“Why all the glum faces?” With those words President George W. Bush began a White House press conference on Wednesday, November 8, 2006. A day earlier, Americans had voted Republican legislators out of office around the country, handing control of Congress to the Democrats.

Bush had more reason to be glum than anyone in the room. His party had taken a “thumping” — driven partly by the unpopularity of his Iraq war. So Bush promised change on Iraq, and to prove it, he announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would be replaced by Robert Gates.

Rumsfeld’s defenestration from the Pentagon had been weeks in the making. Bush had turned down earlier bids by Rumsfeld to resign. But now Bush made clear in his announcement that he would have replaced the defense secretary “win or lose” — no matter how the midterm elections turned out.

It could be awfully tempting for President Donald Trump to similarly fire his controversial “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, next week, if the midterms turn into the Democratic rout many pollsters are expecting. And if Hegseth remains in office, some of his congressional critics are vowing to impeach him.

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Both Hegseth and Rumsfeld attempted to transform the Pentagon, but in different ways. For better or worse, each had a vision for the Department of Defense. Neither won the hearts and minds of the nearly three-million strong department workforce.

Rumsfeld’s reputation foundered in the aftermath of the disastrous war in Iraq as he got the blame for many of the Bush administration’s strategic errors. Hegseth may pay a heavy price for the unintended consequences of the Iran war, launched by Trump with little apparent forethought.

The two men were high school athletes who went on to Princeton and the military: Rumsfeld reached the rank of captain in the Naval Reserve, Hegseth rose to major in the Army National Guard. The similarities between the two mostly end there.

Success story

If Rumsfeld hadn’t accepted the defense secretary post at the age of 68 after George W. Bush’s election as president in 2000, he might have gone down in history as a true American success story.

Donald Henry Rumsfeld was born in Chicago on July 9, 1932, in the midst of the Depression. In his memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld recalls listening to Captain Midnight and The Lone Ranger on the radio, joining the Cub Scouts and buying a red Schwinn bicycle with the money he made mowing lawns, selling magazine subscriptions and delivering newspapers.

“I guess because my parents were energetic people,” Rumsfeld wrote, “I must have inherited that characteristic at an early age.” His father was a real estate salesman, his mother trained as a teacher.

Dad never wasted time, Rumsfeld noted. “Sometimes he’d take me to the public golf course near twilight for his version of speed golf—playing nine holes in what I remember to be less than 45 minutes, never stopping to take a practice swing.”

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, his 38-year-old father enlisted in the Navy. When word spread at Coronado Junior High School that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died suddenly in April 1945, Rumsfeld cried.

Rumsfeld excelled at wrestling in high school, helping power the team to a state championship. He got to know the love of his life, Marion Joyce Pierson, after they were both elected as class officers in their junior year.

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At Princeton, Rumsfeld joined the Naval ROTC, which helped cover his college expenses. He fulfilled his three-and-a-half-year commitment to the Navy by training as a pilot and qualifying as a flight instructor.

When he moved to reserve status, he landed a job as an administrative assistant to a U.S. congressman from Ohio. At 29, he mounted his own campaign for Congress — and won.

Rumsfeld and his Republican colleagues, labeled “Young Turks” and “Rumsfeld’s Raiders,” struggled to revive the Republican brand in the early 1960s, a time when the political tide was running in favor of the youthful administration of President John F. Kennedy. He made connections that would benefit his career for decades — with future president Rep. Gerald Ford and future vice president Dick Cheney, among others — along with surprising friendships with Democrats John Dingell and Allard Lowenstein. Like many other Republican legislators, Rumsfeld voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

President Richard Nixon named Rumsfeld director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (where he hired Cheney as an assistant) and later, U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Under President Ford, Rumsfeld served as coordinator of the White House staff and, in 1975, became the youngest defense secretary in U.S. history. (When George W. Bush sent him back to the Pentagon in 2001, Rumsfeld became the oldest defense secretary.)

After the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976 drove Republicans out of power in Washington, Rumsfeld was named CEO of G.D. Searle & Company. He refocused the company, pruned it of 20 ancillary businesses, helped gain government approval for its artificial sweetener aspartame and eventually sold it to Monsanto. Searle’s stock price had shot up from $12.50 to $65 under Rumsfeld’s leadership, he noted.

Rumsfeld served as special ambassador to the Middle East for President Ronald Reagan. On one trip to the region, he met Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ("As odd as it might sound,” Rumsfeld wrote, “he came across as rather reasonable.”)

Sharp elbows — and snowflakes

In his government posts, Rumsfeld gained a reputation as an efficient administrator, though one with sharp elbows. Nelson Rockefeller blamed him for Ford’s failure to pick the former New York governor as his running mate in 1976. George H.W. Bush and Henry Kissinger also had gripes about him, which Rumsfeld attempted to rebut in his memoir.

Rumsfeld practiced a top-down approach to management. He reveled in his practice of firing off short memos to his staff, asking so many questions and issuing so many directives that his notes were called “snowflakes.” The blizzard of memos ran into the many thousands over time.

Individually, the memos could effectuate change. Collectively, they became an intolerable burden on his staff.

Paul Bremer, the U.S. official in charge of Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, nominally reported to Rumsfeld, but routinely went around him. He complained to President George W. Bush about Rumsfeld’s “micromanagement.” Rumsfeld quotes Bremer telling Bush, “Don terrifies his civilian subordinates. I can rarely get any decisions out of anyone but him. This works out all right, but isn’t ideal.” In his book, Rumsfeld doesn’t admit to being a micromanager. Instead he blames himself for not providing enough oversight to Bremer.

The reality is that anyone running a government bureaucracy as big as the Pentagon can’t do it with a blizzard of snowflakes. Rumsfeld’s memos were so numerous that most proved to have the lifespan and impact of a single real snowflake.

Sharing his observations had become a lifelong habit for Rumsfeld. His collection of pithy sayings started out on note cards. When he was serving in the Ford White House, the president suggested that Rumsfeld’s Rules should be distributed to the staff. As Ross Douthat noted in The Atlantic in 2004, in the midst of the chaos that followed the conquest of Iraq, some of the rules were particularly apt, though not flattering at the time to Rumsfeld. Among them were:

“Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of the Washington Post.”

“If you foul up, tell the president and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.”

“Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the president and do wonders for your performance.”

“Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them, and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on.”

“It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.”

Leadership

The key to success for a defense secretary isn’t steering management by rules or memos, but finding a path to leadership that convinces others to follow. A leader sets broad standards, inculcates values, rewards outstanding performance and oversees the crafting of strategy.

At one point in his memoir, Rumsfeld appears to recognize the problem with his approach:

An executive who holds on to everything too tightly can lose sight of the larger issues. ‘Find ways to decentralize’ is a guideline I included in Rumsfeld’s Rules. ‘Move decision-making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach.’ No one person can make all the necessary decisions in a large and complex enterprise.

Rumsfeld’s memoir also reveals a man determined to settle scores with the other main players in the George W. Bush administration: in his account, Colin Powell too often represented the State Department’s viewpoint to the president rather than seeing his role as selling the president’s views to the State Department. Condoleezza Rice, he argued, drove the national security process to reach consensus among the principal Bush aides rather than let their views filter up to the president for decision.

Bush himself comes in for a fair amount of Rumsfeldian criticism. Throughout his account, the smartest person in the room is inevitably Rumsfeld, and he wasn’t shy about letting everyone else know that he thought as much.

Rumsfeld devotes a big chunk of his memoir to countering the key criticism of the Iraq War. The Bush team launched the war with the claim that Saddam Hussein had active stockpiles of “WMD” — weapons of mass destruction. But U.S. and allied troops failed to find evidence to back that up.

When asked in February 2002, before the war, about the absence of evidence of ties between Saddam and terrorists intent on using WMD, Rumsfeld got philosophical:

Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.

By that standard, the possibility of Rumsfeld’s firing by Bush was a known unknown. It was something people knew could (and likely would) happen, but they didn’t know when it would happen.

Something similar could be said of the likelihood that Trump will fire Hegseth if and when he feels he needs a scapegoat for the failure to defeat Iran.

‘No beardos, no weirdos’

To Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military should be a testosterone-infused tribe of warriors, shorn of political correctness and the diversity the Defense Department has championed for decades. In September, he told a gathering of hundreds of officers and enlisted troops that the new ethos was, “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” He added, “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”

He has moved aggressively to prune the flag officer corps, derailing the careers of many, including notable Black and female generals and admirals.

