Peggy Noonan

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.

I’m neither an entertainment reporter nor an industry veteran, but I watch the business and culture of Hollywood pretty closely, and I have a bad feeling about this strike. I hope I’m wrong, but the struggle between the writers and actors unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers looks to me as if it will go long and be epic. We may look back on it as one of the consequential labor actions of the 21st century.

The industry said in 2021 that film and television directly create 336,000 jobs and support 2.4 million. Yearly wages total an estimated $186 billion. They constitute a major American export. So the strike matters economically but also culturally. Whatever your just criticism of its products, we want this story-telling industry to continue. You want it employing people who are trying and reaching, you want its art and the arts in general to flourish, because without them we’d be less human, less whole.

Last week smart people were thinking that the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joining the Writers Guild of America on strike would add heft and force things toward resolution. I thought the opposite. SAG-Aftra’s going in raises all stakes, heightens passions and puts sharper emphasis on the existential aspects of the struggle. Barry Diller, an authentic wise man of the industry, shared his alarm last Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “Of course, who cares about Hollywood?” he said. “But these conditions will potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.” If the strike continues through the fall, people will cancel their streaming subscriptions because “there will be no programs.” No new broadcast dramas or comedies either. The longer the strike, the greater the damage to a major American industry.

My fear is that the conflict isn’t between competent owners of companies operating profitably and union members who want a larger share. It’s not Ford in 1960 vs. the guys on the assembly line or, still going back in time, prosperous newspaper owners vs. reporters. It’s not the secure vs. the hungry. It looks more like Lost People without vision vs. Aggrieved People feeling genuine grief.

The Lost People are the corporate CEOs and studio and streaming bosses who were concussed when the world shifted under everyone’s feet in 2020. The pandemic turbocharged existing trends, and they scrambled in response. Theatrical releases were impossible; streaming was everything; they followed and fell over each other mounting new services and spending billions on content, though it turns out no one so far knows how to make money reliably on streaming. (And, as Mr. Diller said in 2021, during the spending spree, “Netflix won this several years ago.”) They did high-price megamergers, leaving their companies with tens of billions in debt. Wall Street didn’t like it, and stocks wobbled.

They’re now trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Charitable gloss: They did their best as a historic plague collided with a technological revolution. Less charitable read: They made blunder after blunder and will now cut to reduce costs as uncreatively as they spent. When we think of Hollywood we can’t help think of the old pirates, the Sam Goldwyns and Jack Warners, who in their own bandit way loved movies. Their successors are more like some sort of detached abstract financialist mergerist persons who move around corporate pieces while intuitively understanding none of them. And somehow, succeed or fail, their astronomical pay keeps going up.

Against them are the Aggrieved People, the actors and writers. In the rise of streaming they were denied, against tradition and history, full residual payment for their work. And they see artificial intelligence for what it is: I am become death, destroyer of jobs. And worlds. And words.

The old writers’ rooms, with a dozen people with benefits, will be replaced by AI that will be told by producers to create a murder-mystery based in Chicago in 1970 and will do it. A single human writer without health insurance will then be called in to “make it a little more ragged and human.” You can say, “Oh, that will never happen, no machine can do what a writer does—the nuance, the subtlety, the sensitivity that comes with being human.” But AI’s capability is growing daily.

It will make worse the biggest creative deficit of the past 40 years or so. Long ago writers and actors learned their trades from life—from living in the thick of it, having pre-Hollywood jobs, often knowing low status. They brought that experience to Hollywood. They arrived knowing how real and average humans expressed themselves with words, how they moved and thought. It made for vitality, was democratic, and accounts in part for the great Hollywood acting and writing circa 1930-90. (Ronald Reagan, who served two stints as president of SAG, thought the Hollywood golden age was the 1930s, when the talkies settled in and the sound of words seemed like a miracle, and was thus treated with respect.) But by some point all the new writers and actors came from media, not some true America or true world. They learned how to think and express themselves through the TV shows and movies they’d watched all their lives; they acted and wrote based on what they’d absorbed in not-real life. It made everything less real, and with each generation authenticity thinned out a little more.

