Peggy Noonan

The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The testimony of his top military leaders that they advised him to leave 2,500 troops to keep the process safe made him look dodgy. The whole thing was a botch from beginning to end, and it will stick in history. The images it yielded (kids running to the planes, 13 Americans killed as they tried to bring order) seemed to sum up the political moment, making this seem not like merely a bad event for the president but a definitional one.

The White House pandemic response has been uneven to the point of baffling. Inflation is going up (in June the Federal Reserve estimated it at 3.4% for the year; by September, 4.2%.) Immigration is not a problem but a crisis, and there appears to be no administration plan to deal with the reality that those from other countries who want to come here approach our border as if there is no border. What the crisis requires, at a bare minimum, is a sense of urgency, of something being done. There is no such sense. Their only plan seems to be hoping Border Patrol agents will do something wrong, or at least something that looks bad, so White House officials can lay blame with indignation and performative compassion.

On Capitol Hill, months of fighting in the Democratic caucus, with liberal moderates versus progressives, has gone on just long enough that it looks not like the inevitable jostling in a divided party but like disarray and an absence of leadership.

All this makes Mr. Biden look unimpressive. And eight months is long enough for an impression to take hold. If I were a Democrat I would be starting to think Joe Biden’s historical purpose was to get rid of Donald Trump, but beyond that he is the answer to no political question.

FiveThirtyEight.com’s tracking poll has Mr. Biden underwater (49% disapprove, 45% approve). The Gallup poll has his approval down 13 points since June. An ABC News/Ipsos poll out this week shows his support eroding on a range of issues, most of the decline fueled by independents and Republicans but with numbers down among Democrats too.

This White House has been pretty good at keeping its secrets. The public has heard very little of what used to be called “Who shot John?”—details about what was said in the Oval Office when the decision got made, who made what argument, who steered things, whose view was decisive. That will come—it always does.

For now, some essentials seem obvious. The sheer size and scope of Mr. Biden’s economic proposals show he is operating with a certain daring. His bills are mandate-size. But he didn’t have a mandate-size victory in 2020 when he was up against the most divisive and controversial president in modern history. Donald Trump got more votes than any Republican ever had. Mr. Biden in turn received more votes than any Democrat. He won by seven million of 159 million votes cast. A good solid win (51.3% to 46.9%), but not a mandate. His party won the House but only by a handful of seats. The Senate is 50-50.

The country is closely split. Mr. Biden’s governing margin is precarious. Yet his economic proposals are quite sweeping, as if he’d won the Great Society mandate of 1964. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide was huge—61% to Barry Goldwater’s 38.5%. Johnson came in with 68 Democratic senators and a 295-140 House majority.

At the same time Mr. Biden acts as if he has a mandate, he seems strangely absent from Hill negotiations. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) said Wednesday on MSNBC that Democratic members “need to know exactly where the president stands and what the president wants them to do, and they’re getting mixed signals depending on who you talk to.” They are told they have to be with the president, but “what is it that the president wants?”

He is letting progressives play the part of conscience of the party. They appear to be calling the shots, and he’s ceding to them the idea they’re not part of the party; they’re the heart of the party. But Mr. Biden didn’t run as a progressive—he beat the progressives in the primaries. In a party going left, he played the role of the middle’s man. What happened to politics as the art of the possible?

This looks like a late-life conversion to progressivism. Maybe that’s what the abrupt and decisive withdrawal from Afghanistan was about, doing what others had failed to do, Barack Obama had failed to do—and what progressives wanted. Show them who their real hero is. The economic part of his agenda would be of a piece with that—show them what Mr. Obama, with his distance from the more progressive wing of his party, refused to show.

I’ve got a feeling there’s more to the Obama competition angle than we understand.

There’s already been a lot of spending since the pandemic began. Mr. Trump was a high spender. Mr. Biden is a high spender. But when the federal government, which is far away from life on the ground in America, creates mammoth spending bills, a sense of targeting gets lost, of workability and intention, of trade-offs and long-term implications. It all gets lost unless you’re careful. We spend so much as a country now, we’re starting to make some workers believe they don’t really have to work. Some renters would be starting to think they don’t necessarily have to write the monthly check.

Does the spending in the big reconciliation bill look careful? It is almost 2,500 pages long, it’s not clear anyone has read it, and no one seems precisely sure what’s in it. It is simply understood as a bill that while not necessarily pertinent to current crises provides the societal changes progressives wish to see in such areas as climate and taxation and beefing up the Internal Revenue Service and free community college.

I think the common wisdom on the right that if this economic program passes it will be bad for the Democrats (huge, messy, inflationary) and if it fails it will be bad for the president (he’s hapless, they don’t have their legislative act together) is correct.

I think Mr. Biden got himself in a fix. The past eight months he could have been gradual and incremental in his approach—a few months slower with a lot more planning in Afghanistan, less appetite and maximalist in economic matters. Old fashioned, undramatic, stable governance from a longtime liberal Democrat.

