Peggy Noonan

It’s a powder keg, a story unfolding with the highest possible stakes. An interesting aspect: We know more than we did last week, but I haven’t seen any minds change. People are where they started. I am also.

Now and then you just want to share your worries. Here is one of mine, one of many. A day or two after the Oct. 7 horror I wrote to friends: “What is happening now doesn’t feel like the past, when, say, a surprised and underdog Israel, a tough and scrappy nation, spiritedly repelled its invaders. Or, later, when an unstoppable and determined nation came down hard on its foes, with all the hardware those foes didn’t have. This feels—and has felt from the beginning—like a nation that is not as competent, not as certain.” It felt like an Israel that had grown less disciplined, with a government that was complacent and distracted, “an Israel more generationally removed from its founding ideas, and its founders.”

Over and over I have seen the footage of the terrified young men and women running from the rave in the moments they first understood they were under attack. The most-used clip shows a young man in his 20s in some sort of knee-length caftan or cloak, his long hair up in a pony tail. The first impression was: modern. My second thought: That’s not David Ben-Gurion. Israel is a thoroughly modern Western culture in a neighborhood that isn’t thoroughly modern and doesn’t like all Western-inflected things. It’s long seemed to me societies that grow steadily more affluent grow stronger, and then at some point weaker.

Israel is unified by what has happened, but it will have to be strong now, and very cool. I find I am reacting to everything—from the first day, with the slain and abused children, with the videotape of babies sobbing as they were grabbed and taken hostage—not as a thinker on politics, or one who has read a lot of history, or lived long in the world, but simply as a mother. All of the instincts of a parent, especially a mother, are protective: You want to keep the young from harm so everyone gets to go on and live.

And so, even as I fear it may be too late—it looks to me as if plans for a ground invasion of Gaza are in place, that decisions have already been made, possible repercussions considered and perhaps accounted for—I am where I was:

Israel was attacked on Oct. 7 because its enemies thought it was weak—divided and distracted, with unwise leadership. Its job now is to get stronger—build itself up internally and in the world. In this corner we have urged a strategy of refortification, of digging deep and making foundations more stable. Strengthen, on all borders and within. Build up. Get Hamas in a way superior to what you have attempted in the past, dust off plans never acted on, step it up, be more focused, vigorous and professional. The world will not only understand it will be impressed by Israel methodically getting its tormentors. It largely won’t understand, in part because it doesn’t want to understand, more maximalist measures.

Why should Israel focus on making itself stronger? Because it is vulnerable. It is surrounded by passionate enemies and ambivalent friends. Because in the end it will never be able to do away with everyone in Hamas, it can’t get rid of all of Hezbollah. The region will only keep making them. Some problems can’t be solved, only managed. And because, in the end, all paths leading to a greater protection, and a new flourishing, run through politics—through diplomacy and deals and agreements and treaties.

If more fronts open it will be dangerous. Israel must do everything in its power to prevent them from opening. It is hard to see how a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza would make Israel’s position stronger. It will more likely bleed the country and deplete it, even as it produces an untold number of innocent casualties and a refugee crisis. It will make Israel look bloody-minded in the eyes of the world.

And Gaza is, most likely, where most of the hostages are—203 of them, at latest count, possibly including 13 unaccounted-for Americans. They haven’t been the focus of things the past week, and they need and deserve more.

Pounding, entering and holding Gaza will likely be a long, brutalizing exercise, and innocents will suffer. In conversation one picks up an air of, “It’s a terrible idea but the only idea we’ve got.” When your only idea is a bad one, that’s a sign to wait and think harder.

When the hospital grounds were bombed in Gaza this week, it was a revealing drama. Many thought Israel was responsible for a simple reason: Israel had been bombing Gaza, and a hospital in Gaza was bombed. Hamas is experienced and talented in propaganda, and it immediately pumped out the word: Israel targeted and bombed the hospital. What used to be called the Arab street exploded with demonstrations. Within a day or two the preponderance of evidence and intelligence showed it wasn’t Israel but an errant terrorist rocket.

It matters who was responsible because it matters who killed innocent people. But it is in the nature of what is under way in Gaza that there will be large-casualty events down the road. People will immediately blame Israel because they wish to, and because Israel is in Gaza. The propagandists will do their instant work. Shortly after the hospital explosion Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted: “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that.” She and her friends in the Squad are quickly becoming America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader who’d grown so extreme and anti-Semitic in his rhetoric—he called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends”—that in 2020 he was thrown out of the party.

A Gaza invasion will be brutal, too, for Israeli troops. The other night in New York a great retired American general spoke of trying to hold such places—of the effect on soldiers, the psychic and emotional price, and the attrition, with time, of their capacity, as they go room to room to clear them. “How many rooms are there in Gaza?” he asked.

Finally, a Gaza invasion marks a historic gamble on the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Will people have confidence in his judgment? This week the liberal newspaper Haaretz reported the families of the Israeli hostages have organized and begun a worldwide media campaign, with pro bono legal and media advisers. Amazingly, it reported, the families have even hired their own hostage negotiators—formerly high-placed veterans of Shin Bet, the security service, and Mossad who are believed to have “deep contacts in the Arab world.” “That’s how low their confidence is in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.”

It is hard to lead a successful long war when that’s where you’re starting from.

I hope Israel digs deep, refortifies, and devotes its focus to making itself stronger than it seemed on Oct. 6.

We are again in a new place. What has happened in Israel the past week is different. I have spent much of my life as you have, hearing regular reports of fighting in the Mideast, so when news broke last Saturday of what was happening near Gaza my mind started to process it as a continuation of the past. Within hours, as the facts of the October horror began to emerge, I understood no, wait, this is a new thing. And I felt a foreboding.

We must start with what was done. Terrorists calling themselves a resistance movement passed over the border from Gaza and murdered little children; they took infants hostage as they screamed. They murdered old women, tormented and raped young women, targeted an overnight music festival and murdered the unarmed young people in cold blood or mowed them down as they ran screaming. They murdered whole families as they begged for their lives; they burned people alive; they decapitated babies.

