Peggy Noonan

Dan Balz’s “Collision 2012” is the best presidential campaign chronicle in many years. It is a great book, in part because it isn’t about what happened as much as about how people in the campaigns were thinking. It is unusual in that it gives proper place to the impact of thought on political outcomes.

The Obama campaign had a lot going for it in 2012, but a lot going against it, too, most obviously the economy. A year before the election Americans weren’t sure who the president was. He held himself at bay, observes Mr. Balz: “An Obama friend once suggested to me that the teleprompter was a perfect metaphor for the president, a physical symbol of how he kept the world at arm’s length.” His ties with the institutional Democratic Party were “minimal.” Members of his own White House were still trying to explain his ideology and leadership style. One compared the president’s relationship with the left to Lincoln’s with the radical Republicans who thought him too cautious, when in retrospect he was daring.

Others around President Obama said he was no centrist like Bill Clinton. He saw no particular virtue in staking out the middle or splitting differences. Compared with Mr. Clinton, Obama “had less capacity to put himself in the minds of his opponents, to understand where they were coming from and why,” Mr. Balz writes. That hindered his ability to negotiate successfully with Republicans in Congress, which in turn damaged his reputation for competence.

So the Obama campaign faced real challenges. But they loved research and data, which they used to help think it all through.

They knew the economy was the president’s biggest obstacle to re-election, that they couldn’t win a referendum on his economic stewardship. They wanted a way to “leapfrog” the immediate economic debate. In Iowa they convened a focus group of independents who had supported Obama in 2008 but voted Republican in 2010. They found themselves fascinated by one frustrated man in his 50s. An Obama adviser summed up the man’s stated grievances: “I can’t send my kid to college next year. . . . I haven’t had a raise in five years. . . . I am sick and tired of giving bailouts to the folks at the top and handouts to the folks at the bottom. I’m going to fire people [politicians] until my life gets better.”

That is as succinct a summation as I’ve seen of how the American middle class has been thinking the past few years: The guys at the top and the bottom are taken care of while I get squeezed.

The Obama people took his comments seriously. It would be nice to say they were primarily looking for policies to help him, but their job was politics: They sought ways to reach him, to make him an Obama voter.

What followed was a “massive research effort” to help the Obama campaign develop a message. They came to see a long erosion, in the words of an aide, “of what it meant to be middle class in America.”

The campaign asked middle-aged, middle-income Americans to keep online financial journals. Over 100 people took part, twice a week for three weeks. The Obama campaign did not reveal it was behind the effort. Participants were asked such questions as whether or not they were putting off various purchases, or buying a used car rather than a new one. They were also asked: When was the last time you were treated unfairly at work? The journals yielded 1,400 pages of raw material.

I’ll add here that when I told a young friend, a professional in her 20s, about this, she asked: “Do they have to do things like that to understand their own country?” Yes, they do. Ideology is only part of it. The American political consultant class lives rarefied lives. Business is good for them in the modern democracies and likely always will be. That’s true of those on the Republican side, too.

What followed the journals was a series of focus groups in which members, according to an aide, “shared a strong sense that America was changing in a way that was out of their control.” They felt the old rules of the economy no longer applied. They didn’t know how to get ahead anymore, and they feared sliding behind.

The groups revealed that the American dream meant less to younger workers than to older ones. Here a departure from the book: There is pervasive confusion about what the American dream is. We seem to have redefined it to mean the acquisition of material things—a car, a house and a pool. That was not the meaning of the American dream a few generations ago. The definition then was that in this wonderful place called America, you can start out from nothing and become anything. It was aspirational. The limits of class and background wouldn’t and couldn’t keep you from becoming a person worthy of respect, even renown. If you wanted to turn that into houses and a pool, fine. But you didn’t have to. You could have a modest job like teacher and be the most respected woman in town.

When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we’ve defined as success in a straitened economy.