AI won’t relieve that problem, it will make it worse. It will feed on the artificialness and replicate it.

No formal negotiations are under way, and there is little discernible trust. When SAG-Aftra president Fran Drescher led the actors out last Thursday her speech was fiery. “We are the victims here,” she said. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.” Earlier, Deadline quoted an unnamed studio executive: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

We aren’t labor mediators, but general advice would be to bring down the temperature. Both sides share a goal: perpetuation of the industry. It’s only a three-year contract. Neither side has to reach Nirvana; while reality sorts itself out, solid steps in the right direction are progress. Talks should begin. Being at the table and saying nothing is better than not being at the table. (Reagan, who presided over SAG in 1960, the last time SAG and the WGA went out together, once observed that more breakthroughs than you’d think happen during bathroom breaks.) Actors at the table should play against type, refrain from long emotion-laden speeches and be coldly factual. Producers, don’t be fat and imperious. Are those high cards you’re holding against your sweater vest? You don’t even know. Modesty is all.

In the end, producers will have to take a more generous share-the-eventual-wealth approach to talent, and put it on paper. A prediction: If they continue to stiff them, they won’t succeed in breaking the unions but they will embitter the industry for a generation—if it lasts that long—and put a cloud over their own names.

Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her 20s, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and she was at a club or great mansion of some kind with a big broad lawn. There were tables scattered along the lawn where people were eating lunch, and suddenly they heard a sound from the sky, a deep booming series of stutters. They all looked up. It was an airplane, the first any of them had ever seen. It must have taken off not far away and had trouble, and now here it was, barreling down toward them to land on the lawn. Everyone said “Oh my gosh” and scrambled out of its path. The plane touched down and came to a halt. The pilot jumped out, did something to the engine, jumped back in, started the engine, used the lawn as a runway again and took off.

It was the most amazing thing, she said, everyone was so excited.

“What happened afterward?” I asked. Meaning, what did everyone say after such a marvel?

She cocked her head. “We finished lunch.” Which, even as I write, makes me smile. Those three words captured, in my imagination, a lot about humanity, about what we’re like—you see a miracle, good, but you still have to eat—and everything about the mood of the then-still-dawning 20th century: America was chock full of miracles, they were expected. You oohed and aahed but accepted it in the course of things and finished your tuna.

Googling around the other day I saw the plane could have come from nearby Roosevelt Air Field, in Westbury, Long Island. Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis from there, in 1927, for the first solo trans-Atlantic flight, to Paris. Amelia Earhart flew out of there too, and Wiley Post. It was named for Quentin Roosevelt, Teddy’s son, a World War I combat aviator who was killed in action in an aerial dogfight over France.

Anyway it was lovely, her sweet memory of a summer day. I have recounted it from memory, didn’t take notes because I didn’t realize it would stay with me. It’s come to mind after 10 summer days in Manhattan and on Long Island, of conversations with all manner of folk. I think I sense a general mood of carefulness about the future, a sobriety that isn’t down, precisely, but is, well, watchful.

At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”

My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”

That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

A subject that came up only once, and indirectly, is Ukraine. I think support for that country is no longer the unalloyed thing it was. People once eager to discuss it now don’t. Time passes and doubts creep in. The loss in blood and treasure is high, the West is simultaneously proudly united and out on a limb, and Russia is in a way already defeated (huge financial and reputational loss, military humiliation, its government revealed as ridiculous). Vladimir Putin is possibly a psychopath and gives every sign of going out like Al Pacino in “Scarface”—“Say hello to my little friend.”

We don’t know where this goes. All who call for a battlefield victory as opposed to some sort of attempt at a negotiated settlement, unsatisfying as that would be, will probably eventually have to factor this in: that public sentiment means something, always, and it can change. Last week we hit 500 days since Mr. Putin invaded. People don’t like long wars.

