Saturday, June 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt six)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

In the back rectory, a telephone rang incessantly, and volunteers like Ronnie Rosenthal answered the succession of calls. Each new voice came with the alarm and paranoia of an uncle or a mother posing almost unspeakable questions. These were family members who might have a son in New Orleans, a son who, they hinted, might be a member of their church. Many admitted that they had dialed the MCC because it was the only number in the phone book for a gay-affiliated organization that wasn’t a gay bar.

To help these families, the MCC kept a running file of confirmed survivors and victims. Ronnie Rosenthal also took on the uneviable duty of calling families to inform them that their son was dead or missing. “The saddest part,” said Ronnie, “was when we tried to call someone’s parents to let them know what happened, and they could care less.” Some families just couldn’t face the shame of claiming a homosexual loved one as one of their own. “All of us understood why a lot of the families didn’t come forward,” recalled John Meyers, the Café Lafitte patron, “bemoaning it but, nonetheless, understanding it.”



Friday, June 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt five)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

When Buddy Rasmussen and bar owner Phil Esteve were finally permitted inside, they could barely recognize the place. But they did notice something peculiar. Evidently, even though only police, fire, medical first responders, and news reporters were allowed inside the structure, the night’s earnings had gone missing. “Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recalled Bob McAnear, the former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, the police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” Up Stairs Lounge historian Johnny Townsend, who interviewed Phil Esteve in the 1980s, in part corroborates this account in his Let the Faggots Burn: “Phil Esteve rushed over to the bar that evening but couldn’t go in until the following day. Then, he says, he watched as investigators tore names off of checks and took money from the cash register which they never turned over to him.” Esteve is now deceased and unable to speak to those details himself.

But money was indeed unaccounted for. “Whether it was because it was a gay bar or that insurance would cover it, so it wouldn’t be missed, there are those who would take advantage of the situation,” McAnear contended. “It would be difficult to break open those machines without more than one person being aware.” The night’s monetary haul from the beer bust was gone, not in the safe. Buddy and Phil both felt the pressure to pretend that no other crime, other than the fire, had occurred that Sunday night. Besides, if anyone had filed a complaint about such missing funds, it would have been the word of two homosexuals against the officials.



Thursday, June 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt four)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

“Coroner’s assistants would untangle bodies two at a time,” wrote the Times-Picayune. They took breaks to retch out nearby windows. Prying the stack of seventeen corpses in the corner, and deciding which piece went where, was a horrific task—in fact, a guessing game. Firemen and policemen pitched in to help the coroner and his team. They began by clearing the front door and bathroom of bodies and proceeded through the bar area toward Chartres Street, gathering and reassembling body parts on top of the bar. Each carcass, completed as best they could, was then photographed and searched for identifying artifacts—jewelry, trinkets, or pieces of wallet. Each was then zipped in a bag. A fire engine with a sixty-five-foot arm raised and lowered a metal basket, and black rubber sacks descended, one by one. Three Catholic priests turned up on the street in time to offer “conditional absolution” over the bags as they were lowered. They made a sign of the cross in the air more than twenty times.



Wednesday, June 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt three)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

New Orleans had long been a sexual oasis for members of the armed forces like Steven. As a port city, like San Francisco or New York—where generations of “undesirably discharged” homosexuals settled after being kicked off transport ships—New Orleans boasted a lineage of military men on leave seeking gay sex. In fact, Tennessee Williams’ first homosexual encounter was with a G.I. in New Orleans. In 1966, W.F. Charles of the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board wrote the proprietor of Café Lafitte in Exile: “Inspection reports presented to the Board indicate that your establishment is a known hangout for persons of undesirable character.” This letter had the reverse of its intended effect. Tickled instead of intimidated, the owners of the bar framed the letter and put it on display near the front door.



Tuesday, June 26, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt two)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

Café Lafitte in Exile, a tavern for the “genteel,” not only survived but thrived in the wake of a 1969 incident in which Laisder Mendoza, the twenty-five-year-old gay son of a Venezuelan industrialist, had gotten into an argument with a lover, exited the bar, and then plowed his pickup truck through the building’s front door, injuring three. Five years earlier, Mendoza had been arrested by the vice squad and booked for “attempted crime against nature,” but, because he was a closeted member of diplomatic society, it does not appear that he received any comeuppance for that charge or for driving his truck through the bar.