Donald Rumsfeld had his own critique of the lumbering military hierarchy and also sought to influence the selection of senior officers. He wrote that he was guided by a campaign statement from George W. Bush: “Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support. We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks rather than months.”

After Iraq’s descent into chaos following the U.S. invasion of 2003, Rumsfeld took the brunt of the blame for launching the war with a lighter footprint of troops than proved necessary to maintain order following Saddam’s ouster. In his memoir, Rumsfeld disputes the view that Gen. Eric Shinseki pushed for a larger force than the defense secretary wanted in order to ensure stability in the power vacuum that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

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President Bush addressed Rumsfeld’s performance as defense secretary in his own memoir, Decision Points. He praised the secretary’s “valuable experience” and noted that he “shared my view of the war on terror as a long-term ideological struggle.” But Bush also observed:

At times, Don frustrated me with his abruptness toward military leaders and members of my staff. I felt he’d made a mistake by skipping the retirement ceremony of General Eric Shinseki, the four-star Army chief of staff who stepped down in 2003 after an honorable career. Don’s decision helped feed the false impression that the general had been fired for policy disagreements over Iraq.

Rumsfeld said he hadn’t been invited to Shinseki’s retirement ceremony. But he agreed with Bush that it was time for “fresh eyes” on the Iraq war strategy. Bush’s high school friend Jack Morrison suggested replacing Rumsfeld with Bob Gates. And with that, Rummy was done.

The weakness lesson

One overriding strategic concept Rumsfeld learned over his career — and repeated throughout his memoir — was that “weakness is provocative.”

“I knew America must not lose the will and the heart to persevere in long and difficult struggles,” he wrote.

At his farewell ceremony as defense secretary, he warned:

A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power.

What Rumsfeld failed to learn — and what Hegseth may be finding out to his cost — is that launching a war without sufficient reason and in the absence of smart strategy is another way of demonstrating weakness. It also invites enemies to pounce.

“I was wrong.”

“I was.”

“I was just — I was wrong. Come on, we know that. Lots of times we don’t know what right or wrong is, but lots of times, we do, and come on, this is one.”

President Josiah Bartlet is sitting in the Oval Office, telling his closest confidante Leo McGarry why he agreed to a congressional censure for hiding the truth about his health. It is Season 3, Episode 11 of The West Wing, the NBC drama that ran for seven seasons. As a candidate, the show’s fictional president had concealed his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis from the American people — and even from his own inner circle.

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Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, continues to explain why he deserves the punishment of a censure resolution: “I may not have had sinister intent at the outset, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalize. ‘Everybody does it.’ That’s what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone’s to blame, so no one’s guilty.”

Bartlet, his face slick with sweat, adds, “I’m to blame.”

“I was wrong.”

Those three words make for an unsparing confession of guilt and acceptance of responsibility. To hear it from the mouth of a president is stunning in the abstract. It’s especially so for viewers today, in the midst of the second Trump presidency, where there is zero possibility of any confession of error, let alone of taking responsibility for what goes wrong.

Bingeing The West Wing now, two decades after its final season, is comforting, almost too comforting. At times, it’s like plunging into an overly warm swimming pool, retreating into what even back then was an unreal world, a fantasy land for policy wonks and political junkies. So much of what happens makes for compelling television. That doesn’t mean it always, or even often, rings true.

The West Wing debuted in September 1999 at a time of heightened political combat. President Bill Clinton had been impeached and acquitted by the Senate. He was nearing the end of his second term in the White House with a more than respectable approval rating of 60%.

The early reviews of the show were mixed. It “swings wildly from the impressive to the insufferable,” James Poniewozik wrote in TIME magazine. He panned the casting of “serial over-emoter” Martin Sheen as President Bartlet. “There will be no curtains left in this Oval Office once Sheen has finished chewing the scenery.”

In 2014, Poniewozik updated his view: “When the show was at top form (‘Two Cathedrals,’ e.g.) it could be red-white-and-blue magic. (And all right—I was a little rough on Martin Sheen, who turned out to have a wry touch as Jed Bartlet.)”

In the first four seasons, show creator Aaron Sorkin indulged his liberal views by enacting some do-overs of the Clinton presidency. Bartlet allows himself to get talked out of proclaiming those famous words Bill Clinton actually said in 1996: “The era of big government is over.” (Big government outlasted the president’s saying.)

President Bartlet also commits U.S. troops to try to stop a genocide in Africa (Clinton, to his eventual regret, didn’t intervene in the actual Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 died.)

At times, improbable plotlines roll out in clumsy fashion. Confronted with the terrorist kidnapping of his youngest daughter Zoey (Elisabeth Moss), The West Wing’s Democratic president invokes the 25th Amendment, thereby inviting Republican Speaker of the House Glen Allen Walken, played by John Goodman, to temporarily take over the White House and put the administration’s accomplishments at risk. (The vice presidency was vacant, making the speaker the first in the line of presidential succession.)

The Zoey kidnapping subplot was launched in the fourth season when Aaron Sorkin was still running the show. In the next season, filmed after Sorkin’s departure, Zoey was found and safely brought home, with almost everything about her kidnapping and rescue left unexplained.

Sorkin and actor Bradley Whitford, who played political adviser Josh Lyman, have mused about bringing back The West Wing as an updated limited series. That may be unlikely. Still, the original episodes on HBO Max reward watchers.

We learn a lot about Bartlet over the course of the series. He is the former governor of New Hampshire. His friend McGarry (John Spencer) talked him into running for president, guided his candidacy and served in his administration as chief of staff. Leo was the voice of realpolitik, the one adviser Bartlet could count on to recommend the most prudent (and centrist) course of action — often to the dismay of the liberal idealists on the president’s staff.

All of the advisers, and Bartlet himself, exemplify the famous saying of Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Every one of them is broken. Leo’s no-limits dedication to his job destroyed his marriage. Other aides — the equally committed Josh, Toby and C.J. — also are unhappily living mostly alone.

Bartlet’s marriage to Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing), a doctor, is troubled, with the first lady furious that he repudiated his pledge to her of serving only a single term because of his potentially debilitating MS. The father of three daughters, he is too often pulled away from the family by his political career.

The back story is that Bartlet is an intellectual. He won a Nobel Prize in Economics and shows off his erudition, in ways that drive his family and his staff crazy. Sometimes we laugh as he seems to be making fun of himself; at other times, his self-indulgent grandiosity wears thin. Bartlet schools the staff on a logical fallacy expressed in Latin: post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this).

In Season 3’s episode “Hartsfield’s Landing,” he brings home exquisite chess sets from a state visit to India. He gives them to deputy communications director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) and communications director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and immediately challenges them to games.

Playing against Sam, Bartlet munches popcorn and riffs: “The Spanish brought chess to the court of Charlemagne. Charlemagne in French is Charles the Great. The Charles is a river in Boston. The Hudson River is actually not a river at all.”

Bartlet’s core

Still, there is a fundamental decency to Martin Sheen’s portrayal of Bartlet. He loves his family, he’s immensely grateful to his advisers and protectors, he cares about the people affected by his decisions. It’s impossible to imagine him conducting an affair with a White House intern, as Clinton did.

Here is a president who reads books, who debates ideas, who challenges himself and his team to live up to their standards and values, who recognizes when he fails to do so, who understands that presidents are not only political actors, but moral leaders whose example sets a tone for society as well as government.

His greatest weakness, reflecting the real-life experience of American presidents, is an openness to foreign adventures, including the secret assassination of a terrorist-linked minister of a Middle Eastern state. When reporter Danny Concannon digs into the true story, press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) agonizes over the betrayal of the administration’s ideals.

Then, in a bid for a lasting Middle East peace, the president commits 20,000 American troops to the no-win role of buffers between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Bartlet and the two candidates to succeed him at the end of his second term — Matthew Santos, played by Jimmy Smits, and Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda — are gifted political strategists, serious thinkers and essentially decent people, who mostly won’t cross ethical lines for the sake of convenience and political success. Santos, whose character was partly modeled on then-rising Illinois politician Barack Obama, prefigures Obama’s barrier-breaking run for president with the eloquence and authenticity of his speeches. Spoiler alert: Santos becomes the first Hispanic president. Vinick is a moderate Republican, a John McCain kind of figure.

