The Western Amputee Golf Association (WAGA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing golf and its community to amputees and golfers with special needs across eleven Western states, including California.”Sometimes life throws you a par. Sometimes a bogey,” said Tim Healea, the association’s president. “It’s therapeutic. It’s self-driven. It’s self-competitive.”Healea has found parallels between life and golf over his many years of play. Circumstances in both, he says, can change in an instant.“I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I’ve always been a competitor,” he said. “In 2001, rheumatoid arthritis started eating my ankles and had to have my right leg amputated in January. And then the following year in January, had to have the left leg done.”Despite having both legs amputated, golf remained constant for Healea. Now he’s focused on bringing adaptive golf to others facing a wide range of physical and mental challenges.”It was five weeks and I had my prosthetic on and I was swinging the golf club,” he said.WAGA supports adaptive golfers with more than a dozen disability classifications, ranging from limb differences to neurological conditions, like Down Syndrome.Established in 1968, it provides support to adaptive golfers through tournaments, workshops, and events.”We all love the game and if we haven’t discovered the game, when we do, they love it,” Healea said.The organization relies on community support to continue its mission.Golfers who have lost a limb or the use of a limb are encouraged to get involved.This April, WAGA is teaming up with the United States Adaptive Golf Alliance for a tournament and public golf clinic at Sierra View Country Club in Roseville from April 19 to 21. Registration for adaptive golfers is still open.As part of our 70 Years of Service initiative, we’re highlighting organizations that are making a difference all year long. See more stories in the series here.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
ROSEVILLE, Calif. —
The Western Amputee Golf Association (WAGA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing golf and its community to amputees and golfers with special needs across eleven Western states, including California.
“Sometimes life throws you a par. Sometimes a bogey,” said Tim Healea, the association’s president. “It’s therapeutic. It’s self-driven. It’s self-competitive.”
Healea has found parallels between life and golf over his many years of play. Circumstances in both, he says, can change in an instant.
“I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I’ve always been a competitor,” he said. “In 2001, rheumatoid arthritis started eating my ankles and had to have my right leg amputated in January. And then the following year in January, had to have the left leg done.”
Despite having both legs amputated, golf remained constant for Healea. Now he’s focused on bringing adaptive golf to others facing a wide range of physical and mental challenges.
“It was five weeks and I had my prosthetic on and I was swinging the golf club,” he said.
WAGA supports adaptive golfers with more than a dozen disability classifications, ranging from limb differences to neurological conditions, like Down Syndrome.
Established in 1968, it provides support to adaptive golfers through tournaments, workshops, and events.
“We all love the game and if we haven’t discovered the game, when we do, they love it,” Healea said.
The organization relies on community support to continue its mission.
Golfers who have lost a limb or the use of a limb are encouraged to get involved.
This April, WAGA is teaming up with the United States Adaptive Golf Alliance for a tournament and public golf clinic at Sierra View Country Club in Roseville from April 19 to 21. Registration for adaptive golfers is still open.
As part of our 70 Years of Service initiative, we’re highlighting organizations that are making a difference all year long. See more stories in the series here.
John F. Kennedy took George Plimpton by surprise after a dinner party one evening when he pulled his friend aside for a word in the Oval Office. The president had Reconstruction on his mind—really, though, he wanted to discuss Plimpton’s grandmother.
Plimpton was lanky and lordly, famous for his patrician accent and his forays into professional sports. The Paris Review founder did everything and knew everyone. He might edit literary criticism one day and try his hand at football or boxing the next. Plimpton had known Jackie Kennedy for years, and he had been friends with Robert F. Kennedy since their Harvard days.
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He also had another, and very different, Kennedy connection. Plimpton’s great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a New Englander, had been a Civil War general and Mississippi governor during Reconstruction. He was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage. Kennedy had soiled Ames’s reputation in his best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. The book ushered the junior senator from Massachusetts onto the national stage, effectively launching his bid for the presidency.
Kennedy’s book presented a pantheon of past U.S. senators as models of courageous compromise and political pragmatism. One such man, Kennedy claimed, was Ames’s racist Democratic rival, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. A slaveholder, drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and Confederate colonel, Lamar later became the first ex-Confederate appointed to the Supreme Court after the Civil War.
Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians—disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman.
Ames’s daughter Blanche—Plimpton’s grandmother—was incensed. She sent meticulously researched letters to Kennedy, demanding that he correct his book. Some of the letters had footnotes. Some had appendixes. Blanche would not let up, chasing Kennedy from the Senate to the presidency.
In Plimpton’s telling, as Kennedy took his guests on an informal tour of the White House that evening, he motioned to Plimpton for a word. “George,” he said, as Plimpton would recall, “I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.” Kennedy begged him to persuade Blanche Ames to stop writing, complaining that her correspondence “was cutting into the work of government.”
Plimpton promised to try, but he knew it would be no use. “My grandmother was a Massachusetts woman,” he later explained, and when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche “did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”
Blanche Ames wasborn in Massachusetts in 1878, the year after Reconstruction ended in a political deal that awarded Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, the disputed presidential election in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Blanche had the Civil War in her blood. Benjamin F. Butler, a Union general, was her maternal grandfather; he had commanded Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and had designated fugitive slaves as “contraband of war,” using a legal loophole that allowed refugees to seek protection behind Union lines. He later became governor of Massachusetts. Adelbert Ames, her father, won the Medal of Honor at First Bull Run and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. After serving as the military governor of Mississippi, Ames became the state’s senator and then its civilian governor. He was a champion of racial rights, embracing a personal “Mission with a large M ” to support Black citizens.
