Some years
ago a convergence of curious circumstances led to me to write a book about some
literary classics of the Cold War. In
order to write about four books that interested me greatly, I felt obliged to
read many others that interested me less.
Among the large library I assembled was a best-seller of the year
1958—the year of my graduation from college.
Its author was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J.
Edgar Hoover, and its title was Masters
of Deceit. The masters of deceit were
the Communists, particularly American Communists—about twenty thousand of them
at the time of publication—but the real source of the contagion was
Russia. Hoover himself might be
described as a master of the oddly constructed sentence: “Engels was tall and
thin, blue-eyed, two years younger than Marx, and a lover of horses and
women.” Horses and women? Well there’s
some masterful deceit right in plain sight.
Hoover and
other prominent anti-Communists of that time saw Russian collusion
everywhere. Robert Welch, founder of the
John Birch Society, opined that Dwight Eisenhower was possibly “a conscious,
dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy”.
Even then, at the height of the Cold War, sane people judged Welch to be
a kook. And I doubt that even he could
have gotten his mind around the idea that a future American President might
fire a future FBI Director in order to cover up his collusion with Russian
politicians and espionage agents. But in
those days the peddlers of embarrassing conspiracy theories were mainly on the
right. We owe to the best minds of our
contemporary moment the development of the collusionist scenario.
What might be called the Mueller
Report report issued by Attorney General Barr excited in me two unworthy
reactions: surprise, followed closely by a kind of subliminal
disappointment. The latter reveals a
degree of political pathology that it is hard to fess up to. When a patriotic American citizen of
conservative temperament is disappointed to learn that his President is not
actually treasonous, there is something wrong—wrong with him, of course, but
also, perhaps, with something rather larger.
I blame society. Mr. Mueller and
his staff beavered away for two years while maintaining an eloquent silence that our
household exegetes at the New York Times
and National Public Radio daily transformed for me into the unmistakable
portent of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Is there a separate Pulitzer Prize
for headlines? If so, I want to nominate
the Times’s combo of “Mueller Finds
No Trump-Russia Conspiracy Says Barr” and “Barr Clears Trump of Obstruction
After Mueller Demurs”. Who is this man
Barr with his four-page masterpiece of deceit?
He’s the Attorney General, Mr. Mueller’s boss. A dull stickler for legal formalities (often
called “the rule of law” by the Times)
Mr. Mueller, as required, forwards his report to his boss. There is reason to believe that Barr had
thought a bit in advance about how he would handle Mueller’s report when
finally submitted. After all, Barr had
recently gone through public confirmation hearings composed in large measure of
stern demands from his Democratic inquisitors that, should he be confirmed, he
honor and protect the “Mueller probe”, as the press like to call it—demands to
which he solemnly submitted before a televised audience of millions. It may have been his sensitivity to the
possibility of distorting in any way Mr. Mueller’s principal finding—that he
did not discover that Trump colluded with Russians—that led the Attorney
General to cite Mueller’s own words verbatim and punctuate them with quotation
marks: “[T]he investigation
did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated
with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” To attribute this opinion to Barr may strike
one as rather curious: something like attributing Hamlet’s soliloquy to Daniel
Day-Lewis. “Day-Lewis Claims ‘To Be or
Not to Be?’ Is Question”. To be fair, by early
morning when the print copy of the Times arrived,
the absurdity had been removed. By then,
however, Progressive Twitter was in full tweet.
Note that Mueller-Barr speak only of the “Russian government”. No mention
whatsoever of possible random oligarchs, the Bolshoi Ballet or the Nizhny
Novgorod United Football Club.
The grousing of sore
losers, however, may be drowned out by the bellowing of the sore winner. President Trump says (or tweets) a lot of
unscripted things. Alas, frequently these
things are stupid, too often they are erroneous, and almost always they are
ungrammatical. He did not fail us on
this occasion. Barr had made only two
specific citations from the report, in one of which, with regard to the
possible charge of obstruction of justice, he quoted Mueller as saying “while
this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also
does not exonerate him.” So, said the
President: “a complete and total
exoneration”.
And so, I fear, it
will go on, and that is a pity. For it
is not as though the only fish our nation has to fry are red herrings. For example, our elected politicians might
address such matters as economic stability, public education, environmental
salubrity, physical infrastructure, and the reconstruction of a politics aimed
at problem-solving and pursued in civility.
Oh, and then there is foreign policy.
Russian interference did not elect Donald Trump. The desperate and probably misplaced hope of
millions of forgotten Americans did.
Still, our political and journalistic elites have managed to spend the
better part of two years in a strange obsession. So the Masters of Deceit in Moscow have good
reason to gloat. They are a bit short of
cash these days. And with enemies like
theirs, who needs expensive friends? I
wonder: does Trump love horses?
