https://m.youtube.com/watch?
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Stop and think about this. The mass media had an opportunity to investigate and expose one of the biggest most unique and corrupt efforts to wreck the administration of a duly elected President and, like the Democrats at The SOTU evening, what have they done? They have sat on their hands with their biased heads up their rears.
Without an honest and unbiased press willing to do their job another pillar, upon which our Republic rests, is failing. That is unhealthy.
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Is this Hillary's answer to her involvement ? "We paid good money for opposition research. That is standard in a political race. We thought it was good information. Certainly we released it to the press. We did not know it was made from whole cloth. We did not know the FBI would rely on it as fact. It was the FBI which got a warrant to tap
Trump's communications. We were used by the FBI. We join with the Republicans in demanding a Special Counsel for a new investigation limited to finding the bad apples at the FBI. "
And: Interchange. Do we have a Paul Revere FBI? (See 1 and 1a below.)
Wanting to have it both ways? The cover-up fall back position is always the same - it will impact national security etc. Is this the case again? You decide. (See 1b below.)
Finally, Peggy Noonan addresses, more eloquently, some of the issues I brought up in a recent memo regarding the fact that Trump's term as president is all about him. Consequently, unless he makes alliances and modifies some of his more egregious tactics, driven by his personality to counter punch, he could lose The House, notwithstanding the economy.
I have also written previously betting on Stock Market volatility, to win, is a dangerous game. (See 1c below.)
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I have also written that we are a very divided nation politically and this op ed puts our history in perspective.
Apparently university adherence to teaching aspects of history ebbs and flows with the times.(See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Inside the FBI Life of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as Told in Their Text Messages
Exchanges between agent and lawyer show dedication to bureau—but no hesitation to criticize colleagues and Trump
By Del Quentin Wilber
WASHINGTON—In the summer of 2016, FBI Agent Peter Strzok had just wrapped up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and was embarking on a probe into Moscow’s interference in the presidential election. As he watched the Republican National Convention and scanned intelligence reports and news stories, he made clear how he felt about his new target: “f*ck the cheating motherf*cking Russians,” he texted in late July. “Bastards. I hate them.”
“I think they’re probably the worst,” texted Mr. Strzok, who had spent years tracking Russian spies and was familiar with their tactics. “F*cking conniving cheating savages. At statecraft, athletics, you name it. I’m glad I’m on Team USA.”
The messages were sent to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, one of thousands turned over by the Justice Department to Congress on Jan. 19 as part of an internal inquiry into how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled its investigation into Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page, who were in an extramarital affair at the time, have been accused of bias against President Donald Trump after some previously released emails showed their disdain for the president.
In the new texts, provided to Congress and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the pair’s distaste for Mr. Trump re-emerges. After the 2016 election, Mr. Strzok wrote, “OMG I am so depressed.” Ms. Page replied, “I don’t know if I can eat. I am very nauseous.”
Republicans have said the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe and the Russia investigation, as well as the criticism of Mr. Trump in the couple’s exchanges, indicate bias against the president and have suggested a conspiracy to undermine him.
Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month that he interpreted Mr. Strzok’s messages to Ms. Page as “treason.” Mr. Strzok’s attorney said at the time the president’s accusation was “beyond reckless.”
Texts critical of Mr. Trump represent a fraction of the roughly 7,000 messages, which stretch across 384 pages and show no evidence of a conspiracy against Mr. Trump. Rather, a broader look shows an unvarnished and complex picture of the lives of an FBI agent and lawyer who found themselves at the center of highly charged probes.
They logged long hours and frequently worked on weekends. They seemed dedicated to their jobs but didn’t hesitate to chastise or criticize many others beyond Mr. Trump, including their colleagues and each other. In deeply personal office chatter, they come across as intense, ambitious and unsure of their standing in the bureau.
After serving as the lead agent on the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s server while she was secretary of state, Mr. Strzok was promoted to deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
A longtime spy-hunter, he was tasked with helping supervise the Russia probe. After Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel for the probe on May 17, Mr. Strzok joined his office as its top agent.
Yet, he was ambivalent about taking the job, even if Mr. Mueller’s investigation was one that was certain to end up “in the history books.”
