Peggy Noonan

Once when I was little, seven or so, I was sitting on the couch with my Uncle Johnny and we were watching something about Memorial Day. Johnny was about 30, a veteran of Korea, and on a day off from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On the TV they showed a cemetery and at the end they played “Taps.” Suddenly Johnny stood up from the couch, saluted and held the salute with tears in his eyes. I didn’t understand what I was seeing but I knew it was important, and came to understand it had to do with loyalty and grief. And of course I remember it now because that is what I am feeling toward 9/11. I just want to stand and salute as it goes by, and it is going by.

Oh my God what we felt that day and that night and for years after. We wore our hearts on our sleeves. Read the emails you sent, the diary entries. It was all so big. It was the last day of the 20th century and the first day of the 21st and somehow, by dusk, we knew this. In New York, the thing you have to understand is not that the towers were hit, we could have taken that and regained our stride the next morning. It’s that the towers came down. That was impossible. If the towers could fall anything could fall. If the towers fell they were taking a whole world with them.

It was too big, not only in itself, as a catastrophe, almost 3,000 dead, but because we knew it would likely be war, of one kind or another. That was a lot to absorb in a city covered in ash and filled with sirens, a city where people were still lined up in hospitals to volunteer and give blood and help the wounded who would never come.

And the wars ended as they ended, and so the muted tone of things, and all the confused pain.

I want to mention something that happened in this small space, this column, that I’d never experienced before, because it gets at something larger. I had been an online columnist at the Journal for a year. After 9/11, 50 of the next 52 columns were about 9/11, and in that time and before my eyes a whole living community sprang up. It was still the early days of the internet. I didn’t fully realize you could write a column or essay and your readers could immediately respond, telling you what they were experiencing and feeling, what they’d seen.

And we weren’t talking about “politics” we were pouring out our hearts and we did it every week. Readers sent stories of things they’d experienced—for some reason I think first of the telephone repairman in Queens showered by a small rain of paper following the collapse of the towers, who grabbed one as it went by, the business card of a stranger who worked at the World Trade Center, and he kept calling to see if she was all right, and she was. I’d tell the stories in future columns. We helped each other through. It was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life, to write to and with a group of people tied by trauma and keening together.

And what we lived through. How chic, hard shouldered New York was suddenly awash in religious imagery—prayer cards and pictures of saints, candles and statues—and no one resented it, everyone was generous, many joined in. We experienced 9/11 as a spiritual event. We saw an old-fashioned kind of masculinity come back. We looked for meaning. We grieved the firemen. Three hundred forty three of them entered history that day when they went up the stairs in their 70 pounds of gear, and tried to impose order on chaos. We knew: Those outer borough boys were not part of the story but the heart of the story. We’ll never get over them. We don’t want to. So many of them, as you can hear in their last phone calls, and in their faces in recent documentaries, understood they were on a suicide mission. But they stayed and wouldn’t leave. Because they were firemen.

We talked about everyone who added that day to the sum total of human glory. For all the horrors and blunders that surrounded 9/11 and would follow it, there was always that, and always would be.

There was Welles Crowther. Remember him? A young guy, 24, just starting out, worked as a junior associate at an investment bank on the 104th floor of the south tower. He always carried in his back pocket a red bandanna, and they teased him. WHAT ARE YOU, A FARMER? He’d laugh and show bravado: WITH THIS BANDANA I’M GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD. And that day as the world exploded he did. He led people to safety, carried them down to lower floors. He kept going back for more. To protect from the smoke he put the bandanna over his face. He never came home from the towers that day or the day after, his parents were anguished, hoping against hope. Then one day, three days in, his mother was at her desk at home in Nyack, N.Y. Suddenly she felt a presence behind her. She didn’t look, didn’t move. She knew it was Welles. She knew he was saying goodbye. She said: “Thank you.” She knew now he was dead. Months of mourning, no word on how he’d died. And one day, Memorial Day weekend 2002, the New York Times had a story about the last minutes in the towers, and they mentioned survivors who spoke of a man in a red bandanna who’d saved them. And Welles’s mother thought she knew who that was. She got a picture of her son to the survivors and they said yes, that was the man who saved me. Some time later they found his remains, near the command post the firemen had set up in the South Tower. When his family opened his apartment they found an unfinished application to become a New York City fireman.

Just a few days before 9/11, on Labor Day weekend, Welles, visiting his parents, was unusually subdued. He told his mother he had a feeling he was going to be part of something big, had a role to play in it or a job to do.

Isn’t it funny how the mind works, how it knows things it does not know?

“Courage comes from love,” was my summation in 2016. “There’s a big unseen current of love that hums through the world and some plug into it more than others, more deeply and surely.” It fills them with courage. It makes everything possible.

Now that day is over, the shock and the sacrifice and the explosion of love, and the stories that brought tears to your eyes, not only in New York and Washington but Afghanistan and Iraq, and beyond. And on this 20th anniversary of 9/11, this psychic endpoint, maybe the last time the grief will still feel fresh, I suspect a lot of us will just feel like Johnny and want to stand in silent tribute as we hear the lonesome old bugle call.

Fades the light
And afar
Goeth day, cometh night
And a star
Leadeth all
Speedeth all
To their rest.

August changed things; it wasn’t just a bad month. It left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of “This isn’t how we do things.”

We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the flinty, determined president looking flinty and determined on the 20th anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves. We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night—in the middle of the night—without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military playacting and drive up and down with the guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it—they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat it merely as a perception problem, as opposed to a reality problem. You don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends. Who will protect them if you do that?

The president’s people think this will all just go away and are understandably trying to change the subject. But the essence of the story will linger. Its reverberations will play out for years. There are Americans and American friends behind Taliban lines. The stories will roll out in infuriating, sometimes heartbreaking ways. The damage to the president is different and deeper than his people think, because it hit at his reputational core, at how people understand him. His supporters have long seen him as soft-natured, moderate—a sentimental man famous for feeling and showing empathy. But nothing about this fiasco suggested kindliness or an interest in the feelings of others. It feels less like a blunder than the exposure of a seamy side. Does he listen to anyone? Does he have any people of independent weight and stature around him, or are they merely staffers who approach him with gratitude and deference?

What happened with U.S. military leadership? There’s been a stature shift there, too. Did they warn the president not to leave Bagram Air Base? Did they warn that the whole exit strategy was flawed, unrealistic? If the president was warned and rejected the advice why didn’t a general care enough to step down—either in advance to stop the debacle, or afterward to protest it?