Blanche, too, was a principled fighter, willing to risk her social privilege for the causes that she championed. Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s-suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.
Blanche Ames Ames acquired her distinctive, double-barreled name upon marrying the prominent Harvard botanist Oakes Ames, who came from an unrelated dynastic strand of Ameses. A talented painter, Blanche illustrated some of Oakes’s books about orchids. The Ames mansion at Borderland, their 1,200-acre estate outside Boston, was built entirely of stone to ensure that the library—the filming location for the 2019 movie Knives Out—would be fireproof. Adelbert Ames’s and Benjamin Butler’s Civil War–era swords can still be seen in the foyer. George Plimpton once used one to cut a cake at an anniversary party.
Profiles in Courage roused Blanche from her Borderland retirement. Eight decades had elapsed since the end of Reconstruction. The modern civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, with its promise of a second Reconstruction. Kennedy was not only taking the wrong side, but he was doing so by maligning Blanche’s father:
No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor … [admitted] that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets … Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government.
Lamar, meanwhile, was cast as a “statesman” for whom “no partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth”—a selfless patriot who had helped reconcile the nation.
The truth of the matter was very different. Reconstruction-era Mississippi under Ames’s leadership arguably held more political promise for newly enfranchised Black people than any other southern state. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union. But the new state constitution worked to overturn the Black Codes—laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans—and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the country’s first Black senators. Ames himself shared his gubernatorial ticket with three Black candidates.
Democrats swept the 1874 national midterm elections in what the historian Eric Foner has called a “repudiation of Reconstruction.” Mississippi Democrats saw an opportunity: By seizing control of the legislature in upcoming state elections, they could pass measures that would essentially end Black suffrage. The year 1875 became a struggle between Ames, the elected governor, and Lamar, who was then in Congress. Ames’s administration had the support of Black voters. Lamar, meanwhile, embraced the so-called Mississippi Plan, which aimed to disrupt a legitimate election, by force if necessary. Lamar insisted that the Democrats had to win control of the state legislature to ensure the “supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” On Election Day, paramilitary terrorists called White Liners obstructed polling places, destroyed ballot boxes, and threatened to kill Black citizens who voted, as the journalist Nicholas Lemann has written in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Counties that were once overwhelmingly Republican saw the Republican vote drop to single digits. “A revolution has taken place,” Ames wrote to his wife, prophesying a bleak future for Mississippi. “A race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to … an era of second slavery.”
Democrats, elected by terrorism and led by Lamar, now threatened Ames with impeachment. They accused him of financial impropriety—including the high taxes that Profiles decried—despite his administration’s relative frugality. To avoid impeachment, Ames resigned and fled the state. A U.S. Senate committee investigated the Mississippi elections and produced a 2,000-page document known as the “Boutwell Report.” It concluded that Ames was blameless and that his resignation had been forced “by measures unauthorized by law.” No matter: Ames’s reputation lay in tatters.
The following year, during the presidential deadlock, Lamar helped broker the Compromise of 1877, which gave Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the return of “home rule”—rule by white-supremacist Democrats—to the South, effectively destroying national Reconstruction.
Profiles in Courageevades easy categorization. It is a historical work, written by a political team, heavily assisted by historians, and published for political gain. The book features eight senators, strategically distributed across time, space, and party. Five of the profiles focus on questions of slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, and none of the featured senators took a progressive approach to Black rights. Three, including Lamar, were slaveholders. Questions about authorship arose early: Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was rumored to be the true author. (He did, in fact, write most of the book.) Archival drafts reveal that the Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids helped overhaul the Mississippi chapter. The book’s historical vision, though, came from Kennedy.
Historians in recent years have acknowledged that the real problem with Profiles is not authorship but substance. As a critic, Blanche Ames got there first. Her personal copy of the book, a first edition, overflows with annotations. She drew arrows and corkscrew question marks around the paragraph about her father, her anger visible on the page. When Kennedy insisted that Lamar had written Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession only after losing hope that “the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union,” Blanche thundered in the margins: “Lamar had sown the seed in 1861. He was sowing it again in 1874.”
In June 1956, Blanche sent a nine-page letter to Senator Kennedy, introducing herself as his friend Plimpton’s grandmother and urging “corrections of errata for your own sake as well as mine.” She recognized diplomatically that, “in a work as ambitious as ‘Profiles in Courage’ … there are bound to be some viewpoints to arouse controversy.” Nevertheless, she argued, ambition did not excuse historical inaccuracy.
Kennedy replied the next month. He was cordial, admitting that Reconstruction was “one of the most difficult sections” to write, not because of lack of material, but because of an abundance of “emotion-packed and strongly partisan” readings. It was a politician’s apology, suffused with qualifiers. He insisted that he had relied on “reputable authorities,” but granted that “it is possible, of course, that in so doing a particular individual or incident is slighted or inadequately or inaccurately described.” He added, “If such is the case in connection with my mention of your father … I am indeed sorry.” He assured Blanche that her message “succeeded in stimulating me to further research,” but warned that he did not expect Profiles to be reprinted, so there would be no correction.
