might envy.
In July 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer appointed the 24-year-old Hoover, who had worked in the Justice Department since 1917, to lead the Radical Division in the department’s Bureau of Investigation, as it was then called. There Hoover used his gift for collecting and cataloging masses of information to build dossiers on suspected anarchists, socialists, and communists. He also played a central role in the infamous peacetime roundup of thousands of foreign-born communists on January 2, 1920. The episode was the “greatest blunder of his young life,” Gage writes. Hoover was oblivious to due process, and his filing system failed: In addition to cases of mistaken identity, few of the arrested radicals were found to pose actual threats.
But Hoover did more than survive the blunder. In 1924, amid charges of corruption in the Bureau of Investigation, President Calvin Coolidge’s upright new attorney general, Harlan F. Stone, appointed him acting director of the bureau with orders to professionalize the organization, stick to the letter of the law, and end political surveillance. (Why Stone didn’t clean house is not explained.) Over the next eight years, Hoover worked to establish that he was a restrained technocrat who could be trusted. He improved the quality of agents (though not the variety: He hired only male lawyers or accountants). He also burnished his civil-liberties image, and built up the bureau’s technical expertise with a criminal-fingerprint clearinghouse, a cutting-edge forensics lab, and a crime-statistics division. The bureau’s relatively modest role in federal law enforcement during this era helped his mission. It was barely involved in the organized-crime problems that arose during Prohibition. Its agents were not authorized to carry guns, and it eschewed wiretapping, informants, and rough police tactics.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s arrival in the White House in 1933, Gage shows, changed everything for Hoover and the bureau. Following the repeal of Prohibition that year, the president consolidated all government detective agencies and put Hoover in charge. A string of new federal criminal laws, passed in response to a surge in violent crime, swelled the investigatory reach of the bureau (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935). Congress now authorized agents to carry weapons and make arrests. Urged by Roosevelt to “build up a body of public opinion” to support the bureau’s leadership in fighting FDR’s “War on Crime,” Hoover became a master at trumpeting FBI successes in the press and popular culture. (G-Men, a pulp magazine that included a Hoover speech per issue along with tales of his “famous cases,” was just the start.) Even as he criticized New Deal social workers and their ilk during public appearances, he also pulled off the feat of presenting himself and his agents as hyper-competent, nonpartisan New Deal professionals.
In 1936, Roosevelt invited Hoover back into the business of political surveillance—a fateful move. Amid widespread labor strikes and social protests, a president concerned about national security, and about his reelection, asked his FBI chief to secretly investigate “Fascism and Communism.” Hoover jumped at the opportunity. Roosevelt later authorized FBI investigations of other “subversives” before and during World War II. The scale of Hoover’s surveillance and infiltration of these groups remained secret. But after Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the president announced that the FBI was pursuing spies and saboteurs. And Hoover told Congress that he was compiling “extensive indices” of individuals and groups engaged in “any activities that are possibly detrimental to the internal security of the United States.” When the FBI began to arrest Nazi and communist sympathizers, progressive and liberal critics decried the actions as an unacceptable return to Hoover’s dark days running the Radical Division.
Public concerns about civil liberties began to recede after the German invasion of France in June 1940. And Hoover, having learned his lesson in 1920, worked hard to legitimate his wartime actions. He cultivated relationships with ACLU and NAACP leaders and pledged fealty to their civil-rights concerns. He opposed the West Coast internment of Japanese Americans and investigated white southern lynchers. He arrested few political dissidents. By the final months of the war, Gage writes, Hoover was “a darling of the New Deal establishment, known as a protector of civil liberties and a vanquisher of Nazis, saboteurs, and race-baiters.”
This public judgment reflected Hoover’s firm control over what the world learned about the bureau’s activities. He made sure to keep secret its spying on the ACLU and NAACP even while he was buttering them up. Only a handful of people in the government knew of the bureau’s investigative reports, written at Roosevelt’s request, on the sexual practices of government officials as well as on the president’s wartime detractors (including isolationists, union officials, and civil-rights activists). Nor did the public know that the by-now-gargantuan FBI had prodigious surveillance capabilities that it would continue to exercise in peacetime.
After the war, Hoover’s main obsession was the threat of communism. Gage shows that in the 1940s and ’50s, Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government and civil society was real and serious. Hoover spoke out vehemently against the “diabolical plots” of the Communist Party. Yet he faced a trickier balancing act in securing public support for the bureau’s approach, and at first he found himself charged with red-baiting by many liberals and progressives. Hoover knew much more than the public did about the scale of the problem because he had access to supersecret intelligence programs that revealed clues about the identity of Soviet spies and details about Moscow’s relationship with the American Communist Party. The need to protect these programs sometimes kept Hoover both from convicting Soviet spies and from substantiating his public warnings about the Red Menace.
