On the last Saturday in April, 1979, President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter met in the Oval Office with one of the people who helped put them in the White House: pollster Patrick Caddell.

The 28-year-old former campaign aide had developed a back-channel connection to Rosalynn, who fretted about the president’s failing political fortunes. Her husband was at first reluctant to meet with Caddell, according to one of his former White House staffers, but on that day, “Jimmy Carter began to come under his spell.”

We know that because of former White House domestic adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat’s thousand-page memoir, President Carter: The White House Years. Eizenstat was not only a trusted aide to the president but also an industrious note-taker, who documented Carter’s single term in microscopic detail.

What happened after the Saturday Oval Office meeting was extraordinary.

As an oil shortage following Iran’s Islamic revolution forced Americans to wait in line for gasoline, the president’s approval rating continued to plummet.

Now that he was even below the level President Richard Nixon had registered during the Watergate scandal, Carter was willing to entertain far-reaching changes in his approach to governing. Among the steps he took: replacing a planned speech on energy policy with a soul-baring address on America’s “crisis of confidence” and demanding that his Cabinet members offer him their resignations so he could shake up the government.

Carter’s reshuffle was abrupt and politically damaging. He did in one day what President Donald Trump is doing bit by bit as he offloads Cabinet-level officials who run afoul of the White House. So far this year they have all been women: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

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Other changes may be in the offing, perhaps prompting Cabinet officials to lash out proactively to fend off a “you’re fired” from the former Apprentice host. FBI Director Kash Patel sued the Atlantic over devastating coverage of his leadership. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Secretary of the Navy in the midst of that service’s blockade of Iranian ports, weeks after he axed the Army chief of staff during the war with Iran.

However richly deserved some of Trump’s Cabinet firings might be, throwing people overboard is no recipe for success in Washington. As Eizenstat wrote in his 2018 book of Carter’s upheaval, “When this ghastly period was over, the Gallup poll of September 14 showed his ratings were the lowest of any president in three decades. And Senator Ted Kennedy saw a clear path to deny the renomination of his party’s president.”

Rasputin

Detractors who learned of the Carter couple’s increasing reliance on Pat Caddell inevitably compared him to the bearded Russian monk Grigori Rasputin, who exercised inordinate influence over Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. Even Carter’s close aide Hamilton Jordan cited the Romanov royal family’s disastrous experience with the monk.

Rasputin’s presence appeared to improve the health of their hemophiliac son. Caddell’s presence was less mystical but equally intense.

“Pat Caddell was not satisfied with providing poll numbers for the president,” Eizenstat recalled, “he saw deeper trends in American society that he impressed upon the president and first lady with ferocity. He sported a heavy black beard with a streak of white that made it appear he had been touched by lightning—and in a sense he had been. He also wore a perpetual frown under a furrowed brow, and his eyes seemed to be lit by embers of coal, so intense was his visage.”

Caddell’s polls revealed that Americans had lost their usual optimism about the future. The combination of low economic growth and high inflation — stagflation — soured people on the prospect of upward mobility. The Vietnam War and Watergate planted seeds of distrust in the basic institutions of government. Spiritually, Americans were drifting away from organized religion and questioning the nation’s values.

The polls, Caddell wrote, showed “an alarming decline in confidence in the country, both in the political system and in people’s expectations for the future, never registered before in data that goes back to the 1940s.”

Now there were “more pessimists than optimists, which is unheard of in America.” And the mood was shifting, with people “much more hostile, much more greedy, much more short-term, and much more volatile.”

A moral crisis

For Carter, the ascetic Sunday school-teacher in the White House, this sense of a moral crisis resonated. It was a battleground on which he felt comfortable operating, unlike the political horse-trading that left him cold.

Caddell brought leading academic experts to the White House to alert the president to a crisis of alienation in America. But he faced pushback from many in the administration, and not least the vice president and experienced Washington hand Walter Mondale.

“When the president gave Caddell’s memo to Mondale,” Eizenstat wrote, “he exploded in anger, telling me Caddell was selling a ‘bunch of crap’ taken from books he might have read in college, and dismissing Caddell’s analysis as ‘crazy,’ a view shared by the vice president’s top staff.”

Mondale would later tell aides he was so upset with Carter’s support for Caddell’s prescriptions that he was thinking of resigning as vice president.

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Mondale and many Carter aides, including Eizenstat, thought the president’s problems were primarily economic and political, not spiritual. “Gasoline lines were spreading across the country, and rising prices of fuel and other necessities had reached deep into American pockets,” Eizenstat recalled.

But Carter read Caddell’s extensive analytical memo on July 4th, 1979 and termed it “one of the most brilliant analyses of sociological and political interrelationships I have ever seen. The more I read it along with Rosalynn, the more I became excited.”

The president had made peace between Egypt and Israel during an unprecedented 13-day ordeal at Camp David; now he used the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland for a week of discussions with leaders and experts from government, religion, business and labor, all trying to diagnose the problem facing America (and Carter).

Washington powerbroker Clark Clifford told Eizenstat that his experience at Camp David was “as unusual a weekend as I have ever spent. The president of the United States was sitting on the floor with a big pad of yellow paper, taking notes while people sat around him, five or six of us, and told him what he was doing wrong.”

The result was a dramatic speech to the nation. Carter said, “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption [and are] no longer identified by what one does, but by what one owns.”

It became known as the “malaise” speech, but Carter never used that word. It was used by Caddell in his memo, which was leaked to a reporter.

In any event, the speech worked, Eizenstat noted:

In one night Carter’s approval rating jumped 17 points as measured by the Gallup poll, the greatest gain ever recorded by a modern president in such a short time, except for a speech seeking a declaration of war. Newsweek stayed open beyond its Saturday deadline to cover the Sunday address, then put Carter on the cover with a halo. On television CBS’s normally skeptical Roger Mudd approved of the speech wholeheartedly: “A very strong one, very upbeat.”

Carter connected with his audience, partly because he admitted his own shortcomings. “Also, the American people still liked Jimmy Carter and wanted him to succeed,” wrote Eizenstat.

Cabinet shake-up

Hamilton Jordan, who Carter then elevated to White House chief of staff, was among several voices urging the president to follow up his speech by taking action, including firing several members of his Cabinet. But rather than do that surgically, Carter made every Cabinet member submit a resignation letter.

In the end, five cabinet secretaries departed, although at least a couple of those were voluntary.

“All the goodwill built up by the retreat to Camp David and the president’s speech seemed to be thrown away in a sophomoric effort to look tough,” wrote Eizenstat.

In his book, the former White House aide makes a strong case that Carter was a consequential president, in a good way. He protected vast stretches of public land (including more than 100 million acres in Alaska), deregulated industries such as airlines and telecommunications, started increasing defense spending that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and put America on a course toward energy self-sufficiency.

Carter placed Paul Volcker at the head of the Federal Reserve, where the banker eventually broke the double-digit inflation that bedeviled the American economy. Perhaps the president’s greatest accomplishment was the treaty that has kept the peace between Egypt and Israel for nearly 50 years.

But Eizenstat is also honest about Carter’s failures, including a refusal to compromise and a baffling lack of commitment to the basic block-and-tackling that is needed to get things done in Washington.

The stereotype of Carter as a “weak and hapless president” wasn’t fair, Eizenstat wrote. At many points in his term, he showed great fortitude and took risks to achieve his aims. But many of his accomplishments were buried under the wreckage of his failed mission to rescue the American hostages seized by Iran.

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Trump’s trouble

As President Donald Trump watches his own approval ratings fall to new lows in 2026, he too is unable to solve the problem posed by the enmity between the U.S. and Iran. He is also grappling with inflation made worse by conflict with the Islamic regime.

Trump, who was 34 when Carter left office, once said of him, “He’s a nice man. He was a terrible President.”

Does Trump ever reflect on the contrast between his second term and Carter’s four years in the White House? And does he wonder if history will treat him the way it has Jimmy Carter, as a failed president?

In 2002, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Jimmy Carter for his post-presidency — "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." Of course, it is the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump has lusted after, as he claims to have ended 10 wars. The decision to attack Iran, with its devastation and worldwide economic consequences, likely killed his Nobel chances for good.

There was one holdover from the Carter era that stretched into Trump’s first term: Pat Caddell. The pollster never gave up his central analytical point: that Americans had fundamentally lost faith in their country.

“By 2016,” Eizenstat wrote, “Caddell had moved into the orbit of Donald Trump and served as pollster and sometime adviser to the candidate and his billionaire backers. Steve Bannon, Trump’s political guru, likened Caddell to an ‘Old Testament prophet’ for propounding the same message of voter alienation for a quarter of a century.”

John Fund wrote, “Few people had more to do with Donald Trump’s amazing victory in 2016,” than Caddell, who died of a stroke in 2019 at 68.

Caddell’s polls showed that “political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House,” wrote Jane Mayer.

Of course, the hope for an outsider president to drain the swamp has been a recurrent theme of American politics, from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. The question now is whether Jimmy Carter’s unhappy experience in the 1970s and, even more so, the chaos of the Trump presidency, will be enough to cure us of the “outsider” impulse.

Pope Gregory VII’s register for the year 1075 includes a set of 27 “dictates” that set out a sweeping view of papal authority.

Popes can depose emperors, the document asserted. They can free people from an obligation to follow immoral leaders. No one can judge a pope. His name must be recited in church. And the pope is the only figure whose feet must be kissed by kings.

Leave it to France’s Cardinal Richelieu, the minister to King Louis XIII, to come up with the appropriate riposte six centuries later. If the attribution to him is correct, the cardinal quipped, “We kiss the pope’s feet — and bind his hands.”

The struggle between popes and secular leaders for pre-eminence has been going on for a very long time. But it has been a while since it surfaced in as crude a form as it did, according to the Free Press, at a January Pentagon meeting attended by Pope Leo XIV’s U.S. representative. In the National Catholic Reporter, Aleja Hertzler-McCain referred to it as a “peculiar meeting.”

One Pentagon official, objecting to papal criticism of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, reportedly tried to intimidate the pope’s nuncio by mentioning the move — under royal pressure — of the papal seat from Rome to what is now the southern French city of Avignon in the 14^th century.

There, seven popes under the shadow of France’s monarchy ruled the church for 68 years. And for four decades after that, rival claimants to the papacy simultaneously sat in Rome and Avignon. It was an ordeal that forever doomed the grandiose conception of the papacy sketched out by Pope Gregory VII’s dictates. (None of the principals who attended the meeting has publicly confirmed the Free Press account.)

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Last week, President Trump made a much more public — and much less subtle — attack on the Pope. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump posted on Truth Social. The president stirred the pot further by disseminating the now-famous (and now-removed) post with a drawing of Trump as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick.

The pope has spoken out against Trump’s immigration crackdown, the U.S. war with Iran and the president’s threat to eliminate Iran’s civilization. “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do,” the Chicago-born Leo said. He has since told reporters he is not trying to debate the president, “which is not in my interest at all.”

Without evidence, Trump asserted that Leo wouldn’t be pope if Trump wasn’t in the White House, suggesting that the cardinal electors may have thought it useful to have an American in the role at a time when Trump is disrupting the world order. That is a somewhat similar thought to the process that led to the election of the seven French popes who served in Avignon at a time of rocky relations with the kings of France.

My former Newsday colleague Bob Keeler, a Pulitzer-Prize winning religion writer, pointed to Pope Francis’s choice of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to head the church’s office for selecting bishops as the likely credential that won him the papacy. “The election of Leo XIV has a lot to do with his predecessor and nothing to do with Trump,” wrote Keeler.

Trump’s overreaction to criticism from Pope Leo reflects his shaky grasp on history, as well as his insecurity.

When the Bush administration was heading to war against Iraq in 2003, Pope John Paul II publicly told diplomats at the Vatican, “No to war!” Popes have sounded that theme for more than a century. Andrea Tornielli wrote for Vatican News:

From the 1917 letter to the belligerent nations by Pope Benedict XV, which described the First World War as a “useless slaughter,” to the efforts of Pope Pius XII to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War; from the words of Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), who wrote that “it is almost impossible to think that in the atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice,” to the cry of Pope Paul VI at the United Nations, “No more war!” — and the often unheard appeals of Pope John Paul II to prevent disastrous conflicts in the Middle East: the Successors of Peter have consistently raised their voices with both prophetic insight and realism, though sadly they have often gone unheard.