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Most improbably, Bartlet, in his final year in office, deploys 130,000 American troops to Central Asia to try to disrupt Russia’s and China’s impending clash in Kazakhstan. As Santos notes, there’s no exit strategy for this risky venture. There’s no compelling reason to enter this quagmire in the first place. After all, there’s a reason for the saying, famously uttered in The Princess Bride, to “never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

There is some dialogue that seems preternaturally relevant in 2026: when Toby talks to Bartlet about the prospect of saving Social Security and the president jokes that a solution will come “right after we colonize Ontario.” Or Bartlet jokes on a midterm election day: “I wish I could spend more than a few minutes with you, but the polls in the East don’t close for another hour, and there are plenty of election results still left to falsify.”

Sorkin and his co-writers had the rhythm of a successful presidential speech down pat, as shown by Bartlet’s rousing appeal to pass a foreign aid bill. Here is a president unashamed of asserting America’s leadership in the world, making the case for the nation to support its ideals rather than simply relying on its might.

You only have to watch the speech — in “Guns, Not Butter,” Season 4, Episode 12 — to lament how much of a vacuum the U.S. has created by retreating from global responsibility and substituting naked self-interest for it.

Channeling the global outlook of President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, Bartlet says, “We live in an interdependent world and we should act like it. We live in a global community and we should sustain it. We should cross borders. We should cross borders to build sustainable democracies that can banish privation and fear. And we should cross borders to bring food, and medicine, and roads, and schools, and teachers to parts of the world forgotten by all but the warlords...”

“This should be a century of hope and prosperity everywhere. And America is going to lead the world and not just bully it.”

Or maybe we are going to just bully it.

A.W. Phillips, the New Zealand-born scholar who wrote that journal article and graduated with a barely respectable “pass” grade, was considered a genius by his colleagues. His work on inflation and unemployment influenced the decisions of policy makers around the world for decades.

Nine years after Phillips’ embarrassing exam result, he was named to a highly prestigious professorship in his department at the London School of Economics.

A fellow economist, A.G. Sleeman, wrote in a 2010 issue of The Economic Record that “the more one learns about Phillips the more astonishing he seems.”

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Alban William Housego Phillips — known to his friends as “Bill” — traveled widely as a young man in a turbulent time, venturing from Australia to Japan and Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the 1930s before reaching Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and then heading for Britain.

He showed ingenuity and courage in trying to fight off Japanese invaders in Singapore and Java. He spent three and a half years in prisoner-of-war camps where he risked death at the hands of prison guards by secretly building miniature radios to keep fellow inmates aware of the war’s progress. His seven languages included Russian and Chinese.

Phillips’ landmark 1958 paper, with the uninviting title of “The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957,” was published in the journal Economica. It gave birth to the “Phillips curve,” which would become the lens through which economists, finance ministers and central bankers around the world viewed tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment.

At times when the jobless rate is low, wages and prices tend to go up, since employers have to pay more to attract workers whose skills are in great demand. When unemployment is high, workers are just happy to have a job and willing to accept relatively lower wages, enabling producers to avoid hiking prices.

Yet the author of the famous curve said he tossed off his influential paper over a weekend — he called it a “rushed job” — and never really considered it a definitive guide to how government should try to discourage unemployment and avoid rampant inflation. He was making a careful set of observations about statistical patterns rather than proving there was a durable causal relationship driving inflation and unemployment, his biographer Alan Bollard wrote.

“I did not do very much,” an ailing Phillips told colleagues at a 60th birthday gathering, months before he died of a stroke. “I just put out a few hares for other people to chase.” Bollard used A Few Hares to Chase as the title of his Phillips biography.

Searching for stability

What makes Bollard’s book particularly interesting is that he ties Phillips’ economic scholarship to the scars left by his tumultuous wartime life.

In his struggle to survive World War II, Phillips saw firsthand the awful consequences of political and economic upheaval. Bollard argues that the experience inspired him to study sociology, though he later dismissed it as “a combination of ethics, social statistics and pseudo-science.” It eventually led him to examine the possibility of using economics to promote stability, fostering democracy and free enterprise.

You don’t have to reach back to the late 1970s — when stagflation doomed Jimmy Carter’s reelection and led to the conservative Republican administration of Ronald Reagan — to see just how destabilizing high levels of inflation and unemployment can be. In recent times, we saw how the Covid-era spike in inflation destroyed President Joe Biden’s popularity and helped put Donald Trump back in the White House.

Trump’s broken promise to focus on reducing inflation is perhaps the greatest single factor explaining why Republicans are trailing badly in the polls for next month’s midterm elections. The latest bump up in inflation has been aggravated by Trump’s ill-advised attack on Iran. It is exacting a high price from consumers dependent on gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oil — or any of the myriad of products affected by those fuel prices.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reported last week that approval of Trump’s handling of the cost of living has sunk to 17%. Roughly two-thirds of Americans blame the president’s policies for inflation. Trump and the Republicans would be in an even worse plight if unemployment shot up, but it remains relatively low, at 4.2 percent. That is in part due to the huge investments artificial intelligence companies are making in data centers.

Not wasting time

Bill Phillips’ great-grandfather Samuel was one of the more than 162,000 British convicts transported to Australia for their crimes — in his case, burglary. After arriving in a new land, Samuel met and conceived a child with Catherine Storey, who soon married him. The couple moved to New Zealand in 1857; their second child Herbert was Bill’s grandfather.

Herbert’s son Harold, also known as Housego, won an auction to rent uncleared land in the Hawke’s Bay region. The government had purchased it from the indigenous Māori people.

Housego Phillips made his dairy farm a standout in the region for its indoor plumbing and electricity generated by a waterwheel. The family donated two of their farm’s acres for the building of a church. The first baby to be baptized there was Bill Phillips, in 1914.

“Being born into the first electric house in the district provided an enquiring child like Bill with a big advantage—being able to study and read in the evenings,” Bollard noted. “Later the family could listen to the wireless.” Soon Bill and his brother would be building their own radio sets.

Bill excelled at school, despite spending four hours a day getting there and back:

Each morning Bill had to clean up after early milking, grab a quick breakfast, cycle down the dirt road, and then six miles up the main highway to Tahoraiti mill stop. There he had a concession ticket to travel with several other students in the guard van on a local goods train. Alighting at Dannevirke Station, there was a brisk walk uphill three-quarters of a mile to the high school, where he would usually arrive while the morning assembly was in process.

To avoid wasting time on his commute, he fashioned a book stand and attached it to his bike’s handlebars.

Staying in school till he reached college age didn’t seem to be an option. At 15, Phillips left home for a job in a remote town as an apprentice electrician on a hydroelectric project. In his spare time, he ran a side business: the movie house, where he began showing the first talkies.

When his five-year apprenticeship ended, Bill rejected the idea of returning to the farm and traveled to Australia. He worked on a banana plantation and a copper mine before joining forces with a crocodile hunter. Bill remembered that they “shot a few crocs but not enough to make big money.” Again, he didn’t waste any time — during these adventures, he began studying electrical engineering.

Phillips’ eventual goal was to reach Britain, but he chose a very roundabout route, via Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Siberia, Moscow and points west. Visiting Hiroshima while the Japanese were at war in China, he was briefly arrested as a suspected spy for taking photos of troops. Once in London, he passed his exam for certification as an electrical engineer. After the outbreak of World War II, Phillips joined the Royal Air Force as an armaments officer. He was posted to Singapore.

There he was tasked with trying to equip the RAF’s fighter planes to better confront the superior arms of the Japanese. Though he made things better, British forces were ultimately overwhelmed. Forced to evacuate, Phillips took refuge as one of more than 2,100 people on the Empire Star, a cargo ship which had been designed to accommodate only 23 passengers. It left port three days before the British surrendered Singapore to Japan.

His citation as an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire)
tells the rest of the tale:

On February 12th 1942, when the ship on which this officer was taking passage to Java was attacked by enemy aircraft, he obtained an un-mounted machine gun, quickly improvised a successful mounting, and operated the gun from the boat deck with outstanding courage for the whole period of the attack, which lasted for 3½ hours. Even when the section of deck from which he was operating was hit by a bomb, Flying Officer Phillips continued to set a most valuable example of coolness, steadiness and fearlessness to all in his vicinity.

After the Allied forces surrendered Java in March, Phillips traveled 100 miles to Java’s south coast, determined to elude capture by the Japanese. He and two companions planned to convert an old bus into a boat they could sail to Australia but Phillips was captured. His new destination was a POW camp at Bandung.

Prisoners were kept on slim rations, but they were spared the ordeal of boredom thanks to an extensive array of classes put on by the British inmates. Phillips taught some classes and studied Chinese with the help of prisoners from China. He indulged his technical expertise by making immersion heaters that prisoners used to brew tea. He developed miniature radios that could be hidden in upholstery or even in the wooden clogs prisoners wore after their shoes fell apart.