Unsure the investigation would lead anywhere, Mr. Strzok worried that leaving the bureau might harm his chances of advancement, and was concerned he wouldn’t play a key role.
“I don’t know what I want, Lisa,” Mr. Strzok, 47 years old, wrote in a text message to Ms. Page, 38, on May 24. “I don’t want to be anything but the lead agent. And I think even that is going to be a far cry from the inner sanctum of what Bob decides.”
He served in the special counsel’s office about two months before Mr. Mueller learned in July about the disparaging texts and dismissed him. He has since been assigned to human resources at the FBI.
Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok couldn't be reached for comment.
The tranche of redacted texts—which deal with mostly work-related issues, while the set seen in December focused more heavily on politics—covers August 2015 through December 2016, then picks up again in May and June of last year. The Justice Department has blamed the gap on a technical error. The department’s inspector general said it recently recoveredthose messages and is reviewing them.
Many of the texts reflect their day-to-day workplace trials. Mr. Strzok complained about a top prosecutor, whom Ms. Page agreed was “pompous.” She described another as arrogant. Mr. Strzok said that “I hate” the Justice Department, and dealing with it was “a wild pain in the ass.”
Mr. Strzok raised questions about the initiative of some colleagues, telling Ms. Page in April 2015 that the bureau or prosecutors “will puss out. If I got a quarter of the support [redacted] blindly gives his guys, we might, but we won’t.”
He later confided he felt compelled to tell a colleague during a meeting that “I cannot overstate to you the sense of urgency about wanting to logically and effectively conclude this investigation,” an apparent reference to the Clinton probe.
Ms. Page worked in the FBI general counsel’s office and in the office of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and was detailed briefly to Mr. Mueller’s office. With her proximity to bureau leaders, she sometimes helped transmit information on behalf of Mr. Strzok to executives.
“I’ll ask you, in front of the D,” she texted one day in May 2016, referring to the FBI director. “‘Pete, I apologize for putting you on the spot, but I know you shared with andy some of the comments you’ve been hearing from folks, I think it would be valuable for the D to know them.’ ”
When Mr. Strzok was unsure where a question was coming from in the FBI’s top ranks, he asked Ms. Page for help: “Your mission, Agent Page, should you choose to accept it…”
“Obviously,” she replied, “I’ll find out what I can tomorrow…”
Though he generally comes across as confident, Mr. Strzok harbored doubts about his abilities. In late June, as the interview with Mrs. Clinton neared, he said he was “spinning in my head about the case.”
The interview needs tweaking, he wrote, and reports “need a fine edit, the summaries need to be written, I need to see what I did wrong or forgot or put off and not do that again and I need to do background for the job application, combination of I’m perfect for the job and not good enough and not going to get it and and and.”
That same month, he suggested the FBI had missed the fact that some Clinton emails were marked with a “c,” meaning they contained classified information. “DOJ was very concerned about this,” he wrote, adding that “they’re worried, holy cow, if the fbi missed this, what else was missed. Which I get, because I had the same worry.”
An hour later that same June day, Ms. Page texted with more news about the Clinton probe: “oh jesus. Have something to tell you.” The FBI interview with Mrs. Clinton, she said, would happen on July 2.
As he was gearing up for that session, Mr. Strzok was also helping edit a statement that FBI Director James Comey would deliver July 5 explaining why he was recommending against charging Mrs. Clinton.
In that statement, Mr. Comey would say Mrs. Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information; Mr. Strzok urged changing the phrase in a draft from “grossly negligent,” according to people familiar with the matter.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) in November said the editing suggests the FBI was seeking to help Mrs. Clinton avoid legal trouble, since, he added, “gross negligence” could be grounds for a criminal charge.
“I may go insane editing this,” Mr. Strzok texted on June 13, in apparent reference to the statement.
On the morning of the interview with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Page sent Mr. Strzok good wishes. He replied, “Just got Starbucks, already dealing with issues (all admin, as in, her five attorneys all wanting to drive into [FBI headquarters] separately because of fear of media.” When the interview ended, he texted, “Hey, it all went well.”
As the summer wore on, he transitioned into helping spearhead the Russia investigation. He even joked about potential code names with Ms. Page. He said he would reserve “YUUUGE” as their code for Mr. Trump if they ever opened an investigation of him.