Back to the book. The Obama campaign’s research produced three findings. The first was obvious: People were dissatisfied with the economy. Second, people hadn’t quite given up on the president. Third, they weren’t sure he was up to the job. They feared the nation’s problems were bigger than he was, and they criticized his failed negotiations with the Republicans in Congress. Amazingly, people in focus groups kept bringing up Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to knock heads and twist arms. A campaign aide told Mr. Balz, “I’ve never had so many damned references to Lyndon Johnson in my life!”

Washington journalists usually blame Mr. Obama’s failures to work with Congress on the GOP—its tea-party nuttiness, its “nihilism.” But the president’s own focus groups, which didn’t contain Obama haters on the assumption they were unreachable, put the onus on him: It’s your job, make it work, get it done.

The Obama campaign decided not to make the campaign about the state of the economy, but about who could look after the interests of the middle class in a time of historic transition. At the same time they decided to go after Mitt Romney hard, and remove him as a reasonable alternative. His selling point was that he understood the economy and made it work for him: He was rich. They turned that into a tale of downsizing, layoffs and rapacious capitalism. An Obama adviser: “He may get the economy, he may know how to make money . . . but every time he did, folks like you lost your pensions, lost your jobs.”

Somehow the Romney campaign never saw it coming.

Republicans, now and in 2016, should remember the colorful but not at all high-minded approach of Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. “My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” he told Mr. Balz. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore.” Obama’s people punched first, and hard.

Bits and pieces:

I like everything Pope Francis is doing because he’s trying to shake things up. The minute popes become popes they become insiders. They are inside the Vatican, inside the curia, inside the papal apartments, daily presented with inside information on the operation of the church. But Francis seems to be preserving his role as the outsider—the priest from Buenos Aires, the man who gets along with everyone but isn’t of them. He doesn’t want to do the showbiz—the regalia. He doesn’t want to live in the apartments. He doesn’t want to do the grandness, including the perpetual security machine that keeps normal people away.

Americans started this—the over-the-top security apparatus with the hundreds of guards and the bulletproof glass—and now every leader imitates it. The rationale, a serious one, is physical protection, but the underlying message is that those who are guarded are magical, irreplaceable—dainty little eggs being carried through the world on thrones of lettuce leaves. Safety is protected but vanity is projected: “I’m better than you, I’m special. You little people jumping to touch my hand—you can’t touch me.”

This is all, obviously, not Francis’s way. You could see it last week during World Youth Day in Rio de Janiero, where he was in the heart of the crowds, unafraid and unassuming.

There’s a quality in certain popes so that when you see them go by in the popemobile, or just on a TV screen, your soul sort of jumps and you find yourself moved in a way you can’t explain. John Paul II was like that—I remember a businessman, a casual Protestant, turning to me once when the pope was on TV and saying: “I can’t figure it out but every time I see him my eyes fill up.”

I don’t remember that being true of Pope Paul VI, who preceded John Paul, and it wasn’t true of Benedict, who followed him, but it is true of Francis. This week he had words on homosexuality, and they made big news. In part this was surprising and in part not. What the pope told reporters was nothing Catholics wouldn’t say and haven’t said in common conversation. Asked about his views on priests who are homosexual and celibate, Francis responded, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

He made it clear priests must do the true work of priests—helping people. But as to what is in a human heart, who is to judge? A modern pope hadn’t said anything quite like that in public, which is why it was news. It has been called tolerant, but it wasn’t tolerant—it was loving, which is what a Christian should be. Church teaching is church teaching, doctrine is doctrine, they’re often complex and requiring of assertion and explanation. But when a pope speaks plainly the kind of actually humble thought Catholics actually hold in their hearts it can be powerful. And this was. Good.

Francis continues as a breath of fresh air. I hope he stays seemingly simple and doesn’t become too clever. Guilelessness and humility are not only virtues, they have real practical force.

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Connected to the thoughts on security, I have a friend who once told me the difference between cats and dogs. When you get up in the morning and feed your dog he looks up at you and thinks: “She comes, finds my food and pours it for me—she must be a god.” A cat thinks: “She comes, finds my food and pours it out for me—must be a god.”