I tried the patience of a foreign-policy specialist by saying that if China were thinking creatively it would stun the world by pushing itself forward as mediator and peacemaker. China has natural sway with Mr. Putin, but also would with Volodymyr Zelensky, who must be thinking of his country’s potentially brilliant postwar future in tech and industry. Two things Ukrainians have shown: They are a gifted people, and they are a people. You can go far with that. Anyway, everyone wants to be friends with big bad China. Xi Jinping has the standing to make a move. It would improve his country’s reputation after a dozen years in which that reputation has grown dark and menacing. Why not make a move that surprises the world?

A foreign-affairs specialist said this was a romantic idea. True enough. But the problem with the world isn’t that there’s too much romance in it, is it?

I close with a small lunch at a white-walled restaurant on Long Island. Present were accomplished foreign-policy thinkers and lawyers. After something said at dinner the previous night, the subject of ghosts crossed my mind. What do you think, I asked, are they real? Suddenly we were off to the races. One was a skeptic but the kind of skeptic who’s clearly spent time thinking about it. Another thought ghosts a real phenomena—the ghost of his late father, an artist, was seen in his studio. This led my mind to the enduring mystery of prophecies and dreams in history—Lincoln’s repetitive dream before major Union victories, his prophetic dream of his own death. Dreams are . . . something. Not just your mind at rest firing off neurons, not just an undigested piece of cheese, not only expressions of repression or family dynamics in the Freudian sense. They are something we don’t know. Maybe AI will figure it out.

Then the talk turned to magic. It was nice—all these smart and accomplished rational thinkers agreeing there’s a lot of mystery in life, things all around us that we don’t know, forces we can’t see and don’t credit, and that it’s all connected somehow to a magic within life. Hearing they thought this—it was sweet.

If you frequently have a screen on, your impression this summer is that all the hungry things are coming closer in. The sharks are coming closer to shore, the beaches suddenly closed. Bears have been coming in closer for years, deer too. Alligators are advancing onto the golf course and creeping out of the pond.

Candidates for president are coming in closer, away from their natural habitat in the greenrooms of the east and into the heartland primary states, marching in July Fourth parades, waving sweatily, hoping someone will wave back. To mark their summer kickoff, a few thoughts on the race.

The first primaries are just more than six months away, the first GOP debate is next month, and yet the only thing to be sure of is that clear and consistent majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents don’t want the choice they’re likely to get, a race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It has a depressing effect on political talk. If either party were daring and serious about history, it would shake off its front-runner and increase its chances of winning in 2024. It feels weird that, politics being the cold business it is, neither is making this pragmatic decision.

Democrats are stopped by their fear of the apparatus of presidential power. They’re afraid to push against the big, inert, tentacled power blob that is the presidency. They fear they can’t raise money in such circumstances; they fear unsettling things—better the devil you know—and fear that a challenge to Biden-Harris will be interpreted by a major part of their base as a move against the multiracial first female vice president. They fear their party isn’t organized enough, in a way isn’t real enough, to execute an unexpected national primary race.

If Mr. Biden had more imagination than hunger, he’d apprehend his position and move boldly: “After long thought, I judge that I have done the job set for me by history: I removed Donald Trump and saw to the ravages of the pandemic. I now throw open the gates and say to my party: Go pick a president. You did all right last time, you’ll do fine this time too.” What a hero he’d be—impressive to his foes, moving to his friends. History would treat him kindly too: “Not since George Washington . . .” But he has more hunger than imagination.

Many Republicans, the polls say, are also having trouble letting go.

This weekend I reread Paul Johnson’s “Napoleon,” which came out in 2002, part of his series of brief lives. Johnson paints his subject as genius and devil and spends time on his political unscrupulousness: “French rule was corrupt and rapacious.” In conquered nations France took everything not nailed down, especially art, which would go to the Louvre for the convenience of the world. At birth, nature gave Napoleon great gifts but “denied him things that most people, however humble, take for granted—the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, or right and wrong.” He was a mountebank who hid his “small feminine hand” inside his waistcoat and lavished his person with cologne.