Kennedy did, in fact, do further research. According to Plimpton, during that Oval Office conversation after the dinner party, Kennedy asked Plimpton what he knew about his great-grandfather, apparently eager to demonstrate his own knowledge. He reenacted how Ames would inspect his Civil War soldiers and shout “For God’s sake, draw up your bowels!,” causing White House personnel to burst in, worried by the uproar. The president had found this obscure detail in an equally obscure book, The Twentieth Maine, which was published a year after Profiles.
But between 1956 and 1963, Profiles was reprinted more than 30 times. Kennedy did not change his account of Adelbert Ames and L. Q. C. Lamar.
Kennedy’s intransigence only fueled Blanche’s campaign. She forwarded her letters to Harper & Brothers, giving the publisher “the first opportunity” to rectify where Profiles in Courage “falls short of the Code of Historians.” The publisher declined, claiming that too much time had elapsed for readers to be able to understand any corrections. Blanche combed through Kennedy’s acknowledgments and wrote to the professors who assisted with drafting or editing Profiles, hoping that the historians might put pressure on him.
They did not. There is no evidence that Davids, architect of the Lamar chapter, ever bothered to reply. Allan Nevins, at Columbia, backpedaled, claiming that the introduction he had written for Profiles “carried no endorsement of all details … I am sure the Senator will make correction where correction is proper.” Arthur Holcombe, at Harvard, patronizingly suggested that Blanche had “misunderstood Senator Kennedy’s meaning.” Some of these academic historians may simply not have taken Blanche seriously: She was old, she was a woman, and she lacked scholarly credentials.
Blanche contacted a second circle of scholars, seeking a historian “free from bias” who might serve as an impartial biographer of Adelbert Ames. She steeped herself in the historiography of Reconstruction, coming to understand how closely Profiles followed the neo-Confederate historians Wirt Armistead Cate and Edward Mayes. “Cate copies Mayes and Kennedy copies Cate,” she wrote to the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Now, unless corrected, modern and future historians may copy Kennedy! This method of writing history leads around in circles of quotations of half-truths. It is a false method.”
Morison suggested a few military scholars as potential Ames biographers, but mainly recommended “Negro historians” such as John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Alrutheus Ambush Taylor. “Adelbert Ames’ career as Governor was, I believe, more important than his military career,” Morison reasoned, “and he was the champion of the Negroes.” Blanche contacted a host of prominent academics, including C. Vann Woodward, whose books had criticized the Dunning School and challenged the myth that Reconstruction governments with Black elected officials were simply incompetent or ignorant. The Profiles team had paid no attention to this scholarship. Despite her efforts, no historian would commit to the project. So Blanche resolved to write a biography of Adelbert Ames herself.
Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.
Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.
The stakes, Blanche believed, included not only her father’s reputation but the very meaning of Reconstruction. Her final chapter, “Integrity and History,” is a scathing condemnation of the traditional Reconstruction historiography Kennedy had parroted. Throughout the book, she linked Adelbert Ames’s promotion of racial rights in the 1870s with the modern civil-rights movement—the second Reconstruction:
In this fateful year of 1963, our Congress has a unique opportunity with its overwhelming Democratic majorities … Congress seems to hold the practical power to do away with the disgraceful suppression of Negro suffrage rights … A hundred years has been too long to wait for application of these long-standing laws of equity.
Blanche Ames’s book was published at the worst possible moment. In September 1963, she finished correcting page proofs for Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor. The book was lovingly bound in Sundour cloth and stamped in gold. It sold for $12.50, about $120 today—an old-fashioned, costly volume. Kennedy’s mass-produced paperback, meanwhile, sold for less than a dollar. On November 22, 1963, as Blanche’s book was going to press, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy in Dallas.
With the president’s tragic death, Profiles in Courage got a second life, landing back on the New York Times best-seller list. As Americans evaluated Kennedy’s legacy, his prizewinning book seemed a natural place to start. A televised adaptation of Profiles had been in production at NBC before Kennedy’s death. At that time, Blanche had urged Kennedy to use television as an opportunity to “bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.” After the assassination, the network pressed ahead, framing the series as “one of the finest living memorials to President Kennedy.” But Blanche may have gotten through to Kennedy’s team in the end, at least as far as the television series: When it premiered, a year after Kennedy’s death, the planned segment on Lamar had been quietly dropped. It was the only original profile not to be featured on television.
But there was still the book. Blanche wrote to Sorensen in early 1964, trying to strike a tone of mutual interest: “Must we not find a way of correcting these obvious misstatements inadvertently restated by President Kennedy? Otherwise they will be perpetuated with greater force than ever, and I do not believe that he would have wished this. Do you?” There is no record that Sorensen replied.
Blanche lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Born a year after the end of the first Reconstruction, she was able to witness the start of the second. But when she died at Borderland, in 1969, a belittling New York Times headline read: “MRS. OAKES AMES, BOTANIST’S WIDOW; Illustrator of Her Husband’s Works on Orchids Dies.” Despite Blanche’s best efforts, her book sold only a few thousand copies.