It’s important to note that these Popes were speaking as leaders of the church, not attempting to intervene in any material way — and that is a marked change from the times, centuries ago, when popes asserted the right to overrule kings. Catholic doctrine permits wars of self-defense but under strict conditions.

Should popes be discouraged from speaking out on moral issues such as war? Vatican history provides a vivid example of the consequences.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Fascism and Communism, Pope Pius XI had issued three denunciations of totalitarianism. While suffering from heart disease in 1938, the 81-year-old pope summoned an American Jesuit priest to draft a fourth encyclical. As another former Newsday journalist Peter Eisner wrote in The Pope’s Last Crusade, Pius wanted him “to write a papal declaration such as never had been seen before, one that firmly and categorically represented the Church's vision of the conflagration facing Europe. This would be the church's strongest statement ever, an encyclical that rejected anti-Semitism and the Nazi doctrine that espoused it.”

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But Pius died of a heart attack in February, 1939 with the draft of the encyclical and a similarly themed speech sitting on his desk. His successor, a longtime church diplomat who took the name of Pius XII, shrank from such a public repudiation of Nazism.

As Frank J. Coppa wrote, the new pope “scrupulously avoided partisanship and shunned public condemnations. By nature shy, reserved, and gentle, Pius XII lacked the fighting spirit of his predecessor.”

The oldest institution

Papal history is an enormous compendium. As Thomas F.X. Noble of Notre Dame University has pointed out in a series of lectures, the church was already on its 250^th pope when George Washington was elected as U.S. president in 1789. “The papacy is the oldest continuously functioning institution in the world,” Noble said.

It has survived so long by adapting, trying to find new relevance as circumstances change. Some of the early popes experimented with asserting a grand view of their authority. Pope Gelasius, who reigned from 492 to 496, wrote to the Eastern Roman emperor that “there are two powers by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the authority of kings.” And which of these is superior? “The authority of the priests is so much the weightier, as they must render before the tribunal of God an account even for the kings of men.”

Nicholas I, who served as pope from 858 to 867, thought along similar lines. He refused to let King Lothar of Lorraine divorce his wife on a trumped-up charge of adultery and deposed two archbishops who had supported the king’s bid for approval. In response, Lothar besieged Rome, but the pope and king eventually reconciled (although the king stayed with his new wife).

It wasn’t until the period from the election of Gregory VII in 1073 until the death of Boniface VIII in 1303 that “the papacy attained the height of its power, prestige and influence,” Noble said.

The period has been termed “the papal monarchy.”

As Colin Morris wrote in a book with that title in 1991, “In the proper sense of the words, papal monarchy was impossible. A pope could no more rule a kingdom than a king could say mass.” But, he added:

The ineffectiveness of state power at the beginning of our period meant that the clergy supervised activities which in the ancient or the modern world alike have been the business of the state or voluntary societies. These included the provision of hospitals and schools, jurisdiction over marriage and probate, the defence of Christendom against the infidel, and the preservation of peace within its borders. As the supreme authority within the church popes had final responsibility for all these matters, and it is striking to find how many major initiatives were undertaken directly by the Roman Church: the history of the crusades, of the friars, and of the inquisition, for example, was shaped by papal decisions.

The church’s responsibility to care for the souls of laymen gave it apparent supremacy over kings, Morris noted. “Many writers were prepared to see in the papacy an authority above earthly kings, and such language was not always rejected by the lay powers, however carefully they defended their customary rights.”

Crossing the Alps

In 1076, Pope Gregory clashed with Emperor Henry IV over which potentate had the right to appoint the bishops of German cities. Zealously guarding his prerogatives as pope, Gregory deposed and excommunicated Emperor Henry IV, telling his subjects they didn’t have to obey him. The German princes gave the emperor a deadline of February 22, 1077 to persuade the pope to reinstate him — or they would replace Henry.

Despite one of the worst winters in memory, Henry set out to cross the Alps and beg the pope’s forgiveness. He hired local guides, but the snow, ice and cold were fierce.

As Peter Konieczny wrote, a medieval chronicler captured the stress of the trip:

In that situation the men tried to overcome every danger using their own strength, now crawling on their hands and feet, now clinging to the shoulders of their guides and also occasionally, when a foot slipped on an icy surface, falling and rolling down for a considerable distance. At last with difficulty and for a time at serious risk of their lives they reached the plains. The queen and the other women who were in her service were placed in the hides of oxen and the guides who had been hired to lead the expedition dragged them down behind them.

That was how Henry’s entourage limped up to the castle of Canossa, owned by Matilda, the Countess of Tuscany.

Pope Gregory, who was staying there, described what Henry did next:

Once arrived, he presented himself at the gate of the castle, barefoot and clad only in wretched woollen garments, beseeching us with tears to grant him absolution and forgiveness. This he continued to do for three days, until all those about us were moved to compassion at his plight and interceded for him with tears and prayers.

The pope relented, absolved Henry and had dinner with him. But the truce didn’t last. Gregory would excommunicate Henry a second time; a resulting war forced Gregory to flee Rome and he died in Salerno.

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The zenith of papal power came in the reign of Innocent III, from 1198 to 1216. He dramatically expanded the Papal States, gaining the approval of cities near to Rome — and far away — to the pope’s temporal rule as well as his spiritual one. To those cities, Innocent wrote letters describing his conception of power.

“Papal authority was represented by the Sun, and the Moon signified the power of lay princes,” the Encyclopedia Britannica noted. “Both powers were established by God, he explained, but, just as the Moon received its splendour from the Sun, royal power acquired its greatness and dignity from papal authority.”

Avignon

With such a muscular history of papal power, why is it that Trump can decide on war and Leo can’t stop him? Simply put, it’s the history of the last eight centuries — and particularly what happened at Avignon.

In the midst of a war with England, French King Philip IV started imposing taxes on French clergy to raise money, even though the practice violated a church decree. In 1296, Pope Boniface issued a bull declaring that no ruler could tax members of the church without papal approval. The king responded by cutting off revenues the church had been receiving from France. It was a smart move: Boniface backed down and gave Philip approval to tax the clergy without seeking permission.

As in the case of the clash between Gregory and Henry, this resolution wouldn’t last. A new dispute erupted when Philip arrested a bishop sent to the king by the pope to admonish the monarch. Before the bishop was released, the pope had issued bulls against Philip, one of which a French courtier threw into the fireplace in front of the pope’s representative. The king’s supporters then forged a papal bull to make the pope look bad.

The pope was losing patience. As Andrew Latham wrote, Boniface’s next move “came in the form of a bull, Unam sanctam, that mentioned neither Philip nor France, but that instead articulated in general terms the theological case for papal supremacy.”

It was all downhill from here. The king’s supporters accused the pope of heresy; the pope excommunicated some French clergy and asserted that he would fill vacant positions in the French church.

King Philip’s soldiers, joined by Roman enemies of the pope, confronted Boniface in the town of Anagni, southeast of Rome. “It is likely that he was physically assaulted by the soldiers,” Latham wrote. The “Slap of Anagni” would shake the western world. Yet Boniface held on to his papal seat, managing to return to Rome on September 25, 1303. The pontiff, believed to be between 68 and 73 years old at the time, died of a fever 17 days later.

Benedict XI, who succeeded Boniface, died within a year. The cardinals, taking no chance, elected a pope from France, Clement V. He chose to reside at Avignon, which though near to France was then controlled by the King of Naples, rather than travel to Rome.

The seven popes who reigned in Avignon from 1309 to 1377 were all French; when a pope finally returned to Rome, it didn’t heal the church’s wounds. The church Council of Constance finally resolved the dispute with the election of a new pope in 1417.

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There are still signs of the church’s exile, sometimes referred to as the “Babylonian captivity,” in southern France. You can visit the hulking Gothic Palais des Papes and at local restaurants, sip Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the potent red wine named for the nearby village where the Avignon popes built their summer residence.

The experience of the exile left a less pleasing imprint on church history. So you can understand why even hinting that Pope Leo risks an Avignon-like schism in the church would be distressing to him and the Roman curia.

Still, the pope may have had the last laugh. When he was asked about Trump’s posts on Truth Social, he said, "It's ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more."

At the age of 15, Hugo Grotius so impressed Henry IV, king of France, with his intelligence that the monarch declared him “the miracle of Holland.”

At 17, the budding Dutch legal scholar argued his first case. Soon he would be named Attorney-General of the provinces of Holland, Zealand and West Friesland. But Grotius chose the losing side in a 17th Century theological dispute that had explosive political ramifications.

That was why Prince Maurice of Nassau imprisoned Grotius, then in his mid-30s, for life at Loevestein castle. The inmate’s clever wife Maria gained permission to move into the castle. As the vigilance of the guards gradually waned, Maria saw an opportunity. She told the wife of the warden that Hugo was sick from overwork and vowed to get rid of his borrowed books.

Maria had air holes drilled into a wooden book chest. She persuaded Hugo to curl up inside the container, which biographer Samuel Butler says was no more than three and a half feet long. Soldiers carried it to a boat, thinking they bore a particularly heavy load of books and accompanied by a maid who may have inhibited them from opening it. At a nearby town, the chest was taken to the home of a friend of Grotius, who set him on the road to freedom.

The escape, on March 22, 1621, has its historical resonances: a scholar literally finding his salvation in books, an imprisoned philosopher of freedom achieving his own liberty. Yet in our own time, the Dutch thinker commands attention because of his eloquent defense of the freedom of the seas.

“Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it,” Grotius wrote, in 1609’s Mare Liberum (The Free Sea). “For do not the ocean, navigable in every direction with which God has encompassed all the earth, and the regular and the occasional winds which blow now from one quarter and now from another, offer sufficient proof that Nature has given to all peoples a right of access to all other peoples?”

This is the principle at stake when any nation attempts to seize control of a narrow waterway and asserts a right to decide who shall pass. Iran’s effort to rule over (and profit from) traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil normally transits, is a clear violation of the freedom of navigation Grotius advocated more than 400 years ago.

For more than two centuries, American presidents and the U.S. Navy have led the charge to open such chokeholds. Most nations would support that principle and stand with the U.S. Indeed the Navy sent two destroyers into the strait Friday to try to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of navigation.

But President Donald Trump is particularly ill suited for the role of free-sea advocate. He recently scoffed at legal principles for the planet. “I don’t need international law,” he told the New York Times in January. “I’m not looking to hurt people.” He said then the only constraint on his power was “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Moreover, he repeatedly trashes America’s allies and has denied that they and the U.S. have a common interest in opening the strait. He told NATO allies to find a way to solve the problem on their own.

“The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” he said in his primetime speech to Americans. “We don’t need it.” That of course ignores the importance of traffic through the strait in restraining the prices Americans pay at the gas pump and the impact of blocked deliveries of fertilizer on the world’s food supply.

Last week Trump floated the idea of a “joint venture” with Iran to control the strait; that’s not freeing up the sea but rather proposing to share in the ill-gotten billions Iran may reap by charging tolls.

The president seemed to change course Sunday, when he declared the U.S. Navy would blockade the strait to prevent ships that pay a toll to Iran to travel out of it. The U.S. military described the blockade differently: it would apply only to ships heading to, and leaving from, Iranian ports. While Trump said other countries would join the blockade, none had stepped forward as of Monday morning, and the U.K. said it wouldn’t participate.

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Other American leaders have understood that if one nation can illegally dominate a vital chokepoint, the principle that the seas can be used as an open highway — a rule that benefits all of us — will be threatened.

Hormuz isn’t an isolated case; there are “more than 100 straits used for international navigation of critical importance for global commerce and military transit,” said John Norton Moore, in a 2017 speech at the U.S. Naval War College. Moore is a University of Virginia Law School professor emeritus who served as chair of the U.S. National Security Council Interagency Task Force on the Law of the Sea and ambassador and deputy special representative of the president to the law of the sea conference.

As the Financial Times pointed out, there are some limited examples of tolls charged for waterways: “Experts suggest the Bosphorus, a Turkish territorial waterway, is the nearest comparison to Hormuz. It is governed by the Montreux Convention, which allows Ankara to charge ships not for transit but for lighthouse, health inspection and rescue services, calculated based on net tonnage. The revenues amount to about $250 million from ships that do not dock.”

The stakes in the overall cause of free seas are enormous: more than 80% of the world’s goods are traded by sea, and the oceans — making up 71% of the earth’s surface — are the prime arena for projecting military power.

