“Today I invited myself to help open gifts from the Pets.com gift center,” began a holiday season 1999 tv commercial featuring the company’s Sock Puppet character, voiced by Michael Ian Black.

The 30-second spot ends with the puppet looking at Christmas stockings hung around a mantel and saying mournfully, “How could they do this to socks? Oh no, the horror!”

That year the Sock Puppet appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade; a Super Bowl ad would soon follow. On February 11, 2000, the company sold shares to the public for $11, raising a total of $82.5 million.

It was one month before the Nasdaq hit its dot-com era peak and slowly began an excruciating crash. Pets.com wouldn’t even survive until the next Thanksgiving Day parade. When the company shut down on November 7, 2000, the shares were trading for 22 cents.

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Investors who bought at the IPO asking price lost 98 percent of their money in 268 days. The Sock Puppet was sold off to an auto loan firm, reportedly for $125,000.

The Wall Street Journal quoted investment analyst Matt Stamski saying, “People were betting on ideas that were almost stillborn. It’s almost unprecedented to see an entire sector go from an idea to heavily funded to defunct in just a year and a half.”

In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to spot investment mania. Looking ahead, no one can safely predict when a stock market boom will end, or whether a particular company will succeed or fail.

SpaceX is about to go public in an era of high stock-market valuations, aiming to raise $75 billion in a sale that values the company at $1.77 trillion. Wall Street giants are falling over themselves to buy large chunks of the stock. The Wall Street Journal said BlackRock has submitted an order for at least $5 billion worth.

There’s no comparison between SpaceX and Pets.com. Elon Musk’s company launches partly reusable rockets into space and runs the very successful Starlink communications business, even though it doesn’t make a profit overall. Pets.com was wildly unprofitable.

But the Journal’s Spencer Jakab made a vital point about the astronomically high price of the impending public offering: “SpaceX will fetch a price/sales multiple of 92 times at the IPO price but doesn’t make a profit. For perspective, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, tech companies in the S&P 500 fetched an average multiple of seven times revenue.”

You may soon own some of SpaceX, if you hold ETFs or mutual funds that track the Nasdaq index. (The S&P 500 index has a one-year waiting period for inclusion and companies must be profitable.)

Later this year, two giant AI companies could go public: Anthropic and Open AI. It’s too early to tell whether their offerings will be as pricey as Musk’s.

FOMO

In May, 2004, Harvard Business School student Patrick McGinniss attempted to analyze the fraught behavior of his fellow students trying to manage their social lives at a time of many options. “First year, especially first semester can be a trying time socially,” he wrote in the student publication Harbus. “In this state of social flux, FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, weighs heavily on the psyche.”

Fear of Missing Out applies to a lot more than Harvard students having to decide whether to attend a sherry tasting. It explains much of what happens on Wall Street, where following the herd is a way of life for many.

Investment advisers risk losing their clients if they don’t recommend buying the top-performing stocks. On March 10, 2000, the day the Nasdaq hit a new high, New York Times business columnist Floyd Norris wrote:

As the number of shares that are rising has narrowed, pressure has grown on money managers to buy the stocks that are working and to shun the stocks that are not. That pressure has been intensified by mutual fund investors, who have pulled money out of many funds that have been poor performers while pouring cash into funds that have been rising.

‘’Right now, valuation measures are being thrown out the window,’‘ said Phillip Coburn, a strategist at Warburg Dillon Read. He said that the average price of technology stocks, using a measure that compares price-earnings multiples with earnings growth rates, is now twice what investors deemed reasonable only a couple of years ago.

Was this sustainable? Norris noted that Phillip Coburn thought it was: “Money managers are only being prudent when they load up on technology stocks. ‘Given the fact that I don’t see the end in sight, I don’t think they are being foolish,’‘ he said. ’They are being practical, and they are making money for their clients..’”

“The end” started to come over the next several months. By October, 2002, the Nasdaq index had fallen 77% — and it wouldn’t reach another record high until April, 2015.

The experienced analysts at Morningstar think SpaceX’s initial offering price, expected to be $135 a share, is way too high. They assess the value of the company at $63 a share, less than half of the price buyers will likely pay. They concede that if Musk’s moonshots — a fully reusable Starship and widespread development of orbiting data centers — materialize, the stock could be worth $154 a share. But they give that scenario only a 7 percent chance of happening.

Yet even if the moonshots are proven to be fantasies, SpaceX could still rocket higher than its $135 initial price. If enough people fear missing out on the riches they anticipate from Musk’s venture, they could bid the price of the stock far higher.

Still, if SpaceX shares do reach the stratosphere, enjoy it — and remember that the air is thin at that height, and the fall is a long way down.

The 295-foot long ship was one of five such vessels the Nazi regime commissioned to “circumvent the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, using maritime training as a front to quietly rebuild naval strength,” as Will Sofrin’s new book notes. The Germans named the ship the Horst Wessel, after the man who wrote the lyrics for the Nazi anthem and was treated as a martyr after his killing in 1930.

After Hitler’s death and the regime’s surrender in 1945, Allied officials began dividing up the German fleet among the victors. The superintendent of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy suggested obtaining Horst Wessel as a sail training ship for the academy’s cadets.

Eighty years later, the Eagle will be leading the parade of tall ships from around the world sailing up the Hudson River — as it did for the 1976 bicentennial — to mark America’s 250th anniversary. Sofrin told me he’ll be on board for the occasion.

The ship not only trains Coast Guard cadets, but serves as an ambassador for the United States around the world.

Sofrin tells the story in his new book, USCG Cutter Eagle: The Legacy of the Coast Guard’s Flagship, published by Lyons Press. As noted in my conversation with Will, the book weaves in the stories of officers and rank and file members of the Coast Guard who have served on the Eagle.

When the U.S. acquired the ship, it needed major repairs and a new engine. It also was short of the crew required to take it from Bremerhaven to the U.S., so its commander had to sail with many German crew members. Upon arrival, they were transferred to a prisoner of war camp and returned to Europe.

On the final leg of the journey, from Bermuda to New York, a storm brought 60-knot winds and huge seas.

As Sofrin recounted, the ship’s commander Gordon McGowan described the sound of the storm:

“There was the sharp tearing sound—the ripping of the fabric of the gates of hell. . . . This tapestry of sound bore the pattern of maniacal majesty.” The fore upper and lower topsails were the first to go. They exploded in a flash, leaving ribbons streaming. The ship hit 16 knots at this point…the fastest the ship had ever gone. This speed was estimated based on their observations of the prop shaft’s revolutions when the clutch was released—something they had studied on the voyage. At this point, the foresail and main upper topsail blew out. The mainsail and main lower topsail held.

Sofrin describes the risky maneuvers that were needed that day to keep the ship from disaster on its maiden voyage as the Eagle.

Sofrin’s book includes a history of the Coast Guard, which traces its roots back to the U.S. fleet of revenue cutters used to collect tariffs during the time of President George Washington. With this antecedent, the Coast Guard is even older than the U.S. Navy.

Why does the Coast Guard have a tall ship more than 150 years after the end of the Age of Sail?

Sofrin explains:

Sail training holds a vital place in the US Coast Guard and other military maritime forces around the world. Rooted in centuries of tradition, it is more than just a means of teaching seamanship; it also serves as a crucible for developing discipline, risk assessment management, teamwork, and leadership. Operating a sailing vessel demands precise coordination, clear communication, and a deep understanding of natural forces and human limitations. These challenges forge proficiencies in cadets and officers that translate directly into their roles aboard modern vessels. For the Coast Guard, sail training aboard Eagle is a rite of passage, instilling respect for the sea and seamanship principles that remain relevant.

Life on the Eagle has changed significantly since June, 1976, when the first women cadets were admitted to the Academy. In 1980, 14 women were in the graduating class, along with 140 men.