Did they just go with the flow? Did they think the president’s mind couldn’t be changed so what the heck, implement the plan on schedule and hope for the best? President Biden’s relations with the Pentagon have been cool at best for a long time; maybe some generals were thinking: I can improve future relations by giving the president more than he asks for. He wants out by 9/11, I’ll give him out by the Fourth of July. It is important to find out what dynamics were in play. Because it’s pretty obvious something went wrong there.

The enlisted men and women of the U.S. military are the most respected professionals in America. They can break your heart with their greatness, as they did at Hamid Karzai International Airport when 13 of them gave their lives to help desperate people escape. But the top brass? Something’s wrong there, something that August revealed. They are all so media-savvy, so smooth and sound-bitey after a generation at war, and in some new way they too seem obsessed with perceptions and how things play, as opposed to reality and how things are.

There has been a lot of talk about Mr. Biden and what drove his single-minded insistence on leaving on his timetable. Axios recently mentioned the 2010 Rolling Stone article in which Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff made brutal fun of Biden. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that President Obama told him, “Joe is over the top about this.” Mr. Obama himself, in his presidential memoir, wrote of Mr. Biden warning him the military was trying to “jam” him, “trying to box in a new president.”

People have been rereading George Packer’s great 2019 book on the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, “Our Man” (great not only as history but as literature). Holbrooke met with Vice President Biden one day during the first Obama term and they argued about Afghanistan. Mr. Biden dismissed Holbrooke’s arguments for protecting Afghan women’s rights as “bull—.” Their discussion was, according to Holbrooke’s diary, “quite extraordinary.” Mr. Biden said Holbrooke didn’t understand politics, that the Democrats could lose the presidency in 2012 in part because of Afghanistan, that we have to get out as we did from Vietnam.

There was politics in President Biden’s decision, and frustration. Mr. Biden had spent years in Afghanistan meetings, in the Senate during the Bush years, and later in the White House as vice president. He would have seen up close more than his share of military spin—contradictory information, no one with a sustainable strategic plan, and plenty of that old military tradition, CYA.

Afghanistan was emotional for him, for personal reasons. This would be connected to his son’s service in Iraq, and the worry a parent feels and the questions a parent asks. And maybe the things Beau Biden told him about his tour.

And I suspect there was plenty of ego in it, of sheer vanity. A longtime friend of his once told me Mr. Biden’s weakness is that he always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I asked if the rooms are usually small, and the friend didn’t bristle, he laughed. I suspect Mr. Biden was thinking he was going to be the guy who finally cut through, who stopped the nonsense, admitted reality, who wasn’t like the others driven by fear of looking weak or incompetent. He was going to look with eyes made cool by experience and do what needed doing—cut this cord, end this thing, not another American dead.

History would see what he’d done. It would be his legacy. And for once he’d get his due—he’s not some ice-cream-eating mediocrity, not a mere palate-cleanser after the heavy meal of Trump, not a placeholder while America got its act together. He would finally be seen as what he is—a serious man. Un homme sérieux, as diplomats used to say.

And then, when it turned so bad so quick, his pride and anger shifted in, and the defiant, defensive, self-referential speeches. Do they not see my wisdom?

When you want it bad you get it bad.

This won’t happen, but it would be better for his White House not to scramble away from the subject—Let’s go to the hurricane!—but to inhabit it fully. Concentrate on the new reality of the new Afghanistan, the immediate and larger diplomatic demands, the security needs. Get the Americans out, our friends out, figure out—plan—what you would do and say if, say, next November there is a terror event on U.S. soil, and a group calling itself al Qaeda 2.0 claims responsibility, and within a few days it turns out they launched their adventure from a haven in Afghanistan.

Don’t fix on “perception.” Focus on that ignored thing, reality.

“For all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

I keep thinking of what happened at Tora Bora. What a richly consequential screw-up it was, and how different the coming years might have been, the whole adventure might have been, if we’d gotten it right.

From the 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get bin Laden and Why It Matters Today”:

“On October 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush’s expression of America’s desire to get Osama bin Laden ‘dead or alive’ seemed about to come true.”

The war was to be swift and deadly, with clear objectives: defeat the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden. Already the Taliban had been swept from power, al Qaeda ousted from its havens. American deaths had been kept to a minimum.

But where was bin Laden? By early December 2001 his world “had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section” of eastern Afghanistan, Tora Bora. For weeks U.S. aircraft pounded him and his men with as many as 100 strikes a day. “One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles.”

American commandos were on the scene, fewer than 100, but everyone knew more troops were coming. Bin Laden expected to die. He wrote his last will and testament on Dec. 14.

But calls for reinforcement to launch an assault were rejected, as were calls to block the mountain paths into Pakistan, which bin Laden could use as escape routes. “The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines.”

Sometime around Dec. 16, bin Laden and his bodyguards made their way out, on foot and horseback, and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area.

How could this have happened? The report puts responsibility on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. Both supported a small-footprint war strategy, and it was a bad political moment for a big bloody fight: Afghanistan’s new president, Hamid Karzai, was about to be inaugurated. “We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power,” Gen. Franks’s deputy told the committee. “We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the time.” Washington seemed to want Afghan forces to do the job, but they couldn’t. They didn’t have the capability or fervor.

Gen. Franks took to saying the intelligence was “inconclusive.” They couldn’t be sure Osama was there. But he was there.

Central Intelligence Agency and Delta Force commanders who’d spent weeks at Tora Bora were certain he was there. Afghan villagers who sold food to al Qaeda said he was there. A CIA operative who picked up a radio from a dead al Qaeda fighter found himself with a clear channel into the group’s communications. “Bin Laden’s voice was often picked up.” The official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command determined he was there: “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December.”

Bin Laden himself said he was there, in an audiotape released in February 2003. He boasted of surviving the bombardment. “Warplanes continued to fly over us day and night,” he said. “Planes poured their lava on us.”

There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to get him, the report said. It would have been a dangerous fight on treacherous terrain in hostile territory. There would have been casualties, maybe a lot. But commanders on the scene said the reward was worth the risk.