Not everything has to be big, bold and transformational. Especially when you don’t have a mandate for those things. In political figures it is often vanity and ego that make them insist on being transformational.

Or competitiveness.

Or ideology. But ol’ Joe from Delaware didn’t use to have all that much ideology, and wasn’t chosen to have it.

Two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call “on a top secret, back-channel line,” to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng. This is from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” Gen. Milley believed Gen. Li and others in the Chinese leadership had been rattled by what had just happened in America. Gen. Li asked Gen. Milley if the U.S. was politically collapsing. No, Gen. Milley said: “We are 100% steady,” but democracy can seem “sloppy sometimes.”

It wasn’t their first such conversation. Four days before the 2020 election, according to Messrs. Woodward and Costa, Gen. Milley had called Gen. Li after U.S. intelligence reported the Chinese were on high alert and feared that President Trump, desperate to win, might create a military crisis and present himself as its hero. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you,” Gen. Milley assured his counterpart. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time.” Gen. Li, who’d known Gen. Milley for five years, said he’d take the American at his word.

Soon after the Jan. 8 call, Gen. Milley summoned senior Pentagon officers to his office to discuss the steps involved in a nuclear launch. Only the president could give such an order, but Gen. Milley said he’d have to be involved: “No matter what you’re told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure.”

Since the publication of “Peril,” Gen. Milley has been criticized in some quarters: As head of the Joint Chiefs he’s not in the chain of command. Messages to foreign military leaders should be delivered by civilian officials such as the defense secretary. Who is this guy to take it on himself?

But I see it this way: In a fluid, high-stakes situation, lines of communication are best kept open. Generals of different nations know each other and talk to each other, and it’s good they do. Wars are as likely to start through miscalculation and misunderstanding as bloodlust or reasons of state. The world is preoccupied with ground combat, but this is a nuclear world. Big players, not all of them fully stable, have arsenals. It’s good to establish: No sudden moves.

After Jan. 6, Gen. Milley thought Mr. Trump was mentally deteriorating—manic, scattered, even more unpredictable than usual. Trump supporters say Gen. Milley fundamentally misunderstood Mr. Trump’s nature: His impulses were to end wars, never start them; his moves weren’t martial. True. But Mr. Trump never incited his followers to move with physical force on the U.S. Capitol either, until he did. After that anything seemed possible.

I find myself supportive of Gen. Milley’s actions as described in the book. Yet I come down to a negative view of Gen. Milley after reading it, for two reasons.

One is that it does nothing to enhance America’s position in the world to make it known that the Joint Chiefs chairman found it necessary to call China to tell them Bonkers Man only thinks he’s in charge; if you’ve got a problem, call me. Gen. Milley shouldn’t be talking about all this. He should have kept it to himself, told the next head of the Joint Chiefs and a few historians down the road.

I’ve read the books on the 2020 election and the end of the Trump administration, and Gen. Milley appears to have provided major information in almost all of them. With the caliber of reporters he was dealing with, this would have taken major time—gathering and providing information data, documents and readouts of conversations to substantiate and corroborate his account; interviews, follow-ups, transcripts. The portraits of such a cooperative source would inevitably be driven in a positive direction.

In “I Alone Can Fix It,” by the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Gen. Milley is decrying systemic racism one day, telling aides that listening to Mr. Trump is like reading Orwell’s “1984” on another. In “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” by the Journal’s Michael C. Bender, Gen. Milley is a street-wise Ivy Leaguer well versed in the Constitution. He instructs Mr. Trump on the nature of the George Floyd protests. “That guy had an insurrection,” he says, pointing to a picture of Lincoln. “What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.” In “Peril,” Gen. Milley constantly saves the republic. He is “burly and ramrod straight,” his shoulders broad, his persona outgoing. Yet there’s a cerebral edge. “One large bookcase in his hallway at Quarters 6 held hundreds of thick books just on China.”

All of it comes across as believable, factually accurate. But one detects a highly enthusiastic primary source.

This is what I thought as I read: Gen. Milley seems to have spent large parts of the past year building the reputation of Mark Milley. (He had marched in fatigues alongside the president at Lafayette Park during the 2020 street protests; he no doubt concluded reputational rehab was in order.) It would have been better if he’d given that time and energy to avoiding the calamitous disaster that was America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead of seeing to his standing he should have been putting his job on the line to keep Bagram Air Base open.

Top U.S. military officers tend always to have their eye on the media, and how they’re being perceived, which brings us to a larger point. The services are at a hinge point. They have been through 20 years—an entire generation—of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now it is officially over. They need to take time to review and reflect on that experience in a kind of service-by-service after-action report. Part of that should include this question: While the wars were being fought, did top brass keep the military a step apart from the damaging cultural and political swirls that have swept the nation?

It looks to me as if they have been too eager to prove they have all the right cultural and political predicates, that they want the media and political class to see this. That they’re desperate for them to see it.

But the U.S. military is the most respected institution in the country in part because its members aren’t like the country. They are understood to have exceptional discipline, rigor, clear and uncompromised standards. They have teamwork and their teams cohere because they have a higher purpose and higher expectations. They are called on to preserve and protect the Constitution. They’ll die for you. They don’t make you swear to that at Oberlin.