It should be noted, should your mind be going there, that Donald Trump isn’t Napoleon, who was a serious man, or anyone else. He’s a one-off, and of his time.

But Johnson writes of the cult of Napoleon in a way that is now pertinent. As he rose, “the English intellectuals, if that is not too fancy a term, were divided.” Lord Liverpool, who as a young man had witnessed the French Revolution and never got over its horrors, located his place in history: Napoleon was the man who took a violent French mob and turned it into an army that terrorized Europe. William Wordsworth protested his cruel treatment of the peasants in occupied countries; Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw him as a threat to democratic freedoms—“the evil genius of the planet.” Edmund Burke was of course Napoleon’s most powerful literary foe.

Others, still captivated by the revolution, saw him as its residual heir. Some hated monarchy and welcomed Bonaparte as an enemy of the British throne. Some admired him “more as a criticism of British institutions and ruling personalities than in approval of his doings.” The poets John Keats and Percy Shelley saw him as a romantic hero, a daring breakthrough artist of history. Johnson thinks they were influenced by the work of Napoleon’s paid propagandists, especially the painters Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.

“The cult of Bonaparte was originally wide, but it did not last,” Johnson writes. It had power in the moment, but it passed. Reality settled in; history made its judgments. The cultists changed the subject, or added nuance when pressed to explain their previous support.

But Johnson sees in the Napoleon cult the beginning of something, the rise of mass and effective political propaganda. “In the twentieth century, this infatuation was to occur time and again.” George Bernard Shaw, that brilliant man, fell for Stalin and became his willing dupe. Norman Mailer and others worshiped Castro; French intellectuals celebrated Mao.

The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Times in 2017 of Shaw’s loyalty to Stalin. In political cults there is “the tendency to fantasize. . . . There is the same impatience with the messiness and inefficiency of democracy, and it leads to the same crush on the strongman leader who can cut through the irrelevant natterings of parliaments and parties.”

Back to now. Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

We all moved on, but that was the authentic sound of a certain political dialogue. “Surely you can admit he made France great again.” “He is a bad man.” Its antecedents stretch back in history.

Political cults are never good, often rise, always pass. May it this time come sooner rather than later.

What happened in Russia last weekend? What will it mean for the world? I remember the words of a veteran American diplomat years ago: “Avoid premature joy.”

We look at Vladimir Putin and think: That man has been rocked and exposed. He didn’t think an erstwhile ally was going to take arms against him and declare a march on Moscow. He couldn’t have imagined Yevgeny Prigozhin’s advance would be smooth, that town to town he’d meet no resistance, that the locals would stand around and watch, that Mr. Prigozhin’s forces would shoot down a half-dozen helicopters. This does deep damage to the dictator’s mystique—the sense that he’s the only man, the inevitable man, the strongman.

But he survived. He ended the rebellion with dispatch. He’s still here. And survival has its own mystique.

As this is written he’s back to business as usual: in meetings, making a speech at a Moscow technology fair. Wednesday he greeted happy crowds on the streets of Derbent, in southern Russia. The New York Times notes he broke with his longtime stringent Covid protocols to mix with the crowd and kiss a little girl. One of Mr. Prigozhin’s criticisms was that Russian leadership had been isolated throughout the war, not meeting with military leaders, doing everything by phone.

But we learned things about Mr. Putin. There is every sign he misjudged the situation and wasn’t confident of his position. This was telling. In his speech to the nation last Saturday, he looked scared, talked hot and drew a stunning historical parallel. He invoked 1917, when Russian troops threw down their arms during World War I and went home to join the revolution. That produced turmoil—“the collapse of the state and the loss of vast territories,” followed by civil war. “We will not allow this to happen again.” At war again, anything that weakens Russia is “a knife to the back of our country and our people.” “Those who staged the mutiny and took up arms against their comrades—they have betrayed Russia and will be brought to account.”