In 2010, a few years before efforts to remove Confederate monuments gained traction across the country, a life-size statue of Lamar was erected outside his former home in Oxford, Mississippi. The L. Q. C. Lamar House Museum’s public-outreach efforts generally commemorate Lamar not as a white supremacist or an architect of the Mississippi Plan, but as the embodiment of Kennedy’s redemptive arc: “Southern secessionist to American statesman,” as the museum describes it. Ames is not mentioned at all; Profiles is highlighted throughout the museum.
In 1980, George Plimpton donated a copy of Blanche’s book to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. “President Kennedy would know,” he said, “that a Massachusetts woman will eventually have her way.” But Blanche Ames Ames has not had her way quite yet. At the library’s gift shop, visitors can buy a 50th-anniversary edition of Profiles in Courage, published in 2006, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy. The book has never been corrected.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “Kennedy and the Lost Cause.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement.
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“There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. “To bring you the story. No matter the cost. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”
Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”
Two years earlier—a month into Trump’s presidency—the Post had affixed “Democracy dies in darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, as well as at the top of its website and on everything it produced. As the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” And it was not about Trump, although his allies took it to be. Producing a mission statement had been in the works for two years before Trump took office. That it emerged when it did is testimony to the tortuous, and torturous, process of coming up with something sufficiently memorable and meaningful that Bezos would bless.
Bezos, the founder and now executive chair of Amazon, had bought The Washington Post in 2013. In early 2015, he had expressed his wish for a phrase that might encapsulate the newspaper’s purpose: a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product; fit nicely on a T-shirt; make a claim uniquely ours, given our heritage and our base in the nation’s capital; and be both aspirational and disruptive. “Not a paper I want to subscribe to,” as Bezos put it, but rather “an idea I want to belong to.” The idea: We love this country, so we hold it accountable.
No small order, coming up with the right phrase. And Bezos was no distant observer. “On this topic,” he told us, “I’d like to see all the sausage-making. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.” Bezos, so fixated on metrics in other contexts, now advised ditching them. “I just think we’re going to have to use gut and intuition.” And he insisted that the chosen words recognize our “historic mission,” not a new one. “We don’t have to be afraid of the democracy word,” he said; it’s “the thing that makes the Post unique.”
Staff teams were assembled. Months of meetings were held. Frustrations deepened. Outside branding consultants were retained, to no avail. (“Typical,” Bezos said.) Desperation led to a long list of options, venturing into the inane. The ideas totaled at least 1,000: “A bias for truth,” “Know,” “A right to know,” “You have a right to know,” “Unstoppable journalism,” “The power is yours,” “Power read,” “Relentless pursuit of the truth,” “The facts matter,” “It’s about America,” “Spotlight on democracy,” “Democracy matters,” “A light on the nation,” “Democracy lives in light,” “Democracy takes work. We’ll do our part,” “The news democracy needs,” “Toward a more perfect union” (rejected lest it summon thoughts of our own workforce union).
By September 2016, an impatient Bezos was forcing the issue. We had to settle on something. Nine Post executives and Bezos met in a private room at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to finally get over the finish line. Because of Bezos’s tight schedule, we had only half an hour, starting at 7:45 a.m. A handful of options remained on the table: “A bright light for a free people” or, simply, “A bright light for free people”; “The story must be told” (recalling the inspiring words of the late photographer Michel du Cille); “To challenge and inform”; “For a world that demands to know”; “For people who demand to know.” None of those passed muster.
In the end, we settled on “A free people demand to know” (subject to a grammar check by our copy desk, which gave its assent). Success was short-lived—mercifully, no doubt. Late that evening, Bezos dispatched an email in the “not what you’re hoping for category,” as he put it. He had run our consensus pick by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, a novelist and “my in-house wordsmith,” who had pronounced the phrase clunky. “Frankenslogan” was the word she used.
By then, we needed Bezos to take unilateral action. Finally, he did. “Let’s go with ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ ” he decreed. It had been on our list from the start, and was a phrase Bezos had used previously in speaking of the Post’s mission; he himself had heard it from the Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It was a twist on a phrase in a 2002 ruling by the federal-appellate-court judge Damon J. Keith, who wrote that “democracies die behind closed doors.”
“Democracy dies in darkness” made its debut, without announcement, in mid-February 2017. And I’ve never seen a slogan—I mean, mission statement—get such a reaction. It even drew attention from People’s Daily in China, which tweeted, “ ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ @washingtonpost puts on new slogan, on the same day @realDonaldTrump calls media as the enemy of Americans.” Merriam-Webster reported a sudden surge in searches for the word democracy. The Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked that some of the rejected phrases had included “No, you shut up” and “We took down Nixon—who wants next?” Twitter commentators remarked on the Post’s “new goth vibe.” The media critic Jack Shafer tweeted a handful of his own “rejected Washington Post mottos,” among them “We’re really full of ourselves” and “Democracy Gets Sunburned If It Doesn’t Use Sunscreen.”
Bezos couldn’t have been more thrilled. The mission statement was getting noticed. “It’s a good sign when you’re the subject of satire,” he said a couple of weeks later. The four words atop our journalism had certainly drawn attention to our mission. Much worse would have been a collective shrug. Like others at the Post, I had questioned the wisdom of branding all our work with death and darkness. All I could think of at that point, though, was the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
But the phrase stuck with readers, who saw it as perfect for the Trump era, even if that was not its intent.
