Quote of the Day (Hilary Mantel, on ‘A Silence Full of Words’)

“You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”—British novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Wolf Hall (2009)

Making Dr. Fauci the New ‘Enemy of the People’: The Senate’s Degrading, Disgraceful Show Trial

By and large, Capitol Hill and the media have moved on from last week’s Senate “hearing,” if that’s the right word for it, featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

But the stench lingers over the questioning of an 85-year-old retired official who dedicated nearly four decades to protecting the health of Americans. It won’t dissipate any time soon.

What was it that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HDGAC) paraded before their constituents? A hearing? No. An interrogation? Only slightly better. A witch-hunt? Nearer. A McCarthyite public burning? There you have it.

For the past several years, committee head Rand Paul has claimed that Fauci, while director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), approved research in China that could have produced COVID-19.

As the hearing began, the Kentucky Senator urged the witness to “come clean” about mistakes made early on—and, when Fauci on the advice of legal counsel exercised his First Amendment rights, threatened him with “consequences” for obstructing the “investigation.”

Aping President Trump’s foul-mouthed antics and degradation of his office, Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio screamed “who the f— do you think you were” at Fauci, then had the temerity to demand that the immunologist apologize—rather than having the grace to do so himself.

As there are virtually no GOP public officials, even down to the local level, ready to defy Trump, I expected this berserk performance from the Republican Senators. In a way, it’s also probably part of the job description of members of the nation’s fallaciously named “greatest deliberative body” to posture and pontificate.

But I hoped for more from the nation’s media. Instead of examining how much truth actually resided in the accusations that Fauci misled the country, they engaged in tsk-tsking him for what they deemed insufficient humility and for shading the truth:

*Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic summary of Fauci’s private notes was headlined, “The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci.”

*Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan compared his appearance to “congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.”

*Contrarian commentator Andrew Sullivan, starting off by urging readers not to blame Fauci for the coronavirus or the lockdown, concluded on a shrill rising note by saying that they should hold him responsible for “protecting his own ass at all times, stigmatizing those he disagreed with and basking in fame at champagne parties as others died alone, gasping for breath, only to be denied a proper funeral (like my own father).”

These and similar commentators failed to recognize a variation on a longtime Trump theme—one that should have struck close to home for them. The GOP HSGA committee members’ attempts to stigmatize Fauci parallel the President’s charges that the American media represent “an enemy of the people.”

That phrase, as several historians noted when the President began using it at the start of his first term, echoed similar words popularized by Joseph Stalin whose mere use, as successor Nikita Khrushchev said later, “made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven.”

The attempted show trial of Fauci may have disheartened his supporters—and thrilled his critics—but would hardly have surprised aficionados of classic theater.

More than 140 years before, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen had anticipated a community squabble over a health and environmental crisis—and the vulnerability of a medical professional who warns of the danger—in his fiery satire, An Enemy of the People.

Ibsen’s protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, blows the whistle on the contaminated water supply for his town's lucrative new baths, only to be foiled by vested interests who manipulate public opinion against him.

Unlike the journalists who rolled their eyes or clutched their pearls over Fauci’s resort to the Fifth Amendment or note about every celebrity praising his work, Ibsen never lost perspective on the full humanity of his truth-speaking doctor.

For all his idealism—and correctness about the spa—Stockmann is hardly selfless, let alone saintly. He expects the town to greet him as a hero—and when it turns on him instead, he denounces them all in increasingly vitriolic terms that only alienate them further.

While hardly embodying perfection, Stockmann demonstrates an integrity in sharp contrast to his detractors. He pays a steep price for his unflinching honesty, as he loses his job, his children are expelled from school, and his home is vandalized.

Since the start of COVID-19, Fauci has been lambasted not just in his hometown, like Stockmann, but nationwide. Even while heading the NIAID, he faced threats that became so frequent and alarming that he and his wife needed federal protection—a security detail that Trump has since gracelessly withdrawn.

MAGAnauts were quick to trace the assassination of Charlie Kirk to incendiary progressive rhetoric. They might ask themselves whether claims that Fauci was, as new movement member RFK Jr. claims, a “criminal” given to “lying about everything” might produce similar results.

The hypocrisy of such charges is rank, especially coming from legislators like Paul, Moreno, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose self-regard during the Trump Administration has increased even as their usefulness in exercising their constitutional duty as a check on the President has radically declined.

Typical of how—well, infectious—such talk might be was NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who demonstrated that the effects of his acknowledged three concussions might be worse than thought when he called Fauci an “absolute coward.”

If Rodgers truly wants to see an “absolute coward,” he might want to view Feb. 28, 2020 footage of an election-fearing Trump, a month into the pandemic, assuring Americans that “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

And if Senator Paul wants anyone to “come clean,” he can start with himself and explain why in March 2020, as the pandemic accelerated, he continued to work, travel and use the Senate gym for nearly a week while awaiting COVID test results that proved positive—forcing colleagues like Mitt Romney and Mike Lee to self-quarantine.