Sometimes Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok got into arguments that became emotional, such as a dispute over an article in The Wall Street Journal disclosing that Mr. McCabe’s wife, who ran for a Virginia senate seat in 2015, had received campaign donations from the Virginia governor, a Clinton ally. Republicans said Mr. McCabe should have recused himself from the Clinton email probe.
After Ms. Page texted a link to the story, Mr. Strzok said he was angry that she asked that he not share it with his colleagues. “IT’S ON THE INTERNET!!!!” he exclaimed. She replied, “WHICH YOU ONLY KNOW ABOUT BECAUSE I TOLD YOU IT WAS THERE.”
In May 2017, after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey, citing his handling of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page wrestled with whether to join Mr. Mueller’s team. Mr. Strzok overcame his initial reluctance and struggled to convince Ms. Page to do the same.
“You haven’t asked but I think you should go,” he wrote on June 3. “It is an experience unlike any other you’re going to get. Life changing.”
Two weeks later, Ms. Page texted that she was having second thoughts despite the special counsel’s office taking steps “to have me fully integrated” into the team. By June 21, she wrote Mr. Strzok that she was “thinking I might leave” the special counsel’s office. She would soon return to her work at the bureau.
Over the next few days, their relationship appeared to deteriorate. The last text is from Ms. Page, arriving in Mr. Strzok’s inbox on a Sunday morning in late June.
“Please,” she wrote, ”don’t ever text me again.”
1a) A Reckoning for the FBI
The House memo reveals disturbing facts about the misuse of FISA.
By The Editorial Board
Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.
The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.
The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.
Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.
We don’t know the political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Steele and Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters to try to defeat Mr. Trump before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.
No matter its motives, the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.
We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.
Democrats are howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and leaves out essential details. They are producing their own summary of the evidence, and by all means let’s see that too. President Trump should declassify it promptly, along with Senator Chuck Grassley’s referral for criminal investigation of Mr. Steele. But note that Democrats aren’t challenging the core facts that the FBI used the dossier to gain a FISA order or the bureau’s lack of disclosure to the FISA judges.
The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.
Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is doing a service by forcing these facts into the public domain where the American people can examine them, hold people accountable, and then Congress can determine how to prevent them in the future. The U.S. has weathered institutional crises before—Iran-Contra, the 9/11 intelligence failure, even Senator Dianne Feinstein’s campaign against the CIA and enhanced interrogation.
The other political misdirection is that the memo is designed to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible Trump collusion with Russia. We doubt Mr. Mueller will be deterred by any of this. The question of FISA abuse is independent of Mr. Mueller’s work, and one that Congress takes up amid a larger debate about surveillance and national security. Mr. Trump would do well to knock off the tweets lambasting the Mueller probe, and let House and Senate Republicans focus public attention on these FISA abuses.
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If all of this is damaging to the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, then that damage is self-inflicted. We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused. Its apparent misuse during the presidential campaign needs to be fully investigated.
Toward that end, the public should see more of the documents that are behind the competing intelligence memos to judge who is telling the truth. Mr. Trump and the White House should consider the remedy of radical transparency.
1b)
Justice Department, FBI Officials Frustrated By Memo Release
Current and former officials say they can’t defend the FBI more openly because it would require the release of classified information
Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials expressed a mix of frustration and resignation Friday following the release of a Republican-authored memoalleging abuses in the surveillance of a onetime adviser to Donald Trump.
The Justice Department and FBI had raised objections to the memo’s release, with the bureau saying earlier this week that it had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” On Friday, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent an email to his employees to quell rumors that he might be leaving and to address any potential backlash.
“I want to make sure you know where I stand,” Mr. Wray wrote to the bureau’s 35,000 employees. “Let me be clear: I stand fully committed to our mission. I stand by our shared determination to do our work independently and by the book. And I stand with you.”
Current and former U.S. law-enforcement officials said they were frustrated they couldn’t defend the Bureau more openly against the memo’s accusations about FBI’s request from a secretive court for permission to surveil Carter Page , a former Trump campaign adviser. A full-blown defense would require the disclosure of classified information, they said.
Mr. Page left the campaign in September 2016, and surveillance began a month later, according to the Republican memo. The document says the surveillance application was based on information the FBI obtained from research compiled by Christopher Steele, an-ex British intelligence official, who was working for a firm that at that point was being paid by Democrats.