In Washington the White House was already turning its attention to Iraq. Late in November, after the fall of Kabul, President George W. Bush asked Rumsfeld about Iraq war plans. Rumsfeld ordered up an assessment. Gen. Franks was working on air support for Afghan units being assembled to push into the mountains around Tora Bora. Now he was told an Iraq plan would have to be drawn up. The report noted that for critics of the Bush administration, “the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers.”

It changed the course of the war in Afghanistan. The most wanted man in the world, the reason those poor souls jumped from the high floors of the twin towers, the man whose capture was an integral part of the point and mission of the war was allowed to . . . disappear. The American presence descended into a muddle of shifting strategies, unclear purpose and annual reviews. The guiding military wisdom in Washington—that too many troops might stir up anti-American sentiment and resistance—was defied by the facts of Tora Bora. The unwillingness to be supple, respond to circumstances and deploy the troops to get bin Laden “paved the way for exactly what we hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency.”

Why didn’t Washington move and get him? Maybe it was simply a mistake—“the fog of war.” Maybe leaders were distracted by Iraq. Maybe it was a lack of imagination: They didn’t know what it would mean to people, their own people, to get the bastard. And maybe this: Maybe they consciously or unconsciously knew that if they got the guy who did 9/11, killed him or brought him to justice, that would leave a lot of Americans satisfied that justice had been done. That might take some steam out of the Iraq push. Maybe they concluded it would be better not to get him, or not right away . . .

Bin Laden was found almost 10 years later, in May 2011, and killed in a daring operation ordered by Barack Obama, who was loudly, justly lauded. He made the decision against the counsel of Vice President Joe Biden.

But what if we’d gotten Tora Bora right? Think of what might have followed. Bin Laden and his lieutenants captured or dead, an insult answered. Maybe a few more months in Afghanistan for America while the bad guys were fully, truly broken. Then—time for some historical romance—a message is delivered by a U.S. general, the last general in Afghanistan, who puts the last boot on the last helicopter. “Months ago you wounded a great nation. Your government of mad imbeciles has been removed. Fortresses have been reduced to rubble, your Taliban killed, al Qaeda expunged. Our mission complete, we will now leave. Let me give you some advice: Don’t make us come back. It will be so much worse when we do.”

Human, ragged and clear. What would have followed? Who knows? But it’s hard to imagine it would be worse than the 20-year muddle and the troops and treasure lost.

The ends of things matter as much as the beginnings. This end was unworthy of an epic struggle. It was not a departure but an abandonment. We left carelessly, with incompetence that can hardly be imagined. Could there have been less planning and foresight? That’s what will follow Joe Biden now, his carelessness and, when it broke as a world-wide story with the stampedes at the airport and people falling from planes, his stubbornness and pride.

It was weird from the beginning. The withdrawal plan always seemed abrupt and arbitrary. Why did the White House think the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was the right date for a pullout? What picture of America do they carry in their heads that told them that would be symbolically satisfying? It is as if they are governed by symbols with no understanding of what the symbols mean.

The president’s speech Monday was what everyone called it, defiant. What was needed was a distanced kindliness—patience, an acknowledgment of the mess that was unfolding, an explanation of a way through, a reiteration of the soundness of the larger vision. Instead, blame shifting, finger pointing, and defensive claims of higher wisdom. He “inherited a deal” from his predecessor. Sure, things “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” but that only “reinforced” his conviction that he’d made “the right decision.” He’d told Afghanistan’s president to prepare for civil war, clean up corruption, unite politically. “They failed to do any of that.” There was no admission of mistakes or misjudgments. “I stand squarely by my decision. . . . We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. . . . I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone.” Unlike others he sees the big picture. “I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past.”

What America needed was wise and stoic Lincoln after First Bull Run. What we got was more late-season Junior Soprano telling Tony and the boys they don’t have the vision and guts anymore.

In the interview with George Stephanopoulos he was even worse—dug in, standing by carelessness and painting it as courage. When he means to project strength he very often appears high-handed and merely mulish.

The reputational blow for the president and his administration will be severe, and so will the foreign-policy implications. On Wednesday Mr. Biden was condemned in the British Parliament by members from both sides of the aisle. Imagine that—our old ancestral friends, who fought with us side by side.

What can be done? I would say that when history turns dark, it can help to astound yourself and see the romance in it. History, after all, is the story of mankind: There’s a lot of derring-do in there, sacrifice too, even some high-mindedness.

The only right political path now is the humane one. It’s also the path to at least some partial redemption. Mr. Biden should see that his job now is saving the lives of Americans in Afghanistan and their friends in a major and declared rescue operation. If that means embarrassing himself temporarily by reversing decisions, then so be it. Humility never killed anyone.

No one knows how many Americans are in Afghanistan—you’d think we would at this point—but estimates are 10,000 to 15,000. They are U.S. citizens. They are our people. Our government exists to help them. They must be rescued, wherever they are. If we have to fight our way to them, we fight our way.

As for the Afghan translators and others who worked with us and with our European allies, the obvious should not need saying but apparently does. They threw their lot with America at some immediate cost and an enormous potential price. It is not only a national imperative but a human imperative to save them from retribution. America does this after its wars. It tried to save those who helped in World War II and Vietnam. Those refugees made excellent Americans. Afghan workers have for 20 years seen the idealism and good faith of our servicemen up close. They know us better than we know ourselves. They are not a burden but a benefit.

Mr. Biden, focus. Don’t be diffident and fatalistic, don’t be equivocal, don’t be forced by events. Don’t make the media and the military drag you to this decision. Take authority. This story is not going away.

Accept the chastening decision to send in more troops and air power if needed. Show that you recognize the emergency. Pivot away from process. Don’t “speed up Special Immigrant Visas”; that ship has sunk, suspend the rules. Get Afghans trying to flee to a third country, and sort it out there. Mistakes will be made; uncover them there.

Find and save the Americans who can’t get out. The road to Kabul airport should be smashed open and kept open by whatever means—whatever it takes. If Bagram Air Base needs to be reopened under U.S. control, reopen it. Throw in everything you’ve got. The administration, which is talking to the Taliban, should make it clear that this is what we are doing, that nothing will stop it, the rescue is going to happen. If it means blowing way past the Aug. 31 fixed departure day, blow past it.

Mr. Biden would fear this will make him look weak. It would make him look strong, and loyal. He will fear it will make him look stupid, always a concern of his. It would make him look like he knows what’s important.