Politicians—no matter how they started out, with what modesty or inner sense of stability—tend to wind up as cats. They come to think “the people” are there to meet their needs—to provide the money they allocate, for instance. They come to think taxpayers are there to pay for their staffers, who in turn are there to meet their needs, and their benefits packages.

We are a cat-encouraging system. Probably the only thing that would change this, in a practical sense, is an old idea: term limits.

Term limits—a maximum three terms in the House, say, and two in the Senate—would limit the opportunity for a dog to turn into a cat. It would also change the reward system. If you’re not spending all your time advancing the prospects of a lifetime career in government, at the end of which you’ll be an object of respect, you may just spend your time advancing the interests of your country, which in the end will truly enhance your reputation.

Term limits are simple and clear. They’d make things better. We don’t focus on this simple fix. One reason is that there are always so many pressing crises that dominate the daily political conversation. But another is that we look to Washington for leadership in this area. And Washington will never vote to limit its own power without enormous pressure from outside.

By the way, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is not running for re-election and will leave in 2015 after two terms because when he first ran for the Senate he term-limited himself, and he’s keeping his word. Before he entered the Senate he was a popular representative who term-limited himself, and departed when his time was up. This is remarkable, that he kept to his word. It’s one of the reasons he is respected in Washington.

They know something unusual when they see it. That fella stayed a dog.

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The bankruptcy and decay of Detroit puts the spotlight again on corrupt public officials (the Motor City has been rich in them) one-party rule (it was a Democratic town, pretty much top to bottom, for 50 years) and public-employee unions and the long-term implications of their demands on what used to be called the public purse.

The deal years ago, and everyone knew it, was this: If you work for the government you may be paid less competitive wages than the general marketplace offers, and your workplace would likely not be as dynamic and afford as much advancement as the private sector. But in return for these agreed-upon limits you got one important advantage: job security.

A government job was a comparatively safe job. And that was worth a lot, especially when you saw your neighbors get laid off in various cycles and contractions.

Now that original agreement has been turned on its head. Government workers are relatively well paid. They have benefit packages and pension plans that are the envy of their neighbors. As for job security, they are so secure they pretty much can’t be fired—witness Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth in the IRS scandal, who appears in fact to be at the center of that scandal, and who apparently refused to resign and is still on paid leave.

None of this is what was intended. None of it is how it was supposed to work.

We weren’t supposed to be ruled by cats.

In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don’t think it’s been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation when its people come to lack even rudimentary confidence in the decisions made by the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government? It will also diminish the hope for faith in government, which whatever your politics is not a good thing. We need government, as we all know. Americans have a right to assume that while theirs may be deeply imperfect, it is not deeply corrupt. What harms trust in governmental institutions now will have reverberations in future administrations.

The scandals that have so damaged the agency took place in just the past few years, since the current administration began. And it is not Republicans on the Hill or conservatives in the press who have revealed the agency as badly managed, political in its actions, and really quite crazily run. That information, or at least the early outlines of it, came from the agency’s own inspector general.

But the point is that it was all so recent. It doesn’t take long to crater a reputation. The conferences, seminars and boondoggles in which $49 million was spent, including the famous “Star Trek” parody video—all that happened between 2010 and 2012. The targeting of conservative groups, the IRS leadership’s public lies about it, the leaking of private tax information to liberal groups or journalists, the abuse of donor information—all that took place since the administration began, in 2009. Just this week, an inspector general report revealed excessive travel spending by a handful of IRS executives in 2011 and 2012.

All of it has produced the biggest IRS scandal since Watergate. Which makes it the second of only two truly huge scandals to be visited on the agency in its entire 100-year history. (The IRS began in its modern incarnation in 1913, the year the 16th Amendment was ratified.) And Watergate didn’t kill the IRS’s reputation, only Nixon’s.