Current and former Justice Department and FBI officials said that the warrant, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was based on more than just Mr. Steele’s information, and they disputed an assertion that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the intelligence committee that the government wouldn’t have sought the warrant without Mr. Steele’s information.
Ron Hosko, a former high-ranking FBI official, said morale at the bureau “was sagging, particularly at headquarters” in reaction to a stream of political broadsides.
“There is very little they can do to respond in a responsible way,” he said. “They are not going to start ignoring the requirements for handling classified information.”
Mr. Hosko and others said the FISA warrant process is rigorous: an agent, supervisors, and the bureau’s general counsel all weigh in on the application, which can stretch to 100 pages. Then it must be reviewed and approved by Justice Department lawyers and signed by a top official.
The current and former officials said such warrants are among the most rigorously reviewed and vetted documents in the government. There is a separate file where all factual assertions in the affidavit are buttressed by documents, photographs and other materials, they said.
Frank Montoya, a former top FBI counterintelligence agent, said the memo landed “like a lead balloon. It’s nothing. They are basically trying to poke holes in an ongoing investigation. I don’t see the corruption or willful misconduct.”
Shortly after Mr. Trump criticized the agency’s leadership in an early morning tweet Friday as having “politicized the sacred investigative process,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions departed from prepared remarks in a speech to praise his second- and third-ranking officials, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.
In a brief statement after the memo’s release, Mr. Sessions said he had “great confidence in the men and women” of the Justice Department, adding that “no department is perfect.”
Despite a comment Friday by Mr. Trump declining to reaffirm confidence in Mr. Rosenstein, Justice Department officials said they didn’t believe Mr. Trump would dismiss him and weren’t preparing for that possibility.
Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. Sessions dating back to last summer, and at times publicly mused about his dismissal, they noted, but Mr. Sessions remains in his role as attorney general.
1c)The Left’s Rage and Trump’s Peril
The Democratic base is even worse-tempered than the president. But Mueller could still harpoon him.
The State of the Union speech was good—spirited, pointed, with a credible warmth for the heroes in the balcony, who were well chosen. They were beautiful human beings, and their stories were rousing—the cop and his wife who adopted the baby, the hardy North Korean defector who triumphantly waved his crutches, the mourning, dignified parents of the girls killed by MS-13. My beloved Cajun Navy.
The thing about the heroes in the balcony is it reminds you not of who the president is but of who we are. “With people like that we can’t miss.” I had that thought when Ronald Reagan gave tribute in 1985 to a young woman who as a child desperately fled Saigon as it fell. She and her family were among the boat people, spotted and saved by a U.S. ship. Reagan called her to stand, and Jean Nguyen stood—proudly, in the gleaming uniform of a West Point cadet. She would graduate within the year.
The recognition of heroes in the balcony is called a cliché. It certainly is. An inspiring and truthful one, and long may it live.
The Democrats in the chamber were slumped, glowery. They had chosen to act out unbroken disdain so as to please the rising left of their party, which was watching and would review their faces. Some of them were poorly lit and seemed not resolute but Draculaic. The women of the party mostly dressed in black, because nothing says moral seriousness like coordinating your outfits.
Here it should be said of the rising left of the Democratic Party that they are numerous, committed, and have all the energy—it’s true. But they operate at a disadvantage they cannot see, and it is that they are loveless. The social justice warriors, the advancers of identity politics and gender politics, the young who’ve just discovered socialism—they run on rage.
But rage is a poor fuel in politics. It produces a heavy, sulfurous exhaust and pollutes the air. It’s also gets few miles per gallon. It has many powers but not the power to persuade, and if anything does them in it will be that. Their temperament is no better than Mr. Trump’s . It’s worse. But yes, they are intimidating the Democratic establishment, which robs itself of its dignity trying to please them. It won’t succeed.
As for the president’s base, I am coming to a somewhat different way of thinking about it. It’s true they are a minority, true that his approval ratings are not good, are in fact historically low for a president with a good economy at the end of a first year. But Mr. Trump has just more than a solid third of the nation. They are a spirited, confident core. What other political figure in this fractured, splintered country has a reliable third of the electorate? And it’s probably somewhat more than a third, because Trump supporters know they are not and will never be respected, and just as in 2016 you have to factor in the idea of shy Trump voters.