Much depends on the attitude of Taliban leadership. Much, maybe more than we know, will depend on their ability to control their own hopped-up warriors cruising through the streets in American trucks. Can Taliban leadership control the situation on the ground? Can they make the fighters surrounding Kabul airport stand down?

If the leadership is thinking strategically and tactically—if—they will see the reasons it’s in their interests to let a U.S. rescue succeed. They’re on top of the world, delighted at their victory. They’ve already humiliated us; they don’t have to do it again right away. There’s no reason for them to want to keep a built-in simmering opposition around. It’s easier to run the country without them. They can always kill the stragglers later. Why should they want the picture of their triumph to be marred by new pictures of vengeance and carnage? They enjoy thinking they’re not barbarians. They want the world to think they’re not the Flintstones dragging their clubs but Taliban 2.0, cool players, real big boys. More violence will only complicate future requests for foreign aid.

But however things fall, the mood and needs of the Taliban cannot be allowed to determine events. We must do what we have to do. They must be made to understand this.

Here’s some romance of history. Dunkirk was a disaster: the British army trapped in France in 1940, the Nazis encircling and bearing down. Cunning Winston Churchill, with the complicity of the Western press, spun it into a triumph. A volunteer civilian fleet turned the Channel white-capped with its sails and saved our boys. It was splendid. Here’s to you, doughty John Bull.

Go save your people and our friends, and spin it however you want. If it works, no one will care.

They’re all afraid of their base. That’s the central fact of American political life now, that leaders of all sorts aren’t leading their people but are terrified of getting crosswise with them. They’re afraid of their own fans. This is true of everyone from cable anchors and hosts who know exactly who’s watching and what they want, to presidents of the United States.

Joe Biden is afraid of Joe Biden’s base, an extremely important part of which is the teachers unions. He’s afraid to insist publicly, with fervor and commitment, that they get vaccinated and open the schools. He speaks delicately of the unions when he speaks of them at all. It’s clear who’s in charge, who’s going to whom hat in hand.

Donald Trump is afraid of the Trump base. His administration pushed, against the odds, to develop the Covid vaccines and bragged, rightly, at the sheer scientific feat of it. He received the vaccine as soon as he could, as did his family and advisers. But he hasn’t led a national charge to overcome vaccine hesitancy; he’s not out there beating the drum to get the jabs. His stray comments have been furtive and low-key. Some in his base resist the vaccine and are angry that they’re going to be pushed around about it. If he put his name behind a campaign to persuade them, they just might push back and say he finally gave in to the swamp. So he dummies up.

I think Gov. Ron DeSantis fears his base. He’s shown some guts in Florida the past eight months, pushing back against a kind of National Federal Behemoth Establishment Thoughtblob that was claiming too much power and influence. But now he is forbidding local governments and public schools from requiring masks if they think circumstances justify. This is not conservative but extreme.

Eighteen months into the pandemic people have mask fatigue. The subject has become so fraught you have to be either pro or anti, pick a side, no room for an approach that weighs circumstances. Moderation is for the gutless and insincere. But it is reasonable that any power to mandate masks come from the power closest to the voters—local government. No federal power should tell them they must. No governor should tell them they can’t.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had it right this week when he told CNN, “When it comes to local conditions, if my hospital is full and my vaccination rate is low and infection rate is going crazy, we should allow local officials to make those decisions best for the community.” He added: “I think you govern best when you govern closest to the people being governed.”

And local powers should do it tactfully. Nothing has been so damaged by the pandemic as what had remained of American tact. Schools should keep free masks in the supply room and not embarrass kids if they don’t have one. No one should be a Nazi about enforcement. That only raises the temperature and deepens kids’ trauma. Make a decision and then encourage, persuade, exemplify helpful behavior.

So much is in the doing, especially in a crisis. Nothing is going to be perfect. Don’t we know this by now?

Maybe not. We’re 18 months into the pandemic: At this point we’re all long haulers. People are tired, nerves are frayed, and our inability to predict with confidence what’s coming only sharpens things. The illness has settled in. Variants will continue to evolve. No one knows the characteristics of future mutations. It’s possible we’re in the worst moment right now, with hardy Delta, and possible we’re not.

What rules of the road might help us as we enter the coming school year, what general attitudes?

• Regain a sense of give. Stop pushing each other around. Have a generous and sympathetic sense of who your fellow Americans are. There are 330 million of them. It’s a big lumbering thing we have here, with a lot of moving pieces and millions of views. People you think stupid may be thinking things that hadn’t occurred to you. We all have to be patient with each other, not only as a moral but a practical necessity.
• Stop picking on each other. Some people don’t want the vaccine, which is the only way out of this mess. Does it help to ostracize them? No. Instead, try to change their minds with respect, good faith and clear language. Humor, too. I read about a woman the other day who saw, on TikTok, that the arm you get the shot in becomes magnetic. Spoons and knives are drawn to it so you have to watch yourself when you’re walking around the kitchen. The theory is creative and insane. But this country cares for little so much as entertainment. Why aren’t there entertaining and funny spots on what the vaccine doesn’t do, along with what it does, all over TV and the internet?
• Admit there are reasons people don’t trust the experts. If you are an expert, don’t doubletalk. Play it straight, if you don’t know something admit it, don’t be media-coached within an inch of your life. It would be good if all scientific and medical spokesmen for the pandemic could ask themselves: Do you like the American people? Do you feel a quick broad affection for them when you think of them? A sense of kinship? Or do you see them as unruly imbeciles you have to get in line? Because if the latter, you’re going to show it—in your TV appearances and written materials. People will pick it up, because nothing is more obvious than a lack of affection.

And maybe some of us should regain or adjust our sense of proportion. There’s a bad disease out there that’s settled in. Approaching it with prudent realism is good. Taking precautions is good. But—it’s hard to say this without being misunderstood—some people have gotten neurotic about the virus. They’re fixated, they’ve wound up every fear they have in it. They’re not concerned about heart disease, cancer, the big killers, it’s all Covid. But Covid now is part of life; it’s not life. At a certain point you’ve got to remember what Sean Connery’s character said in David Mamet’s great screenplay of “The Untouchables.” The Canadian Mounties had screwed up the ambush, Eliot Ness’s men didn’t know whether to join in. “Oh what the hell, you gotta die of something,” Connery’s character said. And they charged.

Life has to be lived.