The effect in terms of public approval can be seen in the polls. Fox News, in May, compared its recent IRS polling with its polling 10 years ago. In May 2003, just under a third of all respondents said they had little or no faith in the IRS—a high number, perhaps, but a cantankerously American one. In May 2013, that number had jumped to 57%. Around the time of Fox’s 2013 poll, Gallup had 60% of Americans seeing the IRS as an agency that “frequently abuses its powers.” And Gallup had 42% of respondents saying the IRS did a “poor” job, more than double the figure from 2009.

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

This White House is careless with the reputation of government. They are a campaigning organization, not a governing one.

You might think at this point the White House might begin to think cleverly and strategically. That they would very showily give the scandal their time and attention—really give it some priority. That they might show daily indignation, and see to it that the IRS is utterly forthcoming with Congress. That would have two effects. First, it would help the IRS recover if the public saw it being responsive, as opposed to speaking in the usual word salad punctuated with “We have no comment.” Second, it would help the Obama White House look responsive, responsible and actually interested in good governance.

Instead the president and his spokesman just run around and call the scandal phony. That’s their big contribution: It’s phony. It was better in the old days, 2½ months ago, when they feigned outrage.

You would think also the leadership of the IRS would, at this point, be a bit head-bowed—eager to deal publicly with the agency’s problems, to be responsive with Congress and, most of all, to demonstrate good faith after the lying that marked the early days of the scandal.

But that is not what’s happening. House investigators this week said they have in fact received less than 1% of the documents they have been asking for from the agency. The IRS itself at one point identified a whopping and rather intimidating 65 million documents that might be relevant to the tea-party scandal. To date—almost three months into the scandal became public—the House Ways and Means Committee says the IRS has turned over only 13,000 pages. And some of them were duplicates.

It’s gone beyond what staff aides were, last month, calling “slow walking.” Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement the IRS’s actions look “a lot like obstruction.” One aide said: “Patience is wearing thin.”

Meanwhile, investigations continue, interviews are ongoing. Congressional investigators believe they have picked up an unusual amount of checking in with and requesting approval and guidance from the office of the IRS general counsel. They also believe they are picking up an intense level of decision making between that office and Lois Lerner, former head of the exempt organizations office. The committee is particularly interested in all correspondence and communications between the general counsel’s office, the Treasury Department, and the White House.

An observer might fairly say that the IRS appears to be stringing the story out, that they are more preoccupied with damage control than finding out what exactly happened in the tea-party scandal. Perhaps the agency, and the administration, is thinking that if they string the story out it may disappear into the summer. Maybe its momentum will be broken. Maybe people will begin to think, when they see an IRS headline on page B-12, that they’ve already read that story. Maybe slowing everything down will take the steam out of the entire investigation.

That might seem a politically astute move—not governmentally responsible but politically astute. Letting the story go forward in slow dribs and drabs won’t help the IRS recover its reputation and begin to function in a healthy way, but it may limit immediate political damage to the administration.

But a slow walk of documents carries political risk. It may keep the story down, but it will keep it alive by keeping it from being resolved. Republicans on the Hill show no signs of losing interest. They seem anxious to stay on the story, for all the obvious reasons, both public-spirited and self-interested.

But they may begin issuing subpoenas. And if the story goes into the fall, and continues through the winter, perhaps even the spring, it will become an active drama within the 2014 election cycle.

Which would make the administration’s recent moves not only governmentally lacking, but politically maladroit.

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn’t say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said “line people in Cincinnati” did work that was “not so fine.” They asked questions that “weren’t really necessary,” she claimed, and operated without “the appropriate level of sensitivity.” But the targeting was “not intentional.” Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on “people in Cincinnati.” They provided “horrible customer service.”

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull’s testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.

In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.

But his recommendations were not carried out.

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull’s unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner’s senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: “Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?”

A: “She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel.”

Q: “The IRS chief counsel?”

A: “The IRS chief counsel.”