Tennessee Williams frequented Café Lafitte in Exile but avoided acknowledgment of his homosexuality because the content of his plays roused enough controversy as it was: he feared it would escalate if his “mad pilgrimage of the flesh” were to become common knowledge. Some critics, such as Time magazine’s Louis Kronenberger, were especially keen to goad Williams as an artist “obsessed with violence, corruption and sex” or a man whose “profanity often seems to relieve . . . [his] own feelings rather than his characters.’” Williams’s dance between out-ness and closeted-ness created paranoia and psychological breaks. Consequently, the playwright suffered a diminution in self-worth. “I once had the idea, the hope, of being a major artist,” he confessed to his lover, Frank Merlo, in 1957. “I know I am a minor artist who has happened to create two or three major works.” At the time Williams wrote these words, he had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Still, the playwright Williams, the shipping titan McDonogh, and the diplomat’s son Mendoza had all been moneyed men with the means to live in a gray space. In a pinch, they could bribe or influence their way out of trouble with law enforcement or the press. Homosexuality, for the affluent, was often something to be managed and concealed like a drug addiction, a “social tic” that would only read on the surface of the deranged or confused. It was still relatively common, for example, for the closeted rich to “keep a boy” in the Quarter, a young lover well maintained, at least temporarily, for the wealthy man’s own pleasure. “It was more of a class thing,” agreed Jane Place, who waitressed at a gay-friendly French Quarter diner. Upper-class gays could have their way in this world of complex graces. One gay fraternal order, for example, held a Mardi Gras ball at the luxurious Hotel Montelone in 1970, but no pictures appeared in the newspapers. “There were the high societies,” Place noted, “and then there were the derelicts, that you knew they weren’t going to live very long. It was very sad because you could almost pick their fate by the group they were in.”



Monday, June 25, 2018

the last book I ever read (Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, excerpt one)

from Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler:

The International Trade Mart building had been erected in the 1960s under the direction of Clay Shaw. A man of aristocratic bearing who wore seersucker suits and lived in a French Quarter mansion, Shaw had counted himself among the New Orleans elite. Years earlier, he had organized the 1953 sesquincentennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, an event that had attracted the newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower. Shaw’s position in the city seemed assured, having accompanied New Orleans mayors on trade missions. However, as only his close friends knew, Clay Shaw lived two lives: conservative businessman in public and homosexual bon vivant in private. His feat of compartmentalization had come crashing down when Jim Garrison, the Orleans Parish district attorney, bizarrely arrested him in 1967 and charged him with colluding to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

This would be the first and only trial brought against a living suspect for the killing of the president, and District Attorney Jim Garrison worked the limelight, as prosecutor, to his full advantage. Garrison postulated to the press, using defamatory tropes of the era, that Shaw’s involvement made the assassination a “homosexual thrill-killing.” The prosecutor loudly declared that an individual associated with the presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, named “Clay Bertrand” by the Warren Commission, was none other than New Orleans resident Clay Shaw. Garrison’s claim that Bertrand and Shaw were one and the same person, an apparent break in the case touted by the press as the final reveal of a “mystery man,” ultimately turned out to be a dubious connection, at best, and knowingly baseless one, at worst. In fact, Garrison happened to be a man with his own set of demons: during his crusade, Garrison was concurrently investigated by an Orleans Parish grand jury for allegedly molesting a thirteen-year-old boy at the New Orleans Athletic Club.



Sunday, June 24, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt seven)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

They were minutes from the dorm, and Arlene wasn’t stopping. The dorm facilities occupied the upper two floors, of a square, rose-pink lunch box of a building that wore the adobe style façade like a too-big sombrero. Tonight the pink faded to a cornflower blue in the dark. Arlene tugged Regina all the way through the security gate, up the stairs and as soon as they were both inside their room, Arlene snatched off her wig and flung it behind her as if the wig was what she’d been pissed off at the whole time. Damn wigs. She aimed for her bed, but it landed on the lamp. The lamp’s bulb had been on for hours and was hot as the freckles that glowed on Arlene’s face.