The war ground on. Japan refused to surrender in 1945, despite the death of its ally, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and the capitulation of Germany. Japan’s POW camp leaders were told to fight to the end. Guards moved Phillips and his fellow inmates to the crowded Landsop Camp and cut food rations. The prisoners were instructed to start digging what they presumed would be their own graves.

When the prisoners’ radio failed, they broke into the office of the camp commandant to steal a crucial part from his radio set. Three nights of work by Phillips revived the radio just in time for him to learn, from an Indian news broadcast, of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The war soon ended, but its effects lingered for the malnourished Phillips: he was hospitalized for about a month.

Bollard wrote:

His weight had dropped dangerously. He had a serious nicotine addiction, his digestion was ruined, and worst of all, he still had to come to terms with the mental damage the camp had inflicted…

His thirst for physical adventure might have been quenched. But now Bill Phillips had developed a new thirst, an intellectual one, to understand what had happened and to help make things better.

Why sociology

As Bollard notes, Phillips was now an accomplished electrical engineer and linguist, with considerable hands-on knowledge of farming. Why would he pick sociology as his subject at the London School of Economics?

“He had been living through the most disruptive of times, having experienced world depression, watched a battle of civilizations in China, seen a struggle of totalitarian movements in Europe, and personally experienced the brutal subjugation of peoples by another race. Like so many others, he would have been struggling to understand all this, to answer the question ‘Why did this happen?’”

Phillips floundered in the LSE sociology program; he didn’t fit in with the rest of the students, who were much younger, and he seemed adrift. He even failed applied economics and economic history.

He had returned to Britain at a grim time. Even though the nation had won the war, its people were miserable in victory: they suffered from power cuts and a food shortage, made worse in the winter of 1947 by record cold and snow.

His biographer cites many possible reasons for Phillips’ poor grades: health issues, loneliness, Britain’s postwar food rationing and cold climate, homesickness for New Zealand and guilt over leaving behind his family, post-traumatic stress from his POW experience and even an addiction to nicotine. But the overriding reason likely was a new project Phillips was developing: a machine that used water levels to represent the flows of the key variables that go into the functioning of a capitalist economy.

Bollard, who re-assembled one of Phillips’ devices decades later, described it this way:

The machine consisted of a series of tanks attached to a steel upright frame, all connected by hoses and pipes, each tank representing a sector of the economy: households, business, government, and foreign sectors. Each tank had a device (a float or a servo-mechanism) to measure water levels or flows. When these reached certain levels they triggered cords on pulleys that in turn transmitted pressure to other tanks. Other mechanisms represented interest rates and exchange rates. Water was pumped around the whole system. And at the bottom of the contraption a holding tank represented total national income.

Bollard suggests that Phillips “had lost interest in sociology, and the machine had now become his real passion.”

American economist Abba Lerner branded Phillips’ machine the MONIAC, for Monetary National Income Automatic Computer — a name, Fortune magazine said, meant “to suggest money, the ENIAC [electronic computer], and something maniacal.”

In writing what would become his most famous work, the Economica paper, Phillips approached the economy as an engineer would fine-tune a machine. By twirling the dials, he hoped to find a series of settings that would promote economic stability, with workers fairly compensated for their growing productivity while avoiding levels of inflation that would sap their ability to buy goods. (In his hydraulic device, he had been forced to drill a hole to let out water when inflation developed in the economy.)

Bollard wrote:

It is hard to imagine a more volatile period than that which Bill Phillips had already lived through: the destructive effects of the World War I reparations, the abandonment of the gold standard, the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarian governments, World War II, and post-war austerity had all produced very difficult economic conditions. These events constituted major shocks to economic stability.

Phillips’ article on wages and unemployment captured the interest of two American scholars: Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. In a May 1960 article for the American Economic Review, they applied a version of the Phillips curve to the U.S. economy.

While explaining that there were many caveats and the finding could only be relied on in the short term, they posited that an unemployment rate of 5 to 6 percent would be needed to keep wages from rising beyond the increase in productivity. If policy makers instead wanted to limit unemployment to a much more tolerable level of 3 percent, they would have to be willing to accept prices rising by as much as 4 to 5 percent.

It was a tradeoff that would leave many people unhappy. And as the economy evolved into the 1970s, the relationship altered. It turned out that you could have the worst of both worlds — with joblessness and prices going up at the same time.

Economist Arthur Okun developed a “misery index” to track the concurrence of both high inflation and high unemployment. It peaked at roughly 22 percent in mid-1980. In the 21st century, the peak was 15 percent during the Covid pandemic; today it is a much more tolerable 7.6 percent.

Still, the inflation component of that index is sticking in the craw of many voters. They are disillusioned or in some cases furious that Trump soon abandoned his campaign promise to end inflation. In August 2024, while campaigning in Montana, Trump had declared, “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.” Instead he imposed tariffs that made goods costlier.

The battle goes on

In 1968, Bill Phillips made what turned out to be a premature judgment about the struggle to control inflation and unemployment. “Bill noted improvements in stabilizing output and employment since the war,” wrote Bollard. “He felt that Western governments had achieved a fair degree of success over the last few decades in controlling fluctuations in economies…Here he uncharacteristically let slip what lay behind the economics for him: ‘The degree of success is probably sufficient to permit the survival of free-enterprise systems and democratic forms of government, but further improvement is clearly desirable.’”

His words came before the dramatic leaps in inflation in the 1970s and during the Covid pandemic of the early 2020s. But he was right about the connection between unstable economies and political turmoil.

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Academic research shows why inflation is particularly insidious. In an April 2024 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Stefanie Stantcheva wrote that Americans she surveyed feel that inflation “systematically erodes their purchasing power” and that wage increases don’t keep up with higher costs.

“Inflation also provokes stress, emotional responses, and a sense of inequity, as the wages of high-income individuals are perceived to grow more rapidly amidst inflation,” Stantcheva observed. As for the Phillips curve-inspired idea of accepting higher prices as a tradeoff for lower unemployment and a more robust economy, the concept is “typically not recognized by respondents.”

When people see their earnings unable to cover rising grocery bills, increased energy costs and growing rents or mortgage payments, they look to government for solutions. And Trump isn’t providing them.

Bill Phillips’ curve isn’t bending the president’s way. That may be the biggest factor influencing next month’s election.

Those words signaled prison staff to pull a lever. It sent about a thousand volts of electricity through the body of William Kemmler, who had murdered his girlfriend with an ax.

After Kemmler was declared dead, Alfred Southwick spoke to several other witnesses in the death chamber. A dentistry professor, he had crusaded for the electric chair as a more humane killing method than hanging. Southwick boasted, “There is the culmination of ten years’ work and study. We live in a higher civilization from this day.”

But as author Jill Jonnes wrote in her 2004 book Empires of Light, this first use of the electric chair didn’t end there. Witnesses saw that the supposedly dead man’s “chest was heaving up and down. He seemed to be struggling for breath, and foam was seeping horribly from his masked mouth hole.”

One person shouted, “For God’s sake, kill him and have it over!” A reporter fainted. When a new jolt of current was applied, witnesses detected “an awful odor.” A flame erupted behind Kemmler, his clothes caught fire and sickened witnesses stumbled out of the death chamber. The next day’s New York Times called the execution “far worse than hanging” and “a disgrace to civilization.”

Despite the ordeal, electrocution would become the nation’s predominant form of capital punishment. Kemmler was the first of more than 4,000 people to die in the electric chair.

The event is notable for another reason: The drive to use electricity to carry out the death penalty got a crucial blessing from America’s foremost inventor, Thomas Alva Edison.

He wasn’t doing it purely for civic-minded reasons: Edison had built a business employing direct current to supply customers with energy. He feared competition from his rival, George Westinghouse, whose more capable networks used alternating current.

What better way could there be to show that Westinghouse’s AC technology was dangerous than to use it to kill death row inmates?

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As Jonnes wrote, Edison and his paid ally Harold Brown were “delighted that a human being was to be officially and specifically electrocuted with the ‘man-killing’ Westinghouse generators. This would be a stupendous public relations coup, indelibly linking alternating current to death and criminality…. On the other side, naturally, stood George Westinghouse, equally determined to thwart the ignoble defilement of his machines, whose whole purpose was to bring lovely light and clarity into the daily lives of men and women…”

Human beings weren’t the only casualties of the new execution method. Brown had performed experiments to show that AC could kill dogs, calves and a horse.

