Two topics, both having to do with presidencies. The New York Times last week recounted the memories of Ben Barnes, 84, who traveled to the Mideast in the summer of 1980, at the height of the U.S. presidential election, with his political mentor, Texas political powerhouse John Connally. There, Mr. Barnes said, Connally urged heads of state not to push for a deal with President Jimmy Carter to release the American hostages held in Iran, but to wait for Ronald Reagan to offer a better one. Versions of the story have been around for decades and sometimes used as an excuse for Mr. Carter’s loss: Nefarious Republicans went behind his back to thwart a humane outcome that would have benefited the incumbent. Highly partisan Democrats are like their Republican counterparts in that they always think their man didn’t lose but was cheated out of what was his. Yet the Times story had a respected figure (Mr. Barnes is a former Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor) on the record with first person testimony, so it was a legitimate exclusive, and the reporter, Peter Baker, is a pro of pros and not excitable.
However: Reagan beat Mr. Carter, an incumbent president with all an incumbency’s powers, 489 electoral votes to 49. He won 44 of 50 states. He carried the popular vote by 9.7 points. America hadn’t seen a sitting president lose in a landslide since FDR took out Herbert Hoover in 1932. Moreover, Reagan won that big when half the country thought of him, understandably, as a Hollywood movie star, and not as what he was politically—a successful former two-term governor, a union president for more than five years, and the voice of rising modern conservatism.
Reagan didn’t win like that for one reason but many. Mr. Carter hadn’t impressed the American people as a capable president. The economy was a misery, the post-Vietnam military a shambles, the world was so dissing us it was dragging our diplomats out of our embassies. When Mr. Carter tried to rescue the hostages militarily, it ended in the aborted and humiliating catastrophe of Desert One. No wonder Reagan picked Mr. Carter up by the neck like a cat and threw him aside.
The idea Mr. Carter lost because he couldn’t get the hostages out by Election Day is simplistic and dumb. The crisis was already baked in the cake. America would have loved seeing them returned, but a year of mishandling Iran had made its impression.
As for Ben Barnes’s memories, I don’t think he was being untruthful. I think the old man was remembering what he came, in time, to interpret of Connally’s motives and actions, as witnessed by a savvy young rube 43 years ago. I would put nothing past John Connally, who was savvy and not a rube. He had been indispensable to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and wished to be indispensable to Reagan. A little independent action might help the cause. Would Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey make a point to hear out Connally on his return? I think he would!
Beyond that, who knows? All the other major players are dead, and Mr. Barnes had no diaries or notes as evidence for his assertions.
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But: Would Ronald Reagan OK a scheme to lengthen the imprisonment of American hostages in Iran to bolster his personal political prospects? He almost killed his own presidency a few years later in an attempt to free an American agent imprisoned by Islamic jihadists in the same place. Reagan’s preoccupation with the suffering of the CIA’s William Buckley resulted in a jerky, far-fetched scheme that would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.
Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 because America saw him for what he was, a good man who was a poor president. Ronald Reagan didn’t beat him because he was cruelly indifferent to the suffering of others. He was a good man too.
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As to our second topic, we throw up our hands and ask: Have we totally lost our marbles? An American grand jury is apparently about to criminally indict, for the first time in history, a former president of the United States. This is a weighty and meaningful act. It couldn’t have more gravity. And so the charge will be . . . falsely accounting for hush money paid to a porn star?
One of the marks of personal maturity is a sense of proportion. A healthy democracy has a gracious sense of the rightness and wrongness of things, and is alive to symbols and signs. Is this, perhaps, the wrong indictment to bring?
On and in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump encouraged and unleashed an assault on our Constitution. Before that he appears to have waged a concerted and thuggish effort to overturn a democratic outcome in the state of Georgia.
For these things he deserves it all—the indictment, the handcuffs, the mug shot, the hauling into court, the bail hearing. Georgia and Jan. 6 are big and serious events, worthy of the strictest legal approach and subject to all legal remedies. These events are being investigated, the former through a state grand jury, the latter through a federal special counsel.
You say, but those cases aren’t ready! Then wait. Allow a serious process to play out seriously.
Charging him in the Stormy Daniels case is below us—not below him, but us. The subject matter is below us. The nature of the charges is below us. The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things. The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right and also in the way all “close Trump advisers” past and present are half-mad: money-addled, fame-addled, power-addled, screwball in their thinking.
“No one is above the law.” True, and an important tenet of democracy. But no nation is above good judgment.
“But the hush money payments likely had tax implications.” Everything has tax implications, hold your fire.
“But that’s how we got Al Capone—we couldn’t charge him for being a murderous gangster so we got his books and indicted him for tax evasion.” Yes, but Al Capone wasn’t president. We didn’t owe even a small civic courtesy to his supporters. And his prosecution was met by no public division but only applause, as America was coming to enjoy the beautiful new myth—the Untouchables, the straight arrow G-Man, the brave and faithful young FBI agent—that was just arising to take the place of the old myth of the cowboy. We loved putting Al Capone in the slammer. It cost us nothing.
Whether indictment helps or hurts Mr. Trump’s political prospects is irrelevant. We have to think more broadly than that. He has called on his supporters to arise and . . . do something, it’s not quite clear. He wants a big public reaction. Will he get it? I don’t think he has that kind of juice anymore. His followers know what happened to the people he inspired to overrun the Capitol: They’re in jail.
The question is, Are we doing the wise thing? No. Hold your fire. Save the mug shot for Georgia, the handcuffs for Jan. 6. Those were real offenses against the country. Not Stormy Daniels, which was an offense against his wife.