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.”

Their leader, a noted muralist named David Alfaro Siqueiros, had revved up his team for the job with a plentiful supply of booze. He suited up in a major’s uniform, a fake Hitler mustache and a World War I-vintage pointed helmet, Josh Ireland wrote in his 2026 book The Death of Trotsky.

After the invaders tied up Trotsky’s police guards, they began firing.

“They’re shooting, they’re shooting into the room,” Trotsky’s wife Natalia told him. The couple moved from their bed onto the floor as bullets whizzed in from the room’s doors and windows. They could see a man firing a pistol into their grandson’s room. “Grandfather,” the child screamed. He too rolled onto the floor. A bullet nicked one of his toes as the boy lay on the floor.

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After the attackers ran out of bullets and fled, “Mexican police counted seventy-three bullet holes in Trotsky’s bedroom wall alone; Trotsky thought that two hundred had been fired in total,” Ireland wrote.

Apart from the superficial wound suffered by Trotsky’s grandson Seva and two cuts on Trotsky’s legs, the shooters inflicted no damage to the occupants of the compound.

It was the first of two attempts on Trotsky’s life that year orchestrated by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, acting on the orders of dictator Joseph Stalin.

On August 20, the results were different. A Spanish civil war veteran who used a false identity to ingratiate himself with Trotsky’s inner circle met with the famous revolutionary in his study. He claimed to be seeking feedback on an essay he had written. But soon after Trotsky began reading it, Ramón Mercader plunged an ice ax into his head. Trotsky died the next day. Mercader served nearly 20 years in prison and was proclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union after his release.

It was a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In this case, the farce of the Siqueiros raid came before the tragedy of Trotsky’s murder by Mercader.

October will mark 100 years since Stalin outplayed Trotsky and forced him out of the Politburo, a key milestone in depriving him of power and ultimately Soviet citizenship.

The Trotsky-Stalin struggle drove much of the history of socialism in the 20^th century, providing a backdrop to today’s debates over the role of Democratic Socialists in American politics. But the intervening decades have stripped socialism of much of the meaning it carried in the days of Trotsky and Stalin.

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The rivals despised each other. Trotsky was brilliant, and arrogant enough to let everyone know he knew how smart he was. He seemed to assume that his exploits in the revolution and as the head of the Red Army in the Russian civil war would make him Vladimir Lenin’s natural successor, so much so that he made no effort to build ties with other party members and to reward his supporters.

“Stalin hated Trotsky’s delicately balanced pince-nez and sweep of dark, glossy hair, his self-confidence, eloquence, and authority,” Ireland wrote. “Trotsky was repulsed by the Georgian’s pockmarked face, his coarse manners, his provincialism.”

Stalin seethed in Trotsky’s shadow for a time, but cleverly built a web of relationships that ensured his rival’s ouster from the party and eventually the country.

This was a poisonous fight for power, not a principled struggle between moderation and extremism. Both men were comfortable using violence to achieve their ends.

When Stalin emerged victorious, it wasn’t enough for him to strip Trotsky of his honors and rank, to exile him, attack members of his family, place undercover agents in his entourage, kill virtually all of their old Bolshevik comrades, and prosecute and execute tens of thousands of others in the Moscow show trials and purges.

Stalin insisted that Trotsky himself, the leading opponent of the Soviet dictator in the world of socialism, had to die. And so he did.

Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, the son of a well-to-do farming family, had escaped a Siberian exile for his involvement in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party during the Tsarist regime (he left his wife and two daughters behind) to travel across Europe. Reaching London, he worked with Vladimir Lenin on the revolutionary journal Iskra (Russian for “spark”).

In 1906, as he was again banished by Russian authorities, Trotsky warned that a Marxist revolution in Russia would perish if it didn’t spread: “Left to its own resources, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe.” Its motto should be, he wrote: Workers of all countries, unite!

But Communism’s international appeal proved very limited. While Bolshevik revolutionaries eventually seized control of Russia, similar efforts failed in western Europe.

Recognizing that his country’s regime would be isolated, Stalin propounded a new theory in 1924: socialism could succeed in one country.

His argument resonated, to the detriment of Trotsky’s concept of “permanent revolution.” The Soviet Union became a model for a left-wingers around the world. They saw it as an unparalleled experiment in running an economy without capitalism, taking a backward country from feudalism to modernity in one leap.

For years, many intellectuals and artists ignored evidence of Stalin‘s blood-soaked leadership — as bodies piled up in the famine he imposed on Ukraine, his collectivization of Russia’s farms and his persecution of alleged ideological enemies who he claimed were inspired by Trotsky.

Diego and Frida

One of the artists who admired the Soviet Union was Mexico’s Diego Rivera. He joined his country’s Communist Party in 1922 and became a leader, as Josh Ireland noted. “At around the same time, Rivera—along with two other artists, Xavier Guerrero and David Alfaro Siqueiros—set up El Machete, the most radical broadsheet in the city.” But Rivera began to lose his taste for revolutionary politics, and after visiting the Soviet Union on the 10^th anniversary of the revolution in 1927, he soon decided that his days as a Stalinist were over.

Ireland quoted a description of what happened next at a meeting of the Mexico Communist Party:

Diego arrived, sat down, and took out a large pistol and put it on a table. He then put a handkerchief over the pistol and said: “I, Diego Rivera, general secretary of the Mexican Communist party, accuse the painter Diego Rivera of collaborating with the petit-bourgeois government of Mexico and of having accepted a commission to paint the stairway of the National Palace of Mexico. This contradicts the politics of the Comintern and therefore the painter Diego Rivera should be expelled from the Communist party by the general secretary of the Communist party, Diego Rivera.”

Ireland added, “He then declared himself expelled, stood up, removed the handkerchief, and broke the pistol, which had been made from clay.”

Still, Rivera remained involved in left-wing politics. In 1933, he was hired by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a mural titled “Man at the Crossroads” at New York’s Rockefeller Center. Among the people depicted in the painting was Vladimir Lenin. The mural was destroyed after the artist refused to remove Lenin’s likeness.

When western European nations made clear they no longer wanted to host the exiled Trotsky, Rivera helped persuade Mexico’s president to let him into the country. Rivera’s wife and fellow artist Frida Kahlo, opened her childhood home to Trotsky and his wife Natalia. The two couples became good friends; Trotsky welcomed the warmth of Mexico and grew to love hiking and hunting in the countryside.

Trotsky supported himself with his pen and set out to write the biography of the man he underestimated: Stalin. He even created a “commission” led by the prominent American philosopher John Dewey to review the trumped-up charges leveled against Trotsky in the Moscow trials.

Some gullible journalists weighed in on behalf of Stalin’s crusade. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty took the claims of treason against Trotsky at face value. He observed that the trials convinced “the whole Soviet Nation that Trotskyism not only is counter revolutionary but also an ally of fascism and a stimulus to war.”