Saturday, June 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt six)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

The pitcher just struck out Esperanza, so right then redemption was up to me. I have the biggest legs of all the Lady Mantises. Daddy used to always say people here like it when you can do something special but not too special. Our town isn’t really small. We don’t have rolling hay fields or anything like that. It’s not big, either, though. Teenagers like me and T don’t have much going on; of course, there is more to do than go shopping and get pregnant. There’s softball.



Friday, June 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt five)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

“Don’t believe anything that drunk lesbian tells you,” he said.

“You mean your granddaughter?” I replied.

“That’s right.”

“Then you aren’t a son of a bitch?”



Thursday, June 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt four)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

Big uncle told me it would be this way. Small uncle just sucks on caramel chews every moment he takes a breath. Mo didn’t want an epidural because she didn’t want the drugs to block the bonding process between her and the babies. She just keeps telling us she is dying and looking at us like we don’t believe her and there is no hope, and it breaks my heart. All I can do is make promises and sip on a sweet drink for energy. She walks around because the midwives make her. Mo says she has to poop over and over. She had to have the babies. The twins, a boy and a girl, come out fast. The midwife passes each one quick, unceremoniously, onto a table. They lie there oily like two humongous fists that fell out of a mouth, unhappy and almost humiliated or robbed of something wonderful. Twins are freaky. They represent some epic balance, the dichotomy of good and evil, Mars and Venus dynamic, or the potential for a catastrophic error.



Wednesday, June 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt three)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

T always knew better than I did about complicated situations, not so much the crushes I would get on other girls, but she understood people’s motivations, told me not to trust Mackensie in eighth grade because she just wanted to be my friend for my fruit snacks, Pilar in ninth grade snuck in on my locker space, and now Esperanza inspired reservations. T was always right. I liked that she gave me choices. Quit. Quit? Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. The word tasted bad, made little since in the context of our lives when Daddy helped us train, sprints every morning, T’s shoulders like afire hydrant, unbeatable fastball, my sprint times unmatched, a duo so good Coach couldn’t believe it. He promised to take care of us now, made T break up with her almost-boyfriend, Dawan, a boy too stupid or scared to look grief or Coach in the face without lowering his long duck lips, unlike Coach always there, upright, actually seeing us, and to leave the game condemned us to invisibility, again. T still waited for an answer on killing or quitting, but I took too long to decide, so she hit me on the thigh with a wood ruler, a thick one, didn’t make me jump just send a deept sting through my muscles that showed me stuff, fibers in the carpet crinkling in waves under pressure from the AC vents, some cold and anxious force arced over T, the membrane of fluid around her eyeball deep enough to swim in, asking me for help, and I didn’t know why yet, but right then knew for sure we needed to quit softball.



Tuesday, June 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt two)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

Faith becomes oddly pretty in a way that makes people wonder whether she might really be ugly. She collects candy, any kind of candy, as long as it has some manufacturer defect. She owned a prized, Siamese peanut M & M, a quadruplet. That one sits in a jar atop a pile of mangled gummy bears, all missing limbs or faceless. The awe of childhood morphs into the horror of puberty. They grow armpit hair, start to smell weird, skunky like sweet smoke and body odor, and fail to notice. Brains get cloudy. Arthritis carves an L shape into Emmanuel’s toes. Hair soft as corn silk peppers the sides of his head. He looks like a boy being siphoned away by some invisible gremlin, and no one can make it stop. Faith leaves him for long periods and says you’re not going to miss anything. He misses everything. When together, they have the sensory capability to detect only food and rap music. Their clothes are designed to frighten, arouse, or camouflage. Music permeates the house from Emmanuel’s room: Tupac, always Tupac. Rhymes of blood, death, and tears beat like an elephant heart in the air vents. Somewhere a hopeless, misguided, futile love persists. Emmanuel turns cruel, ignores Faith when she visits, watches The Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Tingler on an endless loop. He roosts. There is room for malice in their exchanges. She disappears for a while. Even when present, she is absent. He shrinks into the posture of an apology, and they are inseparable again like a motorcycle and its sidecar.