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s appearance on the anti-communist scene in early 1950, charging that 205 card-carrying communists were working in the State Department, proved an unexpected boon to Hoover. He was energetically tracking communists in secret. But he saw McCarthy, with his many unsupported allegations of communist infiltration, as “a loose-cannon threat to the anticommunist cause,” in Gage’s words. Among other things, McCarthy wanted the FBI to reveal secrets about communists that would have betrayed sources and methods. When Hoover resisted on the grounds that the information could be used to “smear innocent individuals” and foment witch hunts, liberals and progressives praised his professionalism and discretion. Dwight D. Eisenhower followed suit in his successful effort to destroy McCarthy in 1954 by invoking Hoover as the trustworthy anti-communist alternative. “In one of the most contentious political spectacles in American history,” Gage writes, “Hoover’s greatness emerged as the one point of consensus.”
McCarthy’s flameout was the crowning moment in Hoover’s three-decade effort to establish the FBI as an institution above politics that the public could count on to act responsibly in secret to keep the nation safe. Gage emphasizes the colossal skill required to maintain this image and the bipartisan support that went along with it. She also notes the “surprising degree of nimbleness and creativity” he showed in responding to shifting law-enforcement and national-security challenges. He kept his agents above reproach and his agency at the forefront of criminal and intelligence science. He shrewdly managed alliances with presidents and in Congress, and with the press. He was gifted at selective restraint—in declining to take actions that might jeopardize his political support, and in saying “no” when he thought presidential requests for secret political intelligence went too far. Not least, he kept senior executive and congressional figures generally informed about his invasive operations (though not so much about his legally dubious tactics) while keeping them secret from a public whose trust he counted on for his success.
In the 1960s, “the American consensus that had once sustained” Hoover fell apart “as the country split over issues of race and civil rights, ‘law and order,’ and the war in Vietnam,” Gage writes. Race relations, she shows, tripped up Hoover the most. He was a lifelong racist who nonetheless, starting in the ’40s and continuing into the ’60s, “mounted aggressive campaigns against the most extreme elements of the segregationist South, especially the Ku Klux Klan.” Hoover disliked lawbreaking and disorder, she concludes, more than he liked segregation. At the same time, she calls attention to Hoover’s significantly more extensive campaigns against civil-rights leaders and activists.
Hoover singled out MLK in particular, whom he considered “degenerate” and hypocritical. He had solid (though undisclosable) evidence that a close adviser to King, Stanley Levison, as well as the man who ran the New York office of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jack O’Dell, had clandestine ties to the Communist Party. In July 1962, after Hoover distributed an anonymous note about O’Dell’s communist past to southern newspapers, King falsely downplayed O’Dell’s role in the SCLC and his knowledge of O’Dell’s communist leanings. The following year, Hoover persuaded President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to warn King off these men. But King demurred in the absence of evidence.
Hoover waited until Lyndon B. Johnson had been elected, in 1964, to call King out, which he did a month after King had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover bluntly told a women’s offshoot of the National Press Club, “I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country.” His shocked aide urged him to take the remarks off the record, but Hoover encouraged the reporters to publish. He was itching for a fight, and he thought he had cause. Instead his remark turned out to be his biggest public blunder since his days in the Radical Division. A firestorm ensued. (A few days later, the FBI initiated its secret blackmail and rumor campaign against King, which of course would have caused a conflagration had it been known.)
The ever more discordant civil-rights movement, the New Left, Vietnam protesters, and Black nationalists had weak ties, if any, to the Soviet Union, and these “subversives” had broader public support than the dissidents the younger Hoover had once pursued. Yet as social order broke down, Hoover went after them all with public jabs and secret campaigns. Generating political consensus in this context was far harder now that his views about threats worth addressing were so much further from the mainstream. When the seamy secret side of the FBI’s methods began to leak out, his signature massaging of allies simply didn’t work.