Assessing the trials in his 1995 book, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Alan Ryan wrote, “Most of the accusations were fantastic, the crimes alleged were impossible, the people against whom the accusations had been made had plainly been tortured into confessing, and the accused were to a man people who had given their entire adult lives to the ideals of the Communist society.”

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Kahlo and Rivera sat in on the hearings of the Dewey Commission. She wanted to get back at her husband for his affair with her sister Cristina. Frida would sit “as close to Trotsky as possible,” Ireland noted. “Within weeks of the end of the Dewey Commission, what had begun as a gentle flirtation escalated into a full-blown love affair conducted at Cristina’s house. While Rivera remained ignorant (a good thing: Kahlo warned her male lovers that her husband was more than capable of murder), Natalia became jealous and profoundly depressed.”

The friendship between Trotsky and Rivera, two men with titanic egos, ended in acrimony. The revolutionary leader returned gifts Rivera had given him and moved with his wife into a nearby mansion. There, as Ireland noted, a watchtower was soon built over the main gate.

Trotsky believed that Stalin would eventually have him killed, but he wasn’t aware of the relentless efforts by the NKVD to track his every move and the spies they planted in his midst.

A Trotskyite’s journey

Max Shachtman came to the United States from Warsaw with his parents in 1905 as an eight-month-old. His family settled in New York’s Lower East Side. A high school teacher introduced him to socialist thought, and he grew to admire the accomplishments of Lenin and Trotsky. He was among those who traveled to Mexico to welcome Trotsky and became a close adviser to Natalia after Trotsky’s assassination.

Shachtman had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 after he and other leaders took Trotsky’s side in the battle with Stalin. He went on to publicly defend Trotsky against Stalin’s charges in the show trials of the 1930s.

But Shachtman broke with Trotsky in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Trotsky’s view was that the USSR was still a worker’s state, even though a “degenerated” one under Stalin’s dictatorship. Shachtman and his supporters in the newly formed Workers Party disagreed—the Soviet Union was “a new type of exploitative and oppressive society, neither capitalist nor socialist.”

The end of World War II led to diminished interest in left-wing politics, with Shachtman moving to the Long Island suburbs, opening a mail-order business and raising orchids on the side. But he came back to prominence in a debate against the ousted head of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder, Shachtman “brought down the house on that occasion, when, after intoning the list of leaders of foreign communist parties murdered on Stalin’s orders, he pointed suddenly to an ashen-faced Browder and declared, ‘There but for an accident of geography sits a corpse.’”

Perhaps his biggest contribution was the network of disciples he developed. Among them was Michael Harrington, a Yale Law School dropout and onetime Catholic Worker writer from St. Louis. “Michael had a gift for making young people feel that their political choices had a meaning and a future,” wrote Maurice Isserman, author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.

“Although never an orthodox Trotskyist, Michael admired the exiled Bolshevik leader as one of those historic figures who managed to combine original thought with great deeds.”

Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America awakened many people to the persistence of poverty amid the postwar wealth of the United States and helped set the stage for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. But while Harrington’s ideas were mainstreamed, he remained a committed socialist, though one firmly opposed to Stalinism.

Birth of the DSA

In February 1973, Harrington convened a conference at New York University on “The Future of the Democratic Left,” out of which emerged the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, with Harrington as chairman.

“Then in a gesture Michael found both appropriate and a little embarrassing the founders of this newest venture on the Left closed their meeting by singing the old socialist anthem ‘The Internationale,” wrote Isserman.

Michael Harrington made clear his brand of socialism would be “democratic, humanist, and antiwar.” In 1982, Harrington’s DSOC merged with another leftist group, the New American Movement, to form the Democratic Socialists of America. At its height, the merged group had 7,000 members, but that dropped to 5,000 by 1987 as the appeal of socialism continued to wane, Isserman wrote.

Harrington would be astonished to learn that the DSA he created now claims more than 100,000 members. He probably would have approved of much of the organization’s platform, calling for public ownership of corporations, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing ICE, guaranteeing free healthcare and ending “economic warfare” against Cuba, Venezuela and Iran (though he castigated Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a totalitarian regime).

He would have been less comfortable with the DSA’s stance on Israel. In 1975, he called Zionism “the national liberation movement of a Jewish people asserting their right to self-determination,” as Michael Bernick wrote in Tablet.

His final book, Socialism: Past and Future, was published just before his death in 1989. Harrington saluted the vision of “democratic socialization.” He wrote, “But when socialism tried to implement that concept of a new civilization that went beyond simple reform it was sometimes disastrously wrong or else vague and merely rhetorical. The question is: can socialism learn from the defeats and betrayals that resulted from its flawed understanding of its own profound truths?”

He probably would not be surprised that Democratic Socialists have still not answered his final question.

As far as the world was concerned, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was signaling to well-wishers that he was enjoying another of his many fishing trips. The U.S. Navy issued daily statements. On August 8, for example, it said, “Cruise uneventful and weather continues fair. President spent most of day working on official papers.” The yacht “moved close inshore today and received fuel, water and provisions.”

In reality, the man with the cigarette-holder was a Roosevelt look-alike. The real FDR had left the yacht at dawn on August 5 and boarded the Navy cruiser Augusta off Martha’s Vineyard. He was sailing to Placentia Bay, on the southern coast of Newfoundland, escorted by another cruiser and four destroyers.

“Curiously enough,” a mischievous Roosevelt wrote to his cousin Daisy Suckley, “the Potomac still flies my flag & tonight will be seen by thousands as she passes quietly through the Cape Cod Canal, guarded on shore by Secret Service and State Troopers while in fact the Pres. will be about 250 miles away. Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a get-away—especially from the American press. It is a smooth sea & a lovely day.”

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It was, as Robert F. Cross observed in his 2003 book, Sailor in the White House, “a monumental charade, designed by Roosevelt himself.” On his sailing trips, FDR loved to elude the Secret Service and reporters as he navigated the foggy waters of New England.

But this time the deception was more than a game. The real reason for the cruise was to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill without alerting German U-boats to the presence of the two leaders.

Out of the meeting would come the Atlantic Charter, a document asserting that Britain, which was at war with Nazi Germany, and the still-officially-neutral United States, shared a belief in freedom, social welfare and self-determination for conquered nations. It was a vision for the postwar world.

On July 8 this year, President Donald Trump was the subject of another elaborate presidential deception: As the Washington Post reported, security officials decided that it was unsafe for the president to travel aboard the former Air Force One from Turkey to the U.K.

A credible assassination threat attributed to the Iranians resulted in a plan to have Trump board the plane, then walk to a concealed catering truck which took him to a smaller plane, according to officials.

As Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times, this year’s maneuver made many people decoys:

The threat to Air Force One was seen as so dire that they sneaked President Trump off the jet in a catering container to keep him safe. But the same dire threat did not stop them from then sending Air Force One into the skies anyway with a planeful of senior officials, government employees, reporters and military personnel serving as decoys, some unwittingly.

Among those on the decoy jet were Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House senior aide Stephen Miller.

FDR’s long-planned meeting

By all accounts, the Trump presidential plane-switch was a hastily improvised plan and lasted a few hours. By contrast, the planning for the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting went on for months, and the deception lasted for days. But some reporters in Washington grew suspicious by August 7.

United Press reported that day:

Another message from the Potomac, the absence from Washington of four ranking naval and military leaders and the continued lack of official denials were thought by some here today to give color to reports that President Roosevelt might be meeting Prime Minister Churchill.

According to Nigel Hamilton’s book The Mantle of Command, FDR kept plans for the meeting secret from his secretaries of state, war and navy and even his own personal secretary.

The idea of the meeting originated with Roosevelt, whose envoy Harry Hopkins discussed it with Churchill in January, 1941. The British island of Bermuda was mentioned as a possible site. But in June, Britain’s Admiralty ordered up an emergency survey of water depths at Mortier Bay, on the west side of Placentia Bay. Ultimately, “a less exposed and deeper site was chosen on the east coast of Argentia Bay,” according to the Northern Mariner, a Canadian research journal.

But there was another reason that likely outweighed the oceanographical merits of the rival locations. Argentia Bay, which is on the east coast of Placentia Bay, was the site of a rapidly expanding U.S. naval air station. In 1940, the United States agreed to trade 50 old naval destroyers to Britain in return for the right to lease bases in British colonies, including Newfoundland.

Upon his arrival, Roosevelt expressed pleasure at seeing firsthand a flurry of activity at the newly created U.S. base. He loved being on the water — on boats of any kind. An attack of polio at age 39 deprived FDR of the use of his legs.

Churchill’s nation was locked in an existential struggle with Nazi Germany, and he believed American support was the key to victory. Roosevelt empathized with the British but knew of his own country’s strong isolationist streak and struggled to project an air of neutrality.

The British prime minister traveled to the meeting aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. “He had ordered grouse and rare turtle soup as among the provisions he would take, as well as a full military band,” Hamilton noted. Churchill was hoping FDR would agree to join the war. Roosevelt had no such intention.

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As Hamilton observed, the United States military could not credibly go to war, even if FDR could persuade Congress to declare it. “The fact was, for all the outward show of U.S. naval and air strength to impress the British visitors on their arrival at Placentia Bay,” the U.S. lacked an army, air force or navy yet able to effectively counter the Axis powers.

Instead of a plan for war, FDR wanted the conference to produce “a joint declaration of principles, or war aims, in order to inspire the peoples of the ‘enslaved’ countries and others,” according to Hamilton.

There was plenty of ceremony at the meeting: a lavish dinner on the Augusta, a church service with nearly 1,000 sailors on the Prince of Wales and a lunch banquet for the leaders of both nations. Meanwhile the two sides privately sparred over the wording of what became the Atlantic Charter, with FDR pressing the imperialist Churchill to swallow language “that guaranteed an eventual end to the British colonial system,” as Hamilton noted.

As a parting gift to the sailors on the Prince of Wales, Roosevelt “ordered two thousand cardboard boxes prepared, each containing a half pound package of cheese, several pieces of fruit, and a carton of cigarettes,” Cross noted. Each included a card saying, “The President of the United States sends his compliments and best wishes.”

The Prince of Wales departed at 5 PM on August 12. The Augusta steamed out of Argentia Bay 10 minutes later.

Two days after the conference ended, the two nations announced their agreement on the charter.

The document ended with a call for peace that still resonates in 2026:

…All of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

Ahead would be four years of war.

Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Within days, the U.S. would be fighting on Britain’s side against Germany, Japan and Italy.

On December 10, Japanese planes attacked and sank — along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse — the HMS Prince of Wales, the ship that had carried Churchill to Newfoundland. More than 840 British officers and crew died on the two ships.

“Strangers! Now who are you?” The Cyclops spots men in his cave and asks, “Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes.”

A nervous Odysseus, gawking at the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, tells him they are returning from Troy and expect to receive the hospitality required by the law of Zeus.

“You must be a fool, stranger, or come from nowhere,” Polyphemus replies, in Book Nine of Homer’s Odyssey. “We Cyclops never blink at Zeus and Zeus’ shield of storm and thunder….we’ve got more force by far.”

As if to demonstrate, he grabs two of Odysseus’ crew. “Rapping them on the ground he knocked them dead like pups — their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor — and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap, devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all.”

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When the hero demands a “guest gift” for visiting the home of Polyphemus, the giant replies that Odysseus’ “gift” will be to be eaten last.

Odysseus, described by Homer as a “man of craft,” devises a plan to save himself and his remaining crew. He had filled a goatskin with an extraordinary wine and now offers it to the Cyclops, who tastes and pronounces it “nectar and ambrosia—this flows from heaven!”

Odysseus tells the giant his name is “Nobody.” When Polyphemus tumbles to the floor of the cave, dead drunk, Odysseus puts the sharpened tip of an olive wood stake into the fire. He and his men then plunge it into the giant’s eye and twist. The Cyclops screams.

As other Cyclops rush to find out what is going on, Polyphemus tells them, “Nobody’s killing me now.”

The verbal trickery predates the famous Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on first” by more than two millennia but the joke is essentially the same.

What the movie misses

In Christopher Nolan’s hit film of The Odyssey, there is no “Nobody.” There is no tension-filled repartee between the Cyclops and the film’s hero.

Nolan conveyed the frightful power and malevolence of the giant compellingly — without CGI — by constructing a 60-foot tall puppet and mashing that together with the acting of the gifted Bill Irwin. But Nolan left out the heart of the story. It’s only at the end of the movie’s Cyclops sequence that it becomes clear Polyphemus can speak — and by then, Odysseus says it’s far too late to resolve the conflict through conversation.

Asked by Jon Stewart about omitting the “Nobody” exchange between Odysseus and Polyphemus, Nolan said, “It’s a pun. Puns in translation are tough… I tried. It was not possible to work it in.”

The director’s handling of this encounter shows why literary critics may never be comfortable with film adaptations of Homer’s epics. What Nolan and other great directors deal in is scenes; what Homer reveled in was stories.

The Odyssey poem is chock full of them. Everyone seems to have an epic story to tell. Odysseus narrates much of the action through his own account of what befell him after the end of the Trojan War. But he also reels off fictional stories of his travels to fool enemies and at times, even his own family.