One Edison associate coined a new word for how prisoners would be executed: “Westinghoused… in the same way that Dr. Guillotine’s name was forever immortalized in France.” Edison didn’t endorse the term, though he did condemn Westinghouse as a “shyster” at one point.

Edison, who had earned the sobriquet “Wizard of Menlo Park,” testified that if prisoners were to be electrocuted, Westinghouse’s alternating current technology was the one to use. His words helped sink a court challenge arguing that the electric chair violated the New York State Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” (Westinghouse may well have paid for the lawyer who mounted that unsuccessful challenge.)

As Terry S. Reynolds and Theodore Bernstein wrote in the March 1989 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, “Edison was called to the stand on July 23, 1889. He testified that he was convinced that death by electrocution would be instantaneous and that alternating current was the best way to administer it. One thousand volts alternating current, he asserted, would ‘in every case’ produce instant, painless death.”

The New York Times reported Edison’s testimony the next day under the headline “Testimony of the Wizard: Edison’s Belief in Electricity’s Fatal Force.”

Under cross-examination, Kemmler’s lawyer, W. Bourke Cockran, asked how much current it would take to burn a man. Several thousand horsepower, Edison replied, would “probably burn him up.”

“Have a nice little bonfire with him, would you?” Cockran asked. “Oh, no,” said the inventor, noted for his experiments in carbonizing filaments for light bulbs. “Just carbonize him.” Given more time, Edison added, the victim would be “mummified” as “the heat would evaporate all the fluids in his body.”

But as Reynolds and Bernstein pointed out, Edison had no substantial knowledge of how electric current affects the human body. He spoke out because he was motivated by “real concerns over the safety of alternating current and personal bitterness toward a commercial rival.”

“State officials charged with making decisions on capital punishment,” Reynolds and Bernstein wrote, “were so in awe of Edison that they overlooked his lack of detailed knowledge in the area.”

The War of the Currents resonates today, a time when the leaders of AI companies on the frontier of technology are sounding alarms about the capability of their own — as well as their rivals’ — models to bring about human extinction.

The history might give us one more reason to be wary of the confident predictions of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang about where the real risks and opportunities lie. And it argues for the urgency of listening to experts who don’t have personal fortunes at stake.

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The generals in the War of the Currents

Three entrepreneurial giants dominated the battle over electricity in the 1880s and 1890s.

The first mover was the astonishingly inventive Edison, who headed a team that obtained more than 1,000 patents. He developed the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb as well as DC-based electric supply systems. Other inventions included the phonograph and an early motion-picture camera. The plan for his Menlo Park, N.J., lab was to produce “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so,” as Jonnes noted. When the Edison Electric Light Company was formed in 1878, the inventor was granted a chunk of stock. But that didn’t motivate him.

“My one ambition,” said Edison, “is to be able to work without regard to the expense.... I want none of the rich man’s usual toys. I want no horses or yachts—I have no time for them. What I want is a perfect workshop.”

Before Edison, American city dwellers mostly relied on coal gas, an unhealthy and dirty technology, for light. As one biographer, Randall Stross, noted in The Wizard of Menlo Park,

When Edison first introduced electric light service in New York City, his primary competition at the time had been the gas utilities, so he had done his best to call public attention to the dangers of gas. But when Westinghouse and other well capitalized competitors entered the power and light business, Edison began instead to talk of the dangers of alternating current.

His pioneering Pearl Street Station, in lower Manhattan, offered a cleaner alternative to gas lighting. On September 4, 1882, Edison’s lights went on at the headquarters of Drexel, Morgan & Co. His company would also wire the Madison Avenue mansion of the bank’s leading New York partner, J.P. Morgan, and install a steam engine, boiler and two electric generators in the cellar of a stable on the property.

Yet there were crucial drawbacks to Edison’s Pearl Street power grid. It required heavy use of copper, which was expensive, and couldn’t transmit power beyond a mile from the plant. He faced competitors who used arc lights to illuminate city streets and landmarks; Jonnes wrote that such a system turned Broadway into “the Great White Way.”

A more formidable rival was George Westinghouse, the inventor of the railroad air brake. He was not only a serial inventor and entrepreneur but also a generous employer. “Westinghouse companies would be pioneers in worker safety, disability benefits, and pensions,” Jonnes observed.

In his hands, alternating current’s advantages became clear. Power could be sent at high voltages over long distances, enabling the placement of polluting electric plants far from the customers they served. Transformers could safely reduce the voltage of the electricity before it reached the final customers.

The Westinghouse Electric Company went head-to-head against Edison’s company in the town of Great Barrington, in Western Massachusetts’ Berkshire region, Jonnes noted. Without attracting publicity, Westinghouse’s system signed up dozens more customers than Edison’s company, and that was just the beginning.

Westinghouse landed the contract to illuminate the White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, later, the system that brought electricity generated by hydropower from Niagara Falls to the city of Buffalo.

The third key figure in the story, the Serbian-born Nikola Tesla, worked at times for both Edison and Westinghouse. Tesla was as eccentric as he was brilliant.

Jonnes noted,

Always fastidious in appearance, his black hair waving back gently, his mustache neatly trimmed, the tall, slender Tesla was prey to strange habits and phobias. He (silently) counted each step he took as he made his early morning walk down to the Ivry factory [outside Paris]. Every activity ideally had to be divisible by three (hence the twenty-seven laps each morning in the Seine). Before eating or drinking anything, he felt obliged to calculate its cubic contents. He deeply disliked shaking hands with anyone. He had a “violent aversion against the earrings of women,” pearls above all.

Tesla invented an AC induction motor which used two circuits of alternating current out of step with each other to power machinery; it vastly expanded the usefulness of the AC technology.

Years earlier, as Tesla biographer John J. O’Neill noted, Edison had told Tesla “very bluntly that he was not interested in alternating current; there was no future to it and anyone who dabbled in that field was wasting his time; and besides, it was a deadly current whereas direct current was safe.”

As Arthur Herman wrote in his recent book Founder’s Fire, the combination of Westinghouse’s drive and Tesla’s innovations proved to be a game-changer. In an effort to compete, “Edison fell back on spreading alarm and panic. He desperately tried to get the government involved in halting AC’s steady advance, claiming that it was too dangerous... it was clever PR but in the end the better technology won.”

If the War of the Currents offers insight into today’s very different battle over AI, it is because it demonstrated two long-lasting realities.

First, Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla could succeed only in a nation that relied on the rule of law and protected the rights of patent holders. Decisions by government to intervene — or not — also proved crucial at times. Both Westinghouse and Edison made their case for and against alternating current in articles for the North American Review, appealing to the public with their thoughts in much the same way as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have in their online essays about AI.

Edison’s article appeared in the wake of a gruesome accident on October 11, 1889. John E.H. Feeks, a lineman working for Western Union in lower Manhattan, was clearing away old wires when he touched a live one. His body caught fire and his blood dripped down to the sidewalk below. For 45 minutes, Feeks’ body hung suspended over the street by a tangle of wires. “This tableau could not have been more ghastly,” wrote Stross, though he pointed out that it wasn’t clear whose line electrocuted Feeks.

As Jonnes noted, Edison’s goal was to create “such public fear of AC that it would be legally banned from use in the United States. He would thereby eliminate Westinghouse from the field and recover his own company’s primacy, which was faltering.” He never achieved that goal.

Second, Edison and Westinghouse were able to launch sizable companies and compete only to the extent that they could attract the backing of Wall Street. Like the AI hyperscalers, they needed new capital to rapidly expand their businesses. But that infusion of capital came at a price: the risk of losing control of their companies, especially when the economy faltered.

The Edison General Electric Company dropped the name “Edison” when it merged with another electric company in 1892, as financiers wrested the enterprise away from the founder.

Westinghouse’s electric company went into receivership after the Panic of 1907; financiers eventually forced him out.

There’s an enormous contrast between the War of the Currents and today’s jockeying over AI. It was easier to grasp the issues in the Edison-Westinghouse conflict: a binary choice between two forms of technology.

Artificial intelligence is a technology capable of autonomy, one that can spin off into an untold number of unanticipated scenarios as machines keep improving themselves.

Doom loop

The scariest part of the recent warnings about artificial intelligence is that the most knowledgeable people admit they don’t completely know what the AI models are doing.

“If you’re working on this tech at these companies,” former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon told PBS, “then you know that we don’t currently have the ability to perfectly control these systems. And currently the systems with the highest level of intelligence will repeatedly behave in ways that we don’t fully understand.”