The scale of Hoover’s electronic surveillance was becoming clear to the public by 1966. Its political thrust was exposed in 1971, with the release of documents that had been stolen from an FBI outlet in Media, Pennsylvania. They revealed for the first time that the bureau was monitoring, disrupting, and neutralizing left-wing activists. For “liberals and leftists,” Gage writes, that “marked the end of whatever was still left of Hoover’s reputation as the limited-state, good-government figure that they had once embraced and admired.” After Hoover died suddenly on May 2, 1972, he received “a grand spectacle of bipartisan tribute,” as Gage puts it, primarily for his earlier successes and long service. But after the shocking revelations of the 1975 Church Committee investigations into U.S. domestic-intelligence practices, he “emerged as one of history’s great villains, perhaps the most universally reviled American political figure of the twentieth century.”
James Comey kept on his desk in the director’s office a copy of the one-page October 1963 memorandum from Hoover to Attorney General Kennedy seeking permission to conduct the initial electronic surveillance of King. The only reasons cited were King’s belief in Marxism and his possible connections to communist influences. Comey made the memo the centerpiece of a seminar for new FBI recruits about the bureau’s cruel campaign against King, and often spoke about it with colleagues. “By remembering and being open and truthful about our mistakes,” Comey explained in his first memoir, “we reduce the chance we will repeat them.”
Comey’s FBI was a world away from Hoover’s. Reforms over the years have ensured that the FBI follows elaborate rules on investigations and electronic surveillance, and is subject to oversight by federal courts, executive-branch watchdogs, and congressional committees. The director’s term is limited to 10 years. And a powerful norm has been established that the FBI must maintain strict independence from the president, in appearance and reality, to preserve the bureau’s credibility when its investigations affect an administration’s interests.
Yet for all of that, the FBI cannot escape Hoover’s shadow and the suspicion that it wields illegitimate power—especially when it investigates senior political figures. The bureau made mistakes in its handling of Hillary Clinton’s email mess and of Donald Trump’s incessantly questionable behavior that cost it credibility. But we fundamentally misunderstand the quandary the FBI faces if we think that these investigations would have been viewed with much more confidence had it avoided those missteps.
The modern FBI lacks Hoover’s tools for managing its investigative legitimacy. Hoover sustained this legitimacy by, in essence, insulating the bureau from outside questioning that would have exposed its excesses. He did favors for presidents and other politicians, who backed him up in a pinch. The law-bound, post-Hoover FBI must (and does) operate at arm’s length from politicians. Adversarial eyeballs in the executive branch and in Congress, and a much less pliant press than in Hoover’s day, mean that secrecy is harder to maintain. These institutions scrutinize every mistake, many of which acquire outsize significance because they are viewed through the villain-Hoover lens. As recent events show, and as Hoover himself discovered, sustaining broad public support can be impossible in fractious times.
Public investigations of senior political figures obviously pose the most difficult challenge. Charges of politicization are inevitable, and the stakes could not be higher. Though Hoover spied on politicians, he never launched a public inquiry of a senior national figure, and would have done everything in his power to avoid that. Such a step would have undermined the political support that allowed him to pursue what he deemed real threats.
The reformed FBI can’t avoid such politically divisive investigations. It gets referrals from inspectors general and pressure from Congress and the press, and must follow attorney-general guidelines in assessing whether and how to proceed. And whatever decision the bureau makes, its response is unavoidably seen by half the country as political. This is not a recent development. Recall, for example, FBI Director Louis Freeh’s rocky relationship with President Bill Clinton. Watergate, which unfolded during the bureau’s transition away from the Hoover era, highlights how much has changed: The pre-reform FBI did solid work, aided by “Deep Throat” Deputy Director Mark Felt’s Hoover-esque political leaks. The bureau acted with broad (and probably unrepeatable) political consensus grounded in revulsion not just at Watergate, but at Vietnam and other executive-branch failures going back a decade.
The FBI has never been in a tougher spot than in the Trump era. Many Democrats haven’t liked the FBI since at least 2016, when they concluded that the organization was trying to elect Trump, who, just as wrongly, believed that the bureau was out to stop his election. The next five years of Trump’s relentless, unparalleled FBI-bashing drove Republicans in our tribal era into an anti-FBI frenzy. Democrats support the bureau today, but that is unlikely to last should the FBI present evidence of convictable crimes by Hunter Biden.
The FBI’s half-century effort since Hoover’s death to remove itself from politics was necessary and admirable. America needs a widely trusted, competent, and reliable federal law-enforcement and domestic-intelligence agency to keep us safe from ever-morphing threats at home and abroad. But as the FBI’s longest-serving director knew well, cultivating an apolitical ethos supplements, but can’t replace, having many friends in high places and controlling the secrecy system. The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover likely smiles at the irony that his beloved bureau has become too independent and too open to be trusted in hyper-partisan America.
This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “When J. Edgar Hoover Was a National Hero.”