In 1984, several women played key roles in preserving lives when the Eagle was almost knocked down. A storm front struck it during a race of tall ships heading from Bermuda to Halifax, Nova Scotia; remarkably no one was killed aboard Eagle in that episode. The ship righted itself and suffered no damage. Several hours later, a squall capsized the 115-foot British ship Marques. The tall ship sank within a minute. Only nine of the 28 people on board survived.

The Eagle has become a symbol of the United States. It sailed to Australia for that nation’s 1988 Bicentenary and to St. Petersburg, in Russia, in 1996.

Presidents and world leaders have come aboard. But perhaps the most notable visitor mentioned in the book was a singer and songwriter.

The captain of the Eagle, Ivan Luke, “had long been a devoted ‘Parrothead,’ a nickname famously associated with die-hard fans of Jimmy Buffett, his music, and his easygoing, tropical lifestyle,” wrote Sofrin. “From the moment Captain Luke took command of Eagle, he set his sights on a personal goal: to get Jimmy Buffett aboard the ship…After years of reaching out, Luke finally succeeded in bringing Buffett aboard. It was a surreal and meaningful moment for the captain, as he blended his love of the sea with the soundtrack that had accompanied much of his sailing life.”

Buffett sailed on Eagle on a short loop from Salem, Massachusetts around Cape Cod. Aboard with his son, Buffett worked the lines, took part in drills and dined with the crew as well as in the officer’s mess.

Buffett’s grandfather, James Delaney Buffett, had been a steamship captain out of Newfoundland and was a big influence on Jimmy.

So when Buffett joined the Eagle’s captain (on harmonica) and a seaman (on guitar) for a jam session, they sang, among other songs, “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

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On the morning of November 25, 1783, the last of the defeated British troops left the soil of New York City. It was the end of a seven-year-long occupation. Yet as the redcoats headed to their ships on that cold day, the royal flag still flew over Fort George at the tip of Manhattan.

The United States of America had won its war of independence against Britain at Yorktown two years earlier. Now the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, ushered in a transition to peace.

When General George Washington and 800 troops reached the fort at the Battery, they discovered that the “flag had been nailed to the staff, the halyards taken away, and the pole itself besmeared with grease; obviously to prevent or hinder the removal of the emblem of royalty, and the raising of the Stars and Stripes.”

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As James Riker wrote a century later, “gunners stood ready to salute our colors. But the grease baffled all attempts to shin up the staff.”

Sgt. John Van Arsdale stepped forward. Wounded in battle at Fort Montgomery, he had survived imprisonment by the British.

With the help of cleats nailed to the pole and a ladder, he reached the top, “tore down the British standard, and rove the new halyards by which the Star-spangled Banner was quickly run up…and floated proudly, while the multitude gave vent to their joy in hearty cheers, and the artillery boomed forth a national salute of thirteen guns!” The crowd, the troops, and even Washington himself, dropped money into hats that were passed around to reward Van Arsdale for his initiative, Riker wrote.

For decades, the holiday of Evacuation Day would mark the triumph over the British, with Van Arsdale and eventually his son David receiving special honor.

In Boston, the earlier evacuation of British troops in 1776 is still observed as the Evacuation Day holiday on March 17.

Yorktown, Virginia, celebrates the victory over Lord Cornwallis’ troops with a parade on October 19.

Any one of these three days could have become America’s principal remembrance of the Revolutionary War.

Yet our national holiday is none of them. It’s July 4^th — the date that the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Theory and facts

In 1320 words, the Declaration sets forth a theory that all men are created equal, that they have “inalienable rights,” that governments derive their powers from the people and that citizens can abolish governments which violate these principles. It declares “to a candid world” a set of “facts” aiming to show that King George III’s abusive rule over the 13 colonies was therefore invalid. (Delegates to the convention chose to brush over the rank hypocrisy of many slave owners denying “inalienable rights” to those they held in captivity.)

At the moment of its adoption, the Declaration’s impact could have been seen as merely symbolic. As David McCullough pointed out, “Such courage and high ideals were of little consequence, of course, the declaration itself being no more than a declaration without military success against the most formidable force on earth.” It was on the battlefield that independence would be won.

We are little more than a month away from the 250^th anniversary of that declaration. By making July 4 America’s key holiday, the nation chose to honor the ideals of equality and freedom, rather than the fact of victory in war. That choice is getting lost in the Trump administration’s conception of the semiquincentennial’s meaning.

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The White House website quotes President Trump saying, “With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history.”

Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch to mark the anniversary. The Treasury Department is proposing a $250 bill with Trump’s portrait. (Congress would have to approve honoring a living person on U.S. currency.) A commemorative gold coin with Trump’s image is in the works. Trump’s signature is going to appear on U.S. money; his face may be placed on U.S. passports and passes to national parks.

A “UFC Freedom 250” match is set for the White House grounds on June 14, Trump’s birthday. An Indy car race through the streets of Washington could follow later this year.

Even Trump’s controversial Justice Department fund to compensate people supposedly targeted by prior administrations has a 250th anniversary connection: it’s in the amount of $1.776 billion.

“Just this past week at a White House Cabinet meeting,” Mallory Wilson wrote for The Hill, “Trump promoted bright red $55 hats sold by his family company in honor of the America 250 celebrations. And in a span of two days, performers were announced for a two-week-long National Mall event, and many quickly withdrew their participation, claiming they were misled about the political nature of it.”

The anniversary of a document drafted to revolt against an imperial king has become the excuse for a profusion of imperial monuments to Donald Trump.

The end of Evacuation Day

Few New Yorkers know of Evacuation Day any more, but there’s still a lesson it can teach us.

While the 100^th anniversary in 1883 was a grand occasion, the holiday soon fell out of favor and was mostly celebrated by organizations such as the Sons of the Revolution, wrote historian Clifton Hood for the Journal of Social History in 2004.

Like a supernova that exploded in a final brief display of brilliance before being reduced to the nothingness of a black hole, the 1883 parade was both the largest Evacuation Day gala ever staged and the last big one. Over a million people attended, including President Chester A. Arthur, several Cabinet officers, and eight governors. Twenty-five thousand troops marched in the parade, while a marine pageant featured 300 warships, private yachts, and other vessels.

The holiday’s significance was diminished by the passing of generations and by subsequent wars including the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Hood wrote. A nation founded in opposition to the British began to view the U.K. favorably.

In 1883, “the last straw” for New York’s large Irish-American population “was a report that ‘Anglo-maniac snobs’ from the Produce Exchange had invited the British ambassador to an Evacuation Day banquet and toasted Queen Victoria’s health.”

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But Evacuation Day did play a part in creating a different holiday. In 1789, a proclamation from President Washington declared a day of thanksgiving on Thursday, November 26, one day after the observance of Evacuation Day. Though the president and his aides didn’t cite Evacuation Day, “their thinking seems clear since Washington’s proclamation and the Federalist representations of the evacuation emphasized the same themes of wartime sacrifice, national independence, and social unity,” Hood observed. Plus, New York City was then the national capital.

Over time, Hood noted, Thanksgiving overshadowed and essentially replaced Evacuation Day. For one thing, Thanksgiving was a national holiday rather than a regional one.

That November 26th 1789 fell on a Thursday was inconsequential to Washington and his contemporaries; it was the date that mattered, not the day of the week. By happenstance and accident this 1789 Thanksgiving ultimately led to the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national legal holiday on the 4th Thursday of November.

New York was a wounded city by the time the British troops headed home. It had been damaged by fire, the taking of thousands of prisoners of war — many of whom died of disease on prison ships floating in the waters off Brooklyn — and the exodus of pro-Independence residents.

When the U.S. won the war, the loyalists began looking for a refuge from the retribution they expected to suffer without the protection of Britain’s army and navy. Tens of thousands left the city for colonies in Nova Scotia and the Caribbean and for Britain itself.