There is no cause on earth that justifies what these murderers did. There is no historical grievance that excuses or “gives greater context” to their actions. Spare me “this is the inevitable result when a people are long abused.” No, this is what happens when savages hold the day: They imperil the very idea of civilization. They killed a grandmother and uploaded pictures of her corpse to her Facebook
page. They cut an unborn child from a mother’s body and murdered both.

This wasn’t “soldiers morally brutalized by war who, in a frenzy, butchered people.” Butchering people was the aim. It is what they set out to do. This wasn’t cruelty as an offshoot; it was cruelty as an intention.

This sadism was strategic. It’s meant to force something.

I have been troubled by, angered by, Israel for years—expanding settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s high-handedness with American political leaders, his party’s embrace of an ignorant populist nationalism. I feel no shame at this and am certain I am right. But you can’t see what we have seen this week and not feel—how to put it?—a reawakened sense of affiliation with this suffering people, a sympathy reborn; as an American Catholic I am experiencing it as a renewed sense of loyalty to kin. And if you can’t feel any of these things, or appreciate how they might be justified, and if you instead use this occasion to say Israel deserves it as the price of its sins—sorry, wrong word, they don’t even know what sin is—then you are a walking, talking moral void.

I’m not going to dwell on The Squad, or the Ivy League student groups that declared support for Hamas. Except to say, about the latter, we seem to be raising a generation whose most privileged and educated members appear to be incapable of making moral distinctions. They made me think of the Oxford Union vow, in 1933, not to fight for king and country: High-class dopes always get it wrong. In Oxford’s defense, when World War II came many of them did their part. These guys are apparently upset they might not get jobs on Wall Street. What cold little clowns.

I will only quickly say of Mr. Netanyahu that I think of him as I thought of Boris Johnson, a bad man who is bad because he thinks politics now is beyond bad and good; you don’t even have to make a choice, there’s nothing in being “good”; it’s all about you and your quest for power and greatness. It never occurs to them not to be selfish because the self is all. This is how he divided his country over domestic questions, alienated his armed forces, stigmatized functioning establishments, and left his country vulnerable to the epic intelligence and security failure that is now his legacy.

“Nothing is the same in Israel as it was two days ago,” read a Monday Haaretz headline on a column by Linda Dyan. “Everyone trusted that the state would protect us,” she wrote. Everyone thought Israel was as strong as in the past. But its enemies saw it wasn’t.

I am worried for Israel. Here I speak of my fears.

It is impossible to me the savagery was not the strategy. The sadism the terrorists delivered was intended to do something, elicit a particular response.

What? We can’t be sure, but there are many possibilities. Maybe the terrorists and Iran, their masters, want to leave Israel with no choice but to go at Hamas by pummeling, then taking and occupying Gaza. That will be a terrible battle—a wracking and, in the end, a hand-to-hand, door-to-door fight. Maybe the point is to bleed Israel there, focus it there, and allow the world in coming weeks and months to absorb the gruesome pictures that will surely follow, as innocent people, including children, are among the collateral casualties. Almost half the population of Gaza is under 18.

Maybe they hope to see Israel preoccupied in Gaza while they open second and third fronts, with Hezbollah moving in from Lebanon, or the West Bank suddenly engaged.

Here is what I hope: that Israel be deliberative, farsighted, cautious. If that means slow, then slow.

Caution isn’t rousing or bold, and it certainly isn’t satisfying. It doesn’t bestow on the grieving any sense of justice. But the famously dangerous neighborhood has never been more so, and one senses Israel’s enemies think this is their moment. Israel must make itself safer and move against Hamas without starting World War III.

The Israelis should reach out in every way, including diplomatically, in their grief. Is the peace deal with Saudi Arabia still gettable? Do everything to get it. Might Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman enjoy saving them? Let him.

They must look to internal stability and security—fortify, build up defense positions, firm up security and intelligence on the borders and internally. Replenish arms and ammunition, continue making arms available to the people. Israelis have to begin feeling secure in their homes again. Do everything possible to proceed in attempting a return of the hostages. Be frank about this.

Continue to unmuddy the moral waters. What Hamas did was stone evil. Tell the world and show the world, over and over.

For now they must bury the dead and mourn. But something else. There is something Israel has shown to a heroic degree each day since that terrible Saturday morning.

It has led with its heart.

On a Zoom call this week a man living with his family in Israel told Americans a story. One of the young women killed at the rave was from Brazil. Her mother and sister flew in for the funeral. But someone on WhatsApp sent out word, a fear that no one else would be there to mourn. So the man’s teenage son jumped in his car and drove, and he had to stop 25 minutes from the site, traffic at a standstill, because . . . 7,000 or 8,000 people showed up, having heard that the family might be alone. My eyes filled as I heard it, and fill again as I write.

What a people. Hearts like that can awe and move the minds of the world.

I want to respond to the toppling of Speaker Kevin McCarthy with the gravity appropriate to a signal event that carries such immense implications (America’s reputation for stability once again weakened, a government shutdown looming, no replacement in sight).

Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.

The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh.

Mr. Gaetz is so small, he makes decadence look banal. Almost everyone believes he was driven by personal motives: An ethics investigation, launched in 2021, went forward in the House, and Mr. McCarthy didn’t stop it. (An earlier Justice Department probe was dropped without charges.) It involves allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, misuse of campaign funds and sharing inappropriate images on the House floor. (Mr. Gaetz has denied the allegations.) The day of Mr. McCarthy’s fall, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who served in the House with Mr. Gaetz, told CNN that when accusations surfaced in the now-concluded Justice Department probe involving Mr. Gaetz and a 17-year-old girl, “there’s a reason why no one in the Congress came and defended him.” The reason? “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor,” of women with whom he claimed to have had intimate relations. Mr. Mullin said Mr. Gaetz found fame nine months ago when he opposed Mr. McCarthy’s bid for the speakership. Now “he got this last moment of fame.”

I hope it is his last moment of fame. I doubt it.

As for Mr. McCarthy, part of what led to his fall was that some of his biggest supporters were ambivalent about his leadership. He wasn’t the most thoughtful or substantive member of the conference; he valued his job and the institution; he was certainly better than his enemies—but on Jan. 6-7, 2021, he voted to sustain objections to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. In the weeks that followed, he personally went down to Mar-a-Lago to resuscitate Donald Trump who was drowning in the polls. And when he ran for speaker, he desperately, suicidally agreed to lower to one vote the threshold needed to trigger a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. He wanted the job too much. This column said at the time that when you want it bad you get it bad, and he did.