He visits the underworld, a device that lets him rediscover and tell the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Achilles, Ajax, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Heracles. Not many of Homer’s stories can fit within the confines of a blockbuster movie, even one that is nearly three hours long.

Wilson’s take

In a now-famous 4,000-word critique in the London Review of Books, Odyssey translator Emily Wilson wrote, “Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea – more grey than purple – threaten to overwhelm his hero’s ship.” Wilson said she was “humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter.” (The one I’m using in this piece is by Robert Fagles.) But she says she would be ashamed to have written this script:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

All of that is true, and yet Nolan succeeds on his own terms with spectacular set-pieces including the sack of Troy, Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs, the wreck of Odysseus’ ship and the killing of the suitors. Nolan “doesn’t know how to make an ugly image,” wrote the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who said the film “is filled with rapturous beauty.”

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At times, Nolan’s imagination fails him. As the Economist wrote, “During the beach scenes with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), Odysseus (Matt Damon) seems less to be in agonizing exile than on a Caribbean mini-break (they are wearing lots of linen). And the less said about the Cyclops, the better.” The Economist review was headlined, “A very silly adaptation of ‘The Odyssey.’”

Adapting a classic composed 2,700 years ago is challenging on any level. Nolan imagines an Odysseus who is so appalled by the slaughter that takes place after he engineers the sack of Troy that he questions the morality of war.

Yet the written version of the Odyssey centers around a hero who freely engages in remorseless battle even after 10 years of war. After Odysseus slays Penelope’s suitors, who occupied his castle and lived off his riches, he orders the killing of the men’s defenseless female slaves. At the book’s end, it is only the hand of the god Athena that stops Odysseus and Ithaca from an endless civil war.

Christopher Nolan has visited us with his personal vision of The Odyssey. If Zeus’ law applies, we have to treat him with hospitality, even though he lets the spectacle diminish the stories.

Soon after John F. Kennedy took office as president in 1961, the first lady’s press secretary sent a draft news release to Jacqueline Kennedy for approval.

“If this is o.k….would you send it back to me, so that I can give it to Plucky Pierre,” wrote Pamela Turnure, on White House stationery, in a note preserved in the files of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Plucky Pierre was Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary. The press release would announce Jacqueline Kennedy’s “most interesting discovery” in her search for historic treasures for the White House: the Resolute Desk, which I covered in last week’s Now It’s History post.

My aim here isn’t to retell the story of the desk, constructed from the timbers of the HMS Resolute. It’s to uncover how the White House, the New York Times, LIFE Magazine and the JFK Library all botched a key date in the desk’s history.

The mistake began with that draft press release. In a sentence pointing out that the desk was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes, someone jotted: “in 1878.” In fact, the desk arrived at the White House as a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880. It’s a minor error, but its persistence in the public record makes it worth exploring.

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It’s not clear who inserted the incorrect date into that draft. In any event, Jackie Kennedy wrote on Pamela Turnure’s note: “Have Pierre save it for a day when we have no news—not today….maybe Monday.”

On Monday, two days after the Resolute desk was moved into the Oval Office, Plucky Pierre sent out the news release. The error spread widely, landing in a front-page New York Times article by Bess Furman and in many other news outlets.

A September 1, 1961 cover story in LIFE magazine followed suit. The article, which originated with a draft submitted by the First Lady’s staff and was rewritten by journalist Hugh Sidey and the magazine’s editors, said, “A carved inscription identified the desk as a gift sent to President [Rutherford B.] Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1878.”

In fact there’s no date — not 1878 or 1880 — given for the Queen’s gift in the brass plaque on the desk.

The mistake lived on into the 21st century, appearing on the website of the JFK Library until the end of last month. I pointed it out to an archivist at the library on July 29 and by the next morning, the library’s website listed the correct date of 1880. (The incorrect date still appears on the website of the National Archives Foundation.)

Pinning it down

When exactly did Queen Victoria’s gift arrive at the White House? Resolute, a comprehensive history of the ship by Martin W. Sandler, published in 2006, states that the desk arrived at the White House on November 2, 1880. The year is correct, but the day of the month is not.

How to pin it down? The most definitive source is the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, Ohio. Julie Mayle, the library’s curator of manuscripts, sent me a file with multiple documents and news reports showing that the 1,300-lb. desk arrived at the White House on November 23, 1880.

Among them is the text of a letter President Hayes sent that same day to historian George Bancroft:

It says, in part:

My Dear Mr Bancroft:

Mrs Hayes wishes me to thank you for the English newspapers containing good words about the administration of her husband. It gives me pleasure to say that I do it in the first note written on the desk made from the timbers of the Resolute sent by Queen Victoria to the President…

Sincerely,

R. B. Hayes

The FDR myth

The Resolute Desk is the subject of a more significant historical mistake. As Sarah Fling wrote for the White House Historical Association, it appears to be a myth that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a wooden panel made to conceal his leg braces as he sat behind the desk.

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The panel, bearing the presidential coat of arms, was indeed constructed, but it was designed two months after FDR died in 1945. There are many reasons to doubt that FDR ordered the panel: His leg braces were ordinarily concealed inside his trousers. He didn’t use the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, but in the oval room upstairs where he met privately with advisers who were well aware that his legs had been paralyzed by polio. And the desk he did use in the Oval Office had an open front, with FDR’s legs clearly visible.

Fling noted that “even if Roosevelt had requested the panel, there is no evidence to suggest the decision was tied to his disability and President Harry S. Truman was the first president to use the newly outfitted Resolute Desk. From the famous photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. popping out of the kneehole in 1963 to the panel’s role in popular culture, the Resolute Desk has become a recognizable symbol of the presidency and a national icon.”

The National Park Service designer who carved the panel claimed in 1962 that it had been made to hide FDR’s disability, but Fling says the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

Nevertheless, in the 2007 Disney film National Treasure: Book of Secrets, a character played by Jon Voight says, “FDR had that put in so that guests couldn’t see his wheelchair.”

When history makes mistakes

The willful spreading of misinformation afflicts our lives: To know that, you only have to look at the consequences of Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.

Yet even innocent errors can cloud our understanding of history, though their impact can be much smaller. Both the White House’s 1878 date error and the dubious story of FDR’s desk panel are examples of the staying power of such mistakes in the telling of history. Once normally authoritative people and organizations err, their assertions take on a life of their own.

Thus skepticism is always a useful tool. In The Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch wrote that “The most naive policeman knows that a witness should not always be taken at his word…Similarly, it has been many a day since men first took it into their heads not to accept all historical evidence blindly. An experience almost as old as mankind has taught us that more than one manuscript has falsified its date or origin, that all the accounts are not true, and that even the physical evidences can be faked.”