As the loyalists left, the revolutionists moved back to New York, with many shocked at the poor condition of the homes to which they were returning. Evacuation Day was thus an emotional homecoming.

After the raising of the Stars and Stripes, the celebrations went on for a week.

Hood wrote:

At many events — a dinner that Governor Clinton held for General Washington and his generals on the 25th, for instance, and the balls that merchants threw in taverns and coffee houses— attendance was restricted to social and military elites and genteel standards of decorum prevailed. More raucous merrymaking took place in public spaces as artisans and farmers raised liberty poles and enlisted men fired thirteen- gun salutes. The festivities climaxed on December 2nd when the Continental Army staged a fireworks display said to be the grandest ever held in North America.

But even the “genteel” events were very well lubricated. Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli wrote that guests at Governor Clinton’s dinner at Fraunces Tavern on November 25, 1783 consumed 75 bottles of Madeira, 18 of claret, 16 of port, and 24 of porter (a dark beer).

Still, it’s revealing to note that the toasts at this dinner honored not only the heroes and supporters of the American cause, but also many of its ideals, as voiced in the Declaration of Independence. Washington and Clinton raised their glasses 13 times to toast, among others, the USA, France, the American Army and the war dead.

But, according to Riker, their toasts also included salutes to these values:

• May Justice support what Courage has gained.

• The Vindicators of the Rights of Mankind in every Quarter of the Globe.

• May America be an Asylum to the Persecuted of the Earth.

• May a close Union of the States guard the Temple they have erected to Liberty.

• May the Remembrance of This Day, be a Lesson to Princes.

Let’s not lose sight of those values as we celebrate the 250^th.

On March 23, 1903, Lizzie Magie applied for a patent to protect a board game she had invented.

The “Landlord’s Game” enabled players to buy and sell properties with play money. Railroads were located in the center of each side of the board. One of the corner spaces said, “No trespassing. Go to Jail.” The opposite corner was the Jail. Players who passed the corner marked “Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages” received $100. Magie’s patent was granted in 1904.

Three decades later and without credit to its original inventor, Parker Brothers made “Monopoly” one of the most popular games of all time. Players who passed Go collected $200 and while “go to jail” was still a dreaded space, people could always hope to pick up a “Get out of jail free” Chance card.

In 16 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has turned that card into an operating philosophy for the Justice Department — with one difference: It’s get out of jail free — and collect $200.

The rioters who were imprisoned for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol not only received presidential pardons but now may apply for compensation from a $1.776 billion fund created when Trump settled his lawsuit against the IRS.

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The settlement, which seemed to have gained the approval only of Trump and his former personal lawyer — now Acting Attorney General — Todd Blanche, also gives Trump and his family immunity from any claims by the IRS over existing tax audits. That could save the president hundreds of millions of dollars. Layer this immunity on top of the immunity from prosecution the Supreme Court granted presidents for actions in their official capacity in its July, 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States.

The compensation fund is the latest of a series of scandals in the second Trump presidency.

Writing for Puck, Leigh Ann Caldwell summed up some of the others:

New financial disclosure documents, first reported by The New York Times, show that Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades during the first three months of this year, including in companies with regular business before the government; separately, he and his family have generated at least $2 billion through crypto ventures. Last October, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao after he helped get the president’s crypto company, World Liberty, off the ground. In April, Bijan Tehrani, an Australian billionaire who co-founded Stake, the largest crypto-backed online casino in the world, gave $1 million to MAGA Inc. As The New York Times reported today, the Trump administration has dropped almost all regulatory action and enforcement against crypto companies. Among the biggest beneficiaries were the Winklevoss twins, who have contributed to Trump’s ballroom and invested with the president’s sons. “It’s wild what’s happening, and they’re doing it with impunity,” one Republican strategist told me. (The White House has repeatedly said the president does not violate conflict-of-interest laws and thinks only of what’s best for the American people.)

President Bill Clinton was widely condemned for pardoning commodity trader Marc Rich, whose then-wife was a major Democratic party donor, on the president’s last day in office. Trump, by contrast, hasn’t tried to sneak clemency in at the last minute: he has rolled out pardons in broad daylight to people who have supported him.

Obeying the law

A foundation stone of America’s vibrant economy is the “rule of law.” What happens to that if the powerful and politically connected can get out of jail free?

Trump’s bending of the rules could be seen as so extreme and offensive that the next president will be focused on restoring ethical and legal guardrails. Or Trump’s actions could permanently upend the rule of law, opening the door to a culture of corruption. Which future is in store? The stakes are enormous.

Why do people obey the law? Tom R. Tyler, a professor of law and psychology, surveyed citizens in Chicago in 1984 to answer that question. The results showed that the legal mechanisms of prosecution and punishment are less significant than moral and political beliefs in prompting people to follow the law.

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“If people view compliance with the law as appropriate because of their attitudes about how they should behave,” Tyler wrote in Why People Obey the Law, “they will voluntarily assume the obligation to follow legal rules. They will feel personally committed to obeying the law, irrespective of whether they risk punishment for breaking the law…normative commitment through personal morality means obeying a law because one feels the law is just; normative commitment through legitimacy means obeying a law because one feels that the authority enforcing the law has the right to dictate behavior.”

A game turned upside down

The inventor of the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie was a bright and ambitious woman, overqualified for her job as a stenographer at the nation’s Dead Letter Office in Washington. She was a follower of Henry George, an opponent of the flagrant inequality of the Gilded Age and of giant corporate monopolies. George argued that there should be a single form of taxes — on land, since that was a common good that really belongs to the community as a whole, rather than on income.

As Mary Pilon pointed out in her revealing book, The Monopolists, people could play the Landlord’s Game one of two ways: They could follow “anti-monopolist” rules “in which all were rewarded when wealth was created” or pro-monopolist rules in which “the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents”.

Magie’s game never became a hit, though it inspired many people around the country to play variations of it for decades. Nor did she succeed in making it an effective way of spreading Henry George’s political philosophy. Monopoly brings out the latent oligarch in most players rather than the social reformer.

By all rights, though, Magie should have been honored as the original inventor when Parker Brothers started producing Monopoly in the 1930s. Instead the game maker supported a Philadelphia man’s bogus claim to have invented the game.

It was Charles Darrow who got thousands of dollars and an unending stream of residuals for Monopoly. To protect its bestseller, Parker Brothers eventually bought Lizzie Magie’s patent for only $500 and with no residuals.

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The game maker’s narrative was challenged and ultimately invalidated as a result of a lawsuit by Ralph Anspach, an economics professor who developed the game “Anti-Monopoly” and who Parker Brothers targeted for allegedly infringing on their trademark. After a long battle, an appeals court ruled against the game maker, leading the company to settle with the professor.

Still, its owner, now Hasbro Inc., is laughing all the way to the bank. More than 275 million analog copies of the game have been sold in the last 90 years. Monopoly made the transition to the digital world effectively. Since mobile game maker Scopely launched Monopoly Go! under license from Hasbro in 2023, the game has generated more than $6 billion in revenue.

It’s remarkable that two games designed to remedy inequities in our economic system — the Landlord’s Game and Anti-Monopoly — led to the exposure of the Monopoly monopoly. And now we’ll see how Americans feel about living under a “get out of jail free” government.

Toledo posted dashcam video of the falling material on Reddit, and told Gothamist, “If I would have been one or two more seconds further forward, instead of that piece of concrete hitting the front of the car, it could have come through the windshield, and I wouldn’t be speaking to you.” (Officials said it wasn’t falling concrete, but lighter material and dust.)

Six days later, actual falling concrete injured a driver on the same road, the Trans- Manhattan Expressway, which connects the Cross Bronx Expressway to the George Washington Bridge. The driver was taken to a hospital. According to the New York Times, Port Authority officials are planning a project to “fortify the overpasses.”