And school this fall is everything. The only truly dreadful decision that could be made is if class doesn’t start throughout the country in September. That would be a generational disaster for kids who by then will have missed more than a year at school, some at vital stages. They will never make up what they were supposed to learn, and kids from disturbed and neglectful homes will never fully recover from what they witnessed or experienced. It’s going to take a lot to turn that around. We can’t even imagine what it will take.

If school does not begin across the country, it will curdle public opinion toward Joe Biden. A president’s base is, actually, the entire country. He’d be better off fearing that.

Let’s stop for a second to reflect on the state attorney general’s report in the case of Andrew Cuomo. I have read the 165 pages. It is a narrative about charges of sexual harassment that investigators found credible, and that were more numerous than expected. But there is a real Crazytown aspect to the story.

The governor of New York is painted as a public leader who treats the young women around him as sexual prey. The report details close and intimate hugs, kisses, buttock-grabbing, breast-grabbing, leering comments and violative questions and statements. Have you cheated on your husband? Would you? I am lonely. Have you been with older men? Would you find me a girlfriend? To one target he described his criterion for a girlfriend as someone who can “handle pain.” This is all too believable. His prey included not only women who worked for him but a state trooper he saw at an event and got assigned to his security detail even though she didn’t meet the position’s requirements. He then targeted her for harassment.

He had a modus operandi. When a woman whose bare back he was stroking grabbed his wrist and removed his hand, he remarked, “Wow, you’re aggressive.” He then asked for a kiss. He had an air of entitlement: He was taking what was his. Many of the events described in the report occurred after the pandemic had raised his profile to that of public hero. Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.

The women were all afraid of him—he screamed, berated and was known to be vengeful. The culture of his office was rife with fear and intimidation. A victim: “It was extremely toxic, extremely abusive. If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day. . . . It was controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior.” Everyone feared retaliation for speaking out, so they didn’t.

But there is deep weirdness beyond that. He ordered one aide to memorize the lyrics to “Danny Boy.” She testified he “would pop out” of his office and ask her to start singing. A footnote says it was not the only time the governor asked her to sing. The aide found herself writing to a former staffer, “He just asked me to sing Bohemian Rhapsody so. We aren’t far off from a bedtime story.” He asked her to do push-ups in front of him, and asked what people were saying about the size of his hands. According to the report the aide testified that “she understood the Governor was attempting to get her to say something about the size of his genitals.” Another aide testified that, in complaining to staff that a speech was disappointing, the Governor said something to the effect of “You need to give me some catchy one-liners. Come up with a line like, ‘you’re having sex without the orgasm.’ ”

Mr. Cuomo’s office played a kind of berserk hardball. When news of the sexual-harassment charges broke this March, the governor’s chief of staff asked the state “vaccine czar” to call Democratic county executives and find out if they stood with the governor. The czar was understood to be in charge of vaccine availability and the location of vaccine sites. Demand for vaccines was exceeding supply. The czar called around. One Democratic county executive understood the call to contain an implicit threat regarding vaccine access. He described himself as “stunned” and unsettled by the call.

You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.

No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.

And no one in New York can see how Mr. Cuomo survives all this, even as no one can figure out how he’ll leave. He could resign, but no one who’s known him in the past thinks that possible. The book he wrote during the pandemic has a subtheme and it’s how losing all power and standing when he lost his party’s nomination for governor in 2002 was the great trauma of his life, and winning his career in politics back in 2006, when he was elected attorney general, restored meaning to his life. He literally lives in the governor’s mansion. It’s his only home.

That leaves impeachment. All who will vote on that question know this: if Mr. Cuomo is impeached, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will become governor. She is a career politician from Western New York who is usually assumed, based on history and temperament, to be a moderate Democrat. If she becomes governor—the first woman in New York history—she would garner great initial good will and could become popular. This might thwart the ambitions of her party’s powerful progressives. Maybe they’ll figure that once she’s installed they can rough her up and let her know who’s boss; maybe they’ll find her unexpectedly pliant. But that’s chancy. Republicans don’t want a potentially popular Democrat either: They want to win in 2022. Both sides would benefit from a weakened, suppurating Gov. Cuomo, not a vibrant moderate who might play well on Long Island.

It would be interesting to know who’s talking to Ms. Hochul right now, and what’s being said.

Still, the Legislature’s hand might be forced by events. Circumstances now are different from when the scandals first broke. The attorney general’s report was grimly particular and distilled stray charges into one compelling narrative. The allegation that Mr. Cuomo brought a cop, a state trooper, into his net and abused her startled people and changed their sense of the story. The old civil-rights establishment that kept Mr. Cuomo afloat in the spring looks to be fracturing. And early polling is bad. An overnight Marist survey this week showed 63% of registered voters saying they want him to resign. When the scandal first broke, the public backed the governor.

His strategy since the beginning has been to delay, delay, let the steam come out. That may still be his strategy, and that of some legislators currently acting out their disapproval of him.

Here’s my thought when I finished the report. As America becomes stranger and our culture becomes stranger, our politicians become stranger. As their power increases (I can close a whole state down; I can close a country!) so do the stakes.

When parties and primary voters pick their candidates this year they will judge them in terms of various categories: likability, local support, money and the ability to raise it, stances on issues. People now have to include explicitly another category, an important, baseline question: Is the candidate fully sane? Is the candidate the kind who will be destabilized or further destabilized by the acquisition of new power? Does he push people around?

If your candidate does, take the other one.

“It happened, move on.” “It wasn’t so bad.” “It was just a protest that got out of hand.” A lot of the rioters were screwballs in antlers—crazy uncles, unhappy sons. They didn’t even have a plan. They didn’t know what they were going to do in there. They just ran around and screamed. “Hang Mike Pence. ” You get the distinct impression from the videos that they were extremely relieved they couldn’t find Mr. Pence, or anyone else.

These are aspects of the events of 1/6/21, but they aren’t anywhere near the most important ones.

There are three reasons we have to learn everything we can about what happened that day, and they are the reasons the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, which held its first public hearing this week, deserves the support of both parties.

One is that the central intent of the riot was to halt, unlawfully and through violence, a constitutionally mandated activity: the counting of the physical Electoral College ballots that would yield the final, formal result of the 2020 presidential election. Those paper ballots, transported to Washington by each of the 50 states, rested inside wooden boxes secured by thick leather straps and placed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Their counting is an expression, but also a practical requirement, of the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Their counting had never been stopped before, even in America’s wild wilderness beginnings.