What happened in the House this week was irresponsible and destructive, a classless move by classless people for low and shallow reasons. Finding a new speaker won’t be quick; it will be a painful, destructive winnowing that will make America look worse.

What GOP members need is what they don’t have. They need a leader who, through the force of his presence and with an awesome competence, can listen to everyone, reach out, heal—and instill sharp stabs of terror in the hearts of his lean and hungry legislators. He needs to be feared. They need a ruthless Mama Cat who can pick the kittens up by the scruff of the neck and throw them in the box. They need Nancy Pelosi. Who, somebody once said, has a Glock in that Chanel bag.

On Wednesday, feeling bleak, I reckoned that demoralized Republicans had two options. First, they could pick as speaker a nut from the nut caucus that did Mr. McCarthy in, and then wait for it to all blow up. It would within months, because they can’t govern. They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist. But picking one of them and watching him flail might break some of the fever.

Or the conference could pick someone normal, someone who connects with moderate Republicans and the nuttier quadrants. The nuts themselves might support someone like that now. They’d think it would show they were always sincere and it was never personal. They’d follow that vote with a party at which they talk about how the new speaker has better personal relationships than Kevin, and his word is more reliable. Then, after a few months or a year, they’d try to kill him.

But a few days later I thought there’s hope in this: There are 221 Republicans in the House, and only eight of them voted, with all the Democrats, to remove the speaker. That number was decisive, it carried the day, but it was small.

The normal Republicans and conservatives who numerically dominate the GOP conference have to assert themselves in a new way. The Gaetz Eight should be shunned and Mr. Gaetz expelled from the conference. He thinks he’s such a big freelance power, let him be freelance.

Members who took a constructive part should stand together. They have to stop seeing themselves as victims of those who make chaos. They should spy an opening where it exists. What’s happening in the GOP isn’t a civil war but a split on the Trumpian right. Mr. Gaetz sent out a fundraising email this week saying Mr. McCarthy was “Democrat-owned,” lies to conservatives and cut deals with Democrats. Right-wing radio star Mark Levin immediately shot him down on Twitter: “But Marxist Democrats unanimously backed you, moron.” He suggested Mr. Gaetz should vacate his own seat after his “shameless serial lies to conservatives.”

That split is an opening, exploit it. And don’t allow the next speaker to agree that in the future it will only take one vote to vacate the office.

There are tens of millions of normal Republicans and conservatives all over this country, and they too should be pushing back against the chaos.

The Democrats have nothing to be proud of. Every member of their caucus voted to do Mr. McCarthy in, even though his deal with them to avert a government shutdown triggered his ouster. People trying to protect America would have taken a longer view and not let the House dissolve into public chaos. They could have saved the day against their own immediate interests. It would have been moving if they had. But they’re rough and tough. And small, puny, and thinking no more of the big picture than Matt Gaetz does.

I don’t know. The central fact of the two parties now is that one is dominated by a policy cult (extreme stands on crime and illegal immigration) and the other by a personality cult (Donald Trump). People in cults don’t think, they only defend against whatever seems a threat or exploit what they think a gain. Something has to come along and break through this stasis. Something will, but I don’t know what.

I meant to write on the debate this week but found the event unsatisfying in a way I couldn’t characterize. Twenty minutes in I wrote my first note: “Is there such a thing as boring bedlam?” All the candidates seemed to be doing their best in predictable ways, but nothing came together. I thought Nikki Haley strong, as usual now, and Ron DeSantis impressively and almost poignantly dogged. Mike Pence has a sad, kind face, and there’s something reassuring and poignant about him, too. Vivek Ramaswamy’s self-confidence is grating. He rudely interrupts. He’s grown his hair so high that at one point I half-glanced his way and thought it was Lincoln in his stovepipe hat. Is that a branding experiment?

On the president’s polling problems, in which major national polls found that he was running even with or losing in a landslide to Donald Trump and that everyone is concerned about his cognitive decline, I think we have the emphasis wrong as we consider the reasons.

Joe Biden is old, but policy is his problem. I believe the majority of Americans don’t like current Democratic policies on major issues. They don’t like the party’s position on crime, which comes down to the idea that crime is bad but we can’t just arrest people and throw them in prison if they’re convicted, it’s more societally nuanced than that. Or its position on illegal immigration, which is that the number and boldness of the past few years’ surge is unfortunate, but we’re not sure it’s happening at really high levels, or why, and the latter question demands more study.

They don’t like Democratic stands on gender issues—boys on the girls’ team, men in the women’s locker room, and all of this enforced in the schools by some Right Think Mechanism whose source can never be traced back. They don’t like the party’s preoccupation with climate concerns to the point that all economic decisions must revolve solely around that issue.

The polls are bearing this out. This week’s Morning Consult poll found that by a 9-point margin voters see the Democratic Party as more “ideologically extreme” than the GOP.

The opposing argument: Heck no, the voters elected a Democrat as president only three years ago, with a popular margin of seven million. So they must kind of like Democratic policies! And they elected Barack Obama twice!

They do like some Democratic policies. But Mr. Biden’s election was about one big thing, the urgency of ridding America of Donald Trump. Voters largely understood Mr. Biden, with his long history, to be a man of the moderate left. As for Mr. Obama, yes, but his party has gone further left since he departed the White House, and it’s a particular kind of leftism, the abstract and academic kind. It’s theory-laden, detached from life; it is the left of the innermost sanctums of the faculty lounge and “The Groups,” interest groups that are big, well-funded and dug in at major Democratic power centers, and which focus on identity politics of all kinds, and climate change.

The president is getting no credit as a high-spending lunch-pail populist, but is seen as a high spender who services The Groups. That’s why he went to the picket line in Detroit, to get some lunch-pail cred.