The two expressways are among the most heavily trafficked roads in the country. Driving on them is scary enough even when it is not raining concrete. The expressways lack shoulders in many places. Eighteen-wheelers whiz by, as they supply the 8 million people of geographic Long Island — Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau and Suffolk Counties — with goods from the mainland of America.

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After the falling debris incidents, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey sent workers to inspect the overpass and to install netting to protect drivers. The agency said the winter’s repeated freeze-thaw cycles might be to blame.

The incidents’ likely cause differed from that of the sinkhole that suddenly opened up on the Long Island Expressway on May 14. The driver of a 2019 Honda, Scott Manes, suffered minor injuries when his car partly fell into the hole, setting off the airbag, Newsday reported. Officials said nearby excavation work for a sewage project probably caused the eight-by-ten-foot sinkhole.

Even though unrelated, the incidents called attention to the state of infrastructure in the U.S.

It was nearly five years ago that President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in front of 800 applauding guests on the White House South Lawn. “America is moving again,” Biden said, “and your life is going to change for the better.”

At the time, former president Donald Trump was urging Republicans to kill the infrastructure bill and threatening primary challenges against those who backed it. One of them was Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his Senate primary this weekend after Trump supported a primary challenger. The president couldn’t forgive Cassidy for something he considered even worse than the infrastructure bill — the Louisiana senator voted to convict Trump of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

Cassidy had helped negotiate the infrastructure bill and attended Biden’s signing ceremony. That took a certain amount of political courage. As NPR noted, “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., opposed the bipartisan bill and tweeted out the names of the 13 House Republicans, calling them ‘traitors.’” Greene has since soured on Trump.

What does Trump call Marjorie Taylor Greene now? A “low IQ traitor.”

Infrastructure week

For years during Trump’s first presidency, the White House planned a seven-day series of events focused on the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, with the goal of hammering out a bipartisan bill to fix it. But Trump kept sabotaging the effort, making “Infrastructure Week” a running joke.

As Katie Rogers wrote in the New York Times:

During the first Infrastructure Week, in June 2017, White House aides dutifully plugged along with topical messaging, hoping to distract from more pressing controversies, until Mr. Trump closed out a Rose Garden event by accusing James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of committing perjury in his congressional testimony about the president’s behavior during an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

“Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a leaker.”

Trump’s obsession with Comey shows no signs of flagging even now. In April, the Justice Department brought its second indictment of the former FBI director, this time for supposedly threatening the life of Trump by posting a photo of seashells on Instagram spelling out “86 47.” An unrelated earlier charge against Comey had been dismissed.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is due to expire September 30, and as of April, no replacement bill had been introduced in Congress, according to an engineering firm, JPC Engineering.

Since passage of the law, nearly $600 billion has been committed to more than 72,000 projects, including roads, bridges, ports and water systems. But Trump signed an executive order upon taking office that froze some payments to states if they had a connection to investments aimed at combatting climate change.

The bipartisan coalition that enacted the 2021 infrastructure law seems like a thing of the past, as Washington politics has grown even more partisan under Trump’s second term

The fiscal picture is another key factor. With the federal deficit and debt growing, funding future infrastructure investments is bound to be harder. And that problem predates Trump’s proposal to fight higher gasoline prices by temporarily suspending the tax that funds highway construction.

Hacking through the city

There may be no better example of the challenge posed by deteriorating infrastructure than the complex engineering and construction work it took to build the Cross Bronx Expressway and its connecting highways between 1948 and 1972.

As Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, the Cross-Bronx Expressway was “one of thirteen expressways Robert Moses rammed across New York City” in the mid-twentieth century. Building such roads through the nation’s largest city was incredibly complex — and costly.

Caro noted:

For most of these roads, Moses had to hack paths through jungles of tenements and apartment houses, to slash aqueducts in two and push sewers aside, to lift railroads into the air or shove them underground. For one expressway, the Van Wyck, he had to hold up in the air the busiest stretch of railroad in the world, the switching yard through which thirteen tracks and sidings of the Long Island Rail Road pass over Atlantic Avenue in Jamaica—hold it up and hold it steady enough so that during the seven months it took to slide the huge expressway underneath, the 1,100 train movements which took place daily in that yard could continue uninterrupted.

The seven-mile Cross-Bronx “would be a huge trench gouged across a city” and, wrote Caro, had to be built “without disturbing the city’s lifelines, the water and gas mains, electric cables and telephone wires, sewers and steam pipes, streets and subways, that supplied hundreds of thousands of residents of the Bronx with services too essential to be interrupted for the long months it would take to build each section of the expressway.”

Caro faulted Moses for destroying part of the East Tremont neighborhood when a much less intrusive route existed. To the delight of the residents, Robert F. Wagner, running for mayor of New York City, had promised to oppose Moses’s route for the Cross-Bronx. But once Wagner was elected, Moses told him, according to his memoirs:

…I said, “I am sorry, Bob, but you will have to tell them you can’t move it. The city is not going to make that decision. The city pays only half the cost of land. It is federal and state money that’s involved and I represent these officials. If you try to move this Expressway you’ll never get another nickel from us. You will have to explain that it was all a mistake.”

Wagner abandoned his promise to the residents. The road was built as Moses planned it.

Where things stand

The highways, bridges and tunnels of the post-World War II boom are now 70 or more years old. Maintaining and rebuilding them is a massive task and requires political muscle, with leaders able to think long-term rather than get consumed in the daily rush of social media posts.

The last two presidents have seen their administrations greatly weakened by raging inflation — in Biden’s case. a result of the reaction to the Covid pandemic and the injection of a gusher of federal money into the economy. In Trump’s case, the inflation demon is being reawakened by rising fuel costs resulting from his war with Iran.

Even before the war, the index of highway construction costs had nearly doubled over a five-year period. The dollars allocated for infrastructure repair won’t go nearly as far as planned, due to the rise in inflation.

In March, 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a grade of “C”. Its 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure was a step up from the 2021 report, which gave the U.S. a “C-” . The engineers stressed that the nation still is $3.7 trillion short of the level of investment needed to “have the nation’s infrastructure in good working order — an increase from the $2.59 trillion gap reported four years ago.”

It’s a good bet that there’s more falling concrete in America’s future — at least until we have a president who is serious about Infrastructure Week.

In 1901, Lipton’s Shamrock II challenged Columbia again and lost all three races.

In 1903, his Shamrock III lost all three races against a new American yacht.

In 1920, Lipton’s Shamrock IV won twice before losing the final three races.

In 1930, Lipton’s Shamrock V lost every race against the U.S. contender.

Despite five successive defeats, the self-made multimillionaire from Glasgow was contemplating a sixth shortly before he died in 1931. Lipton, whose tea brand survives to this day, handled his defeats with grace, earning the admiration and sympathy of Americans — so much so that they raised a fund which gifted him a spectacular gold trophy by way of consolation.

Lipton never gave in to the temptation to bad-mouth his opponents. As Michael D’Antonio writes in A Full Cup, a biography of the entrepreneur, “One sympathetic woman told Lipton she had heard that the American side had ‘put something in the water’ to prevent him from winning.”

“Lipton said she was correct. They had ‘put the Columbia in the water for just that very purpose.’” Even when he was losing, D’Antonio pointed out, Lipton gained publicity that brought customers to his businesses. Yet Lipton was only playing the part of a prosperous yachtsman — he looked jaunty in his cap, but never learned how to captain a boat himself.

A very different kind of entrepreneur, Ted Turner, successfully defended the America’s Cup in 1977, prolonging the streak that kept the trophy in the U.S. from 1851 until Australia II defeated a team led by Dennis Conner in 1983.

Along with a boat made in America to win the America’s Cup came a captain who could only have come from America.

Turner lived out the indelible quote attributed to Vince Lombardi, but which was first said by college football coach Henry 'Red’ Sanders: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Turner would never have been content being only a gracious loser.