Monday, June 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories, excerpt one)

from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories by Venita Blackburn:

Uncle Dwayne became my parental figure for the next ten years. Being cared for by an adult single man with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is some exciting and scary shit. Odd alone does not describe the experience justly. Dwayne always lived in our house on the floor in the den, and even after my parents passed, that’s where he stayed, leaving the master bedroom unoccupied. He tried to tell me my wheelchair was a spaceship, a time machine, an assault vehicle with semiautomatic weapon capabilities. Dwayne stood six feet five inches and had skin like diet cola poured from a can, full of motion and light. In his head he was a rock star. In front of me he was a Minotaur, hooves and muscle in too-sheer boxers. I didn’t just play along for the first two years, I basked in his sudden revelations. He always had big ideas. Once he drained the pool at our house and built a slide for me to go down. The problem was I could never get out of the pool if I didn’t have help. One night I slide down on my own, and the thrill of the fall, the independence of being by myself in the dark outside elated me, but, of course, my chair slipped, and I landed on my shoulder. That glorious error allowed me the chance to watch the stars alone for five hours with a fractured collarbone. I thought there would be stars, but the majority of the sky presented just blackness, great and number and chilled. Only the bizarre passenger jets and helicopters with their goofy dragonfly mannerisms floated under the dark. The eleven-year-old air conditioner whirred then stopped, then whirred them stopped in even intervals.The odor of animal waste is a noble thing, the truest evidence of living. All that evidence of life from the farms miles and miles away and the pets just over the fences nearby collected in a fierce, invisible cloud. The night wind remained callous and inert.



Sunday, June 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt seven)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

It really was horrible. Like an abstract painting, a Kandinsky. And it was shrieking:

“I’m going to kill you! Carrion! Wretch!”

“No! No!”

“Yes! I’m going to kill you!”

“Aaaah!”

“Aaaaaaah!”



Saturday, June 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt six)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don’t know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We’d take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick. That must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things . . . It was healthy and entertaining . . . The wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass . . . and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another . . . until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.



Friday, June 15, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt five)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

Night fell and he drove on and on, with the horn in front . . . because he’d put the armadillo’s tail-cone on as the nose of his vehicle, that is to say he’d screwed it to the opening in front. It looked good, he thought; he’d done it only for aesthetics, not aerodynamics. What he liked most was that it entirely changed the appearance of the remains: with the horn in front it didn’t look like an armadillo anymore. It made him think how easy it was to change the appearance of a thing, what seemed most inherent to its being, most eternal . . . it was completely transformed by a measure as simple as changing the placement of the tail. How many things that seem different from each other, he thought, might actually be the same, with some little detail turned around!



Thursday, June 14, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt four)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

The skies of Patagonia are always clean. The winds meet there for a great carnival of invisible transformations. It’s as if to say that everything happens there, and the rest of the world dissolves in the distance, useless – China, Poland, Egypt . . . Paris, the luminous miniature. Everything. All that remains is that radiant space, Argentina, beautiful as paradise.

How to travel? How to live in another place? Wouldn’t it be lunacy, self-annihilation? To not be Argentinian is to drop into nothingness, and no one likes that.



Wednesday, June 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt three)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

During the taxi ride Delia didn’t sew a stitch or open her mouth. She rode stiffly in the back seat with her gaze fixed on the road, hoping against hope that she would see the truck. Zaralegui didn’t say anything either, but his silence had a different density, because it was the last afternoon of his life. He could have said his last words, but he kept them to himself. He concentrated on driving; though the traffic on the road didn’t demand much attention (there was none), the potholes did. He was a good professional. He must have been intrigued, or at least confused, by what was happening. No one had ever taken him on such an inexplicable trajectory before, and he must have been wondering how far, how long . . . . He wouldn’t wonder much longer, poor man, because very soon he was going to die.