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel’s office looking for? The letter to Mr. Werfel says Mr. Hull’s supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker, provided insight: The counsel’s office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, “information about the applicants’ political activities leading up to the 2010 election.” Mr. Shoemaker told investigators he didn’t find that kind of question unreasonable, but he found the counsel’s office to be “not very forthcoming”: “We discussed it to some extent and they indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period.”

It’s almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.

At the generally lacking House Oversight Committee Hearings on Thursday, some big things still got said.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. “I would send those to general inventory.” Who got extra scrutiny? “They were all tea-party and patriot cases.” She became “very frustrated” by the “micromanagement” from Washington. “It was like working in lost luggage.” She applied to be transferred.

For his part, Mr. Hull backed up what he’d told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, “unusual.”

It was Maryland’s Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.

It wasn’t hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, “Don’t forget to harass my enemies”? Are congressmen that stupid?

Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, finally woke the proceedings up with what he called “the evolution of the defense” since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it—a narrative that was advanced by the president’s spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too—”we did it against both ends of the political spectrum.” When the inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted, he came under attack. Now the defense is that the White House wasn’t involved, so case closed.

This is one Republican who is right about evolution.

Those trying to get to the bottom of the scandal have to dig in, pay attention. The administration’s defenders, and their friends in the press, have made some progress in confusing the issue through misdirection and misstatement.

This is the moment things go forward or stall. Republicans need to find out how high the scandal went and why, exactly, it went there. To do that they’ll have to up their game.

What a scandal it was. It had everything—beautiful women, spies, a semi-dashing government minister married to a movie star, a society doctor who functioned, essentially, as a pimp. And the backdrop was an august English country estate where intrigue had occurred before.

Unlike modern political sex scandals, which are cold and strange, it was what a scandal should be: dark, glamorous. Human. No furtive pictures of privates sent to strangers, no haggling over the prostitute’s bill.

President Kennedy loved hearing about the story, and when he was on the phone with his friend the British prime minister, as he often was, asking advice on Cuba or de Gaulle, he was as likely to be asking, sympathetically but pointedly as one who loves gossip would: How’s it going with Profumo? What’s the latest?

It was 50 years ago, the spring and summer of 1963. The prime minister was Harold Macmillan, the last Conservative giant before Margaret Thatcher but more broadly beloved, in part because he wasn’t all that conservative. He was in tune with his times, until he wasn’t. He’d been in government 11 years.

It came out that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, 48, had become involved with a group of people who gathered at Cliveden, the country estate of the Astor family, about whom controversy had swirled since World War II. Years later Macmillan would write in his diary: “The old ‘Cliveden’ set was disastrous politically. The new ‘Cliveden’ set is said to be equally disastrous morally.”

It was for Profumo. At a pool party hosted by the society doctor, he met a young woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler, who was either a dancer or a prostitute depending on the day and claimant. They commenced an affair. But Miss Keeler was also, she later said, romantically involved with the Soviet naval attaché assigned to London. Yevgeny Ivanov was there the day Profumo met her. And as all but children would have known, a Soviet military attaché was a Soviet spy.

The affair lasted a few months and was over by 1962. But there was a letter. And there were rumors. They surfaced in Parliament, where the Labour Party smelled blood.

When Profumo was caught, he panicked—and lied. That’s what did him in. And his lie was emphatic: He’d bring libel charges if the allegations were repeated outside the House.

Nearby, as he spoke, sat Harold Macmillan, glumly hoping or believing in his minister’s innocence. When Profumo, on the urging of his wife, came clean, Macmillan was left looking like a doddering Tory fool, a co-conspirator in a coverup, or at least a bungler of a major national-security question. Mortally wounded, he considered resigning. His government collapsed a year later.

Profumo—humiliated on every front page as an adulterer, a liar, a man of such poor judgment and irresponsibility that he mindlessly cavorted with enemy spies—was finished. Alistair Horne, in his biography of Macmillan, wrote of Profumo after the scandal as a “wretched” figure, “disgraced and stripped of all public dignities.”