His hyper-competitive spirit and hands-on expertise in sailing made him a ferocious competitor. His drive and intuitive grasp of human nature enabled him to overcome the odds and grow his quirky UHF tv station in Atlanta into a massive cable news, entertainment and sports empire. Turner, who willed into being the category of 24-hour-cable news with the launch of CNN in 1980, died May 6, at the age of 87 of Lewy body dementia.

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His sailing career offers insights into his business success. Turner decided not to rest on his laurels after winning the America’s Cup aboard Courageous. He entered his personal yacht Tenacious in Britain’s Fastnet Race in August, 1979, as his company was preparing to launch CNN.

“Winning the America’s Cup and Fastnet would be comparable to taking the Olympic gold medal in both the marathon and the 100 meters, and I was eager to win it,” Turner wrote in his memoir Call Me Ted.

The Fastnet was a vastly bigger event than the America’s Cup; the field of yachts exceeded 300 and the course was 605-miles long. It began at Cowes in southern England, proceeded west into the Irish Sea, wound around Fastnet Rock on Ireland’s southern tip and back to Cowes.

The 1979 race began in good weather. But by the time Tenacious was halfway through the race, the forecast turned ominous. A major storm with hurricane-strength winds was heading their way. Turner was on watch during the worst of it, from midnight to 4 a.m. The winds reached 60 knots and the waves 35 feet, according to Gary Jobson, Turner’s tactician.

“It was really scary that night,” Turner observed, adding that he had confidence in his 61-foot boat. “Even at the height of the storm, I was more concerned about winning than I was about dying.”

There were many casualties, all on boats less than 39 feet long. Fifteen people died in the race. Five boats sank and 24 boats were abandoned. Only 85 of the 303 boats that started the race crossed the finish line.

Some early reports erroneously listed Turner’s yacht among the missing, alarming his company’s executives who were then working feverishly to get CNN ready to launch the following year. According to Citizen Turner, a 1995 book by Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg, some doubted whether the CNN venture could survive the loss of Ted.

So the executives were relieved to see him pop up on a news report from England, where his crew all survived and his yacht had been pronounced the winner of the tragic race.

As the Goldbergs wrote:

There was Ted alive and talking a blue streak. “Sailing in rough weather is what the sport is all about,” he boasted to reporters, praising his strong boat, his good crew and their experience. “The people who didn’t have those,” he added, in an offhand fashion, “went to the big regatta in the sky.” Asked about the tragic loss of life, he replied “it’s no use crying. The king is dead. Long live the king. It had to happen sooner or later. You ought to be thankful there are storms like that or you’d all be speaking Spanish.” His wise guy answers and his flip reference to the fate of the Spanish Armada which in 1588 also encountered fatal storms angered the British press.

For Turner, simply competing was not enough: he had to win. As TIME reported when it named him Man of the Year in 1991, “For all his days on the sailing circuit, Turner had struck some of those who know him as a joyless monomaniac who pursued achievement not out of passion for the undertaking but out of a tortured focus on the finish line. ‘He told me 20 times that he never liked sailing,’ says [former CNN executive Robert] Wussler. ‘He said, ‘You know, Bob, I got cold and I got wet.’ He was more in love with just winning.”

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The CNN project began after Turner won the America’s Cup at the age of 38. Turner wrote in his memoir, “my thoughts turned to what would come next.”

Turner’s willingness to take risks had become clear when he bought the listless Atlanta Braves, whose games he had already been airing on his station. His flair for showmanship led him to inventive ways to fill seats in the stadium:

According to Citizen Turner:

Soon there were ostrich races and home plate weddings, Easter egg hunts and dollar bill scrambles, mattress stacking and motorized bathtub competitions, free halter-top giveaways and aerialist Karl Wallenda in a Braves hat doing a skywalk 200 feet above the infield. All this plus fireworks, wrestling matches, ball girls in hot pants and belly dancers! Turner said he’d do anything to bring people into the stadium, and he clearly meant it but most interesting and characteristic of the near middle-aged Turner was his eagerness to participate in these events and his willingness to look like a damn fool in the process.

Unlike the airing of Braves games, news had never been a priority for Turner’s “superstation” in Atlanta. It would be presented in the very early morning hours by anchor Bill Tush, who, as Turner recalled, “could read the news with a German shepherd sitting next to him, or he’d put a shopping bag over his head and call himself the ‘Unknown Newsman.’”

But Turner knew that radio stations had succeeded in launching 24-hour news channels and believed that the time was ripe to challenge the triopoly of broadcast networks that profited from half-hour evening newscasts. He did no research before greenlighting the idea of CNN, but wisely hired an experienced journalist, Reese Schonfeld, to get the new venture off the ground.

Schonfeld recruited some TV news veterans including Daniel Schorr and Mary Alice Williams. He had trouble luring others to risk their careers on a news venture based in Atlanta, rather than New York or Washington.

CNN nearly died before it was launched due to the loss of a vital communications satellite and Turner’s financial difficulties. In April 1980, Turner was trying to raise financing for his new venture after having invested $34 million in the CNN project.

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According to Citizen Turner, a frazzled Turner told his lawyers on April 8:

This is about it. The whole deal is crumbling and when it goes it’ll take everything I’ve got with it. I’m just about flat broke... the banks are calling in their notes on me, and the insurance company already has. I’ve got three hundred people on the Cable News payroll, and no money coming in to pay them. I just had to borrow twenty million to tide me over. The interest rate is twenty-five percent. Twenty-five percent of twenty million is five million a year, and there’s twelve months in a year and that’s $400,000 a month in interest alone. I can’t pay it.

Turner wasn’t the only one with doubts about whether CNN could get off the ground. J. Christopher Burns, the vice president for planning of the Washington Post Company, said, “the reason Ted Turner decided to go ahead with it in the form that he’s doing may be that he doesn’t understand the problem. He’s not paying attention. The cable industry doubts that Ted Turner knows his ass from a hole in the ground about news.”

But on Sunday, June 1, 1980, CNN actually did launch — with a ceremony at its headquarters, a former country club in Atlanta. There was a military band and a color guard and 300 guests had been invited. “I’m going to do news like the world has never seen news before,” said Turner. “This will be the most significant achievement in the annals of journalism.”

The hype aside, this was a big moment. There were very few people in business who would have had the courage to take the risk Turner assumed in launching CNN.

It was a rocky start. “Within its first hour on the air,” the Goldbergs noted, “CNN lost its feed from New York and went black, came back on the air only to cut out in the middle of a presidential speech, started to go live to the Middle East only to find out that the Jerusalem feed wasn’t ready” and cut to a reporter who was picking his nose.

“Over the following months there were enough blunders, flubs and goof-ups for a dozen blooper reels.”

A light bulb exploded, setting Daniel Schorr’s clothes on fire. A cleaning woman emptied the wastebasket at Bernard Shaw’s desk as he delivered the news. The weatherman got smacked by the weather map’s revolving panels. More seriously, the network was losing millions of dollars a month.

But for all the early mishaps and the long shake-out period that is natural for any major startup, CNN emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s as one of the world’s strongest journalism organizations, with a staff whose enterprise and intelligence proved equal to the challenge of covering war, political upheaval and social change.

As a business, it stopped bleeding money in the mid-1980s and began earning hundreds of millions — and eventually more than a billion dollars a year.

By all accounts, Turner led a tumultuous personal life and at times treated people, including members of his own family, shabbily. He was haunted by his father’s suicide. But Turner was eventually diagnosed with — and treated for — bipolar disorder and made amends. He became a leading conservationist and a supporter of the United Nations and of world understanding and peace.

When I joined CNN in 2008, Turner had long left the company, a victim, like many others, of the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger. The plummeting stock shrank Turner’s net worth from nearly $10 billion to less than $3 billion. His imprint on CNN was very much evident even after he left. It was a place where people took risks to uncover the news, set high standards and tried to work together collaboratively, like the crew of a sailboat.