In one of the X posts announcing his decision to quit Anthropic, he wrote, “Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”

The builders of AI, he wrote, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Coxon also had worked at OpenAI. His very public resignation from Anthropic didn’t lead to denials from the leaders of those two companies. Instead they mostly backed him up, calling for slowing down the advance of AI.

They were joined by Elon Musk, the head of the company named after Nikola Tesla, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. But they haven’t actually slowed it down.

Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, rejected the calls for a coordinated slowdown and said companies can control AI individually. (Jensen Huang of Nvidia, whose company sells the chips powering much of the AI business, also disputed the need for a slowdown.)

“I happen to think that there’s plenty of commercial incentive to get this right,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with NBC’s Joanna Stern.

Zuckerberg’s company is having striking success with a new AI agent, Muse, that rocketed to the top spot in Apple’s App Store. If you give Muse access to your email and the accounts you have in other apps, the agent will take on many of the tasks of everyday digital life. But Inc. magazine’s technology columnist Jason Aten pointed out that the early incarnation of Muse is “kind of a nightmare.” He wrote:

[I]f you give it Full Disk Access on a Mac, it will do things way beyond what you’ve asked it to do. And I’m a pretty tech-savvy person, and I did not give Muse permission to access my messages, and I never once asked it to perform a task that would have required it to do that. Still, it started sending me push notifications about texts I was receiving from my editor as well as my podcast co-host.

Meanwhile, in the White House sits a man who says, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” We have to hope that those around President Donald Trump have a more informed point of view.

Can Congress develop reasonable and effective AI safeguards?

The early signs aren’t encouraging. Sen. Ted Cruz said there need to be guardrails but, in an interview with Politico, he added, somewhat but not entirely in jest, “if there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.”

Of course, it is the power systems originally developed by Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla that provide the juice for running AI. What about turning off their power supply as a last resort in an emergency?

“Research has shown that AI models in the lab can learn power-seeking behavior and take steps to avoid being shut down, such as attempting to copy themselves to another server,” Sam Schechner wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

On the cover of the New Yorker’s September 28, 2026 issue, a cartoon by Barry Blitt shows a white-jacketed tech guy, his teeth clenched, trying to pull the plug out of a wall receptacle, hoping to kill a presumably rogue AI.

If only it were that simple.

On September 6, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer likened the Postal Service’s stringent new rule on voting by mail to the requirements for mailing cremated remains and replica explosives.

The USPS, he argued in a brief to the Supreme Court, was just exercising its right to make “modest processing rules for mailable but sensitive materials.”

Ashes from cremations have to be mailed in special boxes via Priority Mail Express and have to be trackable by barcode, Sauer noted. Replica explosives have to be mailed from retail counters via Registered Mail.

But to election officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia, the Postal Service’s new ballot rules were not so routine — or innocuous. They threatened to throw November’s midterm elections into chaos, raising the prospect that tens of millions of voters could be silenced. Nearly a third of Americans vote by mail.

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On September 14, the Supreme Court blocked the new rule, with only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the majority’s ruling, saying that “applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

But he also observed that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”

Those words were one of many signs that the assault on voting by mail will continue into the 2028 presidential election campaign. President Donald Trump consistently assails the practice even though he votes by mail. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said in March.

Lincoln’s fear

Controversy over absentee ballots stretches back to the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln, facing an anti-war challenge in the 1864 election from Major General George B. McClellan, feared he was going to lose. On August 23, he wrote to his cabinet, “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.” But in early September, Gen. William T. Sherman conquered Atlanta, bolstering the North’s chances of victory.

Another factor helping Lincoln, as Meilan Solly wrote for Smithsonian magazine, was the passage of laws by 19 Northern states to allow soldiers to cast absentee ballots. About 150,000 Union soldiers did so, and 78% voted for Lincoln.

Lincoln’s War Department found other ways to support his re-election bid. Historian Jonathan W. White wrote for the New York Times in 2014:

Officers throughout the Union armies granted furloughs for Republican soldiers to go home to vote, while Democrats were kept in the field. A Pennsylvania election commissioner reported that “Democrats were threatened to be sent to the front if they voted,” while an Illinois soldier noted that his regiment was polled “to see how many would vote for Lincoln if they got a chance to go home.”

White quoted a New Jersey soldier as writing: “I suppose I might have gotten home if I would have said I should vote for A[be]. But never. I would sooner stay here for another year than to come home and vote for him.” But that was a minority opinion.

Lincoln beat McClellan decisively, winning 55% of the popular vote and 91% of the electoral college.

During World War II, absentee ballots enabled millions of U.S. soldiers to cast their votes. Mail voting also proved its utility during the Covid pandemic. According to Census data, 43% of Americans voted by mail in 2020, compared to 21% in 2016. The states that made the greatest use of mail ballots and early voting showed the highest increases in turnout in 2020, a Census statistician noted.

Voting by mail is convenient and popular, especially among Democrats. Under Trump’s assault against the practice, Republicans have grown wary. A 2025 Pew poll found that 58% of Americans approve of voting by mail. The partisan divide is sharp: 83% of Democrats favor it, while only 32% of Republicans do.

In September 2020, Trump criticized a Nevada law requiring that mail ballots be sent to active registered voters, saying “We’re in front of a court and, hopefully, the court’s going to rule because this is the greatest scam in the history of presidential politics.” After he lost the election, Trump continued to rail against mail ballots.

Executive order

In March of this year, Trump issued Executive Order 14399: “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

It called on the Secretary of Homeland Security to compile a list to be given to each state of the voters confirmed to be U.S. citizens eligible to vote. It ordered the Attorney General to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state election officials who provide ballots to people ineligible to vote in a federal election. And it directed the Postmaster General to set new rules for mail ballots.

The Postal Service’s regulation set design standards for state ballot envelopes and return envelopes, required state officials to submit those designs for USPS approval and directed that states or local officials must enter each voter’s information into a portal run by the postal service.

Yet the rule wouldn’t have really accomplished anything, even though it posed a daunting burden on election officials as they prepared for the midterms.

“This is supposedly an antifraud provision,” wrote election law expert Rick Hasen, “but it is hard to see how these procedures will catch any fraud — the government already has been on a major hunt for noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud and found virtually nothing, and certainly no organized efforts to steal elections.”

Writing before the Supreme Court blocked the USPS rule, Stephen Richer, a former Arizona elections official, noted, “the USPS will not do anything to assess the validity of the mail voters on the submitted list. It won’t check to see if the addressees are real people. It won’t check to see if they’re U.S. citizens, or if they really live at that address, or if the recipient is registered to vote in multiple states, or even if they’re registered in two houses on the same street.”

Two judges

Two federal judges temporarily blocked the Postal Service rule before the Supreme Court weighed in. One, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, called it “a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away.”

The second, District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols, was nominated in June 2019 by President Trump. He rejected the idea that the Postal Service’s regulation of mail ballots was analogous to the rules for handling cremated remains and replica explosives.

“Those regulations concern how particular items are packaged, shipped, and tracked while moving through the postal system,” Nichols wrote. By contrast, “the maintenance of absentee and mail-in voter information through the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and the vetting of Outbound Federal Ballot Mail for compliance with the entire regulatory regime” isn’t about “steps that aid in the transmission of mail.”

Nichols observed:

Nothing in the Postal Reorganization Act authorizes the Postal Service to impose new election procedures on state election officials, to create a data collection system for mail-in and absentee voters, or to refuse the transmission of lawful mail because it fails to meet these data collection requirements.

Thanks to the plaintiffs in the two cases, the judges’ rulings and the Supreme Court’s decision, voters will remain free to receive and submit mail ballots in November’s election.

Yet the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict voting will no doubt continue.

Flying in Chopper 880 near the George Washington Bridge, Kaminski reported seeing a fireball three quarters of the way up the north tower.

Like many people, I remember exactly where I was upon first hearing the news: Driving down a hilly road under a cloudless blue sky. I was heading to Newsday’s Long Island newsroom, where I led the business desk.

Soon witnesses calling in to WCBS reported that a plane had flown into the north tower. Some called it a commuter plane, others a commercial jetliner. Seventeen minutes after the first impact, another plane hit the south tower. The pilots took no evasive maneuvers and seemed to be deliberately crashing into the buildings. Before long, officials reported that the planes had been hijacked.

As the enormity of the event became clear, Newsday began gearing up to publish an extra edition, something most newspapers hadn’t done in decades.