If the military doesn’t stay true to its mission, it will become just another institution in a country that carelessly destroys institutions.

The military isn’t a fortress and doesn’t have a drawbridge it can pull up. It comes from us and will reflect us. That’s good. The services should be bringing in everybody—women, sexual minorities—gathering all the talent they can, because only our talent will give us the edge in future wars, which will come. Talent comes from all quarters.

But that doesn’t mean adopting the ideologies and assumptions of the leftist cultural regime that reigns in other institutions—Critical Race Theory, wokeness. Don’t let that stuff in. If in your reviews of the past 20 years you determine you have, stop. Your future and ours depend on it.

I want to stay with 9/11 to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day 20 years ago. It also had to do with right now.

It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.

Certainly, most obviously and geopolitically we lost the thread in Afghanistan. We went there 20 years ago to make quick work of mass murderers who’d attacked us, and those who’d harbored and helped them. But we didn’t get the man who gave us 9/11, he escaped, and attention turned elsewhere, to Iraq, and we just stayed and walked in circles and came up with new words to rationalize the mission and it all turned into a muddle of confused intentions. Ten years in it was like the drunken song, “We’re here because we’re here.”

Having lost the thread in the war we then with an almost magical consistency lost the thread in the ending of it. It was a frantic calamity of ill-thought-through actions and mistaken agendas. The horrifying part was that it couldn’t have proceeded without a willful ignoring of reality.

Evidence of a lost thread: 9/11 was a deeply communal event. We were all in it together, wounded together and mourning together. We dug deep, found our best selves, and actually saw the best selves in others. The spontaneous community of those who showed up at the hospital to give blood, of those on the top floors of the towers who gathered to try to lead people out, of those on the plane who banded together to storm the pilot’s door—“Let’s roll.” It wasn’t just you, you were part of something.

The country we are experiencing now is one of people in different groups ganging up on each other. We all see this. It’s all division, driven by identity politics, race, gender, class. Twenty years ago we were grateful for cops, now we denigrate them and they leave and we argue about why they left. A rising generation of voters who were children when 9/11 happened and who became conscious of history during the 2008 economic crisis see (and have been well taught!) the imperfections, mistakes and sins of their own country but have no human memory of the abuses of other systems, of how damaging deep socialism, and communism, have been. The passion of their emerging beliefs will engender opposing passions. They already are.

Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?

Following the trauma and drama of 9/11 we started discovering in some new way our nation’s meaning—what it was in history, meant in history, meant to us. We talked about it. We saw: The first thing the firemen did after the towers fell was put up the flag.

Twenty years in our history is treated as all sin, sin, sin. We’re like mad monks flagellating ourselves. We are going through a nonstop condemnation of our past and our people and their limits and ignorance. It isn’t healthy. Reflection and honest questioning are, but not this. And so much of it comes from our most successful and secure, our elites and establishments. Regular people look and think, “But if our professors and media leaders and tech CEOs hate us, who is going to help us think our way out of this mess?” And they know someone has to, because they know in a way elites can never understand, because they have grown so used to security, that no nation can proceed in the world safely and fruitfully when at bottom it hates itself.

Watching the ceremonies last weekend it was understandable if you thought: We started out rediscovering our love and wound up obsessed with our sins. We started out together and wound up more divided than ever, driven apart by opportunists who set us at each other’s throats.

And of course it all plays out in a million political and cultural issues. The pandemic came, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (we hope) and somehow that shared experience became another opportunity for division. Government had to be deft and persuasive and honest about what it didn’t know and didn’t have, and often failed. But government can always regulate, spend and tax. We’re no deficit hawks in this corner but doesn’t U.S. public debt going toward $30 trillion feel a little . . . high? And dangerous?

When a country has lost the thread it gets a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol going for the ballots that will ensure and formalize a presidential election. When it’s lost the thread it can no longer maintain a rough consensus—it doesn’t even WANT a rough consensus—on how we vote.

And there are the million goofy things that are insignificant and yet somehow feel . . . telling. The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.

That’s what I see with leaders all over America’s business life. What follows the lost thread is go-with-the-flow. Even when you know it isn’t going anywhere good. Especially when it’s going nowhere good.

*   *   *

What are regular people doing? My sense is they’re trying to hide from the national, figuring they’ll make strong what they can make strong—the family, the school, the local. They’re not trying to “maintain control” or “retreat,” they’re just trying to make things work. But what does it mean for a country when its most sober and thoughtful people are essentially trying to hide from it? To hide from the accusations and division and the growing air of freakishness, from the whole cultural revolution and the woke regime, trying to enforce boundaries between “that” and “us.” And knowing all the while that, as they say, you may be through with the culture but the culture isn’t through with you.

I feel certain this whole story will have some effect on, maybe a big effect on, the next election and the one after that. Just people feeling, knowing, that we’ve lost the thread, need to get it back, and wondering what we can do to help make that happen.

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.