The launch of the Fox News Channel in 1996 aped CNN in a deceptive way. While proclaiming that it was “fair and balanced,” the channel’s main engine was in reality a conservative ideological project devised by longtime Republican operative Roger Ailes and backed by Rupert Murdoch.

Viewers would tune into CNN in times of crisis, or just for a five-minute update on the news, but they were more likely to stay tuned to a channel whose anchors and guests revved up their political tribe and railed against the opposing side. In the ratings, partisan opinion proved a stronger draw than straight news.

But there is still a need for the kind of impartial, truth-seeking news organization Ted Turner created, even as cable television is being superseded by streaming. As the network faces the likelihood of new ownership in a politically treacherous climate, it’s more important than ever that CNN remain true to the principles laid down by its founder.

Without Turner’s vision, his passion for winning and his willingness to put everything on the line, CNN would never have gotten off the ground.

On June 19, 1924, a foursome of U.S. senators delayed their golf game on the fairway of the Chevy Chase Club outside Washington while one searched for a lost ball. The next group of players, led by Dr. James F. Mitchell, asked the senators if they could play through.

Senate minority leader Joseph T. Robinson objected. As an argument brewed, he punched the doctor in the “eye, knocking him backward over a bench,” the New York Times reported.

Robinson wasn’t hurt physically but the incident was something of a political black eye. The senator from Arkansas was angling for the Democratic presidential nomination that summer.

In July, the country club’s governors voted unanimously to expel Robinson, after he refused to apologize. Robinson had to wait four years to get onto his party’s national ticket: he ran as Al Smith’s running mate in 1928, another year of defeat for the Democrats.

The golf course confrontation enhanced Robinson’s reputation as a brawler and probably didn’t impair his effectiveness in the Senate. There, the senator from Arkansas could also lose control of his temper.

“It took little imagination to see fire and smoke rolling out of his mouth like some fierce dragon,” recalled an attendant in the Senate press gallery, Richard L. Riedel. “Robinson could make senators and everyone in his presence quake by the burning fire in his eyes, the baring of his teeth as he ground out his words, and the clenching of his mighty fists as he beat on the desk before him.”

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When Democrats won control of Congress in the 1932 election that put Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, Robinson became majority leader. He played a vital role in passing New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt cruised to victory by offering voters hope that he could wield the powers of government to rescue Americans from the misery of the Great Depression. The new president’s activism stood in contrast to President Herbert Hoover’s largely ineffectual effort to fight the economic disaster that began with the Wall Street crash of 1929.

FDR’s New Deal was a grand improvisation unlike anything in U.S. history. The president proposed sweeping initiatives including Social Security and FDIC insurance for small bank deposits. He also presided over the creation of an alphabet soup of government agencies to intervene in the economy, put people to work and aid farmers.

With big Democratic majorities in Congress and Joseph Robinson as his loyal lieutenant, Roosevelt won the legislation he needed and was able to sign bills carrying out the ideas of his “brain trust.”

What he couldn’t do was overcome the third branch of government, the judiciary in the form of the U.S. Supreme Court. The measures that most Americans saw as humane responses to widespread suffering appeared to conservative judges and wealthy Republicans as socialistic and even dictatorial infringements on free enterprise.

The court struck down key parts of the president’s program, including the National Recovery Administration (NRA) which aimed to set prices and wages for every sector of the economy. The Constitution allows the federal government to legislate on matters involving “interstate commerce” but the justices interpreted that phrase so narrowly as to rule out virtually any government action to bolster the economy. The court went even further when it overturned an intrastate policy by New York, which had passed legislation to set a minimum wage for women and children.

Roosevelt seethed as the court invalidated his programs one by one, but waited until February of 1937 to fire back. He surprised even his own party’s leaders in Congress by proposing a bill to add one justice to the court for each member over the age of 70. It would have increased the court’s size from 9 to as many as 15 justices.

FDR’s initial proposal was widely condemned — many of his fellow Democrats criticized it as a dangerous power grab — and quickly scrapped. But as historian William E. Leuchtenburg pointed out in a 1985 Duke Law Journal article, a modified plan was soon introduced, and it came closer to passing than most people realize.

The job of gaining Senate passage for that controversial bill fell to Sen. Joseph Robinson. It would be the biggest fight of his life.

Politicians in black robes?

Today, talk of restructuring the court is widespread on the left. Jamelle Bouie wrote for the New York Times on May 6 that “If the Supreme Court is going to act as a partisan institution — as a super-legislature whose judgments override the decisions of voters on the thin basis of ideology — then the only path worth taking is to discipline and transform the court with all the tools Congress has at its disposal under the Constitution.”

Fury at recent Supreme Court rulings prompted President Joe Biden to appoint a commission to review possible changes to the Supreme Court. That panel did not propose enlarging the court. But the court’s new Voting Rights Act decision (Louisiana vs. Callais), followed by the spectacle of Republican-controlled legislatures redistricting majority black districts out of existence is likely to fuel more talk of packing the court.

“The pressures on presidential candidates to make commitments of one kind or another about the Court and its reform will be intense,” observed Bob Bauer, former White House counsel to President Barack Obama. “Most candidates critical of the Court will pledge to ‘do something about it,’ just as presidents are expected to do something about everything.”

Bauer added:

What this means for reform like Court “packing” or “expansion” is that a president whose party controls the Senate can take no chances with the nominees they select for the new spots. They are not promising the voters independence and its correlate, fine judging qualities. They are pledging results. They will be under pressure to put forward either reliable ideologues or (in what might otherwise be a welcome change), lawyers drawn from service other than on the bench. The race will be on for activists, loyalists, and true believers. Each president will be striving to make the Court his or her own.

Democrats are indeed angry at the current court. But some Republicans are too. Even though the court has handed President Donald Trump major victories, he lashed out angrily at the judges’ ruling against his worldwide tariffs. With issues such as Trump’s dubious assault on birthright citizenship on the court’s agenda for the remainder of its term, we could see further eruptions of presidential outrage at the justices.

In a new book, Sarah Isgur argues that the court is the “Last Branch Standing,” in contrast to Congress, which has largely abdicated its role as a check on the president’s power. She takes on the argument that the court is merely a political body, with justices hiding their Republican and Democratic allegiances behind black robes. Instead, she claims many justices leaven their political ideology with institutionalist concerns about the proper role and image of the court.

Public distrust of the court has indeed risen, she acknowledges, but that is partly because people don’t understand how it really works. In her view Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh aren’t Republican spear-carriers, but independent agents with a wise determination to preserve the court’s legitimacy.

Isgur runs the numbers to show that much of what the court decides is done by unanimous rulings, or by majorities that don’t break down along party lines. Instead of the commonly perceived 6-3 conservative majority, she describes the court as 3-3-3, with the middle bloc being primarily driven by institutionalist concerns rather than right/left politics.

The book makes a credible case for a more nuanced understanding of the court. It is also packed with trivia: the “highest court in the land” is actually a basketball court located above the courtroom in the Supremes’ grand marble temple at One First Street. Justice Amy Coney Barrett likes tulips and the comic spy series Slow Horses. Justice Elena Kagan enjoys a local restaurant’s version of chicken tikka masala. And anyone who argues a case before the court gets a souvenir: a white goose-feather quill.

A former president of the Harvard Federalist Society, Isgur is well-positioned to understand the dynamics of the conservative majority. She is an ABC News legal analyst, the editor of SCOTUSblog, co-host of a popular podcast and a former Justice Department official in the first Trump administration.

But ultimately, the book fails to strip the court of its political valence. Isgur can’t wipe away the damage the court has done to democracy in its landmark rulings to stop the recount of the votes in 2000, awarding the presidency to George W. Bush; to allow corporations to spend unlimited billions on swaying elections; to overturn Roe v. Wade; to grant presidents “absolute immunity” from prosecution if they are carrying out their constitutional role and to nullify common-sense gun safety regulations out of an absolutist reading of the Second Amendment.