The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, speaks to the newsroom as the staff celebrates winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
We must have been an odd-looking group, sitting around the dining-room table in the egg-shaped Blue Room of the White House: Bezos, recognizable anywhere by his bald head, short stature, booming laugh, and radiant intensity; Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, an alumnus of the Reagan administration who was a head taller than my own 5 feet 11 inches, with graying blond hair and a giant, glistening smile; the editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, a 36-year Post veteran and former foreign correspondent with an earnest, bookish look; and me, with a trimmed gray beard, woolly head of hair, and what was invariably described as a dour and taciturn demeanor.
Five months after his inauguration, President Trump had responded to a request from the publisher for a meeting, and had invited us to dinner. We were joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. By coincidence, just as we were sitting down, at 7 p.m., the Postpublished a report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was inquiring into Kushner’s business dealings in Russia, part of Mueller’s investigation into that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The story followed another by the Postrevealing that Kushner had met secretly with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and had proposed that a Russian diplomatic post be used to provide a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin. The Post had reported as well that Kushner met later with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian-owned development bank.
Hope Hicks, a young Trump aide, handed Kushner her phone. Our news alert had just gone out, reaching millions of mobile devices, including hers. “Very Shakespearean,” she whispered to Kushner. “Dining with your enemies.” Hiatt, who had overheard, whispered back, “We’re not your enemies.”
As we dined on cheese soufflé, pan-roasted Dover sole, and chocolate-cream tart, Trump crowed about his election victory, mocked his rivals and even people in his own orbit, boasted of imagined accomplishments, calculated how he could win yet again in four years, and described The Washington Post as the worst of all media outlets, with The New York Times just behind us in his ranking in that moment.
Trump, his family, and his team had put the Post on their enemies list, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. We had been neither servile nor sycophantic toward Trump, and we weren’t going to be. Our job was to report aggressively on the president and to hold his administration, like all others, to account. In the mind of the president and those around him, that made us the opposition.
There was political benefit to Trump in going further: We were not just his enemy—we were the country’s enemy. In his telling, we were traitors. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump had denounced the press as “the enemy of the American People” on Twitter. It was an ominous echo of the phrase “enemy of the people,” invoked by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and deployed for the purpose of repression and murder. Trump could not have cared less about the history of such incendiary language or how it might incite physical attacks on journalists.
Whenever I was asked about Trump’s rhetoric, my own response was straightforward: “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” But it was clear that Trump saw all of us at that table as his foes, most especially Bezos, because he owned the Post and, in Trump’s mind, was pulling the strings—or could pull them if he wished.
At our dinner, Trump sought at times to be charming. It was a superficial charm, without warmth or authenticity. He did almost all the talking. We scarcely said a word, and I said the least, out of discomfort at being there and seeking to avoid any confrontation with him over our coverage. Anything I said could set him off.
He let loose on a long list of perceived enemies and slights: The chief executive of Macy’s was a “coward” for pulling Trump products from store shelves in reaction to Trump’s remarks portraying Mexican immigrants as rapists; he would have been picketed by only “20 Mexicans. Who cares?” Trump had better relations with foreign leaders than former President Barack Obama, who was lazy and never called them. Obama had left disasters around the world for him to solve. Obama had been hesitant to allow the military to kill people in Afghanistan. He, Trump, told the military to just do it; don’t ask for permission. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were slammed for reasons that are now familiar.
Two themes stayed with me from that dinner. First, Trump would govern primarily to retain the support of his base. At the table, he pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. The figure “47%” appeared above his photo. “This is the latest Rasmussen poll. I can win with that.” The message was clear: That level of support, if he held key states, was all he needed to secure a second term. What other voters thought of him, he seemed to say, would not matter.
Second, his list of grievances appeared limitless. Atop them all was the press, and atop the press was the Post. During dinner, he derided what he had been hearing about our story on the special counsel and his son-in-law, suggesting incorrectly that it alleged money laundering. “He’s a good kid,” he said of Kushner, who at the time was 36 and a father of three, and sitting right there at the table. The Post was awful, Trump said repeatedly. We treated him unfairly. With every such utterance, he poked me in the shoulder with his left elbow.
Baron’s office at the Post. (The Washington Post / Getty)
A few times during that dinner, Trump—for all the shots he had taken during the campaign at Bezos’s company—mentioned that Melania was a big Amazon shopper, prompting Bezos to joke at one point, “Consider me your personal customer-service rep.” Trump’s concern, of course, wasn’t Amazon’s delivery. He wanted Bezos to deliver him from the Post’s coverage.
The effort quickened the next day. Kushner called Fred Ryan in the morning to get his read on how the dinner had gone. After Ryan offered thanks for their generosity and graciousness with their time, Kushner inquired whether the Post’s coverage would now improve as a result. Ryan diplomatically rebuffed him with a reminder that there were to be no expectations about coverage. “It’s not a dial we have to turn one way to make it better and another way to make it worse,” he said.