His policy problem feeds his persona problem. When you don’t like policies, you take a tougher look at the man who carries them forward. You’re quicker to name his flaws. You don’t feel affectionate and forgiving—“My uncle Mike was slowing down, getting spacey, but he had a decency that time couldn’t change. The night of the fire, he’s the one who saved everything.” Instead people say of Joe Biden: He’s gaga, he’s senile, and the son—jeez, ya think the father was in on it? They’re less forgiving than they were two years ago, when he was also in decline and the laptop was already famous.

Some other points on the polls. There is no way half the country misses Donald Trump, but far more than half the country misses 2019.

Twenty twenty changed our country. Pandemic, George Floyd, riots. That last, not the demonstrations and marches but the riots, which weren’t reported or officially labeled as what they were, hardened things in America. If it’s true that racial minorities are detaching from the Democratic Party, the reason can be traced back to then, when the party and big media refused to see the shopkeeper’s agony.

Donald Trump finally left the presidency in January 2021, humiliatingly thrown from office. But the repercussions of 2020 continued to develop, or burrowed in, after he departed. Crime is so bad that big chain stores are leaving cities and neighborhoods, everything in the drugstore is locked behind plexiglass. No one stops the criminals. No one wants to be a cop anymore; as a profession it’s been demonized. If a bad guy is, against the odds, arrested, he’s out the next day. Inflation came; illegal immigration started surging. Among Mr. Biden’s first acts on his first day as president was to sign an executive order making it easier for them to come.

Political professionals, being highly sophisticated and having come to regard themselves that way, forget or don’t notice that regular people are pretty sophisticated too. They see trend lines. They smoke them out quickly and make connections. They look at crime and see that even if the government changed its ways and started arresting, holding and trying street criminals, it would take years for that to show any real impact on the streets. They know that it will be years before America can get control of its southern border and convince would-be lawbreakers not to come, and show the drug cartels they no longer have the upper hand.

Both are long-term problems that weren’t problems in 2019. Now they’re crises.

As to inflation, former Rep. Vin Weber said something arresting the other night on one of Mark Halperin’s online Wide World of News conversations. It was off the record but Mr. Weber later gave permission to use it. His thought was that the inflation we’re now experiencing came suddenly. In past inflationary times it was gradual—think Gerald Ford and Whip Inflation Now, followed by Jimmy Carter’s inflation worries. But this time people have clear and recent recollections of lower, stable prices. Thus they don’t take comfort that inflation is “easing.” They want prices to go back down.

Someone else, it’s unclear who, followed up: It takes time for inflation to build and come out of a system. Once you let the genie out it takes time to get it back in.

People will think: To the extent inflation is caused by high government spending, well, that isn’t going to end tomorrow. To the extent it’s the supply chain, any number of shocks could knock it further off track. To the extent it’s human greed, good luck overcoming that.

So crime, illegal immigration, inflation—it’s not only that they’re here, it’s that no one expects them to go away soon.

That’s the president’s enduring problem: People see trend lines.

For years I’ve had a thought whose expression I could never get right, but it applies to our subject this week, so here goes:

Since the triumphant end of World War II, America has come to enjoy greatly the idea of its pre-eminence. We’re “the leader of the free world,” we dominate science, medicine, philanthropy. We teach emerging nations the ways of democratic governance; we have the biggest economy and arsenal; we win all the medals, from the Nobel Prizes to the Olympics. This has been the way of things for nearly 80 years, and for much of that time we brought to the task of greatness a certain earnestness of style. We had a lot of brio and loved our wins, but we politely applauded for the other teams from the Olympic stands, and our diplomats and political figures—JFK, Reagan—walked through the world with a natural but also careful dignity.

Which was good, because pre-eminence always entails obligations. You have to act the part. You have to present yourself with dignity. You have to comport yourself with class.

For some time—let’s say since the turn of this century—we’ve been at a point in our power where we still love to insist on the pre-eminence—USA! USA!—while increasingly ignoring the responsibilities.

That is the thought I want to express: We want to be respected but no longer think we need to be respectable.

We are in a crisis of political comportment. We are witnessing the rise of the classless. Our politicians are becoming degenerate. This has been happening for a while but gets worse as the country coarsens. We are defining deviancy ever downward.

Two examples from the past two weeks. One is the congresswoman who was witnessed sexually groping and being groped by a friend in a theater, seated among what looked like 1,000 people of all ages. The other is the candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates who performed a series of live sex acts with her husband on a pornographic website, and the videos were then archived on another site that wasn’t password-protected. She requested money for each sexual act, saying she was “raising money for a good cause.” Someone called it a breakthrough in small-donor outreach.

It was within this recent context that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did something that isn’t in the same league in terms of shock but nonetheless has a deep institutional resonance. He quietly swept away a centuries-old tradition that senators dress as adults on the floor of the Senate. Business attire is no longer formally required. Mr. Schumer apparently doesn’t know—lucky him, life apparently hasn’t taught him—that when you ask less of people they don’t give you less; they give you much, much less. So we must brace ourselves.

His decision is apparently connected to the desires of Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who enjoys parading around in gym shorts and a hoodie. Why would his desires receive such precedence?

Because he has political needs. He must double down on his brand. He imagines that dressing like a slob deepens his perceived identification with the working class. But this kind of thing doesn’t make you “authentic”; it just makes you a different kind of phony. Mr. Fetterman, born into affluence and privilege, reacted to criticism of Mr. Schumer’s decision with an air of snotty entitlement. He mocked critics, making woo-woo monster sounds to reporters and telling a House critic to “get your s— together.” He said Republicans were “losing their minds” and ought to have better things to do.

Here are reasons John Fetterman, and all senators, should dress like an adult.

It shows respect for colleagues. It implies you see them as embarked on the serious business of the nation, in which you wish to join them.

It shows respect for the institution. “Daniel Webster walked there.” And Henry Clay, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. The U.S. Senate is the self-declared world’s greatest deliberative body.

It shows a mature acceptance of your role, suggesting you’ve internalized the idea of service. You are a public servant; servants by definition make sacrifices.

It reflects an inner discipline. It’s not always easy or convenient to dress like a grown-up. You’ve got to get the suit from the cleaners, the shoes from the cobbler. The effort means you bothered, took the time, went to the trouble.