Misinformation abounds. In an introduction to the paperback edition of Regret the Error, author Craig Silverman cited a 2007 study by Scott Maier which found that only two percent of 1,200 factual errors he found in newspapers had been corrected by those papers.

Cleaning up mistakes in the telling of history could well become a full-time job, particularly in the age of AI. Perhaps this is a task for the “Library Cop,” the central figure in a celebrated episode of Seinfeld. Character actor Philip Baker Hall played the role in the style of Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday.

Naturally the library cop was named Lt. Bookman, of the New York Public Library. The NYPL cleverly got in on the joke in 2021 by announcing Bookman’s “retirement” when the institution eliminated late fines for returning books.

In the sitcom episode, Lt. Bookman shows up in a tie, jacket and raincoat at Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment to inquire about an overdue book. Seinfeld insists he returned it in 1971.

BOOKMAN: Yeah, ‘71. That was my first year on the job. Bad year for libraries.

Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, Abbie Hoffman

telling everybody to steal books. I don’t judge a man by the length of

his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. But

you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public

Library, fella.

JERRY: Look, Mr. Bookman. I--I returned that book. I remember it very

specifically.

BOOKMAN: You’re a comedian, you make people laugh.

JERRY: I try.

BOOKMAN: You think this is all a big joke, don’t you?

Jackie’s joke

Jackie Kennedy had a mischievous sense of humor too, though it didn’t reach Seinfeldian heights. The document supplied to me by the JFK Library containing Pamela Turnure’s note to the First Lady had this at the bottom, written in Jackie’s handwriting:

Another release for Pierre:

To save money at her musicales Mrs. K has decided that instead of Lawrence Welk Pierre Salinger will play at her musicales in East Room and Miss Turnure will turn the pages for him and hold container to catch his ashes while he plays.

When the Kennedys began hosting after-dinner musicales at the White House, the performers were world-renowned classical musicians, including Pablo Casals, Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern.

The uncool Lawrence Welk, who was popular during the Eisenhower years, wasn’t invited to perform.

Nor was Pierre Salinger.

That was one news release that the cigar-smoking Plucky Pierre never sent out.

Note: Thanks to archivist Corbin Apkin of the JFK Library for locating the appropriate documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. They are used courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which holds the copyright to these materials. The Rutherford B. Hayes documents are courtesy of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums in Fremont, Ohio.

In early February 1961, the White House announced that Jacqueline Kennedy had made a “most interesting discovery.” Aiming to restore a mansion she once labeled a “dreary Maison Blanche,” the new first lady searched for historic objects.

Touring the mansion’s 54 rooms and 16 baths along with a curator from the Smithsonian, Kennedy made her first find: A “massive, richly carved” oak desk that had sat in the ground-floor broadcasting room for eight years.

It was mostly covered by green baize, held in place with scotch tape. Underneath, “the desk was in perfect condition,” according to a Feb. 7 New York Times front-page story which quoted a White House press release.

An inscription in black letters set on a gold background explained that the desk was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and presented as a gift by Queen Victoria to the president of the United States, who in 1880 was Rutherford B. Hayes.

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Jackie Kennedy had the Resolute desk installed in the Oval Office. A famous photo taken for LOOK magazine showed President John F. Kennedy reading papers while his toddler son John Jr. peeked out from a door under the desk. After JFK’s assassination in November, 1963, the desk was exhibited outside the White House.

Fourteen years later, President Jimmy Carter had it reinstalled it in the Oval Office, where President Donald Trump sits as he presides over encounters with reporters, signs executive orders and presses a button that summons a butler to bring him a Diet Coke. On July 6, he symbolically rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq from the Resolute Desk, to promote awareness of the “Trump accounts” established for newborns.

The Resolute desk is firmly a part of American history, but it owes its origin to a decades-long quest that fascinated Britons in the 19^th century. It is the most Victorian of Victorian stories — involving not only Queen Victoria herself but also Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Benjamin Disraeli, along with two central characters: Sir John Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin.

Its themes are Victorian values: An obsession for “duty” that Gilbert and Sullivan satirized in The Pirates of Penzance, a zeal for discovery and conquest and a racist arrogance all played their parts in the saga.

New naval mission

When Britain and its continental allies finally defeated Napoleon in 1815, the Royal Navy’s greatest mission disappeared. As a new raison d’être, John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty, advocated rapid exploration of the Arctic, in hopes of finding a lucrative shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

It was a strategy echoed in the impulse that led Trump to strike a no-bid deal with Finland for 11 icebreakers the U.S. Coast Guard could deploy in the Arctic. Climate change has shrunk the Arctic’s ice, feeding the dream of a shipping channel that would drastically cut the time and cost of moving goods between Atlantic and Pacific ports. Whether such a competitor to the Suez and Panama Canals will ever materialize (and whether the U.S. needs 11 icebreakers) isn’t clear.

The first mission to seek — and fail to find — the northwest passage began in 1818 on HMS Isabella. Many unsuccessful voyages would follow.

But 27 years later, on May 19, 1845, more than 10,000 people crowded the docks of London to see off two famed ships that John Barrow hoped would finally find the passage, noted Martin W. Sandler in his book Resolute.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, equipped with steam engines, had been specially fitted out for Arctic exploration, with added oak beams and a hull reinforced with oak, elm and iron, Sandler wrote.

Some veteran Arctic explorers questioned the wisdom of sending such a well-staffed expedition — there were 129 officers and crew — into the ice-choked waters. The Navy made sure to stock the ships with supplies intended to last more than three years, including seven tons of flour, 4,500 gallons of alcohol and 8,000 cans of food, Sandler noted.

Sir John and Lady Franklin

The vessels were put under the command of Sir John Franklin, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar. That was not entirely reassuring, since his 1819-21 overland Arctic expedition had resulted in the deaths of 11 crew members.

Franklin earned a reputation for benevolence and honesty, but not for expert leadership. His tenure as governor of the convict colony Van Diemen’s Land, now called Tasmania, was widely criticized.

At 59, he was old for taking on this strenuous Arctic voyage and in bad shape physically. But he had one great asset—his second wife Jane Franklin, an extraordinarily influential figure in British society whose deft political skills kept her husband’s career on an upward trajectory despite his failures.

She made a token effort to conceal her own ambition. Writing to her sister, Jane once confided that “I hope I shall never be talked of as one of your bold, clear, energetic women, fit for anything. I am no doubt possessed of great energy and ardor, but I would rather hide than show it.”

Even so, “Jane Franklin defied every taboo of her day,” Sandler observed. She traveled constantly, read voraciously and cultivated a series of young male proteges. “Most of all, Jane Franklin was a woman determined to get what she wanted, and more than anything else, she wanted to get for her husband what she believed he deserved.”