Trump would be the one to call Bezos’s cellphone that same morning at eight, urging him to get the Post to be “more fair to me.” He said, “I don’t know if you get involved in the newsroom, but I’m sure you do to some degree.” Bezos replied that he didn’t and then delivered a line he’d been prepared to say at the dinner itself if Trump had leaned on him then: “It’s really not appropriate to … I’d feel really bad about it my whole life if I did.” The call ended without bullying about Amazon but with an invitation for Bezos to seek a favor. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” Trump said.
Three days later, the bullying began. Leaders of the technology sector gathered at the White House for a meeting of the American Technology Council, which had been created by executive order a month earlier. Trump briefly pulled Bezos aside to complain bitterly about the Post’s coverage. The dinner, he said, was apparently a wasted two and a half hours.
Then, later in the year, four days after Christmas, Trump in a tweet called for the Postal Service to charge Amazon “MUCH MORE” for package deliveries, claiming that Amazon’s rates were a rip-off of American taxpayers. The following year, he attempted to intervene to obstruct Amazon in its pursuit of a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department. Bezos was to be punished for not reining in the Post.
Meanwhile, Trump was salivating to have an antitrust case filed against Amazon. The hedge-fund titan Leon Cooperman revealed in a CNBC interview that Trump had asked him twice at a White House dinner that summer whether Amazon was a monopoly. On July 24, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?”
As Trump sought to tighten the screws, Bezos made plain that the paper had no need to fear that he might capitulate. In March 2018, as we concluded one of our business meetings, Bezos offered some parting words: “You may have noticed that Trump keeps tweeting about us.” The remark was met with silence. “Or maybe you haven’t noticed!” Bezos joked. He wanted to reinforce a statement I had publicly made before. “We are not at war with them,” Bezos said. “They may be at war with us. We just need to do the work.” In July of that year, he once again spoke up unprompted at a business meeting. “Do not worry about me,” he said. “Just do the work. And I’ve got your back.”
A huge advantage of Bezos’s ownership was that he had his eye on a long time horizon. In Texas, he was building a “10,000-year clock” in a hollowed-out mountain—intended as a symbol, he explained, of long-term thinking. He often spoke of what the business or the landscape might look like in “20 years.” When I first heard that timeline, I was startled. News executives I’d dealt with routinely spoke, at best, of next year—and, at worst, next quarter. Even so, Bezos also made decisions at a speed that was unprecedented in my experience. He personally owned 100 percent of the company. He didn’t need to consult anyone. Whatever he spent came directly out of his bank account.
In my interactions with him, Bezos showed integrity and spine. Early in his ownership, he displayed an intuitive appreciation that an ethical compass for the Post was inseparable from its business success. There was much about Bezos and Amazon that the Post needed to vigorously cover and investigate—such as his company’s escalating market power, its heavy-handed labor practices, and the ramifications for individual privacy of its voracious data collection. There was also the announcement that Bezos and MacKenzie Scott were seeking a divorce—followed immediately by an explosive report in the National Enquirer disclosing that Bezos had been involved in a long-running extramarital relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a former TV reporter and news anchor. We were determined to fulfill our journalistic obligations with complete independence, and did so without restriction.
I came to like the Post’s owner as a human being and found him to be a far more complex, thoughtful, and agreeable character than routinely portrayed. He can be startlingly easy to talk to: Just block out any thought of his net worth. Our meetings took place typically every two weeks by teleconference, and only rarely in person. During the pandemic, we were subjected to Amazon’s exasperatingly inferior videoconferencing system, called Chime. The one-hour meetings were a lesson in his unconventional thinking, wry humor (“This is me enthusiastic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell”), and fantastic aphorisms: “Most people start building before they know what they’re building”; “The things that everybody knows are going to work, everybody is already doing.” At one session, we were discussing group subscriptions for college students. Bezos wanted to know the size of the market. As we all started to Google, Bezos interjected, “Hey, why don’t we try this? Alexa, how many college students are there in the United States?” (Alexa pulled up the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)
In conversation, Bezos could be witty and self-deprecating (“Nothing makes me feel dumber than a New Yorker cartoon”), laughed easily, and posed penetrating questions. When a Post staffer asked him whether he’d join the crew of his space company, Blue Origin, on one of its early launches, he said he wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you wait a while and see how things go?” I advised. “That,” he said, “is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”
Science fiction—particularly Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven—had a huge influence on Bezos in his teenage years. He has spoken of how his interest in space goes back to his childhood love of the Star Trek TV series. Star Trek inspired both the voice-activated Alexa and the name of his holding company, Zefram, drawn from the fictional character Zefram Cochrane, who developed “warp drive,” a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds. “The reason he’s earning so much money,” his high-school girlfriend, Ursula Werner, said early in Amazon’s history, “is to get to outer space.”
Baron and the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in 2016 (The Washington Post / Getty)
From the moment Bezos acquired the Post, he made clear that its historic journalistic mission was at the core of its business. I had been in journalism long enough to witness some executives—unmoored by crushing pressures on circulation, advertising, and profits—abandon the foundational journalistic culture, even shunning the vocabulary we use to describe our work. Many publishers took to calling journalism “content,” a term so hollow that I sarcastically advised substituting “stuff.” Journalists were recategorized as “content producers,” top editors retitled “chief content officers.” Bezos was a different breed.