Grotius

In advocating a free sea, Grotius wasn’t writing in a vacuum. He was avidly promoting his own national and financial interest in allowing ships of the Dutch East India Company to trade in Asia. He condemned the Treaty of Tordesillas, which sought to divide the seas into areas controlled either by Spain or Portugal.

As Martine Julia van Ittersum wrote in a 2010 article in the journal History of European Ideas, “Grotius cooperated closely with the directors of the Dutch East India Company in the years 1604-1615….Right up to his arrest for high treason in August 1618, he contributed towards Dutch government discussions about the establishment of a West India Company (WIC). Three years of imprisonment at Loevestein Castle and, following his escape, long years of exile could not weaken his dedication to the cause.”

“In his view, the Dutch had gone to the Indies as merchants, not conquerors, and should regulate themselves according to natural law and the law of nations.”

The American belief in freedom of navigation also began as a self-interested move. The infant nation created in 1776 could not seriously challenge the British navy or the land forces of France; it sought to be a neutral nation profiting from the trade carried on ships.

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Britain argued that the waters nearest her home islands were a narrow sea: “the King of Great Britain is Lord of the Sea flowing about, as an inseparable and perpetual Appendant of the British Empire," wrote John Selden, in his 1635 book Mare Clausum.

Britain seized American sailors and pressed them into serving in the British Navy. It commandeered U.S. merchant ships carrying goods intended for France and its colonies, and France did likewise to ships carrying goods headed for Britain. American vessels also had to contend with the Barbary pirates, who threatened maritime commerce for three centuries.

As James Kraska and Raul Pedrozo wrote in their 2018 book The Free Sea, the fate of those seized by the Barbary powers was even grimmer than those pressed into the British navy: “Chained to their oars, they sat, ate, slept, and defecated on a one-foot-wide bench; often they were not unchained for months at a time or until they collapsed from exhaustion and died — at which point they were thrown overboard.”

In 1794, Congress sought to oppose the Barbary threat by approving construction of six warships, including the Constitution, which remains a commissioned naval ship.

During the Quasi War with France in the late 1790s, Congress officially created the U.S. Navy and the Marines. From October, 1796 to June 1797,” Kraska and Pedrozo wrote, “French raiders captured 316 American ships” — six percent of the US merchant fleet. Marine insurance rates soared, from 6 to 30 percent of the cargo value. For ships bound to the West Indies, the insurance cost increased by as much as 600 percent.

U.S. warships saw repeated action, not only in the Quasi War, but in later battles against the North African powers and in the War of 1812 against the British. Naval combat would again deeply involve the U.S. as it sought to protect merchant ships from German submarines in World Wars I and II.

After those wars, the U.S. took the lead in pushing for free seas. In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was approved, with more than 160 countries participating in the process. It took effect in 1994. The U.S. Senate has not ratified the treaty, but America generally abides by its provisions.

As John Norton Moore observed:

The rule of law matters. Law serves to provide clear expectations as to jurisdictional boundaries and national rights and obligations so necessary for co-operative relations, economic life, and more broadly, human creativity. Thus, we need to know the breadth of the territorial sea, who manages coastal stocks of fish, the rules for straits transit and a myriad of other rules to function cooperatively in the oceans. If some states claim three nautical miles for the territorial sea and others two hundred nautical miles, we simply do not know the basic rules. But of even greater importance, the rule of law serves as a check on power. An oceans space driven by out-of-control national claims and a “might makes right” credo can neither serve community common interests nor restrain conflict. The Law of the Sea Convention is a remarkable achievement in the rule of law—providing both stability and a check on power.

The Law of the Sea established that nations could govern fishing, oil drilling and seabed mining within a 200-mile “exclusive economic zone” radiating outward from their coasts, but allowed other nations to send ships freely through those zones. Otherwise, more than half of all coastal nations would be effectively land-locked, Moore said.

But while there’s general agreement with the Law of the Sea, there are many clashes: for example, China asserts that its 200-mile zone is only open to foreign commercial ships; the U.S. maintains that military ships can travel freely through it.

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Tanker War

In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war led to repeated attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, with Iran often adopting the tactics it is now trying to apply to prevent ship travel. Neutral ships, Kraska and Pedrozo noted, can be stopped and searched by nations that are at war, but they cannot be legally captured or destroyed. Both Iran and Iraq violated that rule, with nearly 500 ships attacked from 1980 to 1987.

“Iran repeatedly warned it would close the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping if Iraq succeeded in interdicting its oil exports,” wrote Kraska and Pedrozo. The U.S. caught Iran in the act of laying mines in the gulf, a violation of international law. The U.S. frigate Stark was attacked, perhaps accidentally, by an Iraqi fighter, killing 37 American sailors.

President Ronald Reagan said he wouldn’t let Iran control the strait. “Freedom of navigation is not an empty cliché of international law. It is essential to the health and safety of America and the strength of our alliance…”

The U.S., U.K. and Soviet Union sought to protect shipping by allowing foreign-flagged ships to be reflagged as their own. Following a UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. Navy provided a convoy for U.S.-flagged tankers in Operation Earnest Will. Five European nations also provided protection for ships.

The U.S. attacked an Iranian ship laying mines, as well as offshore oil drilling platforms that were being used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, as part of Operation Praying Mantis. Those counter-measures eventually ended the Tanker War.

“Three Iranian command-and-control platforms were destroyed. Six Iranian vessels were sunk and the [Iranian frigate] Sabalan heavily damaged,” Kraska and Pedrozo wrote. “The United States lost one AH-1 attack helicopter…and its two-man crew.”

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Tragically, a U.S. Navy ship, the Vincennes, wrongly assessed a civilian airliner as an incoming missile, and shot it down, killing 290 people. The U.S. expressed regret and paid $131.8 million in compensation.

Summing up the lesson of the Tanker War, Kraska and Pedrozo noted, “Iran’s decision to forego further challenges to U.S. naval power in the Persian Gulf and halt attacks on U.S.-flagged shipping illustrates the country’s typical characteristic of de-escalation when confronted with a determined, superior force.”

The Law of Reason

The history of conflict over the free seas demonstrates the need for calm, determined leadership. Will we get that from Donald Trump?

This is another area in which Hugo Grotius can be a helpful guide. The Dutch philosopher believed in the importance of reason, even when it threatened to diminish the claims of religion.

"Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself,” he wrote in The Law of War and Peace. “For although the power of God is infinite, yet there are some things, to which it does not extend.” Even God, he wrote, can’t deny that two plus two equals four, nor make something that is evil not evil.

Moreover, he argued, a person can only lead others if he is in control of his own inclinations and can submit to reason.

“A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.”

The shah, wearing sunglasses and a light gray suit, “was pale and grave and had a two-day growth of beard on his chin,” The New York Times reported. His wife, “in a brown silk dress and sunglasses, was disheveled and seemed on the verge of tears.” They hadn’t slept in 48 hours, though the Times added archly that they were “both out sightseeing within two hours of reaching their hotel.”

The royal couple’s trauma had a simple explanation: the apparent failure of an American- and British-backed coup to oust Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and place absolute power in the hands of the shah.

Except for one thing.

By the time the shah and his wife sat down to dine that day at the Excelsior Hotel, word reached them the coup’s plotters had actually succeeded in toppling Mossadegh. The shah was free to go home — and to rule. In his book King of Kings, Scott Anderson captures the awkwardness of the moment. “It was a somewhat sheepish King of Kings who returned to Tehran three days later to reassume the Peacock Throne,” Anderson wrote.

Even then, some American officials were wondering if they were right to place their faith in the shah.

The 1953 coup was only the beginning of a series of disastrous mistakes the U.S. would make in dealing with Iran over the next 73 years. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would make another aerial escape from Tehran, in 1978, this time for good. And his replacement would be far worse.

47 years

In his Wednesday evening televised speech, President Donald Trump was right about at least one thing: the U.S. has been at war with Iran for nearly half a century.

“This fanatical regime has been chanting death to America, death to Israel, for 47 years,” and as Trump pointed out, tried to bring those aims to fruition with terrorist attacks against both countries. The prospect of Iran developing nuclear weapons is nightmarish, though it’s not clear if the ongoing war will eliminate that threat.

What Trump didn’t say, and perhaps doesn’t know, is that the U.S. has an even longer track record of failing to understand Iran and at crucial moments, making catastrophically bad choices. American officials enabled the shah’s one-man rule — but when it began to appear that he was doomed in 1978, they minimized the risk that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini posed to freedom and to the security of western nations.

In King of Kings, Anderson expertly marshals the evidence of American blindness on Iran stretching back to the early days of Pahlavi’s regime. The catalogue of U.S. blunders ranges from the comical to the nearly criminal negligence of American officials.

Iran’s history

Iran traces its history back more than 2500 years to Cyrus the Great. The empire created by Cyrus and his successor Darius, “extended from northern Africa and southeastern Europe all the way to the edges of the Indian subcontinent and encompassed an estimated 40 percent of the world’s known population at the time, a feat of conquest never achieved before or since,” observed Anderson.

It was a “remarkably progressive” system. “Rather than enslave or put to the sword those they vanquished, the Achaemenid emperors and their satraps largely hewed to a live-and-let-live approach, allowing their varied subjects to continue to practice their religious faiths and cultural traditions so long as they remained quiescent and paid tribute to the emperor.”

Today’s Iran is 99% Muslim, with the vast majority being adherents of Shi’ism, a form of the faith that emphasizes deference to religious leaders.

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The shah’s father, an Army general who ousted Iran’s corrupt dynasty and crowned himself ruler in 1926, ran afoul of Britain and the Soviet Union during World War II. Those nations invaded Iran in 1941 and put the shah’s 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, on the throne.

Mohammad Reza was Swiss-educated and intelligent. But as Anderson notes, a British diplomat remarked then, “The young shah is not credited with much strength of character, which if true, might suit our present circumstances.”

The coup

British officials grew worried when Prime Minister Mossadegh began agitating for a takeover of the British-controlled oil company that held a monopoly over the nation’s petroleum industry; they persuaded the Eisenhower administration that something had to be done to avoid a Communist takeover.

CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, sought the shah’s support for toppling Mossadegh, but Pahlavi vacillated.

“With the operational clock ticking toward zero hour,” wrote Anderson, Roosevelt, “snuck into the royal palace to compel the king to sign the decree dismissing Mossadegh, bluntly informing him that the coup was going forward with or without him. The shah signed, but then devised his own backup plan: The following morning, he and his wife flew out of Tehran for a secluded royal estate on the Caspian Sea, a way station for a potentially much longer journey. ‘If by any horrible chance things go wrong,’ he told Roosevelt by telephone, ‘the empress and I will take our plane straight to Baghdad.’”

An experienced pilot, the shah flew the plane himself to Baghdad; he would also be at the controls in 1978 when an Islamic revolution forced him from power — and from Iran — for good. Both times his cover story was that he was going on a “vacation.”

The CIA coup at first appeared headed for failure, as Mossadegh’s supporters poured into the streets and confronted the military. And then, “In a last-gasp effort, and even as his Operation Ajax colleagues prepared to flee the capital, Roosevelt dispatched a rent-a-mob of bazaari hoodlums into the fray, a move that, against all odds, turned the tide,” Anderson wrote.

After the 1953 coup, parliamentary democracy was effectively dead. Iran would remain friendly territory for western business interests. The energy crises of the 1970s would fill Iran’s coffers with petro dollars. Its military would bristle with the latest American weapons, thanks to a ruinous policy decision by President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. But nothing would make up for the shah’s continuing failure of nerve.

The Ayatollah

In 1963, the shah’s regime faced a strong challenge from a mullah in the religious city of Qom. Ayatollah Khomeini accused the king of being a pawn of the West and called him a “miserable wretch.” Islamic protesters rallied in the streets. The shah turned for advice to his longtime minister Asadollah Alam.

“If you want to get tough, get tough,” Alam replied, according to Anderson. “But if you take half measures, you will lose everything.”

As the anxious shah continued to fret, Alam told him not to worry and that he’d “manage it.” He ordered Khomeini’s arrest and eventually got the monarch’s permission for the military to fire on protesters, quelling the revolt. At least 100 were killed according to the government, although Khomeini’s side put the death toll at as many as 15,000. The next year, Iran exiled Khomeini, who eventually settled in the Iraqi city of Najaf and years later, on the outskirts of Paris.

The shah ignored Alam’s advice to hold meaningful elections. And by 1978, when Khomeini again emerged as a major threat to the regime, there was no trusted counselor capable of steering the shah away from disaster. Alam had retired due to illness.