One person who met Sir John when he was 50 and serving in Van Diemen’s Land, wrote that “he is rather deaf, his hand shakes and he looks nearly seventy.” An American convict wrote, “of all men I ever saw, none ever gloried in such breadth of waistband. I was told he had devoured a whole sheep at a meal.” Those recollections are contained in Alison Alexander’s excellent biography, The Ambitions of Jane Franklin.

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After the fanfare of the 1845 departure from London and some letters a few months later, nothing more was heard from Erebus and Terror.

Officials and the public grew increasingly alarmed. What followed was an extraordinary search and rescue effort.

As Alexander noted, the costly “Franklin Search” went on for 12 years and “involved twenty search expeditions, three aborted expeditions, eleven supply expeditions, one relief expedition and four bi-purpose expeditions, 39 in all, sent by the British Admiralty and private interests in Britain and America.”

Franklin’s disappearance was the “greatest mystery of its age,” a sensation followed avidly by newspaper readers across the globe.

Alexander wrote:

The Search (as the family called it, with a capital S) had everything a drama needed. ‘No hunt was ever so exciting’, claimed a British journal: missing men and theories about where they were, continuing action of one sort or another—reports that Franklin was alive, mysterious bottles in Siberia, tinned food found putrid, clairvoyant predictions and so on — and a personification of tragedy in Lady Franklin, the devoted wife giving her all to find her lost husband.

Most of the searchers failed to find any evidence of Franklin’s route, though they wound up charting much of the Arctic region. Ships kept getting stuck in the unpredictable ice, sometimes for years. Some skippers scheduled activities, including games and plays, to keep their crews from going stir crazy in the bitterly cold, sunless winters; other captains proved less resourceful and suffered sullenly along with their crews.

Sailors would see their rations cut as supplies ran low. When starvation threatened, or ships suffered catastrophic ice damage, sailors pulled heavy sledges across the ice in temperatures dipping far below zero. They pursued fresh game, along with clues to what happened to Franklin and other missing explorers.

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Five ships to the rescue

In 1852, the Royal Navy sent out a five-ship expedition under the command of Sir Edward Belcher. Among its vessels was HMS Resolute, whose well-respected captain was Henry Kellett.

By contrast, the 53-year-old Belcher was “pompous, quarrelsome, critical of everyone, and arguably the most narrow-minded commander that had ever been sent to the Arctic,” Sandler observed.

Aboard the Resolute, Captain Kellett took refuge for the winter at Dealy Island and sent sledging parties out to find missing British explorers. One party found the crew of HMS Investigator, under Commander Robert McClure. He was generally credited with discovering that a northwest passage actually existed, though his ship got trapped in the ice for two years, and the crew likely wouldn’t have survived but for the rescuers from the Resolute.

Kellett intended to remain in the Arctic, continuing the search for Franklin. But his superior officer was Belcher, who detested the mission and medicated himself liberally with alcohol. He ordered the crew of the Resolute and other ships to abandon their vessels and return to England with him aboard HMS North Star. The Navy court-martialed Belcher after he docked back home in September, 1854, but ultimately concluded that he was within his rights to cut the journey short.

A year later, the American whaling ship George Henry came across a huge ship while picking its way through the ice of the Davis Strait. Captain James Buddington’s men couldn’t get any response when they “gathered at the rail and began shouting across the ice pack to the other vessel,” noted Sandler.

They climbed aboard the mystery ship. “Spying a nameplate, they discovered that they were now standing on the deck of the Resolute,” Sandler added. “Moving ahead, they encountered the unmanned pilot’s wheel. Inscribed in brass letters around it were the words ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’”

In the abandoned cabin, a dining table was set for a meal. Elsewhere, there were open books, glasses full of wine and cards ready to be played. The whaling ship’s crew soon discovered—and began to enjoy—decanters full of the Resolute’s wine.

The Resolute had drifted more than 1,000 miles in the ice. Buddington wound up piloting the British ship to his home base of New London. The U.S. government purchased the ship, repaired it and sailed it to Britain as a goodwill gesture in 1856.

At the seaport of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the ship, which flew both the U.S. and British flags. Told by the American Captain Henry J. Hartstene that the Resolute’s return was a “token of love, admiration and respect to your Majesty personally,” the Queen said, “I thank you, Sir.” She gave the crew £100 to split among themselves.

Victoria’s name was invoked again 24 years later when the ship was broken up and the desk made from its timbers packed into a case of zinc and wood and sent without advance warning to the White House.

What happened

Explorers eventually solved the mystery of the sad fate suffered by John Franklin and his crews. After confronting solid ice at Cape Walker, the ships turned south into Peel Sound, heading for King William Island. On September 12, 1846, the vessels became trapped in the ice.

As Sandler noted, Franklin died of unknown causes nine months later. Twenty three other men died, some perhaps because of lead poisoning or botulism due to improper canning of their food.

The expedition was now under the command of Francis Crozier, captain of the Terror. He decided to abandon the ships and was likely trying to reach the Great Fish River in search of food and possible rescue. It turned out to be a death march on the ice for the rest of the expedition’s officers and crew.

What was truly stunning about Franklin’s voyage and that of most other British Arctic explorers was their failure to consult the people who actually knew how to survive in those harsh conditions — the Inuit. Unlike the British, they didn’t haul hundreds of pounds of gear on sleds, but used dogs to pull them. They didn’t subsist on canned food, but hunted for their survival.

British explorers literally starved to death alongside the Inuit people who could have taught them how to live in the Arctic — if only they had asked. This failure to recognize the shared humanity of the Inuit was not surprising. When John Franklin governed Van Diemen’s Land, where British convicts had displaced the aboriginal population, Jane Franklin obtained two native children, a boy and later a girl, as curiosities she could display. She soon lost interest in both of them.

Alooka

Dr. John Rae, the British explorer who first brought back reliable evidence of what actually happened to the Franklin expedition, was a surgeon who didn’t hesitate to rely on Inuit guides. For his skill on snowshoes, the natives named him Alooka: “he who takes long strides,” Sandler wrote.

He came across a group of Inuit, including a man wearing a British naval cap with a gold band. The natives reported seeing thin white men pulling a sledge and later finding the bodies of about 30 men along with graves. Sandler noted that the Inuit showed John Rae some forks and spoons engraved with the initials of the expedition’s officers, a silver plate inscribed “Sir John Franklin, K.C.B.” and a medal that had been awarded to Franklin bearing the motto, “Difficulties do not terrify.”

Then came the shocker: Rae would write, “From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.”

Jane Franklin refused to believe it. So did Charles Dickens, who wrote, “It is in highest degree improbable that such men as the officers and crews of the two lost ships would or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.” He pointed a finger at the “Esquimaux” natives as the likely culprits.