Everyone hoped he’d disappear. He did. Then, three years later, he declared himself rehabilitated. In the midst of a classic Fleet Street scrum—”Do you still see whores?” demanded a hack from the Sun—Profumo announced he’d deepened and matured and was standing for Parliament “to serve the public.” Of course, he said, “It all depends on the voters, whether they can be forgiving. It’s all in their hands. I throw my candidacy on their mercy.”

Well, people didn’t want to think they were unmerciful. Profumo won in a landslide, worked his way up to party chief, and 12 years later ran for prime minister, his past quite forgotten, expunged, by his mounting triumphs.

Wait—that’s not what happened. Nothing like that happened! It’s the opposite of what happened.

Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.

He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.

He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.

And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years.

He didn’t give interviews, never wrote a book, didn’t go on TV. Alistair Horne: “Profumo . . . spent the rest of his life admirably dedicated to valuable good works, most loyally supported by his wife. At regular intervals, some journalist writing ‘in the public interest’ would rake up the old story to plague the ruined man and cause him renewed suffering. His haunted, unsmiling face was a living epitaph to the ‘Swinging Sixties.'”

In November 2003, to mark the 40th anniversary of his work, Profumo gave an interview to an old friend. “Jack,” said W.F. Deedes, “what have you learnt from this place?” After a pause for thought, Profumo said: “Humility.”

He was president of Toynbee by then, respected, but nothing quite said what needed saying like what happened at Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday party, in 1995. To show their countrymen what he’d done—and what they thought of what he’d done—they invited him, walked him through, and put him in a particular place. They seated him next to the queen. People wonder about the purpose of establishments. That is the purpose of establishments.

When he died in 2006, at 91, the reliably ironic Daily Telegraph wore its heart on its sleeve. “No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity as his name was repeatedly dragged through the mud; and few ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew him.”

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So what are we saying? You know.

We’re saying the answer to the politician’s question, “What is the optimum moment at which to come back from a big sex scandal, and how do I do it?” is this:

“You are asking the wrong question.”

The right questions would go something like: “What can I do to stop being greedy for power, attention and adulation? How can I come to understand that the question is not the public’s capacity to forgive, but my own capacity to exercise sound judgment and regard for others?

“How can I stop being a manipulator of public emotions and become the kind of person who generates headlines that parents are relieved—grateful—to explain to their children?”

And of course the answer is: You can do what John Profumo did. You can go away. You can do something good. You can help women instead of degrading them, help your culture and your city instead of degrading them.

You can become a man.

The air is full of the Battle of Gettysburg, whose 150th anniversary this week marked. Those who love history are thinking about Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the Peach Orchard, and all the valor and mistakes of men at war. The mystery of them, too. How did Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish young professor of rhetoric from Maine, turn into a steely-eyed warrior of the most extraordinary grit and guts at the exact moment those qualities were most needed? He was a living hinge of history. Why did Robert E. Lee, that military master who always knew when not to push it too far, push it too far and order Pickett to charge that open field?

At Gettysburg, great deeds were followed by great words. The battle won the war—it was the turning point—and a speech named the war’s meaning. We will mark the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address this fall.

What do we know of its writing? Still pretty much what John Nicolay told us in 1894, 31 years later. In an essay in The Century, a quarterly, Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s two private secretaries, sought to put to rest some myths.

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln would speak at the dedication of the new national cemetery. He had been invited just over two weeks before, so he wouldn’t have long to prepare his remarks. And he was busy with other things—a report to Congress, the day-to-day conduct of the war.

“There is no record of when Mr. Lincoln wrote the first sentences of his proposed address,” wrote Nicolay. “He probably followed his usual habit in such matters, using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts, and molding his phrases mentally, waiting to reduce them to writing until they had taken satisfactory form.”