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When the Islamic protests mounted, Carter administration officials were distracted by other international challenges — including the successful effort to forge a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

There wasn’t a deep bench of Iran experts in the administration. Few U.S. diplomats spoke Farsi, and no effort was made to translate the cassette tapes of Khomeini speeches that were being smuggled into Iran. Had they translated them, American diplomats might never have entertained the fantasy that if Khomeini took over, the religious leader would be a grandfatherly figure, content to ponder religious issues in Qom while a parliamentary democracy emerged in Tehran.

Anderson noted that the tapes included “angry screeds that called for the death of the shah and other ‘apostates,’ that heaped abuse on the monarchy and Jews and Bahais in equal measure.”

The U.S. ambassador reassured Washington policy makers that the shah had the situation under control and was mollifying the mullahs with payoffs. Then he switched tack and began predicting the shah’s doom.

American officials, including national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, convinced themselves, without evidence, that Iran faced the threat of a Communist takeover, which they feared more than an Islamic one.

President Carter speculated that “a genuinely nonaligned Iran would not be a U.S. setback.” The National Security Agency said Khomeini “might be far more moderate and Westernized than perceived.” The State Department’s Iran desk officer, Henry Precht, argued that “the ayatollah and his followers were turning toward moderation,” Anderson wrote. “How delusional this wishful thinking was swiftly became clear.”

Khomeini announced that he would choose Iran’s government “based on divine ordinance, and to oppose it is to deny God as well as the will of the people.” His forces killed hundreds of moderate politicians and military leaders, suppressed street protests and banned independent newspapers while imposing a theocratic regime, aiming to force women to cover themselves from head to toe.

The regime’s simmering anger at America escalated after the shah was admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment.

The U.S. State Department’s Precht had advocated increasing the number of U.S. diplomats in Iran and he personally recruited many of them, only to see them held as hostages after Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy. A few diplomats obtained their release, but 52 hostages were held by the regime for 444 days as a U.S. rescue mission ordered by Carter failed.

Does the U.S. have a better handle on Iran now, after decades of hostility?

Trump and his top officials appeared to hope that the decapitation strikes that killed Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would produce a more compliant regime. But so far there is no sign of that, no Iranian version of Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan leader who stepped in after the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro and is bowing to Trump’s wishes.

Regime change isn’t easy, former CIA operative Jonny Gannon wrote in the Financial Times:

What some foreign-policy theorists miss is that political culture cannot be redesigned from the air, and human nature cannot be remade from a conference room in Washington. The question now is whether we understand Iran well enough to influence its fracture without owning the collapse.

Most serious observers already understand that uncomfortable truth. The prospects for immediate political change in Tehran remain slim. As the scholar Karim Sadjadpour has observed, the Revolutionary Guard and military are seeking to ensure regime survival because it is in their economic interest. Even after military setbacks, the regime’s core instruments of coercion remain intact enough to shape succession and survival.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared that “we negotiate with bombs” and cast the struggle as a religiously justified war, only from a Christian rather than Islamic standpoint. But like all wars, the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is only going to end through negotiations. The more the U.S. knows about how Iran really functions, the more likely those negotiations are to succeed.

On February 27, 1945, CBS Radio’s Don Pryor reported from the flying bridge of the U.S.S. Eldorado as Marines fought to take the Japanese-controlled island of Iwo Jima.

The operation’s overall commander, Navy Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, and Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith of the Marines, put a positive spin on the bloody battle.

“To me,” Turner told the reporter, “the most impressive incident of the whole campaign so far as the raising of the flag on the top of Suribachi volcano Thursday morning by men of the 28^th Marines. It affected me very deeply — and I’m sure that General Smith felt the same way…”

Smith then saluted the patriotism and esprit de corps of the Marines who captured “that extinct volcano rising 556 feet, with sheer cliffs around the sides.”

Turner added, “For my part, General, I hope the American flag always flies there; that it’s never allowed to come down.”

There’s no hint in the CBS Radio report of the titanic clashes between these two commanders behind the scenes. Both had suitable nicknames: It was “Terrible Turner” versus “Howling Mad Smith” and the two had “horrendous shouting matches,” according to The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia. Turner was a perfectionist who thought he knew everything, a workaholic and a heavy drinker.

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He also was a lightning rod for controversy. As a Washington-based war planner, he had been criticized for failing to share enough intelligence with naval commanders about Japan’s potential to attack the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

But when the Navy embarked on a planned series of amphibious landings on South Pacific islands, Turner was selected as an operational leader. He was “brilliant, caustic, arrogant, and tactless. If anyone could succeed with Operation Watchtower (the code name for the eastern Solomons assault), it would be Turner,” Thomas B. Buell wrote in his biography of Admiral Ernest J. King.

Turner’s new role started out disastrously, with the Japanese sinking four U.S. cruisers at Savo Island near Guadalcanal, but he achieved a string of victories afterward.

Iwo Jima would go down in history as the bloodiest battle ever fought by the Marines — and also the source of the iconic AP photograph by Joe Rosenthal of U.S. troops raising the flag. The battle is now playing a role in the Iran war debate.

On the March 22 edition of “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Lindsey Graham argued that the Marines should take Iran’s oil-exporting center Kharg Island. “We did Iwo Jima,” he said. “We can do this.”

‘Losses must be expected’

The Marines did take Iwo Jima. But it was far from easy.

Responding to a question from Don Pryor in the February 27,1945 radio interview, Vice Admiral Turner acknowledged that the U.S. had suffered “losses and damage to our troops, ships, and boats.”

“Losses are regrettable, of course, and we try to reduce them so far as possible. But losses must be expected if we are to go forward — and we are strong enough to accept them.”

The battle to conquer Iwo Jima, a stepping stone on the way to a potential allied invasion of Japan, lasted for five weeks — and there were indeed heavy losses before the U.S. declared victory. Of the 87,000 members of the landing force, 6,821 were killed and 19,217 wounded. The 30% casualty rate was even slightly higher than allied forces suffered in the much larger D-Day invasion of Normandy, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Navy in 2002.

The U.S. military’s experience at Iwo Jima, in Normandy, in Anzio, Okinawa and numerous other battlefields, shows the extreme risk that troops face in trying to pull off an amphibious landing against a well dug-in enemy, especially when the element of surprise is absent.

It’s worth recalling this history given the Trump administration’s commitment of ground troops to the Middle East for potential deployment against Iran. Perhaps the thousands of Marines and paratroopers sent to the region are only there to give the U.S. leverage in negotiations with Iran. But if President Donald Trump gives the signal for “boots on the ground,” the risks of the invading force taking serious casualties are substantial. (Incidentally, the phrase “boots on the ground” was coined by a U.S. general at the time of the Iran hostage crisis, more than 45 years ago.}

Haunting the U.S. war planners in World War II was the frightful history of the Gallipoli campaign, the allies’ failure to secure control of the Dardanelles Straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea.

Of the 559,000 allied troops committed to that operation, there were more than 250,000 casualties; of those, about 58,000 people died. Much of the toll resulted from disease rather than combat. The operation’s prime backer, Winston Churchill, resigned as first lord of the admiralty.

As Richard B. Frank wrote for Naval History in August, 2005,

At the start of World War II, conventional wisdom ranked horse-cavalry charges well above amphibious landings as an effective means of waging war. Military critic B.H. Liddell Hart declared in 1939: “A landing on a foreign shore in the face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war. It has now become almost impossible. . . .” By 1945, however, the United States had transformed not simply amphibious landings but the very nature of modern warfare.

Transforming amphibious warfare wasn’t just a puzzle to solve; it was vital for victory. There was no practical way for the allies in World War II to defeat Germany, Italy and Japan without using amphibious landings. And over time, they learned how to coordinate air, sea and land resources effectively to secure needed territory.

During the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur executed a surprise amphibious landing at Inchon, with U.N. forces suffering a casualty rate of only 4%. The operation cut off the North Korean troops that had been trying to seize all of South Korea. It could have ended the war, had MacArthur not sent troops to the far north, prompting China to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Yalu River.

What now?

Now that Iran has essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil normally travels, Trump is faced with a wrenching choice.

Is he willing to allow Iran’s regime to control this chokepoint and charge a toll to any vessel seeking to transit? Will he agree to a ceasefire that fails to achieve regime change and U.S. control of Iran’s enriched uranium? Or will he put U.S. troops at extreme risk by launching an invasion of Iranian territory, with a potential outcome that even then, Iran’s regime could survive and continue to destabilize the global economy.

After the conquest of Iwo Jima, “Terrible Turner” led the amphibious attack on Okinawa, where the U.S. casualty rate was 21%. His record of victories led to the saying, “If you want something done, call on Turner.”

He retired to Monterey, California, where he died of a heart attack at the age of 75 on February 12, 1961. His obituary in the New York Times noted that he was a cultivator of prize roses. But it also mentioned his candor. Some thought he was “too ready to disagree with his superiors,” the Times said.

“A friend recounted once that a general brought a military plan for Admiral Turner to look over,” the obituary continued. “After a few minutes, the Navy man ridiculed the plan and asked whose it was. ‘It’s mine,’ the red-faced general snapped. Admiral Turner then repeated his original opinion.”

The obituary doesn’t say whether that “red-faced general” was “Howling Mad Smith.”

That is where — on July 4, 2026, more than 107 years since Theodore Roosevelt died —the nation’s 26th president will finally be honored with a presidential library. It will also be the day the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary.

In my podcast with TR Library CEO Edward O’Keefe, we explore why the library is sited in North Dakota and how the Badlands helped shape TR’s character and career. Ed is also the author of The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created A President. He talks in this conversation about the profound influence several women had on Roosevelt, including his mother, two wives, two sisters and his irrepressible daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

More than most of the presidents of the early 20th century, Roosevelt feels relevant to our time. He presided over the country in an era of extreme inequality in wealth, when immigration stirred controversy and when a muscular foreign policy and the Monroe Doctrine were in the news.

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As Doris Kearns Goodwin has written, TR took hold of the “bully pulpit” of the presidency, building a strong relationship with journalists that helped him shape the messages he shared with the nation. No longer was the president a distant, dignified figure far away from the lives of most Americans. He now would become a flesh-and-blood personal leader who played a prominent role in the everyday lives of most people and whose idiosyncrasies would become the topic of talk around the dinner tables of families from coast to coast.

One of the unforgettable scenes in Ed’s book recounts TR’s first bison hunt in the Badlands, in September, 1883. After days of looking, he and a hunting partner came across the “great beasts.” Roosevelt aimed for the largest animal’s shoulder but instead hit its ribs, and it galloped away. His partner managed to intercept the buffalo.

TR fired again and missed.

“As I urged the horse still closer — for it was very dark — the bull turned... and charged me,” Roosevelt wrote. “The lunge of the formidable looking brute frightened my pony, and as he went off he threw up his head and knocked the heavy rifle I was carrying against my head with such force that it gave me a pretty severe cut on the crown, from which the blood poured over my face and into my eyes so that it blinded me for the moment.”

Then the “infernal beast escaped after all.”

As with other reverses in his life, Roosevelt didn’t let this defeat deter him. He kept hunting and returned to New York with the head of a bison and other mounted creatures he would install in Sagamore Hill, his summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

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On February 14 of 1884, TR suffered the unimaginable loss of his wife Alice and his mother on the same day in the same house in New York City. To cope with his grief, he journeyed later that year to the Badlands, where the epic scale and beauty of the landscape soothed Roosevelt’s mind.

So did the women around him, including his childhood friend, second wife and future First Lady, Edith Kermit Carow.

Ed O’Keefe, who was born in North Dakota, explains in our conversation how this mix of influences helped mold one of America’s most distinctive presidents.

The daughter of a Swiss immigrant land owner thought that Garner’s fondness for whiskey and poker made him ill-suited for a judgeship.

Somehow Garner must have persuaded her he wasn’t such a bad guy, since the two got married in 1895.

For nearly half a century, they worked as a team, with Ettie typing John’s letters and helping run his office. He climbed the rungs of power to become Speaker of the House and then Vice President of the United States for eight years under President Franklin D. Roosevelt — all without giving up his fondness for whiskey.

When Garner briefly emerged as an obstacle to FDR’s unprecedented bid for a third term, the president told his Cabinet, “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle — I mean his hat — into the ring.”