He seemed to value and enjoy encounters with the news staff in small groups, even if they were infrequent. Once, at a dinner with some of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winners, Bezos asked Carol Leonnig, who had won for exposing security lapses by the Secret Service, how she was able to get people to talk to her when the risks for them were so high. It had to be a subject of understandable curiosity for the head of Amazon, a company that routinely rebuffed reporters’ inquiries with “No comment.” Carol told him she was straightforward about what she sought and directly addressed individuals’ fears and motivations. The Post’s reputation for serious, careful investigative reporting, she told Bezos, carried a lot of weight with potential sources. They wanted injustice or malfeasance revealed, and we needed their help. The Post would protect their identity.
Anonymous leaking out of the government didn’t begin with the Trump administration. It has a long tradition in Washington. Leaks are often the only way for journalists to learn and report what is happening behind the scenes. If sources come forward publicly, they risk being fired, demoted, sidelined, or even prosecuted. The risks were heightened with a vengeful Trump targeting the so-called deep state, what he imagined to be influential government officials conspiring against him. The Department of Justice had announced early in his term that it would become even more aggressive in its search for leakers of classified national-security information. And Trump’s allies and supporters could be counted on to make life a nightmare for anyone who crossed him.
Journalists would much prefer to have government sources on the record, but anonymity has become an inextricable feature of Washington reporting. Though Trump-administration officials claimed to be unjust victims of anonymous sourcing, they were skillful practitioners and beneficiaries as well. The Trump administration was the leakiest in memory. Senior officials leaked regularly, typically as a result of internal rivalries. Trump himself leaked to get news out in a way that he viewed as helpful, just as he had done as a private citizen in New York.
Trump had assembled his government haphazardly, enlisting many individuals who had no relevant experience and no history of previously collaborating with one another—“kind of a crowd of misfit toys,” as Josh Dawsey, a White House reporter for the Post, put it to me. Some were mere opportunists. Many officials, as the Post’s Ashley Parker has observed, came to believe that working in the administration was like being a character in Game of Thrones : Better to knife others before you got knifed yourself. Odds were high that Trump would do the stabbing someday on his own. But many in government leaked out of principle. They were astonished to see the norms of governance and democracy being violated—and by the pervasive lying.
Trump’s gripes about anonymity weren’t based on the rigor of the reporting—or even, for that matter, its veracity. Leaks that reflected poorly on him were condemned as false, and the sources therefore nonexistent, even as he pressed for investigations to identify the supposedly nonexistent sources. With his followers’ distrust of the media, he had little trouble convincing them that the stories were fabrications by media out to get him—and them. Conflating his political self-interest with the public interest, he was prone to labeling the leaks as treasonous.
At the Post, the aim was to get at the facts, no matter the obstacles Trump and his allies put in our way. In January 2018, Dawsey reported that Trump, during a discussion with lawmakers about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of an immigration deal, asked: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” In March, Dawsey, Leonnig, and David Nakamura reported that Trump had defied cautions from his national security advisers not to offer well-wishes to Russian President Vladimir Putin on winning reelection to another six-year term. “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” warned briefing material that Trump may or may not have read. Such advice should have been unnecessary in the first place. After all, it had been anything but a fair election. Prominent opponents were excluded from the ballot, and much of the Russian news media are controlled by the state. “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers,” said a senior White House official who, as was common in an administration that condemned anonymous sources, insisted on anonymity.
To be sure, sources sometimes want anonymity for ignoble reasons. But providing anonymity is essential to legitimate news-gathering in the public interest. If any doubt remains as to why so many government officials require anonymity to come forward—and why responsible news outlets give them anonymity when necessary—the story of Trump’s famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offers an instructive case study.
In September 2019, congressional committees received a letter from Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. A whistleblower had filed a complaint with him, he wrote, and in Atkinson’s assessment, it qualified as credible and a matter of “urgent concern”—defined as a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of the law or Executive Order” that involves classified information but “does not include differences of opinion concerning public policy matters.”
Soon, a trio of Post national-security reporters published a story that began to flesh out the contents of the whistleblower complaint. The article, written by Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Shane Harris, cited anonymous sources in reporting that the complaint involved “President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader.” The incident was said to revolve around a phone call.
Step by careful step, news organizations excavated the basic facts: In a phone call with Zelensky, Trump had effectively agreed to provide $250 million in military aid to Ukraine—approved by Congress, but inexplicably put on hold by the administration—only if Zelensky launched an investigation into his likely Democratic foe in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and his alleged activities in Ukraine. This attempted extortion would lead directly to Trump’s impeachment, making him only the third president in American history to be formally accused by the House of Representatives of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The entire universe of Trump allies endeavored to have the whistleblower’s identity revealed—widely circulating a name—with the spiteful aim of subjecting that individual to fierce harassment and intimidation, or worse. Others who ultimately went public with their concerns, as they responded to congressional subpoenas and provided sworn testimony, became targets of relentless attacks and mockery.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council, who had listened in on the phone call as part of his job, became a central witness, implicating Trump during the impeachment hearings. He was fired after having endured condemnation from the White House and deceitful insinuations by Trump allies that he might be a double agent. Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, an NSC staffer who had raised protests internally about Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, was fired too. Gordon Sondland—the hotelier and Trump donor who was the ambassador to the European Union and an emissary of sorts to Ukraine as well—was also fired. He had admitted in congressional testimony that there had been an explicit quid pro quo conditioning a Zelensky visit to the White House on a Ukrainian investigation of Biden. The Vindmans and Sondland were all dismissed within two days of Trump’s acquittal in his first impeachment trial. Just before their ousters, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham had suggested on Fox News that “people should pay” for what Trump went through.