Yes, the court has been unpredictable and at times makes decisions that run counter to the prevailing trend, such as the 2012 decision preserving Obamacare, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the key vote, and this year’s overturning of Trump’s tariffs.

Isgur points out that “Trump in his first term had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century.”

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But that may be more of a statement about the recklessness of Trump’s policies — his willingness to test limits — than about the court’s overall impact on American society and politics. In his confirmation hearing, John Roberts said his role as chief justice would be that of an umpire — to call balls and strikes. Much of America no longer sees him as impartial.

Perhaps the book’s strongest point is its argument that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a crucial mistake in 2013 when he eliminated the filibuster for judicial appointments below the Supreme Court. That opened the door for Senator Mitch McConnell, to ax the filibuster for the highest court once his party was in the majority.

Judges can now be confirmed by a simple majority in the 100-member Senate. “With the filibuster in place—requiring sixty senators to agree to take a vote—that meant a nominee would need as many as ten votes from the other side,” Isgur noted.

“Not only did this rule mean that more moderate judges were nominated; it also affected who tried to become a judge in the first place…Future judges are no longer competing against their peers for who can get the most votes from the other side of the aisle. They are competing for who can be the most pure form of their own side.”

Dramatic ending

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first court-packing plan got a withering thumbs down from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Seven of the 10 senators who signed the committee report were Democrats, but they didn’t hold back, accusing the White House of proposing “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country.” The bill they said, was “a needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.”

Relations between the president and his party were so strained that Roosevelt would later unsuccessfully try to purge some of his fiercest critics in the party in the midterm elections.

But Majority Leader Joseph Robinson saw a potential way out of the conflict. He suggested to FDR that the president meet with all of the Democrats in Congress over a weekend at “the Jefferson Islands Club in Chesapeake Bay, a former bootleggers’ hideout that was now a Democratic fish and game club,” noted Leuchtenburg.

On Friday, June 25, Navy patrol boats started ferrying Congressional Democrats to the retreat.

Leuchtenburg wrote:

When the Congressmen arrived at the island, not knowing what to expect, they discovered that a whiz-bang entertainment had been arranged. They swam in the nude, shot clay pigeons, fished, swapped stories, played pinochle, knocked a softball around, and enjoyed the amenities of the julep room. They sang such sentimental ballads as “The Old GOP, She Ain’t What She Used to Be” and “My Sweetheart’s a Mule in the Mines.” There was even a hog-calling contest…At long tables on the lawn, Congressmen ate a shore lunch of crabs, potato salad, cold cuts, apple pie, and iced tea. In the afternoon they sought the shade of the clubhouse or drank cold beer under the trees.

The Congressmen found the President in a jovial mood and altogether accessible. For six hours each day he sat in a big chair under a mulberry tree near the water’s edge and greeted scores of guests by first name, even those he had never met before. Dressed in old white linen trousers, coatless and tieless, his soft shirt opened at the neck, he seemed completely at ease, and reporters on press boats circling the island could hear his laugh booming across the water.

The weekend shifted the mood of the Democrats. Robinson began lining up support for a compromise bill that would allow FDR to expand the court, but a bit more slowly than the original version. FDR aide Tommy Corcoran told a senator, “Wait until the heat is turned on.” Asked to elaborate, Corcoran said he was referring to “the heat of reason.”

But it wasn’t the heat of reason, but the heat of Washington that Robinson was counting on as he assembled votes for FDR’s bill, Leuchtenburg wrote. One columnist noted that the White House was air-conditioned and the homes of the legislators were not.

“In truth, the prospect of being trapped in the capital through all of July and August and even beyond was enough to make strong men quail, and one-third of the Senate was over sixty,” Leuchtenburg noted.

Robinson could insist on all-night meetings and on convening the Senate on Saturday.

“On the opening day of the Great Debate, Robinson made an aggressive two-hour speech that carried the fight to the enemy. His face an angry purple, his voice bellowing, his arms pawing the air, both feet stamping the floor, Robinson gave the appearance of an enraged bull,” wrote Leuchtenburg.

The Senate debate droned on for a week.

Then, on July 14, 1937, as a U.S. Senate historical note recounts, “a cleaning woman entered the Methodist Building, across the street from the Capitol. When she turned the key to the apartment of her client, the Senate majority leader, a terrible sight awaited her. There sprawled on the floor, a copy of the previous day’s Congressional Record lying near his right hand, was the pajama-clad body of Arkansas senator Joseph Taylor Robinson. At the height of his powers, with hopes of a Supreme Court appointment as his reward for services to a grateful president, the grievously overworked 64-year-old Robinson had succumbed to heart disease.”

Washington was stunned; senators rose to pay tribute to Robinson’s career. So did the press.

“If it could ever be said of a good soldier in the ranks of party regularity that he died with his boots on, in the thick of battle, that epitaph belongs to Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas,” the New York Times commented.

Robinson’s death was a turning point for the president’s court-packing plan; several senators withdrew their support, dooming the bill.

But even without packing the court, Roosevelt ended the year a winner. The court began to moderate its opposition to government regulation of the economy, allowing many key parts of the New Deal to survive.

One conservative Supreme Court justice retired, giving FDR an opening to appoint Senator Hugo Black of Alabama. Black would become a key liberal voice on the court, but before he could put on the black robe, he had to explain why he had worn a white one. His confirmation was stirred by controversy over the disclosure that he had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He had resigned from the KKK 12 years earlier. (Robinson’s politics on race were also worthy of condemnation — he had consistently stood in the way of anti-lynching legislation.)

“A switch in time saved nine,” became the irresistible phrase summing up Roosevelt’s unlikely accomplishment in taming the court. But did the court-packing plan intimidate the justices into approving FDR’s program? Some legal analysts say no and argue that New Deal initiatives began faring better because the administration had improved its draftsmanship of the laws.

As for Roosevelt’s loyal, combative soldier Joe Robinson, FDR said: “A pillar of strength is gone. A soldier has fallen with face to the battle….And so death found him at the last with hope unfaltering, with vision undimmed, and with courage unafraid. Of him well may it be said: He has fought a good fight; he has finished his course; he has kept the faith.”

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the U.S. in 1998 to meet with President Bill Clinton, his fellow Labour Party MP Gwyneth Dunwoody sensed an opportunity.

She called on the prime minister to demand the return to the U.K. of the stuffed animals that inspired the characters in Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne’s immortal children’s book. The author bought the bear from London’s Harrods department store as a first-birthday gift for his son, Christopher Robin, who would become the central human character in the stories.

Pooh and the others were then residing at the Donnell Library, part of the New York Public Library system. “I saw them recently and they look very unhappy indeed,” Dunwoody said. “I am not surprised, considering they have been incarcerated in a glass case in a foreign country for all these years.”

She compared the imprisoned Pooh and friends to the frieze from the Parthenon that Britons stubbornly retain despite requests from Greece for its return.

“Just like the Greeks want their Elgin marbles back so we want our Winnie the Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends,” Dunwoody observed. “This is where they belong. They plainly want to come home after 70 wasted years exile.” Milne’s U.S. publisher had donated the toys to the library.

In what may have been an early sign that Tony Blair would function as “America’s poodle,” the prime minister signaled complete indifference to the fate of the Pooh stuffed toys. “I’m sure they are perfectly well looked after where they are,” he said.

This week, as part of the centenary of Winnie-the-Pooh’s publication, Queen Camilla is compounding Blair’s crime by visiting the public library to donate a stuffed animal representing Roo, the baby kangaroo in Milne’s tales and to call attention to her charity, the Queen’s Reading Room. The original “Roo was lost in an apple orchard,” according to an inscription at the public library. The new Roo will join Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Tigger.