It reflects an inner modesty. You’d like to be in sneaks and shorts but you admit that what you’d like isn’t the most important thing. It shows that thoughts of your own comfort aren’t No. 1 in your hierarchy of concerns. Also, you know you’re only one of 100, and as 1% of the whole you wouldn’t insist on officially lowering standards for the other 99.

It bows to the idea of “standards” itself, which implies you bow to other standards too, such as how you speak and what you say.

It shows you understand that America now has a problem with showing respect. We can’t take a seat on a plane without causing an incident, can’t be in a stadium without a fight. You would never, given that context, move for standards to become more lax.

It shows you admit to yourself that you’re at an age and stage when part of your job is to model for the young how to behave, how to be. It shows you’re not a selfish slob who doesn’t know what time it is.

It shows you don’t think you’re better than others or deserving of greater rights. News reporters outside the hearing room operate under a general dress code; citizens who testify before Congress do so in business dress. The old dress code still applies to Senate staffers. They don’t show up in torn undershirts and sandals. Why are you better than they are? Conversely, why would their dressing like you make anything in America better?

It shows, finally, that you understand that as a high elected official of the United States you owe the country, and the world, the outward signs of maturity, judgment and earnestness. That isn’t asking too much. It is a baseline minimum.

Also, the least people could do in public life now is make everything look a little better, not a little worse.

I hope Mr. Fetterman’s colleagues don’t join him in taking another brick out of the Capitol facade but quietly rebuke him, and Mr. Schumer, by very clearly not joining in, by showing up for work in your sober, serious best.

I leave you with a picture of some dark day in the future. China moves on Taiwan, and perhaps the White House, whoever’s in it, bobbles, or is unsure, or makes immediate mistakes. Everything is uncertain, anxiety high. All of us, and much of the world, will look for voices in Congress who can steady things—voices of deliberation and calm. And we’ll turn our lonely eyes and see . . . the congresswoman from the theater, the senator in his play clothes.

That will be a bad moment.

How people bear themselves has implications greater than we know. It’s not about “sartorial choice.” It’s about who we need you to be—and who you asked to be when you first ran.

It’s been a week of “step away” stories for President Biden, the most significant of which came from the normally sympathetic David Ignatius of the Washington Post. His argument was clear and gently put: Mr. Biden is an admirable figure who’s won great victories, but age has taken too much from him. His supporters can see this, most privately admit it, and he should refrain from putting himself forward as his party’s nominee.

The tempo of such advice is increasing because time is running out for other candidates to gain purchase, raise money and organize campaigns. Some urgency comes because even though he’s under increased scrutiny as a teller of untruths, Mr. Biden unleashed a whopper this week, on 9/11, after the morning’s commemorations, when he claimed in a speech that he’d rushed to Ground Zero the day after the attack. He hadn’t, and the White House quietly admitted as much; he visited the site with a congressional delegation on Sept. 20, 2001.

Stories like this are so instantly checkable you wonder, again, why Mr. Biden would court embarrassment. After 22 years memory might scramble things, but CNN followed up with a report on other recent false claims, citing three in a single speech last month, one of them “long debunked.” It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.

Last December I hoped the president’s advisers would take him aside and use some friendly persuasion. The age problem will only get worse, but it also offers a chance to cement his legacy. They could tell him, “You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.” He could go out an inspiration, announcing he wouldn’t throw his support behind any one candidate but would trust the party to decide.

I still think that’s the way to go. But only Joe Biden can remove Joe Biden. And there’s every sign he means to hang on—even past 82, and after more than 50 years operating at the highest levels of public life, and having achieved all the glittering prizes.

In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. Second terms are disaster sites, always now. He isn’t up to it; it will cloud what his supporters believe is a fine legacy and allow the Kamala Harris problem to fester and grow. She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.

Obviously if the president took himself out of the 2024 race, chaos would follow. Democrats would immediately commence a hellacious fight, sudden and jagged. A dozen governors, senators and congressmen would enter the race. There would be no guarantee it wouldn’t produce a repeat of the 2020 Democratic primaries, when the party flag was planted so far to the left on such issues as illegal immigration that it thoroughly tripped up the eventual victor’s first term, and may account for his eventual loss.

There is no guarantee a man or woman thought to be essentially moderate, who would therefore be attractive to independents and centrists in the general election, would emerge, as Mr. Biden did in 2020. There is no guarantee the eventual nominee would be able to beat Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polls suggest it’s no longer assumed Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump.

But it would be a fight fought by a party newly alive, hungry and loaded for bear. It would be turning a page from the endless repetition we’re caught in. It would introduce an unknown factor for Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee. And presumably it would unveil a candidate who could wage a vigorous and physical campaign. The closer the election gets, the less you can imagine Mr. Biden commanding a real re-election drive, one with enough energy and focus, while Mr. Trump, who looks physically worse than Mr. Biden, seems in his brain to be exactly what he was in 2016 and will continue with his mad vigor.

I close with the fact that whenever I think of Mr. Biden’s essential nature and character I think of “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s great history of the 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s first. This, as I have written, annoys me because I found Cramer a rather tricky and light-fingered fellow. He was also an indefatigable reporter with a gift of gab and a real voice who produced a classic of modern politics. Thirty years after publication, it presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.

For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie. . . . And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.

He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a back yard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?”

His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important.

“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”

A lot of hungers, resentments and future actions were embedded in that speech by Joe Biden, Syracuse Law, class of ’68. They aren’t the words of an unsophisticated man but of a man who wanted things—houses, power, the glittering prizes—and who can’t always be talked out of them.

Joe Biden is in one of those seasons in which people are noting, again, that he often tells stories about his life that aren’t true. This is bubbling around largely because the week’s polls indicate his own party’s voters think he is too old to be president, and its donors and officials are frustrated he shows no sign of stepping aside to allow some fresh, brisk candidate to take his place.

He has often claimed or suggested that his son Beau, who died of brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 2015, died in Iraq, where he had served six years before. The president has claimed he graduated in the top half of his law school class when he didn’t, and has over the years made unsubstantiated claims as to his extremely high measurable intelligence. He’s said that as vice president he awarded his uncle a purple heart, and that he was arrested in a civil-rights protest. There are many such stories, including the enduring one of Corn Pop, the bad dude from a bad gang who threatened a young Mr. Biden with a switch blade until Mr. Biden, bearing metal chains, forced him to back down.