If we have a future in which such attempts become commonplace, everything will fall apart: No future presidential outcome will be assumed to be settled, no transfer of power peaceful. That would be a disaster.

Something else almost as important: The melee, the whole crisis of 1/6, made America look unstable, hollow, all facade. In a predatory world such appearances are dangerous. What happened that day knocked us down a few pegs, disheartening our international friends and exciting our foes. (Imagine what those cool operators in Beijing thought as they watched the videos. These are the people with whom we’ll spend the 21st century in epic struggle? OK!)

These are the reasons what happened on 1/6 can’t be allowed to become normal. One way to discourage that is to see that all involved pay a steep practical and reputational price—public exposure, shame and, when a crime can be proved, prison time. To determine who deserves this requires investigation.

Indignation is a form of loyalty. You protect the things you love.

The committee hearing this week focused on public testimony from four police officers who described what 1/6 was really like—not just a lark by guys in antlers but a day of considerable blood lust. They testified that they were physically and verbally assaulted, targeted by the mob, kicked, punched, crushed and sprayed with chemicals.

Rep. Liz Cheney asked: Was it a “loving crowd,” as Donald Trump has described it? “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day,” Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell responded dryly. He characterized the day as “a medieval battle.”

The committee will have a chance to create a formal record and secure details that amplify and supplement what we think we already know. Some of it may be surprising and some shocking.

Members of the Republican leadership are making a huge error in how they are responding to the committee. They misunderstand their own position. They should be quietly trying to push away from the disaster by leaving it on Mr. Trump and his White House, not their party. They should have taken part in the committee investigation, defended those who entered the Capitol but did no harm and truly thought their presence was legal—the president, some have said, told them to do it—while letting the evidence against Mr. Trump pile up.

Instead they’ve played down what happened and dismissed the committee as a partisan effort. They have put their party on the wrong side of reality. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy called the two Republicans on the panel, Ms. Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, “Pelosi Republicans,” he looked unserious and stupid. He breathed more oxygen into crazytown theories of a stolen election, and again propped up Mr. Trump, whose support in the party is broad, true, but also shallow. Trump supporters are loyal to him and defend him, but when you talk to them you sense their passions are moving on. The candidate he endorsed in a special congressional runoff election in Texas just lost by a resounding six points.

The reality of Donald Trump torments a lot of the GOP leadership, and yet they constantly revive him. They set their fortunes with his when the physics of politics dictates one thing: Out of power, removed from the presidency and denied social media, this is a balloon losing air, not gaining it.

Republican leaders think they’re playing to his base, and they forgive this in themselves by telling themselves stories about how he really may have won the election. They aren’t loyal, they have Stockholm syndrome: They’ve come to identify with the guy who took them hostage and hope the cops don’t hurt him.

The committee should spend the next few months doing everything it can to get the story. More important than the timing of future hearings this fall and winter is what can be gotten that is deep and new—real information that has never been heard before. Members should focus on what drove this thing, who quietly encouraged it. The collapse of Capitol security has already been done. More interesting now: Were members of Congress in communication with the rioters? Did any advise or coordinate with them before 1/6? What did they say to the White House by phone and text on 1/6?

There’s an important roadmap in the books coming out about Mr. Trump’s final days in the White House. Everyone around the former president seems to be talking, usually not for attribution. Most of what they say is not complimentary. Much that has already come out is valuable, a contribution to the record, but it all lacks the true heft of history because it reflects the limits of journalism. Reporters don’t have subpoena power. They can’t make their sources speak under oath.

The committee can. Democrats in recent investigations have been slow to use the subpoena. They say this time they will. To get the story they’ll have to.

I hope they get at least one of their colleagues on the record on this: Some representatives who later insisted the rioters were peaceful patriots, that it was all just another day with rowdy, happy tourists, accepted the protection of the police they now deride on 1/6. If the protesters were such gentle souls, the representatives could have confidently refused police protection, refused to hide in undisclosed locations, walked freely into the halls, and told their fellow Trump supporters that while their passion was understandable they were breaking the law. “March with me to the exits. We will move our questions about the election forward in the courts, but lawfully.”

Why didn’t they? Because they were afraid of the people they now excuse? They were scared little rabbits who finally knew what they’d unleashed.

Nail this story down. Nail everyone involved. Then, and only then, move on.

In the Democratic primary, which took place Tuesday, the candidates for mayor reflected competing party realities. Each brought a particular vibration. City Comptroller Scott Stringer was Abe Beame without the charisma. Former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia was the woman on the train working a hard job in the city, the kind of middle manager who keeps the whole place going. Manhattan loved her. Andrew Yang was a good person, refreshing and unpredictable—refreshing because unpredictable—but he didn’t know the city in his gut. Activist Maya Wiley was elegant, dignified, had presence and warmth, but her policies were those of the detached academic, all progressive ideology. She wouldn’t say in debate that she’d refuse to disarm the police.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, currently in first place by nearly 10 points, scrambled things up. In the war between the abstract and the real, he backed reality. Opposition to his candidacy had a constant undercurrent: He’s an old-time machine pol, a deal maker, corrupt, he doesn’t even live in New York. Everyone heard these things. A lot didn’t care because of the other thing they knew, which is that Mr. Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the first to admit we were in a crime wave.

That was considered cheap until it was considered visionary. (The NYPD reports shootings were up 73% last month, compared with May 2020.)

Mr. Adams’s election-night speech had an air of lovely bitterness: “How dare those with their philosophical and intellectual theorizing and their classroom mindset talking about the ‘theory of policing’?” he said. “You don’t know this. I know this. I’m going to keep my city safe.”

His multiracial coalition drew heavily from black voters. It looks to me like the Democratic Party is in the middle of a big change that it’s not fully noticing, or admitting. For at least 50 years Democrats thought they had to lean left to secure the black vote. In a general way this tilted the entire party left. Now the party has to tack rightward to hold them, at least on some issues, those I’d characterize as the intensely human ones, such as crime. This shift has been apparent at least since the 2020 presidential primaries, when black voters in South Carolina, specifically women, deliberately and strategically rejected progressives and chose Joe Biden, the moderate with whom they’d had a long relationship, saving his candidacy.

I think this was part of the story in New York. Because of the new system of ranked-choice voting, we don’t know the winner. Later rounds of counting could deliver a surprise. But whoever wins, this is true: If you take the top five first-choice candidates as of Thursday afternoon, the more or less reality-oriented moderates (Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang) received 63% of the Democratic vote. The self-declared progressives (Ms. Wiley and Mr. Stringer) got 27%.