Tuesday, June 12, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt two)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

It’s incredible, the speed a chain of events can take, starting with one that could be called immobile. It’s a kind of vertigo; straightaway events do not occur: they become simultaneous. It’s the ideal resource for getting rid of memory, for making an anachronism of any recollection. Starting from that slip of mine, everything began to happen at once. Especially for Delia Siffoni, Oman’s mother. Her son’s disappearance affected her deeply, it affected her mind, which must have surprised me since she wasn’t the emotional type; she was one of those women, so abundant then in Pringles, on the poor outskirts where we lived, who – before ceasing to bear children forever – had a single child, a boy, and raised him with a certain severe coolness. Each of my friends was an only child, each more or less the same age, each with that kind of mother. They were maniacal about cleanliness, they did not allow dogs, they acted like widows. And always: a single male child. I don’t know how, later on, there came to be women in Argentina.



Monday, June 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (César Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind, excerpt one)

from The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira:

These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.” The heroine has to be a seamstress, at a time when there were seamstresses . . . and the wind her antagonist, she sedentary, he a traveler, or the other way around: the art a traveler, the turbulence fixed. She the adventure, he the thread of the adventures . . . It could be anything, and in fact it must be anything, any whim, or all of them, if they begin transforming into one another . . . For once I want to allow myself every liberty, even the most improbable . . . Although the most improbable, I should admit, is that this plan will work. The gusts of the imagination do not carry one away except when one has not asked for it, or better: when one has asked for the opposite. And then there is the question of finding a good plot.



Sunday, June 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt thirteen)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

At some point early on, maybe by the time the navy stewards brought us the shrimp scampi, Trump asked bluntly, “So what do you want to do?” It was an odd question that I didn’t entirely understand at first, but without waiting for an answer, he launched into a monologue that made it crystal clear what he was referring to: whether I wanted to keep my job.

He said lots of people wanted to be director of the FBI, but that he thought very highly of me. He said he had heard great things about me and knew the people of the FBI thought very highly of me as well. He said despite that, he would understand if I wanted to “walk away” given all I had been through, although then he noted that that would be bad for me personally because it would look like I had done something wrong. He finished by saying that he knew he could “make a change at FBI” if he wanted to, but that he wanted to know what I thought.

Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening. The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and Trump’s pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship. Somebody probably had told him, or maybe it just occurred to him at random, that he’d “given” me the job for “free” and that he needed to get something in return. This only added to the strangeness of the experience. The president of the United States had invited me to dinner and decided my job security was on the menu.



Saturday, June 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt twelve)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

Donald J. Trump was inaugurated the forty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 2017, before a crowd whose number immediately and famously came into dispute. The new president was determined to demonstrate that the number of spectators who turned out for him, which was sizable, surpassed the number of people present for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. They did not. No evidence, photographic or otherwise, would move him off his view, which, as far as everyone but his press team seemed to agree, was simply false. This small moment was deeply disconcerting to those of us in the business of trying to find the truth, whether in a criminal investigation or in assessing the plans and intentions of America’s adversaries. Much of life is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, but there are things that are objectively, verifiably either true or false. It was simply not true that the biggest crowd in history attended the inauguration, as he asserted, or even that Trump’s crowd was bigger than Obama’s. To say otherwise was not to offer an opinion, a view, a perspective. It was a lie.



Friday, June 8, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt eleven)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.

I have seen and read reports that Hillary Clinton blames me, at least in part, for her surprising election defeat. I know that at one point in her book she wrote that she felt she’d been “shivved” by me. She had worked for much of her professional life to become the first woman president of the United States, and quite understandably that loss, as unexpected and unpredicted as it was, hurt her badly. I have read she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made. I also know many Democrats are similarly baffled—even outraged—by the actions I took.