Sadly, there was ample evidence of British seamen engaging in cannibalism as a last resort, to the point where the practice had a name: the “custom of the sea.” Three decades later, the British courts would hear a landmark case involving the death of a 17-year-old cabin boy, who was killed and partly eaten by three shipmates after the yacht Mignonette was wrecked.

Jane Franklin never gave up her crusade to find out what happened to the expedition led by her husband. She lobbied the Admiralty and the whaling industry to go in search of the Erebus and the Terror. She raised funds for some private expeditions.

She “became the first woman presented with the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Gold Medal,” as Alison Alexander noted. Parliament appropriated £2,000 for a John Franklin statue in London and “his widow supervised the sculptor, casting, inscription and site—Waterloo Place.”

Her final achievement was the placement of a bust of John Franklin in Westminster Abbey, with an inscription by Franklin’s nephew-by-marriage, poet laureate Alfred Tennyson.

It reads:

Not here: the white north has thy bones; and thou,

Heroic sailor-soul,

Art passing on thine happier voyage now

Toward no earthly pole.

Jane Franklin died in 1875. It took 139 more years to locate her husband’s ship. In 2014, underwater archaeologists for Parks Canada, acting with guidance from Inuit natives, found the remains of the Erebus and brought up relics such as the ship’s bell. The ship was found south of King William Island in 36 feet of water. Two years later, they found the wreck of the Terror.

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Symbol of folly

The plaque on the Resolute desk says it was “presented by the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland to the President of the United States as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the Resolute.”

An alternate account, by historian Stephen Dando-Collins suggested that the desk had been “foisted on the U.S. by Britain’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as a sly joke.”

Disraeli, a political ally of Jane Franklin, was leading his second government in 1879 when the Admiralty advertised a design competition for a desk to be made from the broken-up hull of the Resolute. The prime minister was peeved at the terms demanded by the U.S. government to settle its claims for reparations after Britain allowed the construction of ships for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

“It is entirely possible that Disraeli, after being re-elected as prime minister… saw an opportunity to give Americans a subtle, ironic, poison chalice of a gift, as a personal salve to the Treaty of Washington’s sting,” wrote Dando-Collins. “The Resolute Desk represented multiple failed attempts to rescue a failed expedition headed by a failed leader. It was, in effect, the very embodiment of failure.”

It is an intriguing theory, but is also only speculation.

What is certainly true is that the Resolute’s mission and its abandonment in the Arctic epitomized the folly of the Victorian era. And now in the form of the desk it may come to symbolize the folly of the American one as well.

Invoking a Greek myth, he argued that the abolitionists and their supporters, “have for long years been sowing dragons’ teeth, and have finally got a crop of armed men. The Union, sir, is dissolved.”

He accused northern senators of seeking to violate the constitutional rights of southern states and to overturn “our social system.”

“Your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race in a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people…”

Claiming to speak for the people of his state—even those who didn’t own slaves—he declared, “This is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other…”

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The South would go on to lose the civil war. But that didn’t end the determination of many white Georgians to deny freed blacks the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes, literacy tests, primaries in which only whites could vote and terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan nullified the power of black voters for decades.

Today’s moves to disenfranchise voters have more complex motivations than simply race. But the onerous requirements of President Donald Trump’s proposed SAVE America Act could sharply depress turnout, particularly among the poor and minorities.

As the New York Times noted, current law mandates that those registering to vote provide a driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Under Trump’s proposal, the Times reported:

Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote. That would limit mail or online registration, and direct voters to local election offices instead. There, they would have to produce documentary proof of U.S. citizenship such as an enhanced form of REAL ID — a state identification card compliant with federal regulations — that indicates American citizenship; birth certificate; passport or military identification card.

The bill would also mandate that all voters present a government-issued photo ID at polling places. Those seeking to vote by mail would have to enclose a copy of photo identification both when requesting a ballot and when returning it.

States would be required to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, to be cross-referenced with citizenship data and purged of those deemed ineligible to vote. And election workers who fail to properly verify an applicant’s eligibility to vote could face criminal penalties.

The new law would go into effect immediately, with the midterm elections a little more than three months away. It could unleash chaos at polling places as officials ask for costly or difficult-to-obtain credentials that an estimated 21 million Americans lack. The financial burden of getting the needed credentials amounts to a new poll tax.

“The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately,” according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. “Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.”

For all practical purposes, it would essentially kill the popular option of voting by mail.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Sen. Lisa Murkowski explained why she’s against the bill being pushed by the president and members of her party.

“The president is right that we should protect the security of our elections,” Murkowski wrote. “But we can’t make it harder for American citizens to cast their ballots, because free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic.”

In her state, Alaska, online registration is vital, since there are only six election offices where people could prove they were qualified to vote: “Six places in a state more than twice the size of Texas, where roughly 80% of our communities, and about 20% of our population, aren’t connected by road…”

“Say you are an 18-year-old living in Savoonga, on a remote island in the Bering Sea, who wants to register to vote for the first time. If the SAVE America Act passed, your only option would be to buy a ticket on Bering Air to Nome, which runs about $780 round-trip. A night at the Aurora Inn would be more than $300. So, not counting food and local transportation, it would cost more than $1,000 just to register to vote.”

Other states face far less severe challenges, but there are a myriad of particular issues. The wisdom of a locally administered electoral system in a country as big as the United States seems evident.

Congressional Republicans are faced with a choice: Disobey Trump or destabilize the system that put them in office, which has experienced few instances of voter fraud and is popular with the folks back home.

Trump is attacking a voting process that elected him twice, with the bizarre explanation that the 2024 victory over Joe Biden was “too big to rig.” In this sense he is the ultimate sore winner.

Yet those who attribute Trump’s zeal for the SAVE America Act to his inability to get over his loss in 2020 may be missing the point. The president likely isn’t primarily trying to rewrite history so much as shaping the future: by questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections and weakening the GOP’s opponents in the 2028 balloting for the presidency.

Robert Toombs

When Robert Toombs spoke, people listened. “He could be kind, pushy, funny, arrogant, charming, eloquent, sarcastic, dedicated, slovenly, candid, manipulative, and a host of other dispositions that his mood or the circumstances required,” his most recent biographer Mark Scroggins observed.

Raised by an affluent planter family that traced its roots back to Virginia and England, his childhood nickname for a while was Runt. But he grew to be six feet tall, with a powerful torso that served him well for speechifying.

In his sophomore year at Georgia’s Franklin College, “the fifteen-year-old Toombs quickly earned a reputation for gambling, drinking, fighting, foul language, and other hell-raising,” Scroggins wrote. One story about his student days “has a proctor discovering him as he is drinking and gambling with some friends. All of the students flee except for the inebriated Toombs who wobbily exclaims: “The guilty flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion!”