What they are not sufficiently concerned about is that Mr. Trump has not expanded his popularity. He has kept his core but failed to reach out consistently and successfully to others. He has not created coalitions.
His position is more precarious than his people see.
He has too much relished the role of divider. When you’re running for office you are every day dividing those who support you from those who don’t, and hoping your group is bigger. But when you win you reach out to your enemies with humility, with patience—with love!—and try to drag ’em in to sup in your tent. You don’t do this because you’re a hypocrite but because you’re an adult looking to win. Or a constructive idealist. That happens sometimes.
His supporters don’t know what he doesn’t know: He must grow or die.
They are happily watching The Trump Show as he sticks it to people they hate. They don’t know Shark Week is coming.
In November he may lose the House. That’s what the generic ballot says is coming, that’s what was suggested by last year’s GOP defeats in Virginia and Alabama.
I know what Republicans are thinking. They are going to run on an economy that is expanding thanks to tax reform and deregulation. They are going to run on bigger paychecks and unexpected bonuses. They’ll run on the appointment of conservative judges to balance out Barack Obama’s liberal judges at a time when the courts have taken a more powerful role in American culture. They’ll run on We Will Stop Illegal Immigration and Give a Break to the Children of Illegal Immigrants.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are running on Trump is unpopular and so is his party, he is a fascist, and any limit on immigration is like any limit on abortion, tyrannical on its face.
Republicans are thinking nobody’s noticing but they’re in a pretty good place. I suspect they are right.
Except.
Special counsel Robert Mueller will likely, before November, report his findings to the Justice Department, and you have to assume he is going to find something because special prosecutors exist to find something. When Mr. Mueller staffed up he hired Ahabs, and Ahabs exist to get the whale. You have to assume Mr. Trump will be harpooned, and the question is whether it’s a flesh wound or goes deeper. If it goes deep the Democrats may well win the House, in which case he will be impeached.
Trump supporters don’t view this with appropriate alarm. They comfort themselves with the idea that he is playing three-dimensional chess and his opponents are too stupid to see it. That’s not true—he is more ad hoc and chaotic than they think. They should help him by trying to improve his standing, which means telling him what doesn’t work.
He thinks he rouses and amuses his supporters with feuds and wars, tweets and grievances. In reality, as Trump supporters know, it’s something they put up with. For everyone else it’s alienating, evidence of instability.
He calls out fake news and wars with the press while at the same time betraying a complete and befuddled yearning for their approval. Mr. Trump is a little like Nixon in this—embittered and vengeful at not getting the admiration of those he says he doesn’t respect.
These things don’t speak of tactical or strategic brilliance.
His supporters argue the media is against him, and this is true and should be acknowledged. But they were totally opposed to Reagan, too. They more or less admit his greatness now, or at least concede his towering adequacy, in part because Trump-shock has left them reconsidering the bogeymen of the past, in part because they like all dead Republicans.
But Reagan didn’t need the press to feel like a big man or be a success, and Mr. Trump looks unmanned to be so destabilized by their antipathy.
The president’s supporters should be frank with him about his flaws. They’re so used to defending him, they forget to help him. They should give him the compliment of candor.
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2)Polarization Is an Old American Story
Gordon Wood, the noted historian of early America, says Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans were far more divided than today’s political parties.
By Jason Willick
Mr. Wood says a student told him about the mention immediately after the film’s Cambridge, Mass., premiere. But he is fond of pointing out that he isn’t the historian Mr. Damon’s character most admires: “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘People’s History of the United States,’ ” Mr. Damon says in another scene. “That book will really knock you on your ass.”
And the truth is that today the pompous grad student would be likelier to quote Zinn’s progressive indictment of America than Mr. Wood’s work. “I’m considered on the wrong side,” Mr. Wood, energetic and alert at 84, tells me over lunch at the faculty club of Brown University, where he is a professor emeritus. “American history is now a tale of oppression and woe. And if you don’t say that . . .” he trails off.