And yet before the weekend was out he’d essentially tell Mr. Prigozhin: It’s OK, never mind, go your way.

Mr. Putin’s problem: He didn’t know who’d be loyal to him. What are called the elites—the influential and prosperous, those holding secondary seats of power—weren’t going to back Mr. Prigozhin and weren’t going to back Mr. Putin; they were going to back the winner who emerged. Early this week the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted a conversation on the still-unfolding events, and a comment by CSIS fellow Maria Snegovaya captured this. “The public, the society, the elites, they have all taken a pause while all this has been unraveling,” she said. “Particularly stunning is the silence of Margarita Simonyan, the notorious editor in chief of RT, who just disappeared from Telegram for a couple of days and then resurfaced saying that ‘Oh well, sorry guys, something happened—I was away, I’m sorry, on holiday, vacation.’”

Beyond that and more important, I think Mr. Putin looked so scared during the crisis because he didn’t know and could not know who his military would back under pressure. After 16 months of a demoralizing, embarrassingly unwon war, would the brass be loyal to the boss of 23 years or the supposedly competent mercenary commander in from the field?

The military probably didn’t know themselves. I suspect events would dictate their loyalties—whether Mr. Prigozhin’s forces grew and proved competent in fighting, or whether his column would be bombed, stopped and scattered.

That is probably why Mr. Putin made his unprecedented deal—stop, leave now, and I won’t hold it against you. And I suppose it’s why Mr. Prigozhin stopped and fled the field. He didn’t know if he could pull off something serious. He’s not Alexei Navalny, the dissident imprisoned for producing a compelling political challenge to Mr. Putin. He’s a hot-dog salesman turned Putin crony. He could organize certain things, but he’s not a serious man—he’s a slob. And if you’re a slob, you’re surprised when someone takes you aside and tells you when you take arms against a dictator you’ll be crushed like a bug. From reports, it sounded as if this hadn’t crossed Mr. Prigozhin’s mind, and he decided he might have to rethink.

It would be nice to think the past 10 days will leave Mr. Putin wondering if he’s pushed the war too far, made a terrible mistake, and must begin looking for the least humiliating path out. But I don’t guess he’s doing Putin Agonistes. I think he’ll conclude what he needs is more victories. And he’ll do anything to get them.

Here is a wholly imagined scenario that wouldn’t shock me in the least. Mr. Putin will not only publicly forgive Mr. Prigozhin and what remains of the Wagner Group; he will, in line with a great man’s magnanimity, privately befriend him. Mr. Putin will order Mr. Prigozhin to take some city. Mr. Prigozhin, his safety dependent on victory, will rouse his men and make some breakthrough. And after he wins the tragic news will spread—Mr. Prigozhin died heroically on the field. No one will mention the Russian colonel who calmly took him out with a pistol shot to the head and was overheard muttering, “Clean him up and ship him to Moscow for the state funeral.” Where Mr. Putin will deliver a eulogy about reconciliation in the greater, mystical cause of the endurance of the Fatherland.

I close with the one bit of lasting damage Mr. Prigozhin really did.

In the audio clips he posted on Telegram at the beginning of his adventure, he said things that have been said before in Russia but not by someone so prominent. Russia is losing in Ukraine: The cost in blood and treasure has been greater than the military admits. The army is “retreating in all directions and shedding a lot of blood. . . . What they tell us is the deepest deception.”

The war, Mr. Prigozhin said, was launched under false premises. Ukraine wasn’t the aggressor. President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted agreements. Russia’s Defense Ministry “is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine, and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO.” This was “a beautiful story.” But “the special operation was started for different reasons”—chiefly to enrich the oligarchs and the ruling elite. “The task was to divide material assets” in Ukraine.

“The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.”

Russian elites want stability. They’d like progress, a better Russia in a better world, though after the last century they’d be forgiven for equating regime change with meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But it will surely mean something in the execution of the war that Mr. Prigozhin described the entire effort as a cynical and cruddy little blunder.