What these stories have in common is that they are cinematic. They’re pictures—the glistening scholar, the rumble. This is in line with the fact that Biden, born in 1942, lived his early life during the rise of movies as an art form and as the primary way America explained itself to itself. I understand and am of this cohort and have a kind of felt memory of the old American West from spending a Long Island childhood watching John Ford movies on channel 9. On the other hand, I don’t think I am Liberty Valance.

Mr. Biden has always taken it too far, and here is a small theory on why he tells lies. It is not only that, in terms of his nature and personality, he likes to make up stories and to be at the center of them. It is that he entered national politics in 1972, before the age of mass-media saturation. That’s when he ran for U.S. Senate. In those days, trying to build his brand—it was then called the image—he’d go to the local Kiwanis Club in Wilmington, Del., and speak to the guys at lunch, and he could tell them anything to make himself memorable and keep things lively. We know from all the reporting and biographies over the years that he’d talk about what a sports star he was and how he got triple honors at school.

Audiences would enjoy it. Stories of other people’s lives are interesting. And even though he was bragging, occasionally perhaps subtly, I’m sure he wove in some modest jokes at his own expense, at which the audience would have chuckled even while thinking: Son, you’re not big enough to be self-deprecating.

Mr. Biden became a pol before everything was on tape, so you could make up pretty much anything and not get caught. This was true of others in his political generation. Hillary Clinton got in trouble in 2008 for claiming she’d come under fire in a diplomatic visit to Bosnia. She didn’t; there was videotape. But she started out before videotape was accessible and ubiquitous.

What is peculiar is that they don’t change when times change, and they get caught. This is testimony to the power of habit, but also connects to the old world of politics as a school of entertainment. Fifty and 100 years ago politicians were supposed to entertain you. One way to do it was through rousing and sentimental stories.

Here we mention Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” a history of the first two years of the Biden administration, published this week. Mr. Foer touches on the tall tales: “A good Biden story often gets better with time.” The president has a “heroic self-conception.”

“Grieving was his expertise. If there was one thing that everyone agreed Biden did more adroitly than any other public official, it was comforting survivors.” I disagree. From what I’ve observed Mr. Biden has a disconcerting habit of turning all conversation to his grief, not yours, and this is not quite empathy but the work of a needy and glommy ego.

“The Last Politician” isn’t a fully satisfying work. Its virtue is that it gives readers some sense of the inside of the Biden White House in its first two years, and of those who peopled it, which is an underreported story and seems here reported responsibly. Sometimes it’s fun, if confusing. The newly inaugurated Vice President Kamala Harris tells the White House she doesn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race, but she needs her office to be majority-female and to have a black woman as her chief of staff. Mr. Foer presents the following as if one might understand it: “She asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia.” She sounds like Connor Roy from “Succession.”

The section on Afghanistan is valuable as a tick-tock but provides no deep access to the thoughts of the many players in that crisis. And the book can be frustratingly double-minded on the meaning of things. Mr. Foer asserts as a reporter that there were reasons to believe schoolchildren were damaged educationally and emotionally by pandemic school closings. He reveals what was happening in the White House as that issue came to a boil: First Lady Jill Biden’s primary interest was to make sure the new education secretary wasn’t a school-choice supporter. While mayors are trying to get the unions to return to school, she celebrates the heads of the two leading teachers unions. “As she sat with the heads of the union, Jill Biden didn’t even nod in the direction of the tensions. Instead of pressing the union chiefs, she paid tribute to them, reserving her highest praise for [Randi] Weingarten.” Later the president calls Ms. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at her New York home to buck her up when she came under fire over shut schools: “I am not abandoning you on schools. I want you to know that.’”

Mr. Foer: “For the sake of avoiding conflict . . . the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail.” That “was the price of peace.” This seems well-reported and yet weirdly without judgment. This is what you do to keep a major constituent and donor group in your tent? You sacrifice a generation of kids?

I don’t see what will change Mr. Biden’s mind about running. You get the strong impression, in the book and outside it, that he likes the job and sees himself as a great man, indispensable, or at least the right man for the moment.

Many in his party wish he would move on. They can’t make him, don’t have the power; it’s a fractured party broken in pieces, just like the Republicans. The old bosses—Tom Pendergast, Richard J. Daley—are long gone, with their smoke-filled rooms. There are seasons when I miss them. This is one of them.

My great memory of this summer is reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” In all these years I never had. In college I majored in British and American literature, so didn’t have to. I expected I’d catch up with it along the way, but I didn’t. For one thing it was huge, more than 1,000 pages, a real commitment, and one that involved patronyms, lineages and Russian existential gloom. Also, at some point in my 40s I pretty much stopped reading fiction and was drawn almost exclusively to nonfiction—histories and biographies. From youth I had read novels hoping to find out what life is, what grown-ups do, how others experience life. Now I wanted only what happened, what did we learn, how did it all turn out.

But something got in my brain the past few months, that there were great books I hadn’t read and ought to. My mind went back to something George Will wrote about William F. Buckley, that later in life he’d finally read “Moby-Dick” and told friends: To think I might have died without having read it.

And so in late July I picked up the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I gathered isn’t considered the greatest but was approved by Tolstoy himself, and finished it this week. And, well, to think I might have died without having read it.

It was stupendous. At some point I understood I hadn’t made a commitment of time but entered a world. It is about life—parties and gossip and thwarted elopements in the night, religious faith and class differences and society, men and women and personal dreams and private shames. It is about military strategy, politics and the nature of court life, a world that exists whether the court is that of Czar Alexander in 1812, or the White House or a governor’s office today. And of course it is about the Napoleonic wars, and Russia’s triumph after Napoleon’s invasion.

It begins with a whoosh: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.” This is Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the Perle Mesta of St. Petersburg and a favorite of the empress, at one of her grand receptions. It will be seven years before Napoleon invades her country but she had her eye on him and clocked him early: “I really believe he is Antichrist.” The prince to whom she’s speaking shrinks back, suggests she’s excitable. “Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” she asks. “You are staying the whole evening I hope!” In the end, what she cares about is the party. So does most everyone else.