Mr. Wood graduated from Tufts in 1955, served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan—“I was lucky, I was between two wars”—and enrolled in Harvard’s graduate history program in 1958. He had hoped to study with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , but the latter was gearing up for the Kennedy presidential campaign. Mr. Wood enrolled in a seminar with Bernard Bailyn, a just-tenured early-American historian, and never looked back.
Over six decades of work on the colonial period, the Revolution and the Founding, Mr. Wood has accumulated virtually every award available to historians—the Bancroft Prize for “The Creation of the American Republic,” a Pulitzer for “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” and the National Humanities Medal, which President Obama presented him in 2010.
But as his star rose, his field suffered an extended decline amid the late-20th-century backlash against “dead white males.” Experts on revolutionary politics retired and weren’t replaced. Social history—“bottom up” accounts of marginalized groups—gained prestige. The New York Times reported in 2016 that in the previous decade universities posted only 15 new tenure-track openings for American political historians of any kind.
“I understand what they’re doing, and it’s important,” Mr. Wood says of the social historians. “We know more about slavery than we ever did.” But he argues the academic literature has grown unbalanced, neglecting crucial questions, including about the political divisions that shaped the early republic. “It’s not that they’re wrong about the killing of the Indians and slavery, but there are other things that happened too, and it’s a question of which ones do you emphasize.”
He describes the attitude of some of these scholars: “I want to show how bad things were so people will wake up and do something about the present.” Many Americans tune out instead. Weary of “one tale of oppression after another,” they turn to popular historians, many of whom have no formal training in history.
Meanwhile, many scholars retreat further into narrow subspecialties and esoteric jargon. These days, he says, professional history is “almost like a science” in that the work is unintelligible to laymen. But whereas “physicists can show us what they’ve done” by engineering real-world applications, historians’ work must stand on its own. They have a responsibility to make it vivid and meaningful for the broader public.
What happens when they abdicate this responsibility? For one thing, a lack of historical perspective can lead to apocalyptic thinking about the present. “History is consoling in that sense,” Mr. Wood says. “It takes you off the roller-coaster of emotions that this is the best of times or the worst of times.”
His latest book, “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, ” provides an illustration. The antagonism between Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans in the 1790s was far more fundamental, and therefore more threatening, than American partisanship today: “I think we’re going to survive easily,” Mr. Wood says.
By contrast, Adams, Jefferson and their coalitions came close to killing the republic in its cradle. They disagreed on as fundamental a question as whether the new republic should be democratic. Jefferson had a romantic faith in democracy and the wisdom of ordinary people; Adams predicted that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization.”
Jefferson’s view was partly self-serving. “The leadership of the Republican Party, which is the popular party, is Southern slaveholders,” Mr. Wood says. “They don’t fear the people,” because the gentry-aristocracy effectively controlled electoral outcomes. Jefferson was akin to today’s “limousine liberal” in that he was insulated from the policies he promoted. (Eventually, his ideas would prove potent in arguing against slavery.) Meanwhile, Adams’s Federalists “are coming from New England, where you have far more egalitarian societies, far more democratic societies,” he says. “But for that very reason, the leaders are more scared of populism, of democracy.”
That may make Adams sound like a member of today’s “establishment.” Yet some of his other ideas would be more amenable to populists like Donald Trump. Adams said to Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s paraphrase: “You fear the ‘one’ of monarch, I fear the ‘few,’ meaning the aristocrats.” Adams argued that domination by oligarchs was a grave threat to liberty. “It’s his way of justifying the strong executive who will act as a check on the few,” Mr. Wood says. Adams wanted the executive to have some of the powers of the Crown.
That was anathema to Jefferson, whose life mission was “the elimination of monarchy, and all that it implies, which is hereditary rule, hierarchy and corruption.” He saw around him “a world of privilege in which ordinary people are abused. . . . From our point of view, he’s very sympathetic because he’s destroying that world,” Mr. Wood says.
The Federalists feared that Jefferson’s leveling vision would prove destructive to mediating institutions. Mr. Wood cites a recent book by political scientist Patrick Deneen, “Why Liberalism Failed,” which argues that the West’s commitment to individual autonomy—in both markets and culture—has undermined communal connections, leaving people lonely and isolated. That’s what the Federalists feared—“this awful kind of world, where the individual is alone and without any kind of connections with anyone.”