This in deep blue New York, ground zero of the progressive explosion, where in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sprang from Zeus’ brow and defeated the moderate Rep. Joe Crowley in the Bronx. (It must be noted that progressives did better down the ballot on Tuesday; we squish that information in here so as not to harsh our mellow.)

Here is something I think helped Mr. Adams.

What is always missing from “the public discourse” on crime is simple compassion. It is weirdly absent. Being the victim of violent crime can change a life and bring untold long-term woe, real physical and psychological repercussions.

The progressive left brings a coldness to this issue. If they feel any personal horror they don’t show it, perhaps because horror demonstrates a human and real-world understanding of the nature of the violation, which suggests an insufficient adherence to ideological abstraction. Rising crime is simply more evidence that if we don’t focus on root causes—poverty, racism—crime will continue to rise. Rising crime is proof that inequity brings violence. AOC at a town hall last July, when the crime uptick had begun: “Do we think this has to do with the fact that there’s record unemployment in the United States right now?” People are “economically desperate.” “Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent and so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don’t have money so . . . they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.”

But bread-stealing isn’t the problem. The problem is that criminals, professional and freelance, know the police are on the defensive, that elimination of cash bail has left the criminal-justice system a revolving door, and this is in fact a golden age for street criminals.

On the conservative side what is always present is indignation and a tendency equal to the left’s to diminish the problem by reducing it to a matter of political gain. Yes, Sean, I think voters will punish those who want to defund the police. It will be a killer issue for us in ’22.

What is missing is human sympathy. It is missing because many in public life are detached from the lives of the people they represent.

The media cover the politics of the issue, not the issue itself. They seem afraid to tell the stories of victims of crime—their lives, what happened, the physical and emotional impact on them and their families, including long-term effects such as debilitating anxiety, or fear of being on the subway, which has an impact on your ability to hold a job. When you are a victim of violent street crime, you become not only afraid of the streets but afraid of your fellow citizens. You feel in some new way how thin is the veil of civilization, how quickly it can be sundered. And this is a fairly common story. In 2019, before the current crime wave, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said there were approximately 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people. New York City’s figure was 571. The numbers for this year are sure to be a lot higher.

Media folk seem to fear such coverage might be taking a side, or somehow exploitative. But the public, I think, sees these stories are never or rarely told. That tells people who have experienced crime, or the fear of it, that they’re not really at the table, not really seen, not an Official Object of Compassion. It does us no good as a society that our national media underreport this story and don’t break your heart with it.

Eric Adams, however, talked about the victims of crime a lot. You could see he felt it. This would have made an impression on a lot of people.

Whatever the outcome, those in the primary who gave signals that they know what crime is and how its victims suffer got far more votes than those who gave signals they don’t. Good. Gives you hope.

The word now is radicalized. So many people feel pushed to the edge and are pushing back. Go to social-media sites and search “school board meeting” adding descriptors like “explosive,” “outrage” and “chaos.” Parents are rising up. New York Democrats just picked an anticrime former cop as their mayoral nominee. Other signs that suggests a spirit of having been radicalized: Longtime alliances based on natural affinity are loosening. Conservatives by nature support and respect the military. That’s changing among some of them, or at least becoming less reflexive, under the pressure of charges of political correctness and a woke brass. Conservatives have begun detaching from traditional support for corporations over the idea they’re too woke, too big, and feel no particular loyalty to America, which made them, when the China market beckons.

There’s a sense in America of a continuing political realignment, that it didn’t all start and end in 2015-16. I think that what happened last summer, when the streets erupted and statues toppled, is being answered now with a pushback—a quieter one but no less consequential.

In the past four years, Mr. Shor said, “white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party.” But whites are “sorting on ideology” more than nonwhite voters. “We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment.’”

In connection with that, a small but possibly telling piece from a man of the left, journalist Kevin Drum, a veteran of Mother Jones and Washington Monthly, who posted some thoughts on July 3 on his blog at Jabberwocking.com. What he said is the obvious, but it wouldn’t be obvious to all his readers, and those to whom it is obvious wouldn’t want it said.

He titled the piece bluntly: “If you hate culture wars, blame liberals.”

“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle,” he writes. “Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues, while Republicans have moved only slightly right.”

He cites data on issues from abortion and religion to guns, same-sex marriage, immigration and taxes. The numbers suggest “the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.” He’s not personally unhappy with this, but Democrats should be concerned they’re moving further away from median voters.

He refers to the work of David Shor, “a data geek who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us.” Mr. Shor told New York magazine a few months ago that Democrats in 2020 gained roughly 7 points among white college-educated voters. Support among blacks declined by a point or two, and Hispanic support dropped by 8 or 9. This followed last summer’s defund-the-police movement. The Democrats had, in Mr. Shor’s words, “raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”

“Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives,” Mr. Shor notes, “don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do.” His conclusion: “If we polarize the electorate on ideology—or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology—we’re going to lose a lot of votes.”

Mr. Drum agrees: However those on the left feel about the Democrats’ “leftward march,” the party “has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary. . . . Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.”

Why, then, is it still conventional wisdom on the left and in the mainstream media that it is conservatives who are culture warmongers? Because “for most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are ‘losing’ the customs and hierarchies that they’ve long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire.”

Mr. Drum speculates that “the whole woke movement in general” has turned off many moderate voters. “Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues.”

The white activist class won’t like hearing this, he says, but moving to the left, while galvanizing the progressive base, “risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.”

He ends: “And for God’s sake, please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.”

Good on him for speaking truth to rising power.

The cultural provocations that are currently tearing us apart do, certainly and obviously, come from progressives. And the left seems to have no prudent fear of backlash. They don’t seem to believe public opinion counts for much anymore.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made this clear in her big speech this week to union members. She said parents who are rising up against the teaching of what is called critical race theory aren’t opposing, as they perceive it, a radical and destructive theory in which they fear to see their children indoctrinated. No, they are bullies, “culture warriors” who are trying to stop teachers “from teaching students accurate history.”

It was a very aggressive speech. It threw a match in the gasoline. You wouldn’t give it unless you thought a big political party is fully with you and fully has your back. That of course is the Democratic Party, of which the teachers unions (though not all teachers) are a major subsidiary, and in which they have major power, including financial power.