I didn’t understand what good company Tolstoy is. The Russian general Pfuel, an ethnic German, is “self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.” A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally as irresistibly attractive. “An Englishman is self-assured, as being of the best organized state of the world.” “A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”

One of Napoleon’s commanders rejects better quarters and sets himself up in a peasant’s hut on the field. “Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.”

“Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument.”

Tolstoy’s Napoleon is a puffed up poseur, not so much confident and bold as “intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so successfully.” “His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick shoulders, and chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that imposing and stately appearance one sees in men of forty who live in comfort.” “Only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.”

A small tragedy of humanity is that “man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.” And so man, in the form of historians, makes up stories. Napoleon, at the battle of Borodino, did all he’d done in previous battles, but this time he didn’t triumph. Why? Because, researchers say, he had a cold. No, Tolstoy says, that isn’t it! Some historians say Moscow burned because Napoleon set it on fire for revenge. Others say the Russians lit the blaze rather than let him rule there. Nonsense, Tolstoy says: Moscow burned down because it was a city made of wood. The French soldiers who occupied it cooked and lit candles and fell asleep and stumbled about. Moscow’s inhabitants had fled; there was no one to watch things and no fire department.

There are beautiful set pieces. Count Pierre, sick, starving, a prisoner of Napoleon’s army, on a constant forced march without shoes, sets his entire intellect to understanding the truth of life. All he has experienced tells him “that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” An epiphany follows: “That nothing in this world is terrible.” “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. . . . To love life is to love God.”

His character is transformed. Once he waited to discover good qualities in people before caring for them. Now he loved them first, “and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.”

I read this in a hotel in Ireland after visiting the site of a 19th-century Marian apparition in the town of Knock. It was a peaceful place and felt holy. Pierre would have been comfortable there.

And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.

Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.

Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow.

Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.

When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.

Donald Trump is now criminally charged for actions taken before and after Jan. 6, 2021. He is accused of directing a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution with an intent to retain power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

However the politics of the indictment play out, it is right and proper that the case go to a courtroom and a jury in Washington, the scene of the alleged crimes. This both reasserts the primacy of the rule of law and reminds us how a constitutional republic works: Should the executive branch abuse its power, the judiciary will adjudicate.

We owe this to history. Get to the end of the story, formally and finally.

It is argued that the indictment goes, uncomfortably, at Mr. Trump’s thinking: Did he believe what he said about the stolen election, or was he lying? This speaks to intent. His defenders argue that he believed it, and that even if he didn’t, he’d still be operating under First Amendment protections. His estranged attorney general, William Barr, disagreed, telling CNN: “He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. . . . But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.”

The question of what Mr. Trump believed strikes me as beside the point. Based on long observation, he doesn’t “believe”; he’s not by nature a believer. His longtime method of operation is to deploy concepts and approaches strategically to see what works. Put another way, he makes something up, sticks with it if it flies, drops it if it doesn’t, and goes on to “believe” something else.

But to sum up, the gravity of this story means the criminal charges had to be brought, with all that will follow—the arraignment, the pretrial motions, the trial, the presentation of evidence, the summations, the verdict, the sentencing if he is convicted. Other considerations, and they are real, are secondary.

Is the indictment poorly timed? Yes, in a presidential cycle, while the Hunter Biden story reaches a new level, and after a lot of time has passed. The indictment, when it was announced, wasn’t as electrifying for normal people as the media thought it would be. It felt like something that had already happened. We have been through last year’s Jan. 6 Select Committee hearings, saw all the dramatic testimony from those around the president. We’ve read the books, seen the documentaries. Didn’t this thing already go to court?

And there will be no clarifying sense at this point of, “At least now we’ll all figure out where we stand.” We all know where we stand. To supporters of the former president it will look like political overkill from the corrupt, Democrat-owned Justice Department, which will never stop going after Mr. Trump. If he dropped dead they’d go after him for dying the wrong way.

And yet: All this may be taking place late, but it must take place.

*   *   *

I mentioned Hunter Biden, whose case, until the indictment, was to be the subject of this column. Something is happening in that story, some big shift is occurring. In the past month or so it has broken through in a new way.

The story is becoming more real, more substantial, especially I suspect to people in the middle. In the old understanding of the Hunter story, a druggy sex addict recorded his adventures on a mislaid laptop. An embarrassment, but every family has one. The emerging Hunter story is different in nature. It is: This guy was actually good at something, being a serious influence peddler and wiring things so he never got caught.

Some on the right have always thought this. I think it’s being picked up and watched now by less politically aligned and engaged people. The story has taken on a different level of sleaze. It’s starting to look not like family loyalty but enabling, and not only enabling but doing so in search of profit.

In May and late July two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, put their careers on the line in congressional testimony. It was credible; they were impressive. They said the IRS had impeded its own investigation of Hunter Biden’s income and its sources, including from overseas business dealings. Mr. Ziegler said the investigation was “limited and marginalized” by Justice Department officials. Mr. Shapley told CBS News that his efforts to follow money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy,” Hunter’s euphemisms for his father, were blocked by the Justice Department.

Also in late July, in federal court in Wilmington, Del., the plea bargain deal blew up. It dealt with tax and gun-possession charges against Hunter. Judge Maryellen Noreika told federal prosecutors and defense attorneys to go back and try again, the deal didn’t look normal and she wasn’t there to “rubber-stamp” it.

That was followed by the congressional testimony of Devon Archer, who was Hunter’s business partner and said to be his best friend. In closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Archer said that as vice president, Joe Biden took part in phone conversations with representatives of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Mr. Archer and Hunter Biden sat. Mr. Archer’s full testimony was released Thursday. He confirmed that the vice president attended a dinner with Hunter’s foreign business associates, and soon after $3.5 million was wired into one of Hunter’s business entities.

It is unseemly, to say the least.

Another thing breaking through: when speaking of Hunter Biden, people use language like “the president’s troubled son.” There’s always the sense he’s a kid, that he tragically lost his mother as a child, had a troubled adolescence as the younger, less impressive son.

Hunter Biden is 53. At that age some men are grandfathers. He was doing business with Ukrainian and Chinese companies not as a wayward 25-year-old but as a middle-aged man. An age when adults are fully responsible for their actions.