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Garner had great powers of persuasion — indeed he used them to ensure the passage of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation through Congress. But he also had a sixth sense for how Washington really worked. He was colorful and quotable, particularly about the vice presidency. “It wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” he said. The office was “a spare tire of the government.” The “worst damn-fool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected vice president of the United States,” he said.

In private, Garner grew increasingly critical of FDR’s policies. He predicted that Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court with friendly judges and his purge of conservative Democratic lawmakers would both fail. He was proven right on both counts. But when you’re vice president, simply being right is perilous.

That thought must haunt J.D. Vance, a longtime opponent of American military operations overseas who President Donald Trump has noted was less enthusiastic than other advisers about attacking Iran. Vance has publicly supported the war, but, according to Politico, he is “ ‘skeptical,’ is ‘worried about success’ and ‘just opposes’ the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message.”

On Monday, Vance said in the Oval Office as Trump looked on, “We have a smart president, whereas in the past, we've had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren't repeated.”

Trump began the war, according to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt, because of a “feeling based on fact” that Iran would soon attack the U.S. and has said the war will end when he “feels it in his bones.” He appears to be flailing around, trying to find some way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is choking off the movement of 20% of the world’s oil. Trump is asking China and America’s allies to send ships to force the strait’s reopening, but those nations aren’t buying into the idea.

The confusion over the war’s timing, its aims and potential outcomes, including the damage it is inflicting on the world economy, could well vindicate Vance’s private opposition to the war.

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But his political fate lies in Trump’s hands. The president, who no longer talks about seeking an unconstitutional third term (because of the 22nd Amendment), commands the loyalty of MAGA voters. Many will support his choice of a successor as head of the Republicans.

Vance has to fear that Trump could try to sink his chances of winning the 2028 Republican nomination for president. The president could instead anoint Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime hawk supportive of the Iran War, the Venezuela raid and whatever action Trump may take to further weaken the shaky Cuban regime.

Cactus Jack

John Nance Garner had many nicknames. The most durable was “Cactus Jack,” a sobriquet he earned for campaigning to make the prickly pear cactus the Texas state flower. Instead the state chose to honor the bluebonnet.

When Garner entered politics, according to an article in the Saturday Evening Post, he was likened to the road runner, a bird that was more capable than its Looney Tunes incarnation would suggest. The bird “can outrun anything on two legs and is afraid of nothing,” not even rattlesnakes. In its honor, Garner was graced with the nickname “The Chapparal Cock of Uvalde.” The author of the Post’s article, Henry M. Hyde, said the label was “not inappropriate, for after he got really started, nobody was ever able to catch him in a political race.”

Garner was born in a log cabin in northeast Texas’ Red River County. He spent a semester at Vanderbilt University, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Garner returned to his native state, but ultimately chose a different region, seeking the dry climate in the southwest Texas town of Uvalde.

When he won a state legislative seat there, Garner soon gained control of the redistricting process. He designed for himself an extraordinarily large, rural congressional district that he proved exceptionally able to win — and win, again and again, racking up enough seniority to emerge as House Speaker when the Democrats took control of Congress in 1931.

The following year, he helped his party avoid a deadlocked convention by throwing his state’s delegates behind Franklin D. Roosevelt on the fourth ballot. He wanted the vice presidential slot on the ticket and got it.

Garner irritated Roosevelt and his more liberal advisers: he was a reluctant campaigner and took frequent “vacations” in Texas during his vice presidency. He used non-union labor in Texas and opposed the pro-labor legislation FDR backed. In their second term in office, he favored trying to balance the federal budget, a stance at odds with a president committed to expansive spending on social programs.

The No Man

“Since the election of 1931, Garner has not given a newspaper interview on any subject,” Hyde wrote. “He has kept the fight—as far as there has been one—in the Administration family.” Yet anyone who reads Hyde’s June 25, 1938 article entitled “White House No-Man” has to suspect that Garner shared his thoughts privately with the journalist.

It’s full of praise. For example: “Senators had confidence in the shrewd, earthy wisdom of the Vice President and in his patriotism, and they liked the man.” Long naps and full nights of sleep “are two of the reasons why, at sixty-nine, Garner is as strong and husky as most men of fifty.”

Hyde noted that during the last year, “the relations between the President of the United States and the Vice President have been officially correct and, in public, almost ostentatiously friendly.” But at White House meetings, Garner objected to FDR’s use of deficit spending to spark economic growth and “the free digging of wells and the building of water tanks, outhouses and other improvements for farmers, and the making of loans and grants of all kinds to individuals, as tending to break down the self-respect and self-confidence of the people.”

Garner’s dissents from FDR’s policies would soon become public, Hyde predicted. “Sooner or later, such a break seems inevitable… For instance, if the precedent-breaker {FDR] should announce his candidacy for a third presidential term, it is certain the old Texas cowhand will give a “Yip!” and start shooting from the hip.”

As historian Thomas T. Spencer wrote, it wasn’t just the third-term idea that affronted Garner. “Roosevelt’s use of executive authority, his desire to broaden the base of the party, and the unprecedented scope of the New Deal, which expanded the role of the federal government in the economy, all challenged Garner’s long-standing ideals about government and how politics worked.”

On the bill to “pack” the Supreme Court, Spencer noted, “Garner reportedly ‘loathed’ the plan and walked from the Senate rostrum holding his nose while gesturing thumbs down to colleagues as the bill was read.”

Poker vs. chess

If Garner was the consummate poker player, Roosevelt was a grandmaster at chess. Devious, manipulative, strategic, the president was the superior player. He realized that Garner, doing well in the polls, could block him from a third term and set out to remove the obstacle.

Union leader John L. Lewis had testified to Congress that the proposed weakening of pro-labor legislation “emanates from a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man whose name is Garner.” Texas representatives were outraged by this public attack on one of their leaders and wanted to draft a resolution denying the allegations against Garner. But one of their number, Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to sign a document saying that Garner wasn’t a big drinker and a big enemy of labor.

As Robert Caro noted in The Path to Power, the first volume of his LBJ biography, Johnson argued that trying to absolve Garner of those sins would make the Texas delegation look foolish. Johnson was placing his bet against Garner’s long-term prospects and instead was trying to score points with Roosevelt.

LBJ’s strategy paid off, in a windfall of federal funding to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station that benefited Johnson’s prime financial backers. Roosevelt benefited too, from contributions to his Texas campaign, which challenged Garner’s status as the state’s favorite son.

The final blow to Garner’s 1940 presidential ambitions came early that year, when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. In a time of high tension, Democratic leaders began to unite behind the idea of keeping a trusted hand in the White House for a third term.

“The most down-hearted man on Capitol Hill,” syndicated columnist Ray Tucker wrote, “is Vice President John Nance Garner. His friends have deserted him—left him cold.” At the height of his power, senators flocked to Garner’s office. “They rushed in every hour of the day to seek advice or toss off a quick drink.” Now they were climbing aboard the “Third Term bandwagon,” noted Tucker.

Roosevelt picked Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace to replace Garner on the 1940 ticket. Their 1941 Inauguration was the last time Garner visited Washington. (FDR wasn’t done replacing vice presidents. He dumped Wallace when he ran for a fourth term in 1944 and selected Harry S. Truman, who would succeed FDR when he died in April, 1945.)

Advice to LBJ

Garner settled in for what proved to be a long retirement on his Texas ranch, where he raised chickens and grew pecans.

It’s one of history’s small ironies that Garner got to give Lyndon Johnson advice on whether to accept the vice presidential nomination in 1960.

The writer Theodore White “revealed the uncertainty in the Johnson camp over accepting Kennedy’s offer to join the ticket,” wrote Patrick Cox. “From his suite in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Johnson telephoned Garner at his home in Uvalde. White reported Garner’s remarks to LBJ. ‘I’ll tell you Lyndon,’ Garner surmised. ‘The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.’ Any other advice from Garner went unrecorded.” Many believe Garner actually said “piss” rather than “spit,” and maybe it was “bucket” rather than “pitcher.”

In any event, Johnson signed on as Kennedy’s running mate.

LBJ came to deeply regret his move from his powerful perch as Senate Majority Leader to the invisibility of the vice presidency, where President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy marginalized the Texas Democrat.

On November 22, 1963, hours before an assassin killed JFK in Dallas, the president made one of his last telephone calls — to John Nance Garner. It was Cactus Jack’s 95th birthday. He would live nearly 4 more years.

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Sources: Briscoe Center for American History; Miller Center; In Search of the Proverbial Bucket; History News Network; “For the Good of the Party: John Nance Garner, FDR and New Deal Politics, 1933-1940, by Thomas T. Spencer, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January, 2018; “White House No-Man” by Henry M. Hyde, Saturday Evening Post, October 25, 1938; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982.

At 81, Douglas MacArthur was living out retirement with his wife and son in a 10-room apartment on the 37^th floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

The previous Democrat to serve in the White House, Harry S. Truman, had fired MacArthur for voicing his personal views on political matters and clashing with the president’s policies. But JFK, who served in the Pacific as MacArthur had, thought the “old soldier” would be an invaluable counselor. He particularly wanted his advice on sending U.S. troops to fight Communist guerillas in Laos and Vietnam.

There was no doubt in MacArthur’s mind about the right answer. “Anyone wanting to commit ground troops to Asia should have his head examined,” the general said. Instead the U.S. should protect its national security in the Pacific by safeguarding Japan, the Philippines and Formosa, now known as Taiwan.

After that meeting, William Manchester wrote in his brilliant biography of MacArthur American Caesar, Kennedy told aide Walt W. Rostow “that he had decided not to risk sending American ground troops to Indochina—that the ten thousand U.S. Marines who were suited up on Okinawa could stand down.”

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MacArthur had seen the Japanese wage a war of attrition for eight years against the larger army of China. And he personally had to order a bitter retreat after China’s Mao Tse-Tung sent 300,000 troops over the Yalu River to support North Korea’s fight against U.S. and South Korean forces in 1950.

In 1964, when MacArthur was dying at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, he repeated his advice against getting involved in a land war in Asia to JFK’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ ignored that counsel, plunging ahead with a massive military commitment to the government of South Vietnam. It was a blunder that cost more than 58,000 American lives.

MacArthur’s excruciating ordeal in Korea cemented his opposition to limited wars. He had lost his battle against Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the proper response to China’s invasion.

The general advocated extreme measures — even suggesting to the Pentagon that he should threaten the use of atomic weapons and poison the border between China and North Korea with radioactive materials. If you go to war, he thought, you have to fight to the end and win. That was the spirit of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence on “unconditional surrender” from Germany and Japan.

“Once war is forced upon us,” MacArthur said in a speech to a joint session of Congress after Truman fired him, “there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory — not prolonged indecision.”

To the general, Manchester noted, limited war was like limited pregnancy.

But America’s military history in the 80 years since World War II has been a series of only limited wars, without risking nuclear Armageddon. Indeed it’s hard to imagine any sane person advocating the use of nuclear weapons given their potential to destroy life on the planet. So while President Donald Trump has mused about requiring “unconditional surrender” from Iran’s theocratic regime, there appears little chance he can succeed without putting U.S. troops at risk in a ground invasion.

Unlimited war

World War II really was an unlimited war. Japan launched it in the Pacific with a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

It took years of costly battles for the U.S. to gain the upper hand. Seeking to force the Japanese to surrender, the U.S. dropped a devastating new weapon — atomic bombs — on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. The island nation lost hundreds of thousands of people in those attacks, and its total losses in the war approached two million. Japan lost 81 percent of the territory it controlled, Manchester noted, adding:

Nippon’s merchant fleet was rusting on the floors of ten Oriental seas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been reduced to barren pits of glazed rubble, and virtually all other major cities, including the capital, were ghastly wastelands.

In 1945, Truman named MacArthur the viceroy heading the Allied occupation of Japan. The general wisely saw that the war had devastated the spirit of the Japanese: “It was the collapse of a faith, it was the disintegration of everything they believed in and lived by and fought for. It left a complete vacuum, morally, mentally and physically.”

Into that vacuum, MacArthur instilled a belief in democracy and civil liberties. He saw his role as leading “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.”

When Truman fired MacArthur in 1950, Japan mourned. Top Japanese officials wrote to MacArthur “of their personal anguish, and Hirohito appeared at the embassy, the first time an emperor had called on a foreigner with no official standing,” Manchester wrote. “Taking MacArthur’s hand in both of his, he told him of his own profound distress.” MacArthur would be leaving Japan with “the good wishes of eighty-three million Japanese people,” wrote the Japan Times.