The Fauci browbeating in no way fulfilled any Congressional mandate to investigate, to ascertain facts so appropriate legislation could be passed.

It’s not just because it will be nearly impossible to discover the truth about conditions in China while that government tightly controls the flow of information—a characteristic of an authoritarian regime being adopted at a frantic pace by the Trump Administration.

Not, it’s also because Congress in Trump II—and, arguably, earlier—is no longer capable, and probably not interested, in enacting laws.

Instead, what Americans witnessed last week was a blame game that will frighten away exemplary medical professionals from entering the public health field lest they, too, like Fauci, experience abuse, calls for their imprisonment, and threats to their safety and that of their family members.

It is a particularly shameful aspect of the Age of Trump that public health—like sports, once thought to be a matter beyond politics, where Americans could unite in a common concern—has become just another front in the culture wars. 

Anyone who dares face a public aggrieved by job losses or deaths and inflamed by misinformation will indeed prove, as Ibsen’s beleaguered hero maintained, that “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a coronavirus update briefing Tuesday, April 7, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, is an official White House photo taken by Tia Dufour.)

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on Summer’s Power ‘To Make Us Suffer and Like It’)

“What must the fish make of it as they pass the American coast with its banks packed with sunning carnivores? There they lie in the millions—their flesh broiling, their hides oiled, their hair stiff with salt, their blankets stained with mustard, their skins bitten by insects, the grit of sand between teeth and toes, their great masked eyes staring blankly into Proust, electric guitars throbbing into their earplugs, and the boredom as thick as crocodiles on the Zambesi. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American reporter, humorist, and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “Observer: The Strangest Shores,” The New York Times, June 27, 1965

Quote of the Day (Lynne Truss, on Our ‘Screen-Bound Lives’ and Social Skills)

“Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.” —English journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door (2005)

The image accompanying this post, of Lynne Truss at an event for Melville House Press in Brooklyn, was taken on Feb. 13, 2015, by Terry Ballard from Merrick, NY.

Joke of the Day (Emo Phillips, on Him and Technology)

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”—American stand-up comic and actor Emo Phillips in “Quotes on Technology,” Reader’s Digest, June 2009

Maybe true back in 2009. But if the edge lords of today’s tech world have anything to say in the matter (and they will, they will), you can bet that they’ll be crowing about the athletic ability of their latest AI-driven projects before long—even promoting a Computer Olympics.

(The image accompanying this post, of Emo Phillips opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theater, was taken on Mar. 22, 2018, by slgckgc.)

This Day in New York History (Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump Whisperer, Dies)

Aug. 2, 1986—While pressed by multiple misconduct charges leading to disbarment, Roy Cohn—a shadowy courtroom presence behind public figures ranging from Sen. Joseph McCarthy to future President Donald Trump—died of complications from AIDS, a disease he denied having.

When I was an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, I was talking with fellow staffers on my college newspaper about the McCarthy Era, venting my loathing for the senator’s chief counsel. Suddenly, a freshman reporter yelled, “Don’t talk about my Uncle Roy that way!”

To say that I was stunned by this unexpected response would be an understatement. But I was equally amused by the retort of another reporter in the room: “I wouldn’t go boasting about it, Richard.”

Cohn had graduated from the same school where we were matriculating, Columbia University. For all his brilliance (he graduated from the law school at age 20), he remained, a quarter-century after his meteoric rise to fame and notoriety during the Red Scare, a deeply loathed figure on campus.

He was reviled in New York at large and Washington, too, for what many judged his abrasive, ethically edgy representation of clients. But his Rolodex still bulged with prominent people from all walks of life and even both political parties. (Despite closeness to far-right Republicans, he retained the ties to local Democrats developed by his father, a judge and member of the party.)

Clients hoped to benefit not just from his undoubted knowledge of the law, but influence. Ironically, in his last couple of years, even as he falsely claimed he was afflicted with liver cancer, Cohn was calling in chits in the ideologically sympatico Reagan Administration to secure the experimental AIDS medication AZT, then only in the clinical trial stage.

Nearly a decade after his death, Cohn was depicted, in all his splenetic hypocrisy, in Tony Kushner’s epic drama of life during the AIDS years, Angels in America. 

And more than three decades after his passing, he was recalled as the evil mentor of young real estate tycoon-on-the-make Trump, in the documentaries Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story Of Roy Cohn, as well as the feature film The Apprentice.

Ivy Meeropol, the director of Bully. Coward. Victim, has special reason to abominate Cohn. As an assistant prosecutor, he was not only instrumental in winning espionage convictions against her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but also in communicating in secret with Judge Irving Kaufman about the need to sentence both to death.

(Today, after the release of declassified Soviet archives and USA government intercepts, the historical consensus is that though Julius was guilty of running a spy ring, the evidence against Ethel was far thinner—contradicting Cohn’s ludicrous contention years later to journalist Sidney Zion that she was “the mastermind of this conspiracy.")