Thursday, June 7, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt ten)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

Information is classified based on its potential for harm to the United States if it is disclosed. Information marked at the lower classification level of “Confidential” refers to information that can cause some damage to the security of the United States if released. Information labeled “Secret” refers to material expected to cause “serious” damage to national security. “Top Secret” information is material that, if disclosed, could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave” damage to the security of the United States. This system is enforced by a variety of possible administrative punishments, including possible loss of a person’s security clearance or loss of their job. For the most serious cases, criminal prosecution is a possibility. A variety of espionage statutes make it a felony to steal or to disclose national security information to people not permitted to receive it. Those statutes are used most often when someone is a spy or gives classified information to journalists for publication. More commonly used is a statute making it a misdemeanor—punishable by up to a year in jail—to mishandle classified information by removing it from appropriate facilities or systems. Even with the misdemeanor, the Department of Justice has long required that investigators develop strong evidence to indicate government employees knew they were doing something improper in their handling of the classified information.

In Secretary Clinton’s case, the answer to the first question—was classified information mishandled?—was obviously “yes.” In all, there were thirty-six email chains that discussed topics that were classified as “Secret” at the time. Eight times in those thousands of email exchanges across four years, Clinton and her team talked about topics designated as “Top Secret,” sometimes cryptically, sometimes obviously. They didn’t send each other classified documents, but that didn’t matter. Even though the people involved in the emails all had appropriate clearances and a need to know, anyone who had ever been granted a security clearance should have known that talking about top-secret information on an unclassified system was a breach of rules governing classified materials. Although just a small slice of Clinton’s emails, those exchanges on top-secret topics were, by all appearances, improper. Put another way, there were thirty-six email chains about topics that could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave” damage to the security of the United States if released. The heart of the case, then, was the second question: What was she thinking when she did this? Was it sloppy or was there criminal intent? Could we prove that she knew she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing?



Wednesday, June 6, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt nine)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

I knew there were other areas where we could improve, and I suggested to the entire workforce that they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important things I ever read. Inspired in part by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King’s letter is about seeking justice in a deeply flawed world. I have reread it several times since first encountering it in college. Because I knew that the FBI’s interaction with the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular, was a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history. I wanted to do something more. I ordered the creation of a curriculum at the FBI’s Quantico training academy. I wanted all agent and analyst trainees to learn the history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way. I wanted them to know that the FBI sent King a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide. I wanted them to stare at that history, visit the inspiring King Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its long arcs of stone bearing King’s words, and reflect on the FBI’s values and our responsibility to always do better.

The FBI Training Division created a curriculum that does just that. All FBI trainees study that painful history and complete the course by visiting the memorial. There, they choose one of Dr. King’s quotations from the wall—maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”—and then write an essay about the intersection of that quotation and the FBI’s values. The course doesn’t tell the trainees what to think. It only tells them they must think, about history and institutional values. Last I checked, the course remains one of the highest-rather portions of their many weeks at Quantico.



Tuesday, June 5, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt eight)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

The Constitution and the rule of law are not partisan political tools. Lady Justice wears a blindfold. She is not supposed to peek out to see how her political master wishes her to weigh a matter.



Monday, June 4, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt seven)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

Gonzales then began to explain that he and Card were there at the president’s direction about a vital national security program, that it was essential that the program continue, that they had briefed the leadership of Congress, who understood the program’s value, wanted it continued, and were willing to work with us to fix any legal issues. Then he paused.

And then John Ashcroft did something that amazed me. He pushed himself up on the bed with his elbows. His tired eyes fixed upon the president’s men, and he gave Card and Gonzales a rapid-fire blast. He had been misled about the scope of the surveillance program, he said. He vented that he had long been denied the legal support he needed by their narrow “read-in” requirements. Then he said he had serious concerns about the legal basis for parts of the program now that he understood it. Spent, he fell back on his pillow, his breathing labored. “But that doesn’t matter now,” he said, “because I’m not the attorney general.” With a finger extended from his shaking left hand, he pointed at me. “There is the attorney general.”