The rebuilding of Japan after World War II was indeed regime change — not the substitution of one leader for another, as occurred in Venezuela after the U.S. raid that captured Nicolás Maduro in January — but a thorough upheaval of the society and government. It is the kind of regime change Trump has said he is seeking in Iran, which has been ruled by mullahs since 1979. But so far there’s no sign of a clear plan to achieve it.

MacArthur and Trump

Douglas MacArthur “appeared to need enemies the way other men need friends,” wrote William Manchester, “and his conduct assured that he would always have plenty of them.”

A “yearning for adulation was his great flaw. He had others, notably mendacity and overoptimism…. But it was his manifest self-regard, his complete lack of humility, which lay like a deep fissure at his very core. In the end it split wide open and destroyed him.”

The people around MacArthur “catered to his peacockery, genuflected to his viceregal whims, and shared his conviction that plotters were bent upon stabbing him in the back.” It’s difficult to read those words without thinking of President Donald Trump, who has praised MacArthur.

For all their similarities of personality, though, there is one enormous difference — MacArthur’s military accomplishments: “Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced. He was also extraordinarily brave. His twenty-two medals— thirteen of them for heroism—probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history,” according to Manchester. Add to that MacArthur’s knowledge of history and current events and you had a leader who had done his homework, someone superbly prepared for command.

Yet for all of that, a six-week stretch in 1950 demonstrated his vulnerability, in the war in Korea that would lead to his downfall. There may be no better example in U.S. history of the perils of military strategy and the danger of thinking, as Trump asserts regarding the Iran war, that your side is invincible.

The U.S. and Russia had divided the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel, with the Communist Kim Il Sung and the U.S.-supported Syngman Rhee as competing despots each intent on conquering the whole of Korea.

In 1949, the U.S. withdrew its combat troops from South Korea. In January, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech that signaled to the Russian, Chinese and North Korean governments that the U.S. didn’t consider Korea part of the vital interests it would defend in Asia.

But when 90,000 North Korean troops charged over the line into South Korea in June, the Truman administration decided quickly that preserving that nation was a vital American interest after all. Politically, the Democratic administration believed it couldn’t withstand the blame it would get from Republicans and voters for ceding another nation to Communist aggression after the “loss” of China to Mao’s rebels.

It also installed MacArthur as commander of the United Nations “police action” against North Korea. MacArthur, who continued to preside over the reconstruction of Japan, had control of the military assets nearest Korea, so his appointment to put out the fire in his backyard seemed natural. But it also entailed buying into his particular conception of war and potentially emboldening him to defy the Joint Chiefs and Truman himself. As David Halberstam wrote in The Coldest Winter, the only orders MacArthur respected were his own.

At the outset, MacArthur faced a desperate situation in Korea. Kim Il Sung’s forces captured the South Korean capital of Seoul early in the war. The troops MacArthur sent to Korea from his command in Japan were ill-equipped, ill-trained and psychologically ill-prepared to battle the North Koreans in a country they could barely find on a map. But the U.S. reinforced its troops and reversed the momentum.

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A stroke of genius

The key move was MacArthur’s audacious amphibious landing behind the North Korean lines. His plan for a surprise assault on Inchon, a port on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, shocked the U.S. naval officer who would have to carry it out.

Admiral James H. Doyle “was dumbfounded,” Manchester observed. “He knew that Inchon had no beaches, only piers and seawalls. The attack would have to be launched in the heart of the city. The waters approaching it could easily be mined; possibly they already were. Currents there ran as high as eight knots. In any one of a hundred turns, a sunken or disabled ship could block the little bay, which was interlaced with moles and breakwaters.”

The port’s enormous tidal range of 32 feet risked stranding the American landing craft in “wide, oozing, gray mud flats” unless the operation could be carried out on dates when the high tides would be exceptionally elevated.

“Every flag and general officer” in MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters “tried to talk him out of it,” according to Manchester. He ignored them. The very unlikely nature of an Inchon landing would contribute to the surprise it would inflict on the North Koreans. And it worked spectacularly well. Manchester wrote:

The final reckoning would show that at Inchon MacArthur had defeated between 30,000 and 40,000 In Min Gun [North Korean army] defenders at a cost of 536 dead, 2,550 wounded, and 65 missing. [Admiral] Halsey called it “the most masterly and audacious strategic course in all history.”

The consequences were stunning. A little more than a month after the September 15, 1950 Inchon landing, UN forces conquered North Korea’s capital Pyongyang.

American troops were told to pack their dress uniforms for an eventual victory parade in Tokyo. They confidently expected to be home by Christmas. Flush with victory and mindful of the war aim of reuniting Korea, MacArthur ordered his troops to continue north toward the Yalu River, the border with China.

What he discovered later is that on the day Pyongyang was captured, China began sending troops across the Yalu. Initially, MacArthur and his staff rejected reports of Chinese intervention, dismissing the isolated Chinese who were taken prisoner as “volunteers." MacArthur. It was “one of the worst military intelligence blunders in U.S. Army history,” according to historian Matthew J. Seelinger:

Ignoring reports of contact with CCF [Chinese Communist Forces] troops, MacArthur ordered the Eighth Army and X Corps to push on to the Yalu.

On the night of 25 November, one day after Eighth Army began its offensive, the CCF struck Eighth Army with massive numbers of troops. Thousands of Chinese soldiers, armed with burp guns and grenades, with bugles blaring, swarmed the American positions. Several American units were overrun and destroyed. The CCF onslaught took MacArthur and the U.N. forces completely by surprise and almost instantly changed the tide of the war. Soon, Eighth Army was in full headlong retreat southward.

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Outnumbered and suffering from the extreme cold, American troops took heavy losses as they tried to escape. Once again, the tide of the war reversed. The North Koreans recaptured their capital and for the second time, occupied Seoul. Ultimately, the U.N. forces, under the command of Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway retook enough territory to restore the 38th parallel as the border between North and South Korea.

Fighting on

MacArthur refused to accept blame for the disaster.

Brave, brilliant, and majestic, he was a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him. He simply could not bear to end his career in checkmate. It would, in his view, be a betrayal of his mission, an acknowledgment that MacArthur was imperfect. Politics had always been his Eve, a lure and a threat, fascinating but ill-boding. Now, as he saw it, his political enemies — and anyone who barred his way was an adversary — were thwarting his last crusade. Believing that Washington was denying him the tools to finish his job, that he had been relegated to what he called a “No-Man’s Land of indecision,” scornful of what he regarded as the Joint Chiefs’ loss of a will to win, he grappled through that winter holding the Chinese at bay while trying to persuade his superiors to see things his way.

The Democrats had lost seats in the House and Senate in the November, 1950 midterms, an election in which foreign policy was a key issue. Many leading Republicans placed their faith in MacArthur, seeing him as the heroic voice of resistance to President Truman’s timid policies. MacArthur reciprocated, and his encouragement of GOP opposition to Truman virtually dared the president to fire him.

MacArthur’s firing was an emotional catharsis for America. Millions poured into the streets to welcome him home in city after city and to blast the president. Tens of thousands of letters and telegrams told Truman and his party just how unpopular the firing of MacArthur had been.

Yet, in time, there wasn’t a sizable constituency for unlimited war against China and Russia over Korea. And MacArthur proved unable to convert his popularity into real political power — or the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, which instead went to his former aide Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

The Korean War dragged on until an armistice was reached in 1953. More than 36,000 Americans died; The overall death toll including civilians on both sides, exceeded three million.

The Korean War was utterly unlike the unifying national effort World War II had been. “It was simply a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict,” wrote David Halberstam, “a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution, about which most Americans, save the men who fought there and their immediate families, preferred to know as little as possible.”

Viewed generations later, the Korean War birthed two very different regimes — a hereditary dictatorship that still rules the north and a vibrant economy and democracy in the south.

Yet the initially inconclusive result of the war was a template for so many of the battles America has fought in the 73 years since it ended — in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump has already claimed victory in his war against Iran, but the outcome appears on course to be far more mixed, given Iran’s ability to inflict economic pain by paralyzing the movement of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and the continued existence of the theocratic regime.

When MacArthur addressed Congress after his firing, he looked back to the start of his 52 years in the military. “The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed, most proudly, that ‘Old soldiers never die. They just fade away. And like the soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away —an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.”

Truman thought the general’s speech was “a hundred percent bullshit,” Manchester noted. But the nation was moved by it.

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When the crowds stopped cheering MacArthur in the coming years, he began to rethink his enthusiasm for unlimited war. “His revulsion against war had grown,” wrote Manchester. “He decided that Eisenhower and Dulles had been right in rejecting his proposed ultimatum to Stalin; atomic bombs, he felt, should never be used.” The ability of atomic weapons to eradicate life “destroyed the possibility of war being a medium of practical settlement of international differences,” MacArthur wrote.

It wasn’t only old soldiers who faded away, but the old way of war as well.

“You know what you want,” Evangeline Lindbergh wrote in reply to a letter from her son Charles. She couldn’t help adding a mother’s doubt: “…is a plane a wise investment & has the occupation of pilot any future?”

The 6’ 2 1/2” Lindbergh, nicknamed Slim, was performing stunts on planes that barnstormed from town to town. Billing himself as the “aerial daredevil Lindbergh,” he eked out a living, skydiving and walking on wings. He even toyed with the idea of hanging from a plane by his teeth. His dream, he told his mother, was to buy his own flying machine.

Yes, the occupation of pilot had a future — and thanks to Lindbergh, that future would be brighter than anyone realized.

The improbable arc of Lindbergh’s 33-and-a-half-hour solo flight from Long Island to Paris in 1927 instantly made the 25-year-old Minnesota farmboy the world’s hero. It set off a media frenzy to know everything about Lindbergh — and triggered his response: a decades-long pursuit of privacy.

The lowest point came 94 years ago this month. On March 1, 1932, an intruder climbed a ladder into the second-floor nursery of Lindbergh’s home in Hopewell, New Jersey and kidnapped his 20-month-old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., from his crib. A crudely-written ransom note on the window sill instructed Lindbergh to get ready to pay $50,000 for his child’s return.

“For the second time in less than five years, the world revolved around Charles Lindbergh,” A. Scott Berg wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lindbergh: A Life.

“Radio programs everywhere were interrupted and front pages of newspapers were remade, shunting the Sino-Japanese War and Congressional attempts to repeal prohibition aside.”

It has been more than a month since Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie, disappeared from her Tucson home. Security cameras revealed the presence of a man in a ski mask and gloves, wearing a backpack, at the door of Nancy Guthrie’s home, on February 1, the day she disappeared. Ransom notes were sent to media outlets, but it’s unclear if they were genuinely from someone who abducted Guthrie. The family is offering a million-dollar reward for information leading to Guthrie’s return.

As Axios reported on Feb. 23, “a swarm of national news crews, local reporters, bloggers and social media influencers have spent the past three weeks camped outside Nancy Guthrie’s Catalina Foothills home, where she was last seen Jan. 31.” This week, Savannah Guthrie visited the Today studio and talked of returning to the show at some point.

The world is left to hope that fame will not again bring tragedy, as it did in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The life of the pioneering aviator offers still-relevant insight into the nature of celebrity and the role of the media.

Flunking out

Raised mostly by his mother, Lindbergh was a lonely child who became fascinated by nature and science but struggled with most academic subjects. Evangeline moved to Madison, Wisconsin to be with her son, where he attended the University of Wisconsin. But it didn’t help — and he flunked out.

Lindbergh’s parents, a badly mismatched couple, had separated after his father, C.A., won election to Congress. The elder Lindbergh went on to lose several campaigns for Senate, including one in which he and Charles barnstormed Minnesota on an Army surplus plane they bought after the end of World War I. The Curtiss JN4-D “Jenny” could fly as fast as 70 miles an hour. Evangeline Lindbergh “thoroughly enjoyed” being in the cockpit of that plane after C.A. lost the election.

C.A. Lindbergh was an early isolationist and populist politician, deeply skeptical of bankers and foreign wars. His political stance influenced the world view of his son.

As a child, Lindbergh collected everything from arrowheads to coins and stamps; he was fascinated by nature and mechanical devices, but “painfully shy,” as his half-sister said. While flying brought young Charles Lindbergh out of his shell, there remained something remote and very private about him.

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The prize

In 1919, hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first aviator to fly nonstop from Paris to New York or the other way round. Many of the entrants competed as a crew, rather than relying on one person to attempt the 3,600-mile flight.