After imposing repeated fines and other punishments, the college expelled Toombs. He did much better at Union College, where he ranked 3rd among the 83 members of his graduating class. After taking up legal studies, he became one of Georgia’s highest paid lawyers, noted Scroggins. “By the 1870s, it was rumored that he would not touch a case for less than five thousand dollars.”

By 1837, he was living in a luxurious home with his wife and two daughters. They owned 53 slaves.

Toombs became active in Georgia’s States Rights party. He had voted for Andrew Jackson, but looked down upon the populist president’s followers and Jackson’s opposition to the argument that states had the right to nullify federal laws.

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Following his elections to the state legislature and eventually Congress, Toombs’ speeches stood out. Skilled at dropping in literary allusions, he became what one writer described as a “bold, fluent, sarcastic speaker.” He could be charming in person, but as one associate recalled, “He was haughty, imperious, and overbearing, intolerant and impatient of contradiction.”

One example of his acid tongue: Toombs said President James Polk was the “vilest poltroon that ever disgraced our government,” a “sharp district politician without statesmanship or patriotism.”

Scroggins gives us this portrait of Toombs, relying on an account by the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis:

He was considered handsome, even though he was negligent about his “toilet and dress.” Varina Howell Davis was taken with him. “His coloring was good, and his teeth brilliantly white, but his mouth was somewhat pendulous and subtracted from the rest of his strong face,” she wrote. “His eyes were magnificent, dark and flashing, and they had a certain lawless way of ranging about that was indicative of his character.” Mrs. Davis was particularly struck by his hands. She described them as “beautiful,” and wrote that they were “kept like those of a fashionable woman.”

For more than 15 years, as a member of the House and later the Senate, Toombs had used his ample oratorical skills to insist that the U.S. Constitution protected the South’s property interest in the enslaved.

Through all the debates about the potential expansion of slavery to new territories, Toombs argued the south’s side while trying to support compromises to preserve the union. But by the presidential election of 1860, with the prospect of Republican Abraham Lincoln winning, he had lost hope.

Scroggins wrote:

In October, Toombs traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and dared the nation to elect a Repbulican: “Let the night which decides the election of Lincoln be ushered in by the booming of hostile cannon of the South,” he roared to the cheering crowd. In Atlanta, one witness said that Toombs “spoke like a madman and acted like a fanatic.” But the nation answered right back on November 6 when Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won the presidential ticket.

Toombs maintained that “black people were unfit to have political power and incapable of living as freemen.” The prospect of civil war didn’t scare him: “Wars are to history what storms are to the atmosphere — purifiers.” He told a student interviewer that, ““We are the gentlemen of this land, and gentlemen always make revolutions in history.”

Toombs would go on to become the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, a job he detested, and later a brigadier general in the rebel army, where he clashed with higher-ranking professional officers.

His ambition to become president of the Confederacy was dashed. A close friend and Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, “believed Toombs blew the presidency because he drank too much. ‘He was in the habit of getting tight every day at dinner,’ Stephens wrote bluntly to his half-brother, Linton. A day or two before the election, Toombs drank more than was good for him at an important banquet. Then he went to a late party, got even drunker, and made a spectacle of himself,” according to Scroggins.

After the Civil War, he fled to Cuba and Europe to avoid arrest for his role in the rebellion. Though Toombs returned to Georgia and resumed practicing law, he never renounced his Confederate beliefs nor took an oath of loyalty to the U.S. And he never abandoned his opposition to blacks voting.

“He believed since their livelihood depended on those who owned property—such as himself—their votes could be manipulated,” Scroggins wrote. “There was no harm in blacks voting as long as the whites all belonged to one party, he said. But he feared the time when whites would divide and blacks would be courted by ‘the lower classes of white men.’ If this coalition formed a majority it might attack the interests of the ‘landed proprietors’—like himself.”

To Toombs, the KKK was a positive force. “There is no evidence that Toombs himself ever wore a hood, rode with, or was a member of the Klan. But he certainly approved of their purposes and probably knew a great deal about their activities. Toombs told a reporter that the Klan was the ‘natural protest of an oppressed people against tyranny’ and that the Klan ‘tempered’ the ‘despotism’ of the Radicals.”

In his post-war career, Toombs had his biggest impact as prime mover of a Georgia constitutional convention. The constitution that emerged in 1877 undid Reconstruction reforms that followed the Union victory. Georgia weaponized the poll tax to disenfranchise the freed slaves (along with poor whites). All 11 states of the former Confederacy would eventually adopt poll taxes.

The poll taxes had to be paid in advance of the elections, noted C. Vann Woodward, in Origins of the New South 1877-1913. “The tax receipts usually had to be preserved and sometimes presented twice, once to the registrar and once to the election official,” he wrote. The taxes were cumulative, so would-be voters often faced prohibitively high levies to establish their eligibility. Woodward quotes an Alabama politician as saying “We want that all tax to pile up so high that he will never be able to vote again.”

The voter suppression tactic worked. “In the mid-1940s, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax estimated that 10 million Americans were denied the right to vote because they simply could not pay,” wrote Carol Anderson, in One Person, No Vote.

Georgia’s $1-per-person poll tax was finally abolished by a reformist governor in the 1940s. But similar taxes in other states survived until the mid-1960s when the 24^th amendment, the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections finally ended them.

“Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, “the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”

Georgia’s vote

One day before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s win, a different kind of electoral upheaval took place in Georgia. Two Democrats—Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—were elected to represent the normally red state in the U.S. Senate.

Trump had failed in his bid to nullify Biden’s victory in the state. On January 2, 2021, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and attempted to persuade him, through a number of fallacious arguments, that he won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes. Then Trump said, “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

Shortly before 4 a.m. on January 7, Congress put an end to Trump’s hopes by certifying Biden’s victory, including the 16 electoral votes cast by Georgia for the Democrat.

On March 18 this year, a little more than 165 years since Robert Toombs angrily resigned from the Senate, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock spoke in the chamber.

“I rise today as a child of the Civil Rights movement,” he said. He described himself as “a member of only the second generation of our nation to have full and fair access to the right to vote. …”

“Every American citizen must have access to the franchise, and it must not be treated as a privilege; it is a right. And when you put up unnecessary barriers, you undermine that basic understanding…We know that this will disenfranchise thousands, if not millions of Americans.”

“Anyone could call in and talk to the president,” wrote William Neuman in his book, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela.

“It was democracy in action. A direct channel…

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When the Germans began fleeing the victorious allied troops near the end of the war, they forced camp inmates to walk for miles to other camps. Pisar escaped and hid in the Bavarian woods. As his stepson U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recalled in 2020, he heard the rumble of a tank.

“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.

John James Audubon stared at the caged bird.

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Lawless. If you had to sum up the second Trump presidency in a word, that would be it.

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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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