Sunday, June 3, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt six)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

Goldsmith and Philbin had shared their concerns with the White House—where the president’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and the vice president’s counsel, David Addington, were the primary contacts. Of the two, Addington was the dominant force. He was a tall, bearded lawyer with a booming voice that showed just a hint of a southern accent. In philosophy and temperament, he was a reflection of Vice President Cheney. He did not tolerate fools and had an ever-expanding definition of those who fit that category. After infuriating Addington by telling him the legal foundation of the program was falling apart, Goldsmith and Philbin then set about trying to convince Addington that I, the new deputy attorney general, should be told about—or “read into”—the Stellar Wind program so I could actually see what was going on.

Addington resisted this mightily. Since the program was conceived and authorized, he had succeeded in keeping the number of those who knew the details of the program to an absolute minimum—maybe a couple dozen throughout the U.S. government. Four people at the entire Justice Department had previously been read into the program, and that did not include my predecessor as deputy attorney general. On an activity of such profound importance, one that tested the limits of the law, that small circle was unusual if not unprecedented. Addington had even arranged to have the documents on the program held outside the normal process for presidential records. He—the vice president’s lawyer—kept the orders bearing the president’s signatures in a safe in his own office. Eventually, and only after considerable pressure, Addington relented and allowed me to be briefed.



Saturday, June 2, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt five)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

One of the first cases that I stepped into in my new role at the Justice Department was another case about lying in the justice system. In June 2003, a couple of months after the invasion of Iraq, an article by reporter Robert Novak had revealed the name of a covert CIA employee. The revelation had come days after the CIA employee’s husband had written a newspaper opinion piece attacking one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the war in Iraq, namely that Saddam Hussein was trying to acuire nuclear material. Speculation was rampant that members of the Bush administration had illegally disclosed the name of this CIA employee to Novak in retaliation for the negative article.

Novak attributed his reporting to two Bush administration sources. As the scandal widened, it soon became apparent that at least three, and as many as six, Bush officials had spoken to reporters about the covert CIA employee. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was one official who freely admitted mentioning the CIA employee’s name to Novak. In fact, he had called the Justice Department shortly after the investigation began. He explained that he hadn’t intended to reveal classified information; he had just been gossiping with Novak and didn’t realize what he had done. The identity of Novak’s second source was President Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove. Rove had had a conversation with Novak, in which Novak mentioned that the author of the critical opinion piece on Iraq was married to a CIA employee. Rove said something like, “Oh, you heard that, too.” Although it doesn’t seem like great journalistic craft, Novak took this as a confirmation of what he had learned from Armitage.

But there was also evidence that a third official, the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, spoke to numerous reporters about the CIA employee. By the time I became deputy attorney general, Libby had been interviewed by the FBI and admitted doing so, but said he only knew about the CIA employee from a reporter. Like Armitage, Libby maintained he was just passing gossip, not proactively disseminating the name of a covert agent. Unfortunately for Libby, the reporter Libby named, NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, had been interviewed by the FBI and said that Libby was lying. Russert hadn’t passed along the covert agent’s name to Libby. Three years later, a jury would conclude the same thing: Libby lied to the FBI.



Friday, June 1, 2018

the last book I ever read (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, excerpt four)

from A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey:

“I can’t bring our son back,” Patrice said, “but I can’t bear the thought of another mother feeling the pain I feel. I’ve got to do something.” She framed it in religious terms, based on one of her favorite lines from the New Testament. In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We know that God causes all things to work together for good, for those who love God, for thos who are called according to his purpose.”

She couldn’t explain why a loving God would allow Collin to die, and she rejected glib explanations about “God’s will.” She would reply, often to me after the well-meaning person had moved out of earshot, “What kind of loving God wants to kill my baby? I don’t believe that.” But she did believe she had to make something good come from her loss. That good, she announced, would be saving other mothers’ babies by forcing all doctors to test. So she went to it, channeling her grief into a nationwide campaign.

Patrice wrote publicly about our son and traveled the country supporting efforts to change the standard of care. She poured effort into speaking to the Virginia legislature, and succeeded in getting statutory language passed embracing universal testing and treatment for Group B strep. She didn’t do anything alone, but her voice, along with the voices of many other good people, changed our country. All mothers are tested now, and their babies live. Something good followed unimaginably bad. Other mothers will never know what might have been, which is as it should be.