Here is the unexpected political turn in the story. The president’s calling card to middle America has always been “middle class Joe,” the family man from Scranton, a normal guy of a certain assumed dignity who lived, as he said, on his salary, and who had known personal tragedy. Fully true or not, that was his political positioning, and it served him well. But the Hunter story is threatening to shift his father’s public reputation into Clinton territory—the sense that things are sketchily self-seeking, too interested in money. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because of that aspect of her political reputation.

I suspect the Hunter question is going to linger and grow through the election. It’s a story people can understand—ne’er-do-well son scrounges for money through influence-peddling, name-peddling, access-peddling, whatever. How much money was involved? Where did it go?

This isn’t whataboutism. These are legitimate questions.

For seven years Democrats have scored Republican officeholders for not wanting to talk about Donald Trump. Why do they concede nothing about Hunter, not even admitting the perceptions are bad? Why aren’t they honestly troubled?

Mainstream media has work to do. This is a story. Let the chips fall where they may.

“Oppenheimer” is a serious movie, which comes as a relief—that such a film can still be made and become, as this one has, a blockbuster. It carries within it a compliment, that the audience is able to absorb intellectually demanding material. It assumes you know who Neils Bohr is. It contains a great on-the-edge-of-your seat sequence on the first use of the atomic bomb, in Los Alamos, N.M., in 1945. The acting is great, no one’s a dud, and the look and sound are spectacular. It is a film of huge and moving ambition.

But—you saw the but coming—it isn’t the movie my mind was hoping for. In my view, which I fully admit may be peculiar to me, it missed the essence of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s tragedy. That tragedy isn’t what is considered his persecution during the McCarthy era, after he had became famous as the father of the bomb. It was more personal. It was that Oppenheimer, a brilliant man, probably a genius, wanted to be great, and won his greatness at what he fully understood was a grave cost to the world.

He overrode his qualms and doubts to develop the most lethal weapon in human history, arguing to himself and others that only a weapon so uniquely devastating would convince Japan it had lost the war, thus forestalling an invasion that would yield, by one estimation of the time, one million casualties, of which, obviously, not all would be American. The Japanese would have fought hand-to-hand on the streets and beaches. They would only surrender if Emperor Hirohito told them to do so.

But driving Oppenheimer as I have long read him, and perhaps primarily driving him, is that he wanted to be a great man like his contemporary, the hero of science, Albert Einstein. History provided Oppenheimer with both opportunity and rationale. He would split the atom, create the bomb, bring the peace. But the bomb was—is—a moral horror. So to be great, to achieve his destiny, he had to do something terrible.

He did. That was his tragedy. And, forgive me, a lifetime wandering around quoting, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” wouldn’t assuage the resulting unease.

My deeper criticism of the film is that I expected more of Oppenheimer’s reaction to what happened after the bomb was dropped. Before Hiroshima was bombed, at 8:15 a.m. local time on Aug. 6, 1945, everything was theory—mathematical formulae, observed blast radius, calculations and estimates. Only afterward would it be known what actually happened. I expected more of Oppenheimer’s absorbing of the facts of his work, more on how his reflections turned and developed.

He would have absorbed this information indelibly through the work of John Hersey. After the bomb was dropped, magazines and newspapers were consumed with stories of what it meant for the war, what a scientific breakthrough it represented, what it portended for the future. In May 1946 Hersey, a 31-year-old journalist, already battle-scarred—he’d been commended for helping evacuate U.S. military personnel from Guadalcanal—was less drawn to the abstract than the particular, to what actually happened in Hiroshima, to its people and infrastructure, when the bomb came. He went there for the New Yorker, stayed a month, and did his own reporting, independently and with little assistance. He wove a narrative around the first-person testimony of six survivors. In August 1946, the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the magazine published Hersey’s work, breaking tradition by devoting an entire issue to it so no one would miss any part.

It was a masterpiece. It has been called the most important piece of journalism in the 20th century. For the first time people really learned what happened in Hiroshima, and it caused a sensation. You couldn’t hide from yourself, after reading that piece or later the book that came of it, the knowledge of what the A-bomb did. And knowing couldn’t help but affect your thinking.

The writing was straight, factual, matter-of-fact. His British publisher later said Hersey didn’t want to “pile on the agony.” But his plain, simple words said everything: “There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. . . . It seemed a sheet of sun.” There was no roar; “almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb.” But they heard it 20 miles away. Clouds of dust turned the morning into twilight. In gardens, pumpkins roasted on the vine. People ran to the city’s rivers. “Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat on to the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached one and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.”

People died from three causes: the huge blast, the fires that followed and something new, radiation poisoning, which no one understood. Somehow people seemed fine, then they expired.

“About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumour reached Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two.” There was no name for this weapon, but word of mouth yielded one whose root characters were translated, by Hersey, as “original child bomb.” (On my bookshelf is a book of meditations Thomas Merton later wrote using those words for his title.)

I don’t know if Robert Oppenheimer was a great man, but John Hersey was.

In the end, Hirohito, on Aug. 15, spoke on the radio to tell his nation the war was over. Many of those listening in Hiroshima, at speakers set up on what had been public squares, wept, but not because of pro-war fervor. They wept because they had never heard the emperor’s voice. Truly a new age had begun.

I thought “Oppenheimer” would be more of a warning, and I wanted it to be because I think the world needs one. In fairness, the first two hours of the film signal a kind of warning, with a building sense of dread, but it dissipates in the last hour, which gets lost in a dense subplot. I wanted the director, Christopher Nolan, to be an artist picking up unseen vibrations in the air and sensing what most needed to be said.

The world needs to be more afraid of nuclear weapons. We’re too used to safety, to everything working. It’s been almost 80 years of no nuclear use, a triumph, and we just assume it will continue. Those who were healthily apprehensive 50 and 25 years ago aren’t so scared anymore; they think someone’s in charge, it’s OK. My sense is the world has grown less rigorously professional, the military of all countries included, and the leaders of the world aren’t as careful. I guess I wanted a movie that puts anxiety in the forefront of everyone’s mind.

It isn’t entirely fair to say “he didn’t make the movie I hoped would be made,” but yes, he didn’t make the movie I hoped would be made.