One prominent competitor, René Fonck and his crew of three, took off on September 21, 1926 from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, nine months before Lindbergh. The French aviator’s plane was equipped, Berg wrote, with “a bed, red-leather upholstery, long-wave and short-wave radio sets, flotation bags in case of an emergency landing, a hot ‘celebration’ dinner to be eaten upon arrival... even a last-minute batch of croissants to send them on their way.”

As spectators looked on, the plane lumbered down the runway, unable to gain altitude. It crashed into a gully and exploded. Fonck escaped, along with another crew member; the other two were killed.

When Lindbergh took off from the same airfield in 1927, the runway was water-logged. The “Spirit of St. Louis” bounced twice before just clearing a tractor by 10 feet and telephone wires by 20 feet. There were no croissants — he brought along five sandwiches to sustain him on the flight. He sat on a wicker porch chair, rather than red leather.

His mother Evangeline had told him, “The happiest day for me will be the day you return.” She did confide to him in a letter, “for the first time in my life I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”

Lindbergh had hardly any sleep the night before he took off. He had extensive experience as an air mail pilot in the Midwest, but had never traveled such a long distance — and over enormous stretches of ocean. “Where Lindbergh had steered his course in the past according to visible landmarks below,” Berg noted, “he would have to navigate this trip by looking above, charting a course based on time traveled and the position of the stars.”

Heading over Newfoundland and above the open Atlantic, Lindbergh fought fog and an ice buildup on his plane. He kept himself awake partly by writing in his log. “My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart,” he noted. “It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out—and sleep.”

Flying about 50 feet over some fishing boats, Lindbergh shouted, “Which way is Ireland?” He didn’t get a response, but soon soared over Ireland and began to realize that he actually could make it to Paris.

At 10:24 P.M. on May 21, 1927, 150,000 people greeted the sleep-deprived 25-year-old as the Spirit of St. Louis touched down at Le Bourget Airfield.

Evading the press

Lindbergh realized even then that he would pay a huge price for his achievement.

Watching people running toward him on the airfield, Lindbergh pondered his future. “At first he feared for his physical safety; over the next few months he worried about his soul,” Berg wrote. “He instinctively knew that submitting himself to the idolatry of the public could strip him of his very identity; and the only preventive he could see was to maintain his privacy.“

“The unwanted fame all but guaranteed an isolated adulthood. And, indeed, Lindbergh spent the rest of his life in flight, searching for islands of tranquility.”

After Lindbergh’s historic landing in Paris, as many as a million people lined the Champs Elysees and other Parisian avenues as the aviator rode in an open car. Visiting England, he met King George V and patted the cheek of his granddaughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II.

The cultural world took notice, Berg observed:

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht would soon collaborate on a cantata —”Der Lindberghflug” — fifteen scenes for soloists, chorus, and orchestra in which a tenor portraying Lindbergh sings of his preparations for the flight, and later faces such antagonists as the Fog, the Snowstorm, and Sleep.

TIME magazine proclaimed him its first “Man of the Year.” When Lindbergh returned to the U.S. the next month on a U.S. Navy cruiser, “A convoy of four destroyers, two Army blimps, and forty airplanes accompanied the Memphis up Chesapeake Bay,” Berg noted.

“It is a great and wonderful sight,” Lindbergh told an admiral, “and I wonder if I really deserve all this.”

His flight to Paris marked the beginning of a lifelong battle with reporters, as Lindbergh tried and often failed to shield his activities from view.

When he married Anne Morrow, the couple switched cars in an alley to evade reporters and drove from New Jersey to Long Island. “With their two-hour jump on the press, Charles and Anne reached their destination on the Sound at ten o’clock, undetected,” Berg wrote. “According to plan, they found a dinghy tied to a tree, which they hauled by flashlight to the water. As a cold wind blew, Charles rowed his bride out to their cruiser, the Mouette, which waited there with lights shining, beckoning them to begin their voyage together.” They headed up the coast to Maine.

The New York Times admitted that it and the other newspapers had been outfoxed. It reported on May 29, 1929, “Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and his bride, the former Anne Spencer Morrow, vanished utterly from the public view yesterday, spending the first day of their honeymoon in complete privacy that left their whereabouts a mystery.” Eventually reporters found out where they were.

Kidnapping

When their child was taken, the Lindberghs reacted in different ways: Anne grieved. Her husband approached the ordeal non-emotionally, as an engineering problem he could solve if only he remained calm. Of course, he could not.

The clues were scarce. As an FBI account noted, “During the search at the kidnapping scene, traces of mud were found on the floor of the nursery. Footprints, impossible to measure, were found under the nursery window. Two sections of the ladder had been used in reaching the window, one of the two sections was split or broken where it joined the other, indicating that the ladder had broken during the ascent or descent. There were no blood stains in or about the nursery, nor were there any fingerprints.”

A retired school principal in The Bronx publicly offered to act as a go-between in delivering the ransom, which had been increased to $70,000. John F. Condon went by the nickname “Jafsie” in the discussions that followed. He eventually met “John” at Woodlawn Cemetery and later gave him $50,000 in return for a note indicating that the child was on a boat supposedly named “Nellie” near Martha’s Vineyard. The search for the boat proved fruitless. Meanwhile, con men sought to make a quick buck at the expense of the Lindberghs by pretending to know the truth about the kidnapping.

The child’s real fate became known on May 12. His body was found in the woods near a highway, about 4.5 miles away from the Lindbergh home. “The Coroner’s examination showed that the child had been dead for about two months and that death was caused by a blow on the head,” the FBI noted.

Parts of the ransom were paid in distinctive gold certificates, dollar bills backed by the gold standard. A service station attendant in The Bronx reported that a man paid for five gallons of gas with gold certificates. He was eventually identified as Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a 35-year-old carpenter born in Saxony, Germany. He had served time in prison for robbery and had entered the U.S. 11 years earlier. Hauptmann reportedly met the description of “John.” Lindbergh, who accompanied Condon on one of his encounters with John, identified Hauptmann’s voice.

The trial of Bruno Hauptmann was a media sensation on a par with the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. America’s most eminent columnists and authors converged on Flemington, New Jersey — everyone from Damon Runyon to Walter Winchell to Dorothy Killgallen to H.L. Mencken. Hauptmann insisted he had nothing to with the kidnapping, but the evidence of his involvement in the kidnapping was overwhelming — although his precise role and the possibility of accomplices will probably never be known.

Not only did Hauptmann have ample amounts of the ransom money, but an expert came up with devastating evidence of his connection to the ladder that was used to enter the Lindbergh home.

As Berg wrote,

As a result of his study, [wood expert Arthur] Koehler swore that one of the uprights in the ladder had originally been part of a plank in the flooring of Hauptmann’s attic, fitting right down to the nail-holes. The rest of the lumber in the attic, he maintained, also came from the very yard at which his search had ended. Furthermore, a study of the tools found in Hauptmann’s garage revealed that the plank from the attic had been planed down by one of his tools.

Hammering a final nail into Hauptmann’s coffin, Koehler said that a three-quarter-inch chisel was used in making the recesses for the rungs of the ladder, and that upon inspecting the Hauptmann toolchest he found no such tool, one that would be standard equipment in an ordinary carpenter’s kit. That was the exact tool found at the Lindbergh house. [After that testimony] Hauptmann returned to his cell with his head bowed and eyes cast down.

Was the ladder the key to explaining how the child had been injured, and perhaps how he died? Berg noted, “Part of the ladder had broken. One of the side rails of the center section had split along the grain, suggesting that while the kidnapper had been successfully able to climb into the nursery, the added weight of his victim was enough to crack the wood. The location of the break indicated that the kidnapper and the baby might have fallen as much as five feet to the ground.”

The tension mounted when the jury left the courtroom to deliberate.

Close to seven thousand people gathered around the Hunterdon County Courthouse, completely blocking Flemington’s Main Street. At 10:27, an assistant to the Sheriff was sent up the courthouse stairs to the belfry, where he tolled the bell. The crowd shouted for several minutes in anticipation of the verdict—chanting “Kill Hauptmann! Kill Hauptmann!”

Controversy still rages about the fairness of the trial and the evidence of Hauptmann’s guilt. Observers blasted the judge and the press for their behavior. The Boston Herald compared the atmosphere surrounding the trial to “the ballyhooed sideshow of a circus.”

There were other consequences. “The Lindbergh kidnapping affected every child and parent in America,” Berg wrote. “If ‘Baby Lindy’ — protected by servants within estate walls — could be abducted, then every child in America was vulnerable. Parents encouraged their children to come inside and play, and many were forbidden thereafter from walking even a block from home by themselves.”

On April 3, 1936, Hauptmann, still proclaiming his innocence, was strapped into the electric chair in Trenton state prison and executed.

By then, the Lindberghs were long gone from the U.S. After the birth of their son Jon, Charles Lindbergh felt he could no longer protect his family and their privacy in his own country. They fled to England at the end of 1935. “The man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero and a good-will ambassador between the peoples of the world,” reported The New York Times, “is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”

Impressed by Nazi Germany

They did find refuge in a 14th century house in Kent, owned by the writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. But Lindbergh had no inkling that he was heading into another media storm that would shadow the rest of his life.

Major Truman Smith, the U.S. military attaché in Berlin, was anxious to learn more about Germany’s rearmament under the Nazi regime. He asked Lindbergh to visit and obtained approval from the second-ranking man in the regime, Air Minister Hermann Goering.

Inspecting factories, Lindbergh was impressed. Germany, he noted, was “now able to produce military aircraft faster than any European country.” Charles and Anne were feted at a state dinner by Goering, who had to change his pants after his pet lion urinated on him.

Then Lindbergh attended the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics, seeing Adolf Hitler but not speaking with the German dictator.

Germany, Lindbergh wrote, was “the most interesting nation in the world today, and … she is attempting to find a solution for some of our most fundamental problems.” While he privately frowned on the Nazis’ persecution of Jewish citizens, he did not see that as a reason to mute his enthusiasm for the regime. Anne Lindbergh also praised Hitler as “a very great man” in a letter to her mother.

On a return visit to Germany in 1938, Lindbergh attended a stag dinner at the American Embassy. Goering surprised him by bestowing on Lindbergh a medal — the Service Cross of the German Eagle — which he said was being awarded at Hitler’s behest. It was, Berg wrote, “a golden cross with four small swastikas, finished in white enamel, strung on a red ribbon with white and black borders. Accompanying the medal was a proclamation on parchment signed by Hitler.”

This history would dog Lindbergh for years. He returned to America and spoke out against any involvement in the war Hitler launched by attacking Poland in 1939. While the aviator’s isolationist writing and speeches initially drew support in the United States, his cause cratered after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S.

Lindbergh knew then that the U.S. had no alternative but to go to war, and he aided the war effort in many ways. But his reputation never recovered from his glowing view of 1930s Germany. He condemned the Nazis’ slaughter of millions of Jews and others, but engaged in what would now be called a false equivalency by putting it on a par with U.S. war crimes. Anne Morrow Lindbergh admitted their error in cheering on Germany; her husband never did.

In the postwar years, Lindbergh became a committed and effective conservationist, helping to save endangered species and protect indigenous societies. As Berg noted, though, “Some, particularly Jews, found Lindbergh’s newfound passion disconcerting, especially when he flung around such phrases as, ‘I don’t want history to record my generation as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life.’ Longtime editorial writer Max Lerner, for one, wondered, ‘Where the hell was he when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?’”

‘Fractured by secrecy’

In 1952, Lindbergh declined to participate in 25th anniversary events commemorating his flight to Paris, though he did write a book about it, The Spirit of St. Louis, that became a bestseller the following year.

Explaining why he wouldn’t give an interview, he told an Associated Press editor, “I doubt that it is possible for anyone who has not lived through long periods of intense personal publicity to realize fully the problems it creates and the difficulties involved. I believe that over the years I have come to value the freedoms of privacy as highly as you value the freedoms of the press.”

In one respect, Lindbergh succeeded in achieving privacy.

Beginning in the 1950s, he led a double life — fathering children in Germany with three women — with even his family remaining in the dark. Lindbergh would visit them periodically, identifying himself to the children with an assumed name. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, “Ten days before his death in 1974, Lindbergh wrote letters to his three mistresses, asking them to continue ‘utmost secrecy.’”

Those facts didn’t surface in Berg’s biography — even though the author was granted full access to the records of Charles and Anne Lindbergh — but only became public in 2003, 29 years after his death. A book published by three siblings in 2005 said that he had also been the father of four more out-of-wedlock children.