At my desk, I took a call from reporter Susan Harrigan. Wall Street was Susan’s beat. So when she heard about the emergency, she immediately headed to the Financial District. Susan specialized in investigating shady trading and exposing financial scams but could cover breaking news as well as anyone in the business.

I could tell how upset Susan was as she breathlessly recounted running for her life ahead of debris from one of the collapsing towers. She was understandably in despair and I couldn’t offer any reassurance, except to say we had to tell her story to readers. Susan said she had no way to write it, so I asked her to dictate the account to me.

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In Newsday’s extra edition, Susan’s piece noted that she heard a low-flying plane while walking her Yorkshire terrier on Seventh Avenue, not far from Greenwich Village. When she got back to her apartment building, the doorman said a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

“I knew I had to go.”

Susan wrote that she had been interviewing witnesses when a ‘whitish gray cloud’ began ‘mushrooming up from the streets. It was several stories high.”

Now I was a part of the unfolding disaster.

Suddenly, someone screamed, ‘The building is going to fall!’

I knew we weren’t going to be able to outrun it. I was looking for a place to take shelter.

I started to run. I was running south, away from the building. Other people were running beside me. We were pushing one another, but nobody was pushing anybody down.

We were running for our lives.

They tried to get into a nearby building but the revolving doors were locked. Finding refuge in another building, Susan recalled, “Everything turned black outside. The air was thick with debris and ash. I was frightened. I thought I was going to die. I started to think of my family and say a prayer. I managed to think about both. But you’ve only got three seconds. I formed the first words of a prayer.”

Emerging into a “moonscape” outside, “Everything was covered with white ash.”

“I’ve never done interviews before while patting people on the back.”

(Sadly, Susan died in March 2024 at the age of 78)

The toll

Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives n the terror attacks mounted by al Qaeda. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth, apparently headed for the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after heroic passengers fought the hijackers.

Among the dead in New York City were 412 first responders, including 343 NYC firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, 23 members of the NYPD, 8 paramedics and 1 member of the New York Fire Patrol. Hundreds of people who worked on the rescue and recovery died in later years of illnesses from breathing in the toxic fumes at Ground Zero.

The haunting World Trade Center Memorial, with its twin waterfalls pouring into reflecting pools that together occupy half of the 16-acre site of the original building complex, draws attention to the victims’ absence.

At the Global Summit on Terrorism and Political Violence this week, some shared their memories of that day. Among them was the FDNY’s former first deputy commissioner Joseph Pfeifer. The first fire chief to respond to the emergency, he gave orders to members of the FDNY to ‘Go up, evacuate the building, and then regroup on the upper floors to rescue those who were trapped.” Among those he ordered into the building was a fire lieutenant, his brother Kevin. They never saw each other again.

The courage of the first responders helped save as many as 17,000 people that day.

Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card recalled whispering in President George W. Bush’s right ear that a second plane had hit the south tower and that “America is under attack.” The president was at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, FL preparing for a reading event with second graders when he heard the news from Card.

Other participants in this week’s conference, produced by the Soufan Center, explained how radically the world changed after the attacks. Bush declared a global war on terror, which has echoes in today’s war with Iran. America vastly increased security -- from airports to office buildings. Soon there would be a Homeland Security Department and the Patriot Act.

A nation was briefly united in outrage at the attacks, in a determination to find the culprits and in a resolve to rebuild. That unity shattered in the aftermath of Bush’s war of choice against Iraq.

But 10 years later, U.S. special forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A single tower, the 1,776-foot tall One World Trade Center, stands near the site of the twin towers. Lower Manhattan has rebounded from the trauma of 9/11, with its population roughly tripling and nearly as many people working there as before the attacks, wrote Peter Grant in the Wall Street Journal.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said New York City has experienced more than 70 terror plots since 9/11, with most of them disrupted. The NYPD developed its own extensive counter-terrorism resources.

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As much as we would like to be done with terrorism, it isn’t done with us, officials said. A scholar of terrorism, Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman, pointed out that affiliates of ISIS and Al Qaeda still exist. In a September 8 article for CFR.org, Hoffman and Farah Pandith, senior fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned that the U.S. still has a “stunning lack of preparedness to handle mounting new threats and resurgent old ones.” They wrote:

Rapidly evolving technologies such as drones make the U.S. homeland vulnerable to attack by terror groups. Combined with the weaponization of social media by digitally savvy terrorists, the country faces the phenomenon of increasingly lethal autonomous weapons and emerging populations of radicalized youth. An eruption of violence in the Middle East triggered by the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and the U.S.-Israel war with Iran has further fed extremist sentiment that could be directed at the United States.

Memory and history

In many ways, the world has moved on from September 11, 2001.

The name “World Trade Center” itself has an anachronistic feel in the age of anti-globalization and President Donald Trump’s tariff barriers to free trade.

WCBS 880 is no more.

The golden age of newspapers publishing thick editions crammed with advertising as well as news is long gone, as they lost most of their revenue base to the internet and social media.

The street on which I was driving when I heard the early radio reports offered a clear view of that Tuesday’s sky. Today a canopy of tree branches stands in the way.

It’s tempting to say 9/11 is passing from memory into history. Yet we should resist that. Never forget.

Bergen had good reason for his view. Terrorists linked to al Qaeda detonated a truck bomb in the World Trade Center garage on February 26, 1993, killing six people but failing to bring down the towers.

Bergen traveled with a CNN team to the mountains near Jalalabad in Afghanistan to produce the first television interview with bin Laden in March 1997. Bin Laden called for attacks against U.S. military targets. His organization went on to target U.S. embassies and the Navy destroyer USS Cole.

Bin Laden’s goal was to drive the U.S. military out of the Middle East. As Bergen makes clear in his comprehensive new book All the Presidents’ Wars, the al Qaeda terror plot turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Instead of driving Americans away, bin Laden lit the spark for a quarter century of U.S. wars in the region.

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What Bergen does particularly well in his book, which is receiving rave reviews, is to document how four presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump — made a staggering number of mistakes in prosecuting wars in the Middle East.

I worked with Peter as his editor for more than a decade at CNN. In our podcast interview, he speaks incisively about the history his book covers.

In the summer of 2001, Bush ignored a series of increasingly urgent CIA warnings that bin Laden planned attacks on the U.S. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush administration officials began making the case for a war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein even though he played no role in the attacks on the U.S.

Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was hosting bin Laden, and within three months, a force of fewer than 1,000 American troops and CIA operatives ousted the Taliban. The Bush administration failed to commit additional troops to capturing bin Laden when he was hiding out in the mountains near Tora Bora.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Bush that it was vital to launch a war against Iraq because there weren’t enough targets to attack within Afghanistan, and “we need to bomb something else to prove that we’re big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks.” That war of choice, deepened by a series of catastrophic policy mistakes, spawned an insurgency that lasted for years.

Bush framed the war as the “global war on terror,” which implied an endless agenda of conflict. The successful raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 could have provided an opportunity for the U.S. to exit the wars, but the rise of ISIS drew America back in.

Another perceived off-ramp was the agreement with the Taliban reached by President Donald Trump’s first term administration. When President Joe Biden carried out the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it turned into a shambolic exit that triggered a decline in Biden’s approval ratings and arguably led to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the return of Trump to the White House.

Trump’s continuing war with Iran suffers from even greater strategic mistakes than the wars that preceded it. Unlike earlier conflicts, there were no supportive UN or congressional resolutions.

“You actually do want to have a congressional debate about these things,” Bergen told me. “In the end, presidents may choose to ignore congressional resolutions. But the point is, you need a public debate about what are we doing. Why are we sending people into harm’s way? And that never happened with Iran. Trump really never made the case. If he made a case at all, it was on February 28th when the war started, when he made a speech about it in the middle of the night. But, you know, the reason that this is the least popular war since polling on this subject has occurred is there was no public buy-in. 41% of Americans thought the Iran war was a bad idea when the war started.”

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Peter Bergen.

Rahm Emanuel gained a reputation for spewing the f-bomb during his early days in Democratic politics. He and two other campaign staffers infamously mailed a dead fish to a pollster Emanuel was battling. Though he landed a job as political director in the Clinton White House, his rough-edged personality soon got him demoted.

As a teenager, Emanuel lost part of his middle finger in an accident at the Arby’s restaurant where he worked part-time. That didn’t stop him from deploying the rest of his middle finger whenever he got annoyed.