Another Jefferson-Adams disagreement that still resonates is what we now call “American exceptionalism”—the idea that “we’ve transcended the usual definition of a nation, and that we had a special responsibility in the world to promote our way of life.” Jefferson strongly believed it. He thought that “war is caused by monarchs” and “republics are naturally pacific,” so peace would follow if the American model were adopted everywhere. In that sense, he sounded very much like today’s liberal internationalists and neoconservatives. To Adams, meanwhile, America was “just as sinful, just as corrupt as other nations”—a view both Presidents Trump and Obama have sometimes echoed in different ways.
The most poignant comparison, however, is the bitterness of the divide. For much of the 1790s, neither Adams’s Federalists nor Jefferson’s Republicans “accepted the legitimacy of the other,” Mr. Wood says. “And of course, the Federalists never thought that they were a party. They were the government,” and Jefferson’s Republicans a malignant faction trying to take the government down. The Republicans, for their part, “thought that the Federalists were turning us into a monarchy and reversing the American Revolution.”
We hear plenty of similarly apocalyptic rhetoric today, but much of it is cynical and self-consciously exaggerated. What was striking about the 1790s, Mr. Wood emphasizes, is the extent to which each party sincerely believed the other posed an existential threat.
The differences came to a head as Americans split over the French Revolution, which Jefferson saw as vindicating his idea of human liberation and Adams as confirming his fears about how a society might be rent apart. The Federalists alleged Republican collusion with France—and unlike today’s skirmishes over Russian meddling, there was then an acute fear of invasion and mass defection. There was organized violence in Philadelphia, the capital, which to Federalists “seemed to be dominated by all these Frenchmen.” The terrified Federalist Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent. “We came close to a civil war in 1798,” Wood says. “It didn’t happen, and therefore historians don’t take it seriously.”
Adding to the chaos were Alexander Hamilton’s imperial designs. “Hamilton is full of visions of what he’s going to do with this army,” Mr. Wood says. He’s going to “go into Mexico maybe, and he’s going to ally with some of the leaders in South America” in a grand anti-French alliance. In a swipe at popular history, Mr. Wood says the “Hamilton” musical offers a “distorted” picture of a man who was really an antiliberal “Napoleonic figure”: “Things might have gotten to a point where Hamilton actually sends an army into Virginia,” the Republican stronghold.
In the campaign of 1800, Adams’s allies viewed Jefferson much the way opponents saw Donald Trump 216 years later—“stirring up trouble” and “destroying legitimate leaders.” Jefferson won, and Adams declined to attend his successor’s inauguration—to this day, the only such snub in history. The transfer of power was so momentous that Jefferson called it “the Revolution of 1800.” At that point, Mr. Wood observes, the Federalists “assume that he’ll fail so badly that they’ll be back into power before long.” They assumed wrong—the Federalists never won the presidency again and faded altogether by 1820.
Mr. Wood has written that most of the Founders “who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought.” Federalists rued the excesses of democracy, which undermined their aspirations for classical deliberative politics. “People began saying, look, if I don’t have people of my own kind in the government, I don’t feel confident,” Mr. Wood says. “You don’t trust people who aren’t like you, and that’s what feeds the anti-elitism,” which today takes the forms of populism and identity politics.
As for the Republicans, the federal government grew beyond anything they imagined. Today, limited government is associated with conservatism, “whereas in the late 18th century, it’s the radical position.” Jefferson believed a strong state would exacerbate unearned privilege and lead to monarchy. Yet America’s sprawling government today—the welfare state at home and military abroad—largely exists to promote Jeffersonian values of equality and American exceptionalism.
The ways in which both Adams’s and Jefferson’s visions have been frustrated illustrates one of Mr. Wood’s broad insights about the value of history. “History is a conservative discipline in that the one lesson that comes out of it is, nothing ever works out the way you think it’s going to,” he says. “That’s why Nietzsche said if you want to be a man on horseback, forget history, because it’ll stifle you—you’ll get full of doubts.”
History could teach today’s partisans on both sides that their ideas are less radical than they think, that the American republic is stronger than they fear, and that the nation’s divisions are more surmountable than they imagine. At a time when serious historians are proving less and less capable of reaching the wider public, Americans could do worse than to regurgitate lessons from Gordon Wood.
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