That may be good for the teachers unions. I’m not sure it will prove, in a time of pushback, an unalloyed good for the Democrats.

I end with what I think is the left’s misreading of its position. They act as if they’ve got everyone on the run, including those who show their movement the greatest respect in corporate suites and private offices. But I think something unspoken is going on. As a journalist based in New York, you meet a lot of executives, corporate leaders, people in the arts and education. They publicly support the woke regime, speak the lingo, are on board with the basic assumptions, and much early support was sincere. But they have grown indignant at and impatient with the everyday harassments of woke ideology. Deep down, many of them would like to see the left knocked back on their feet. I think the left is overplaying its hand.

America is a sharply divided place. The conservative world is divided, marked by the continued estrangement of old friends. There is the divide over Donald Trump, and the connected division between those open to conspiracism and those not. There are divides between those quietly fighting over policies that will determine the Republican Party’s future meaning and purpose, its reason for being, and between those who differ—polite word!—on the right moral attitude, after 1/6, toward the former president.

So let’s take a look at the historian Gordon Wood’s superb “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ” (2017), the story of two great men whose deep friendship was sundered over politics and later repaired.

They met in Philadelphia in the Continental Congress in 1775 and invented a nation together in 1776. What allies they were, how brilliantly they worked, in spite of differences in temperament, personality, cast of mind and background. Adams of Massachusetts was hearty, frank, abrupt. He was ardent, a brilliant, highly educated man who found it difficult to conceal his true thoughts. His background was plain New England. He made his own way in the world.

Jefferson of course was an aristocrat, a member of Virginia’s landed gentry. He let the game come to him. Mr. Wood quotes a eulogist, who said Jefferson “kept at all times such a command over his temper that no one could discover the workings of his soul.” He was serene.

Adams tended to erupt. But once past his awkwardness and shyness he was jovial and warm. Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s words, “used his affability to keep people at a distance.” Their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush said Adams was “a stranger to dissimulation.” No one ever said that of Jefferson.

In the Continental Congress Adams found Jefferson so frank and decisive on the issue of independence “that he soon seized upon my heart.” Jefferson would tell Daniel Webster that Adams in those days was a “Colossus.” He was “not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent.” But in debate he’d come out “with a power, both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats.”

Their friendship deepened in the late 1770s and ’80s, when both were diplomats representing the new nation in Europe. Abigail Adams captivated Jefferson; she was so intelligent, well-read and politically astute he called her “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” Abigail told Jefferson her husband had no closer friend. Jefferson was “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.” When Jefferson was made minister to France and Adams to Britain, their families parted. Jefferson wrote to say it left him “in the dumps.”

Jefferson later told James Madison that while Adams was vain, that was “all the ill” that could be said of him. He was a man of “rigorous honesty,” “profound in his views,” and “he is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.”

What blew them apart? The French Revolution. Other things too but 1789 was at the heart of it. They disagreed on what it was (a continuation of 1776, said Jefferson; a perversion of 1776, said Adams) and what it would produce (a Continent drowning in blood, said Adams, who could see a Napoleon coming; a global flowering of the spirit of liberty, thought Jefferson, who seems to have mistaken Robespierre for Paul Revere ). When the revolution’s ferocity was revealed in the Terror, Adams threw it in Jefferson’s face: “In France anarchy had done more mischief in one night than all the despotism of their kings had ever done in 20 or 30 years.”

If it hadn’t been for the revolution, they might have gotten through the other strains in store. There were many. Adams became the second president, served one term, ran for re-election and was defeated by Vice President Jefferson in the brutal, rancorous 1800 election.

They disengaged, brooded (mostly Adams) and said bitter things in letters to others (mostly Jefferson).

*   *   *

What saved their friendship? Their friend Benjamin Rush, another great though insufficiently remembered founder. He and Adams had a long correspondence. In 1809, as Jefferson’s second presidential term ended, Adams teasingly asked Rush if he’d had any dreams about Jefferson. Rush had a lot of dreams and often shared them. Months later he reported he did have a dream, about “one of the most extraordinary events” of 1809, “the renewal of the friendship” of Adams and Jefferson. In the dream Adams wrote a short note congratulating Jefferson on his retirement.

“A Dream again!” Adams responded. “It may be Prophecy.”

Rush wrote to Jefferson to soften him up. You loved Adams, he said. Of all the evils of politics, none were so great “as the dissolution of friendships.”

Rush then told Adams to forget what had separated them—explanations are required of lovers, he said, “but are never so between divided friends.”

On New Year’s Day 1812, Adams sent Jefferson a friendly letter. Jefferson wrote back right away, what he later called a “rambling gossiping epistle.” And so their great dialogue recommenced.

They wrote faithfully for 14 years, 158 letters, on everything—what they were reading, who they saw, political philosophy, a thought they’d just had. At one point Adams said: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.” They did their best. Adams would bring up the French Revolution. Jefferson would dodge and share his thoughts on the religious beliefs of the Shawnee Tribe. Adams remembered their history. “I look back with rapture to those golden days” when Virginia and Massachusetts “acted together like a band of brothers.”

They were writing for themselves but also, they knew, for history. They knew who they were.

And so it continued, a great pouring out, until the summer of 1826, the Jubilee summer when the entire country would celebrate the 50th anniversary of what had happened in Philadelphia on July 4.

Both men were near the end of their lives. Both held on for the great day. Wood reports Jefferson woke the night of the 3rd and asked if it was the 4th yet. His doctor said it soon would be. Early the next morning he woke again and called for his servants. Just after noon he died.

At the same time Adams, 500 miles to the north, lay dying. A memoir by Abigail’s nephew William Cranch, chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, reports that Adams awoke on the Fourth to bells ringing and cannon booming. The celebrations had begun. Asked if he knew what day it was he said yes, “It is the glorious 4th of July—God bless it—God bless you all.” According to legend, just before he died at 6 p.m., he awoke and said, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

What drove their reconciliation? A tenderness, toward history and toward themselves. They knew what their friendship had been. They had lived through and to a significant degree driven a world-historical event, the invention of America. They had shared that moment and it had been the great moment of their lives, greater than their presidencies, greater than what followed. They had been geniuses together.

As the Fourth explodes around us we should take some inspiration from the story of an old estrangement healed. We’re all trying to repair something. May you have a Benjamin Rush.