Though Cohn facilitated the Rosenbergs’ destruction, it is equally true that he helped engineer the self-immolation of his boss after that trial, McCarthy, during the lawyer’s 18 months as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

His insane threat to “wreck the Army" if it did not give friend and fellow aide G. David Schine favored treatment in boot camp—and his demand that McCarthy back him up—resulted in the televised hearings that exposed the senator unmistakably as a bullying, reckless threat to the Constitution.

Resigning from his post after the Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn retreated to New York, where he spent more than two decades building up a profitable practice at his law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan.

By the time that journalist Ken Auletta caught up with him for a December 1978 Esquire article, he was riding high—scoffing at four trials from which he had escaped unscathed, even crowing that his notoriety, rather than being a stigma, furnished him with more publicity and clients.

He had some reason to feel that he’d survived the worst blows thrown at him. By this time, his clients had numbered Francis Cardinal Spellman (who had employed his services in a school prayer case), Barbara Walters (whom he briefly dated), Studio 54 co-owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Aristotle Onassis, Rupert Murdoch, Bianca Jagger, and rumored Mafia chieftains Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno.

Nevertheless, Cohn’s ambition and ruthlessness were so relentless as to spark speculation that they were rooted in fear, including of antisemitism. 

Robert Sherrill’s August 2009 review in The Nation of two books pointed to Cohn’s concerns that the public would associate Jews with Marxism, and the lawyer did stun friends with enough slurs directed at co-religionists that it was commonly believed that he was a self-hating Jew.

That behavior was certainly bewildering. But I think Sherrill does not give adequate attention to what was surely Cohn’s more gnawing unease: exposure as a gay man.

As early as the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he and Schien were closely, even inextricably, linked in the public eye, he squirmed as the lawyer representing the military, Joseph Welch, when asked by the senator what a “pixie” meant, responded, “A pixie is a close relation to a fairy. Have I enlightened you?”

As Cohn reveled in his celebrity, whispers about his sexual orientation turned into open conjecture. Auletta, for instance, bluntly asked during an interview if he was gay, and it was difficult to miss the insinuations—starting with the quiet adjectives and adverbs before exploding in the final sentence—in this passage:

“He looks like a killer. Except for the body and the deportment. He's only five feet eight inches tall, 144 pounds. The suit he is wearing this day is dark blue, slightly tucked at the waist, with a faint stripe. A modest paisley tie fades into a nondescript striped shirt. His mannerisms—the licking of the lips, the waving wrists—are effete.”

Six weeks before his death, surely too sick from AIDS to fight with his long accustomed vigor and ruthlessness, he was finally disbarred on several charges, including:

*tricking a dying, elderly multimillionaire client into signing a will naming Cohn as co-executor;

*failing to repay a client $100,000 he’d borrowed for two decades, until the disbarment proceedings started; and

*submitting a false statement on an application to the DC bar.

No summary of the influence of Cohn on life in the second half of the 20^th century—or the first quarter of this one—would be complete without a discussion of his relationship with President Trump, which began in the mid-1970s.

Dennis Rohatyn’s October 2019 post on the Culture Catch Web site criticized Where’s My Roy Cohn? for offering an overly simplified explanation of Cohn’s impact on Trump, leaving the President's overbearing father Fred out of the picture. Fair enough.

But with that said, it’s all too easy to see how Trump absorbed the lessons of his consigliere:

*Never admit wrongdoing, or even a mistake.

*Attack, attack, attack the prosecution.

*The more preposterous a countercharge, the better. (He called the Jewish lawyers from the Nixon Justice Department suing the Trump Organization for refusing to rent to blacks “Gestapo agents,” just as Trump later would weaponize the Justice Department to pursue counter-investigations against officials involved in previous cases against him.)

It’s fair to say that Cohn helped Trump gain his coveted foothold in the Manhattan real estate market with advice on converting the Commodore Hotel into the Hyatt Hotel. 

Then he protected him from the consequences of his playboy lifestyle not only by writing his prenup agreement with Ivana, but also by directing the young Czech emigrant to a lawyer of his own choosing who would review the pact.

For all his tirades about desiring loyalty from aides, Trump displayed little of it as Cohn fought in vain against disbarment and AIDS. The disappearing act did not go unnoticed by the lawyer, who is said to have remarked (in the bowdlerized version) that Trump had ice in his veins.

It is rare that one individual can be seen as a malevolent force in three different eras. But the life of Cohn resoundingly confirms the truth of Shakespeare’s line from Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Cohn conferring with Sen. McCarthy over questioning of witness William Taylor, was taken on Aug. 23, 1953. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times and is now part of the collection at https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002shqk/)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Prayer, ‘The Church’s Banquet’)

“Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth.”—English “metaphysical poet” and Anglican minister George Herbert (1593-1633), “Prayer,” in The Complete Poetry, edited by John Drury (2015)