“At a roast of Emanuel in September 2005, Senator Barack Obama observed that when Emanuel lost half of his right middle finger, ‘this rendered him practically mute,’” as Naftali Bendavid wrote in his book The Thumpin’.

Yet it was to Rahm Emanuel that House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi turned in December 2004 when she was searching for someone to run the party’s congressional campaign committee.

Pelosi called Emanuel at his Michigan vacation home.

A month earlier, Democrats had lost their second straight presidential election. Republicans had even padded their margins of control in the House and Senate.

Pelosi was tired of losing, fearful of seeing her dream of being the first woman Speaker of the House slipping away and willing to gamble on a volatile personality at the helm.

It was a good choice, according to political scientist Larry Sabato, who was quoted by Bendavid saying, “You need someone whose favorite word is not ‘a’ or ‘the,’ but ‘fuck.’ And that is Rahm.”

Emanuel, about to start his second term as a congressman from Illinois, accepted the chairmanship of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But he told Pelosi there was no chance Democrats could win back the House majority in the 2006 midterms — it would take at least two elections, according to Bendavid.

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Emanuel turned out to be wrong; Democrats captured the House and Senate in 2006, capitalizing on the failures of the George W. Bush administration.

An unpopular war, corruption scandals, a spike in gas prices, the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina and the perception that Congress would “rubber stamp” anything President Bush did or said all contributed to the loss of 30 Republican House seats and six in the Senate.

Bush’s approval rating dropped as low as 37% in some September 2006 polls, roughly the same as the ratings of President Donald Trump today. It’s striking that Republicans are heading into this year’s midterms with many of the same weaknesses that doomed their 2006 campaigns—war, high gas prices, corruption scandals and a GOP majority afraid of breaking with Trump’s controversial actions and stances.

If Democrats gain control of both houses, they can make the final two years of Trump’s second term a nightmare for the president. Congress can block legislation, launch investigations, grill administration officials, prevent confirmation of executive and judicial appointees and position Democrats for home field advantage in the upcoming presidential election. All of that happened to Bush after the 2006 midterms.

The odds this November are against the Republicans. Since 1914, the president’s party has lost House seats in 25 of the 28 midterms and Senate seats in 19 elections. On average, the loss of House seats has been 25.9 and Senate 3.6 seats.

George W. Bush conceded that his party’s 2006 loss was “a thumpin’.” His successor Barack Obama admitted he took a “shellacking” in 2010, when his party lost 64 House seats.

Constant motion

Rahm Emanuel was born in Chicago in 1959, the middle of three sons of a pediatrician father and civil rights activist mother. His older brother Ezekiel has gained fame as a medical ethicist; his younger brother Ari is head of a major Hollywood talent agency.

Rahm is slight, of nearly average height and in constant motion.

A vivid portrait is captured in Bendavid’s book:

The young Emanuel often pirouetted around the house while listening to music. “Ari would be wrestling, Zeke would be pondering deep thoughts, and Rahmmy would be leaping down the stairs and doing ballet dance twirls,” said his mother, Marsha.

Thinking he might have talent, his parents sent Emanuel to ballet class, forcing his brothers to go, too, so he would not be the only boy. He was to study ballet well into his adulthood, and the idea of Emanuel performing delicate jumps and twirls always created a curious contrast with the rest of his personality, a contrast he used to throw listeners off balance.

What must have appealed to Pelosi, in choosing Emanuel to head the campaign, was his single-mindedness, his relentless thirst for victory.

He set no ideological tests for the candidates the campaign committee would recruit and support: the only thing that mattered was whether they could win. “In 2005, many Democratic activists wanted only staunchly anti-war candidates,” wrote Bendavid. “That was not Emanuel’s approach.” He invested in candidates capable of appealing to enough voters to win even solidly Republican districts.

It was the one strategy that had a chance of succeeding at a time of extreme party polarization and gerrymandered districts. He brushed off criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus and the conservative Blue Dog Democrats. “I’m an equal opportunity prick to everybody,” Emanuel said. Left-leaning bloggers and activists slammed Emanuel for his willingness to back centrist and even quasi-conservative Democrats. He didn’t care.

Bendavid wrote:

He wanted to win at all costs. He had no interest in a Democratic Party that was purer than the opposition if it lost. He did not care where a candidate stood on abortion or the Iraq war, or whether that candidate was displacing a “better” Democrat, if such purity cost a House seat.

GOP blunders and scandals

But Emanuel’s success in 2006 was only partly a reflection of smart candidate selection and adept use of money and media. A much more important factor was the endless string of Republican scandals and mistakes.

President Bush failed to recognize Hurricane Katrina as the national emergency it proved to be. His decision to go to war against Iraq, with zero evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, backfired with the rise of an anti-American insurgency. Hundreds of Americans died in 2006 alone; tens of thousands of Iraqis died in the civil war that followed the invasion of Iraq.

A succession of scandals involving House Republicans including the high-ranking Tom DeLay branded the party with an aura of corruption, as did the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for allegedly leaking the name of a covert CIA officer. The guilty plea of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff on corruption charges compounded the GOP’s problems. Then a late-breaking sex scandal ensnared a Florida Republican congressman who acted improperly toward congressional pages.

In the spring of 2006, some observers sensed the coming storm for Republicans. Charlie Cook said, “We know that there’s a hurricane coming, and it’s going to hit the Republicans in November. We’re just trying to figure out how big this thing is.”

Republican efforts to focus the election on fighting terrorism and on culture-war issues fell flat.

Emanuel sweated out the final months of the campaign; he had lost 14 pounds, his hair grew increasingly white, he got little sleep. His fingers trembled, his nose ran.

On election night, minutes after CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that the Democrats had won the House, Bendavid noted, “Nancy Pelosi, wearing a lavender pantsuit and looking jittery and happy, walked from the office where she’d been watching the returns into Emanuel’s office. When Emanuel saw her he roared, ‘Fellas—Madam Speaker!’”

Twenty years later

As the two parties gear up for November’s election, Republicans are making the dubious claim of leading the “most aggressive and productive” Congress in 77 years. Punchbowl News responded with this “reality check”: “This GOP-run Congress has also featured two record-breaking government shutdowns, the undeclared Iran war, trillions of dollars in new red ink, multiple sex and ethics scandals, the Jeffrey Epstein furor, and the complete unwillingness by Republicans to confront Trump over pretty much anything, including vanity projects like the White House ballroom.”

President Donald Trump is sitting on $400 million in political action committee money that he could use to bolster individual Republicans in races across the country. But he seems more inclined to use it to burnish his reputation.

“Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues,” the Atlantic reported. Trump disagrees and argues that Republicans should respond to the many attacks against him personally by touting the stock market’s records, the shutdown of immigration on the southern border and a drop in fentanyl deaths. “The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests,” noted the Atlantic.

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A long resumé

Emanuel resigned from Congress in January 2009 to become President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff. He went on to win two races for mayor of Chicago and was later appointed U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

Emanuel, now 66, has said he is thinking of running for president in 2028. To prove he still has vitality, he completed a 113-mile bike trip across the state of New Hampshire last spring.

Winning still obsesses Emanuel. In a July interview with Jonathan Martin of Politico, Emanuel noted that Republicans and Democrats each have support from less than a third of the American public. “You need independents. Now, the other thing you need is to know how to win. And I’ve never lost.”

At a time of increased polarization, when some in his party embrace democratic socialism, Emanuel fessed up to being a “raging moderate.”

“Finding agreement across party lines does not make you a weak person,” he told Martin. “It actually makes you try to get something done.”

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“Instead of an Iron Cross, he saw a five-pointed White Star,” Blinken said. “He ran to the tank. The hatch opened. An African American GI looked down at him. He got down on his knees and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother had taught him: ‘God Bless America.’”

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That soldier was Sgt. Bill Ellington, who served in the 761^st Tank Battalion, known as the “Black Panthers.” Formed in segregated Louisiana, the unit arrived in Normandy in October, 1944 and engaged in combat for a record 183 consecutive days.

Samuel Pisar went on to a career advising presidents and practicing law. His story inspired the remarkable new novel by Steven A. Holmes, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and my former colleague at CNN.

Steve joined me at Now It’s History to discuss Black Messiahs. The book wrestles sensitively with the racism that oppressed blacks in America as they joined the fight against the Nazi regime, which murdered six million Jews.

In our conversation, we discussed the challenges facing a lifelong journalist who turns to fiction for the first time, the real-life stories behind the novel and the ways Steve relied on his own life experiences to shape its characters.

I hope you enjoy the discussion — and go on to read the book.

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