The acting Pentagon comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had her promotion rescinded, evidently for having merely questioned whether Ukraine aid could be legally withheld. She later resigned. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, was fired as well, leaving with a plea for whistleblowers to “use authorized channels to bravely speak up—there is no disgrace for doing so.”
“The Washington Post is constantly quoting ‘anonymous sources’ that do not exist,” Trump had tweeted in 2018 in one of his familiar lines of attack. “Rarely do they use the name of anyone because there is no one to give them the kind of negative quote that they are looking for.” The Ukraine episode made it clear that real people with incriminating information existed in substantial numbers. If they went public, they risked unemployment. If they chose anonymity, as the whistleblower did, Trump and his allies would aim to expose them and have them publicly and savagely denounced.
“We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” When I made that comment, many fellow journalists enthusiastically embraced the idea that we should not think of ourselves as warriors but instead as professionals merely doing our job to keep the public informed. Others came to view that posture as naive: When truth and democracy are under attack, the only proper response is to be more fiercely and unashamedly bellicose ourselves. One outside critic went so far as to label my statement an “atrocity” when, after my retirement, Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, had my quote mounted on the wall overlooking the paper’s national desk.
I believe that responsible journalists should be guided by fundamental principles. Among them: We must support and defend democracy. Citizens have a right to self-governance. Without democracy, there can be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy. We must work hard and honestly to discover the truth, and we should tell the public unflinchingly what we learn. We should support the right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process without impediment. We should endorse free speech and understand that vigorous debate over policy is essential to democracy. We should favor equitable treatment for everyone, under the law and out of moral obligation, and abundant opportunity for all to attain what they hope for themselves and their families. We owe special attention to the least fortunate in our society, and have a duty to give voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. We must oppose intolerance and hate, and stand against violence, repression, and abuse of power.
I also believe journalists can best honor those ideals by adhering to traditional professional principles. The press will do itself and our democracy no favors if it abandons what have long been bedrock standards. Too many norms of civic discourse have been trampled. For the press to hold power to account today, we will have to maintain standards that demonstrate that we are practicing our craft honorably, thoroughly, and fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinions. In short, we should practice objective journalism.
The idea of objective journalism has uncertain origins. But it can be traced to the early 20th century, in the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemed imperiled and propaganda had been developed into a polished instrument for manipulating public opinion and the press during warfare—and, in the United States, for deepening suspicions about marginalized people who were then widely regarded as not fully American.
Baron and his Boston Globe colleagues react to winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the paper’s coverage of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. (The Boston Globe / Getty)
The renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann helped give currency to the term when he wrote Liberty and the News, published in 1920. In that slim volume, he described a time that sounds remarkably similar to today. “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled,” he wrote. The onslaught of news was “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion.” The public suffered from “no rules of evidence.” He worried over democratic institutions being pushed off their foundations by the media environment.
Lippmann made no assumption that journalists could be freed of their own opinions. He assumed, in fact, just the opposite: They were as subject to biases as anyone else. He proposed an “objective” method for moving beyond them: Journalists should pursue “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” That idea of objectivity doesn’t preclude the lie-detector role for the press; it argues for it. It is not an idea that fosters prejudice; it labors against it. “I am convinced,” he wrote, in a line that mirrors my own thinking, “that we shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our theories.”
In championing “objectivity” in our work, I am swimming against what has become, lamentably, a mighty tide in my profession of nearly half a century. No word seems more unpopular today among many mainstream journalists. A report in January 2023 by a previous executive editor at The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., and a former CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, argued that objectivity in journalism is outmoded. They quoted a former close colleague of mine: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Objectivity, in my view, has got to stay. Maintaining that standard does not guarantee the public’s confidence. But it increases the odds that journalists will earn it. The principle of objectivity has been under siege for years, but perhaps never more ferociously than during Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. Several arguments are leveled against it by my fellow journalists: None of us can honestly claim to be objective, and we shouldn’t profess to be. We all have our opinions. Objectivity also is seen as just another word for neutrality, balance, and so-called both-sidesism. It pretends, according to this view, that all assertions deserve equal weight, even when the evidence shows they don’t, and so it fails to deliver the plain truth to the public. Finally, critics argue that objectivity historically excluded the perspectives of those who have long been among the most marginalized in society (and media): women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, the LGBTQ community, and others.
Genuine objectivity, however, does not mean any of that. This is what it really means: As journalists, we can never stop obsessing over how to get at the truth—or, to use a less lofty term, “objective reality.” Doing that requires an open mind and a rigorous method. We must be more impressed by what we don’t know than by what we know, or think we know.
Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in assessing evidence. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no prejudice or preexisting agendas. Without objectivity, there can be no equity in law enforcement, as abhorrent abuses have demonstrated all too often. We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. We want medical researchers and regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and can be safely consumed. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water.
Objectivity in all these fields, and others, gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, even insist on it by seeking to expose transgressions. Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well.
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.”