“I don’t know why he lived this way, and I don’t think I ever will know,” wrote Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest child of Charles and Anne, “but what it means to me is that every intimate human connection my father had during his later years was fractured by secrecy.”

Congress first used that power in going to war with Britain in 1812. Since then, it has declared war 10 more times, but the most recent case was 83 years ago — on June 4, 1942, when it voted to go to war against Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania in the midst of World War II. Congress had declared war against Japan, Germany and Italy immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

President Harry S. Truman set the template for modern war powers in 1950 when he called the Korean War a “police action.” More than 36,500 Americans died in that war, which lasted for three years and ended without an official peace treaty. Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson onward have exercised war powers without a congressional declaration in countries including Vietnam, Grenada, Libya and Iraq. But what has been the reaction in Congress?

Now that President Donald Trump has launched a war against Iran, the issue is newly relevant. I am resharing a post from last June that sheds light on the issue.

The war over war powers

“A conciliator, not a firebrand.” That was how the New York Times’ Steven V. Roberts described Rep. Clement J. Zablocki in his obituary December 4, 1983. The Democrat from Milwaukee “preferred consensus to confrontation” and was known for “a bushy mustache he kept carefully clipped, and a tiny, leather-bound pipe he kept clasped in his hand.”

He also played a key role in the long history of disputes between presidents and Congress over who controls the power to go to war. Zablocki sponsored the War Powers Act, a 1973 law that surfaces whenever a president orders military action.

His career vividly demonstrates the potential for — and the limits of — congressional control of war powers.

U.S. bombers struck three targets in Iran on June 21, 2025, the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said, “We must enforce the War Powers Act.” He insisted, “No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy.”

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Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, said on NewsNation that the Trump administration had complied with the law by notifying congressional leaders within 48 hours of the U.S. strike on three targets in Iran.

In practical terms, members of Congress had little need for that notification. All they had to do was read the news alerts or check their social feeds to find out that Trump had ordered the air strikes. The 48-hour notification requirement is not nearly as significant as other parts of the War Powers Act.

The law seeks to “fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution” and “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President” will govern the use of military force. It says presidents have the power to deploy the military in three circumstances: when Congress declares war, when it passes a law authorizing the use of force or when the nation is attacked.

Whenever possible, the president should consult Congress in advance, the law states; and should submit a report within 48 hours giving the reasons for the military action and estimating its scope and duration. That report starts a 60-day clock, giving the president a deadline to end the military mission unless Congress authorizes it to continue.

President Richard Nixon vetoed the War Powers legislation in November, 1973, but the House overrode him with a vote of 284-135, as did the Senate, voting 75-18 to make it the law of the land.

Since Nixon, many presidents have chafed at the restrictions of the law, questioning its constitutionality. That helps explain why the law ensnared Clement Zablocki in a tense confrontation with the Ronald Reagan administration just a few months before the congressman’s death at the age of 71.

The organist

Zablocki’s parents came to the U.S. from Poland. He grew up in a working-class Milwaukee neighborhood, putting himself through Marquette University by working as a choir director and church organist. He went on to teach high school civics and then put his classroom lessons into practice by winning a seat in the Wisconsin legislature. In 1948, he moved up to a seat in Congress.

“Clem,” as his colleagues knew him, was elected to the House a total of 18 times. He gained an appreciation for the conservative politics of most of his constituents. “They’re supportive of a strong national defense, and are fiercely anti-Communist, and in that respect I reflect their views to a T,” Zablocki said in an interview quoted by Steven Roberts.

In August, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked for the support of Congress after he ordered a military response to apparent attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, near the Communist nation of North Vietnam.

Zablocki cast his vote in the House for the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”; it was unanimous. In the Senate, only two senators dissented. Congress little suspected that this resolution would be used by Johnson and Nixon to justify nearly a decade of war in Southeast Asia, resulting in more than 58,000 deaths of U.S. service members.

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Constitutional conflict

The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to “declare war” but it also names the president “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

Therein lies the clash that has set Congress against the White House over war powers for generations.

While Congress was pivotal in authorizing America’s involvement in World War II, with its declarations of war against Japan, Germany and the rest of the Axis powers, the Korean War unfolded without an official declaration of war.

In an article for the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review written shortly before his death, Zablocki makes his interpretation of the Constitution clear: “While some of the Founding Fathers were concerned about this issue, James Madison commented that the executive has no right, in any case, to decide whether there is cause for declaring war. Madison added that the power of judging the causes of war rests exclusively with the legislative branch. In short, there is nothing vague or amorphous about who receives the vast bulk of war powers under the Constitution. It is Congress.”

Revelations about the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia helped fuel the passage of the War Powers Act. Nixon’s ability to fend off the legislation was greatly weakened by the Watergate scandal.

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Once the bill became law, presidents paid it little heed. Zablocki was dissatisfied with the Gerald Ford administration’s view of the War Powers Act as it applied to Ford’s bid to rescue Americans on the cargo ship SS Mayaguez in 1975.

The congressman also objected that President Jimmy Carter’s administration didn’t comply with the War Powers Act when it staged an unsuccessful effort in 1980 to rescue the American hostages held by Iran.

Zablocki wrote that under Ford and Carter, “executive branch compliance was half-hearted at best and deliberately evasive at worst.” But he conceded that these rescue missions weren’t on nearly the same scale as wars such as Vietnam.

Lebanon

So in his view, the “first real test” of the War Powers Act came under President Ronald Reagan. In 1982, the Reagan administration provided U.S. troops for a peacekeeping force to oversee the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Syrian troops from Beirut, Lebanon. Some members of Congress were “highly skeptical” of using the U.S. military in Lebanon, and Zablocki wrote to Reagan complaining that the White House wasn’t following the rules embodied in the War Powers Act.

In March, 1983, five Marines were wounded in a terrorist attack. In August, two Marines died from a mortar attack and two more were killed in early September. Finally, in August, one year after the Marines were deployed to Lebanon, Reagan instructed his chief of staff James Baker to meet with congressional leaders to gain their approval for the mission.

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I asked Corey where we are on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being a normal U.S. government, 5 representing a constitutional crisis and 10 being the end of democracy. His answer: we’re between a 7 and an 8 — in grave danger of losing our 250-year-old democratic form of government. I hope you will listen to our conversation.

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On October 12, 1945, President Harry S. Truman presented the Congressional Medal of Honor on the South Lawn of the White House to 15 members of the U.S. military who showed valor on the European and Pacific battlefields in the world war that had just ended.

“I would much rather have that Medal around my neck than to be President of the United States,” Truman said. “It is the greatest honor that can come to a man. It is an honor that all of us strive for, but very few of us ever achieve.”

They were just “doing their duty. They didn’t think they were being heroes.”

“Now these young men will go back and become citizens of this great country, and they will make good citizens; and you won’t find any of them bragging about what they have done or what they propose to do.”

That expression of humility was about as far as it is possible to go from the braggadocio of President Donald Trump’s 1…

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Nearly a year ago, President Donald Trump shook hands with Chief Justice John Roberts in the well of the House Chamber.

“Thank you again, thank you again,” the president said to Roberts, patting his black-robed arm. “Won’t forget it.”

The president was basking in the glow of his March 4 speech to a joint session of Congress, thanking and accepting greetings from justices, generals and members of his cabinet and Congress. Observers tried to parse his interaction with the chief justice.

What was the “it” Trump said he won’t forget? Some observers suggested his gratitude was to Roberts for writing the court’s 2024 decision granting presidents absolute immunity from prosecution for actions taken in their official capacity. Trump explained later that he was merely thanking Roberts for swearing him in on Inauguration Day.

Whatever the reason, “The exchange was so awkward,” Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, “it shoul…

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Over the past 250 years, Americans have elected 45 men to the presidency. Their stories tell us much about ambition, achievement and failure.

Through their struggles, we can learn about how the United States has overcome existential challenges — and suffered defeats that still linger.

Presidents are a recurring theme for Now It’s History. Here’s a President’s Day sampling of some recent posts.

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Joseph Schumpeter’s mother had an overriding ambition for her only child: to turn him into an English gentleman.

Born in what is now Czechoslovakia, Schumpeter began living like a gentleman in his 20s, when he left Vienna for a grand tour of European capitals. Visiting London, the future economist rented an apartment and rode his own horse in Hyde Park. He met and married the daughter of a Church of England official.

As biographer Thomas K. McCraw noted, Schumpeter never learned to cook, do laundry, drive a car or type his own manuscripts. But he did know how to wear a hand-tailored suit, seduce a woman and live beyond his means.

Schumpeter came from a German-speaking Catholic family that had operated a textile business in a small Czech town for generations. When his father died, apparently in a hunting accident, Joseph was four years old.

His mother Johanna took him to Graz, Austria’s second-largest city…

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When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, he surprised his defeated rivals for the 1860 presidential nomination by giving them key positions in his cabinet.

“The powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln,” wrote Doris Kearns Goodwin, “became colleagues who helped him steer the country through its darkest days.” The resulting “team of rivals,” to use Goodwin’s label, helped Lincoln earn the informal title of America’s greatest president.

It is striking that in the four years before Lincoln demonstrated how to be a supremely effective president, James Buchanan showed the nation the damage an incompetent one could wreak.

Buchanan began by choosing his cabinet unw…

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“Pape has been in 15 gun battles in which nine hoodlums were killed,” wrote James Gavin in the Chicago Tribune on April. 17, 1960. Detective magazines ran 49 articles about him, including an interview with Coronet in which he declared, “I’m not going to take any lip from a hoodlum.”

When Pape died in March, 2000 at the age of 91, his New York Times obituary said he was responsible for sending 300 men to prison and five to the electric chair. It noted that he “bragged that he never used his gun to fire warning shots, only to kill.”

But according to Gavin’s story in the Tribune, Pape wasn’t only a tough guy. “He has been known to lend money to hoodlums just released from state prison.” When the detectives on his squad started quarreling, Pape knew just what to do. He would soothe their tempers with an invitation to his mother’s cottage in a northern Illinois lake region. There Pape w…

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On August 18, 1572, ten years into a bloody religious war between the Catholics and Huguenots of France, the future King Henry IV married Marguerite de Valois.

It was a tense moment, since the two 19-year-olds were of different faiths: Henry was a Protestant and Marguerite a Catholic, and thus they could not both be present at a mass.

So the wedding vows were exchanged outside Notre Dame Cathedral on a platform “hung with cloth of gold,” the bride would later recall. “I wore a crown on my head…and I blazed in diamonds.” Cardinal de Bourbon conducted the ceremony at the church’s door. Once wed, the couple separated: The bride went into the cathedral for mass while Henry, the groom, left the church.

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The illusion that the interfaith wedding of Henry and Marguerite would bring an end to the war between France’s Catholics and Protestants was shattered six days later on St. Bartholomew’s …

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On October 3, 1974, Edward Eugene Garner broke into an unoccupied house on Vollintine Avenue in North Memphis, Tennessee. Mrs. Daisey Bell Statts, who lived next door, heard the sound of glass breaking and called police.

Two officers responded. While Officer Leslie Wright radioed the dispatcher to say they were at the scene, his partner Elton Hymon went to the back of the house, carrying a flashlight with five D-cell batteries in his right hand and a revolver in his left hand. A door slammed. Hymon saw someone running and heard a sound coming from the chain link fence in the backyard.

The events that night — following a routine burglary — would change the rules governing when police in America may use deadly force, thanks to a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even though the facts were very different in the ICE’s agent’s killing of Renee Good last week in Minneapolis — for one thing, she was not a suspect — some of the same reasoning may apply…

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On April 19, 1775, the first battles of the American Revolution broke out at Lexington and Concord. In Massachusetts, the event is still commemorated as Patriots’ Day.

On July 4, 1776, the political battle of the American colonies against Britain was officially declared in Philadelphia, and of course it is remembered yearly as Independence Day.

There was another monumental day along the road to independence that isn’t officially celebrated. It was 250 years ago — January 10, 1776. It could be called Common Sense Day, after the title of the pamphlet written by Thomas Paine and published then in Philadelphia.

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When Paine took pen to paper, the colonists who resisted British rule were far from united on the course ahead. Should they risk a war against the world’s most powerful military? Or strive for the best settlement they could get from London?

In titling his essay Common Sense, Paine chose wisely. For in the see-saw battle over …

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