Since 1998, the stuffed creatures have moved up in the world, to the library’s landmark home on Fifth Avenue and 42^nd St. The scruffy creatures still sit in a glass box. But they’re in a gallery of “Treasures,” where Charles Dickens’ writing desk and copies of the Gutenberg Bible and John James Audubon’s The Birds of America are displayed.

Tigger is in fairly good shape, but Winnie and the others look like they’ve just lost a bar fight or emerged from a washing machine. The library explains, “Not only Christopher Robin played with the toys; so, apparently, did the family dog, which may have contributed to their well-worn appearance.”

New York’s mayor appeared diffident about the royals visiting New York Wednesday but couldn’t help sharing his thoughts on who should own a different treasure. Jeff Mays of The New York Times reported, “When asked what he would tell the king if they spoke, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he ‘would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.’ The 105.6-carat diamond was taken from an 11-year-old Indian prince in the 1840s and presented to Queen Victoria. India has long lobbied for its return.”

Such controversies aside, the visit by King Charles and Queen Camilla to the U.S. is the latest in a long line of transatlantic missions to maintain and often repair the fabric of the “special relationship” between the two countries, 250 years after the colonies divorced themselves from King George’s realm.

Tony to the rescue

Tony Blair’s February 1998 trip was ostensibly designed to discuss peace in Northern Ireland, conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the international order. But it was widely interpreted as a show of support from the “New Labour” prime minister for Bill Clinton, then under investigation by an independent counsel over his affair with a White House intern. Both were telegenic, nimble politicians who had broken with the longtime orthodoxy of their political parties.

It was a far cry from today’s strained Anglo-American relationship. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer clashed over the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran and Britain’s initial failure to permit the U.S. to use its Diego Garcia base in the military effort. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said in March. A Starmer excursion to Washington would only risk exacerbating the dispute.

Instead it was the royals who came for a state visit, with the king joking about how Trump’s demolition of the East Wing compares to British troops’ “small attempt at real estate development of the White House in 1814,” the year they set fire to the president’s residence. The state dinner, Charles said, was a “very considerable improvement on the Boston Tea Party.”

A lifelong fan of the British monarchy, Trump thanked the U.K. for providing “the richest inheritance that any nation has ever given to another.”

Of course, there was a subtext to this royal visit. It was hard not to see the imprint of Keir Starmer’s government on King Charles’ speech to a joint session of Congress. Much media coverage of that well-received address made it seem as if it was only the monarch who was subtly rebuking Trump’s policies. Charles spoke of the need for preserving NATO, defending Ukraine, fortifying the rule of law, protecting the environment and maintaining checks on executive power.

Yes, the citing of these priorities ran counter to many recent statements from Trump, and many of them no doubt harmonize with the king’s own instincts. But the decision to highlight these points before Congress was heavily influenced by the British government’s worldview.

Under the “Cardinal Convention,” the views any British monarch articulates “must stay firmly within the boundaries of government policy,” according to Francesca Jackson, writing for the U.K. Constitutional Law Association. Jackson pointed to a letter sent in 1986 to the Times of London by the Queen’s private secretary Sir William Heseltine. He wrote that the monarch “must act on the advice of her ministers, whatever her own opinions may be.”

The king’s speech rightly condemned the shooter who was tackled by law enforcement agents Saturday as he headed toward the hotel ballroom at which the White House Correspondents Dinner was being held:

We meet, too, in the aftermath of the incident not far from this great building that sought to harm the leadership of your Nation and to foment wider fear and discord. Let me say with unshakeable resolve: such acts of violence will never succeed. Whatever our differences, whatever disagreements we may have, we stand united in our commitment to uphold democracy, to protect all our people from harm, and to salute the courage of those who daily risk their lives in the service of our countries.

A. A. Milne

In 1924, the popular playwright A. A. Milne published When We Were Very Young, a book of light verse he had written for Christopher Robin, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. It was a huge hit, going through multiple printings and leading to three other children’s books.

Milne’s humor, like that of Lewis Carroll, was rooted in absurdity. “You may wonder sometimes who is supposed to be saying the verses,” Milne wrote in the preface to When We Were Very Young. “Is it the Author, that strange but uninteresting person, or is it Christopher Robin, or some other boy or girl, or Nurse, or Hoo? … If you are not quite sure, then it is probably Hoo. I don’t know if you have ever met Hoo, but he is one of those curious children who look four on Monday, and eight on Tuesday, and are really twenty-eight on Saturday, and you never know whether it is the day when he can pronounce his “r’s.” Echoes of Milne’s inventive silliness can be seen in the comedy of Monty Python and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Near the end of the book, Milne introduced Winnie:

A bear, however hard he tries,

Grows tubby without exercise.

Our Teddy Bear is short and fat

Which is not to be wondered at;

He gets what exercise he can

By falling off the ottoman,

But generally seems to lack

The energy to clamber back.

In 1926, Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh enlarged the cast of Christopher Robin’s animal friends. In one chapter, Winnie and Piglet try to trap a Heffalump (a sort-of elephant) by placing a mostly eaten pot of honey at the bottom of a big hole in the ground. But a sleepless Winnie sneaks off to lick the last of the honey and gets his head stuck in the pot. Piglet mistakes the honey-pot-headed Winnie for the creature they were stalking.

“Help, help!” cried Piglet, “a Heffalump, a Horrible Heffalump!” and he scampered off as hard as he could, still crying out, “Help help, a Herrible Hoffalump! Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump! Holl, Holl, a Hoffable Hellerump!” And he didn’t stop crying and scampering until he got to Christopher Robin’s house.”

The enormous success of the Winnie books didn’t bring Milne and his son Christopher unalloyed joy. As the Guardian noted, “Winnie-the-Pooh may have secured a place in the hearts of children worldwide and made his creator a millionaire, but author AA Milne resented the way the bear of little brain undermined his reputation as a serious writer.”

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As for Christopher, who grew up to be a bookseller, he told journalist Gyles Brandreth that his life with Pooh “has been something of a love-hate relationship down the years.”

Christopher told me that, until he was eight or nine, he ‘quite liked being famous’. He corresponded with his fans, made public appearances, even made a record. ‘It was exciting and made me feel grand and important’. He felt differently when he went away to boarding school where he was teased and bullied as the little boy kneeling at the foot of his bed saying his prayers with his little gold head. ‘Hush, hush,’ cried the other boys, ‘nobody cares, Christopher Robin has fallen down stairs.’

After Cambridge and the army during the war years, Christopher failed to find his place in the world and held his parents responsible. For a time he believed that ‘my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’

But Christopher Milne reconciled himself with the books, if not with his father. “Believe it or not, I can look at those four books without flinching,” he told Brandreth. “I’m quite fond of them really.”

Brandreth added:

And the other thing he didn’t mind, by the way, was the money. When he was young, it didn’t interest him. When he was older, he was grateful for his share of the millions that came with the Disney acquisition of the rights to Pooh & Co. Christopher and Lesley’s only daughter, Clare, who died in 2012, had cerebral palsy and the money helped her parents care for her and establish a charity for people with disabilities that does good work in the West Country to this day.

Uncommon destiny

At the outset of his speech to Congress, King Charles noted, “our destinies as nations have been interlinked. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.’”

But sharing a cultural heritage and an overlapping history doesn’t mean the U.S. and U.K. are on the same trajectory. There is a MAGA-like movement in Britain’s Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage. It’s topping the polls, but at 25% support, it’s weaker than Trump’s Republican party, and the next general election isn’t likely until 2029.

In the U.S., many independent and even some Republican voters have buyer’s remorse over their support for Trump in 2024, primarily due to the continuing trend of inflation and the war against Iran. The chaos surrounding the administration and its continual testing of democratic norms is contributing to the erosion of support for Trump.

Like Winnie-the-Pooh, the administration has gotten its head stuck in a pot of honey and can’t figure a way out.

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."

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By the time the shah and his wife sat down …

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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 b…

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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 …

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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 Philip…

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“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 …

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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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