This is a somewhat unusual way to write an important document. It’s how Samuel Johnson often wrote his essays, getting it right in his head and then committing it, almost fully formed, to paper. From my observation, writers of speeches tend to jot down thoughts, ideas and bits of language and then compose, draft after draft, from the notes. I asked a friend, a writer and artist, if he knew of another writer who wrote as Lincoln and Johnson did. “No, but I know of a great composer who seems to have done exactly that—Mozart.”

Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg by train, arriving near sundown the night before the speech. In his pocket, not his hat, he carried an almost-finished draft, written in ink on Executive Office stationery. He didn’t write any of the speech on the trip—there was too much bustle around him, and the train jerked too much.

That night in Gettysburg, Lincoln stayed in the home of David Wills, a local “eminento” who’d pushed the idea of the national cemetery and helped buy the land. The little town was overrun with visitors. A crowd gathered at Wills’s house and called out to Lincoln to speak.

Here we see a nice moment of the egalitarianism and lack of reverence with which 19th-century Americans approached their presidents.

Lincoln came out and said: “I appear before you . . . merely to thank you for the compliment.” He would not deliver a speech for “several substantial reasons.” One is that he didn’t have one. “In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things,” he added.

“If you can help it,” shot a voice from the crowd.

Lincoln said the only way to help it was to say “nothing at all.”

The next morning, Nicolay joined Lincoln upstairs and stayed for about an hour as the president, with lead pencil, finished the speech.

Days before, Lincoln had told the reporter Noah Brooks that the address would be “short, short, short.” He wasn’t the main speaker of the day; that was the famous orator Edward Everett, who spoke at noon, for two hours.

From Lincoln the crowd expected something quick, maybe pithy, possibly perfunctory. “They were therefore totally unprepared for what they heard,” Nicolay recalled, “and could not immediately realize that his words, and not those of the carefully selected orator, were to carry the concentrated thought of the occasion like a trumpet-peal to furthest posterity.”

Nicolay sat a few feet from Lincoln. “It is the distinct recollection of the writer . . . that he did not read from the written pages,” that there was nothing “mechanical” in his delivery. He spoke instead from “the fullness and conciseness of thought and memory.”

In the end there were three versions of the speech, all the same in meaning but with small stylistic differences.

There was the draft Lincoln wrote in Washington and finished in Gettysburg. There is the version taken down in shorthand by an Associated Press reporter as the president spoke—this would be telegraphed across the country and splashed on the next morning’s front pages. And there is the revised copy Lincoln made after his return to the White House. He compared his original draft with the version in the newspapers and included “his own recollections of the exact form in which he delivered” the speech. That draft is now the official, agreed-upon text.

More from Allen Guelzo’s new “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” a sweeping and meticulous recounting of the battle that never loses sight of its essentials. Mr. Guelzo, in an epilogue, says something about the Gettysburg Address I’d not seen noted in a life reading Lincoln.

It turns out Lincoln gave a kind of preview of the address only three days after the battle had ended. It was July 7. Word had reached the War Department of another Union triumph, on July 4, at Vicksburg, Miss. This greatly cheered a glum Lincoln, who’d been grieving Gen. George Meade’s decision not to follow and crush Lee’s forces as they retreated from Pennsylvania. What happened at Vicksburg underscored the momentum toward victory. Lincoln called the news “great. . . . It is great!”

Word swept through Washington. A crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and called for a speech.

Lincoln improvised from a second-floor window. Actually he rambled, but you can see where even then he was going. Guelzo puts Lincoln’s remarks in italics: “How long ago is it? . . . eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he said, had put the opponents of that truth on the run.

This, Lincoln said, was “a glorious theme,” but he was not prepared, at that moment, to do it justice.

He would, however, in the next two weeks, as he thought, and formulated, and decided exactly how he wanted to say what he wanted to say.

“How long ago is it—eighty odd years?” would become, “Four score and seven years ago.” Less dry and numeric, that. Almost biblical, as if the events of 1776 were epochal in the history of man.

Which is what he thought.

And he was right.

Happy 237th Independence Day to America, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.