50 Years on – how Apollo 13’s near disastrous mission is relevant today

 

When an oxygen tank blew during the 1970 Nasa moonshot, the successful rescue mission was thanks to Nasa organisation, not improvisation

Splashdown: Fred Haise, Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert wait to be picked up by helicopter, 17 April 1970. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

The Guardian

Eighteen months ago, I was combing through the Apollo 11 mission logs, looking at the timelines and events for something unique that we might focus on to celebrate the 50th anniversary of humankind’s first landing on the moon. Last year, that idea became the BBC World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon.

As the series drew to a close, it became clear that there was unfinished business. Some of the flight controllers who had been present for the Apollo 11 landing had also worked on another, arguably more dramatic, endeavour – the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13.

That mission was crippled by an explosion while en route to the moon and nearly 200,000 miles from Earth. The story was popularised in 1995 in a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, but I knew that there was much more behind the narrative than the movie had managed to tell. So for the new series of the podcast I wanted to get under the skin of the thing and focus not just on the crew who flew the mission, but also on those who saved it – the incredible team of flight controllers who worked round the clock in shifts for 87 hours.

We were after more than the story, gripping though it is. I wanted to understand what lessons we all might learn from what became arguably Nasa’s finest achievement: the recovery from catastrophe in deep space and the rescue of a crew from what looked like certain death. How do you lead a team through that? How do you keep yourselves going in the face of something so hopeless? It felt to me like there should be something all of us might learn.

Apollo 13 leader Jim Lovell’s wife Marilyn (far right) and their children watch as the mission lifts off. Photograph: Yale Joel/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

Apollo 13 was the United States’ third mission to land humans on the moon. Launched on 11 April 1970, it followed less than a year after Neil Armstrong’s successful first lunar landing and famous small step. Commander Jim Lovell, a former US navy test pilot and spaceflight veteran, led a crew of two rookie astronauts, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. Things had gone awry even before launch. Swigert was a late inclusion in the crew, having been swapped in at the last moment to replace his colleague Ken Mattingly who had been exposed to a case of German measles. But this drama in the buildup to the mission drew only moderate interest from the media.

To the American public, sending people to the moon, a feat that had existed only at the limits of their imagination just 12 months earlier, had now taken on the air of something almost routine. There was much less press hoopla about the launch itself and television networks across America declined the opportunity to interrupt their schedules and include live inserts of Apollo 13’s early inflight broadcasts. The view of the editorial teams back on Earth was clear: astronauts had landed on the moon not once but twice already and, with much of the novelty gone, the Apollo 13 mission deserved little attention, or so they thought.

Fifty-six hours in, with the crew nearly 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion in one of Apollo 13’s two oxygen tanks left the command module Odyssey fatally damaged. Coasting in space, with alarms flashing all around them, bleeding oxygen and losing electrical power, Lovell, Swigert and Haise were suddenly in deep trouble.

The Apollo 13 rocket lifts off from launch pad A of the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 11 April 1970. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The lunar landing was called off and over the next four days, the crew and mission control would find themselves fending off deadly threats over and over again. They would solve problems one day, only to discover a host of new complications that might kill the crew the next. But they kept working together, across hundreds of thousands of miles of empty space, with everything against them, until they got the crew all the way back.

On 17 April 1970, with the world watching, Apollo 13 reached Earth again. The capsule, surrounded by an inferno created by the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere, became impossible to contact by radio. At mission control, they watched and waited in silence.

We tend to mythologise these stories of outrageous survival to the extent that it becomes difficult to tease fact apart from fiction. This is doubly true of Apollo 13. The popular retelling goes something like this: Apollo 13 was rescued by an elite team led by flight director, Gene Kranz, for whom failure was “not an option”. The rescue was executed calmly and deftly without any doubts that it would succeed.

But you only have to listen to the opening hours of the mission control recordings and the space-to-ground radio transmissions to know that was not the case. After the rupture of the oxygen tank, both the crew and their flight controllers struggled to make sense of what was happening.

That the mission control team was caught flat-footed in the opening phase of the accident is strangely reassuring. Nobody, not even the exhaustively drilled Nasa flight controllers, is able to glide swan-like through chaos like that. Initially there was no structure. There were misdiagnoses and mistakes. The vehicle had failed so totally that it fleetingly crossed the mind of at least one flight controller that he should simply pack up and go home.

Exemplary leadership is what got them through that first hour. Kranz kept his team and the vehicle together masterfully, buying time enough to start solving the problem. When reviewing the response to sudden crises, we often overlook that chaotic period, simply because it has little real structure and doesn’t appear to move things forward. But preventing a team from disintegrating in the face of an apparently overwhelming challenge is a feat in itself. The average age of the flight control team was 27; some were freshly graduated from university. During routine mission operations you would never guess that; their statements are so clear and confident, their knowledge so deep. But immediately after the accident there are times when, listening to the mission audio loop, you hear a hint of fearful youth.

Nasa had learned to be wary – they knew that plans hatched in the heat of the moment often harbour flaws

After a torrid hour of failed troubleshooting, a new shift of flight controllers arrived, as well as a new flight director, waiting to take their turn. They were at this point still in the thick of the fight and the temptation for Kranz to keep going and refuse to relinquish control must have been enormous. Nevertheless he passed the baton to the incoming team, recognising that fresh eyes and minds were what was needed. This is the true spirit of teamwork – the ability to know when your part is done, when someone new can bring something better than you can.

That ability to relinquish control and delegate authority didn’t stop there. The Apollo missions were complex endeavours. Nobody could be across it all and Nasa knew that in mission control it had a team of people who, as a whole, were far greater than the sum of their individual parts.

In approaching this crisis, their delegation of authority and deference to expertise is almost total. In the face of high-stakes scenarios, it is tempting to wrest control from more junior colleagues. But in 1970 the approach of mission control was quite different. They empowered their most junior team members, giving them total ownership of their specialist stations. They would interrogate their recommendations but not second-guess them. It is a lesson that industry and wider society has largely failed to heed.

The other aspect of the Apollo 13 mission that I found fascinating during our interviews with the team was the depth of Nasa’s preparation. I had always imagined Apollo 13 to be a feat of wall-to-wall improvisation. After all, the rupture of the oxygen tank had torn the heart out of the command module, leaving it dead, forcing the astronauts to use the lunar module as a lifeboat and means of propulsion.

Jack Swigert (right) and one of the other two crew members work an improvised CO2 scrubber made from parts found aboard the Apollo 13 lunar module. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images

But what surprised me was how little of the response to the accident demanded improvised solutions. Nasa had learned to be wary of creativity and inventiveness in the heat of the moment. That doesn’t mean it refused to improvise, nor that it wasn’t capable of doing it well – only that it knew plans hatched in the heat of battle often harbour hidden flaws.

Incredibly, Nasa had already rehearsed many of the contingency and fallback plans required to rescue Apollo 13. In earlier missions, it had experimented with using the lunar module’s engines to drive both it and the command module. It had a checklist ready to manage the sudden powering down of the command module that was required to save dwindling battery power. Nasa even had a procedure for flying the spacecraft without their primary navigation and guidance computer. And then, when finally it had no choice but to improvise, it did it with same obsession and attention to detail it brought to everything else.

Finally, we should turn to the things we think we know about the mission through retellings in popular culture. The best quotes are often misquotes. For example nobody ever said: “Houston, we have a problem.” The precise words were: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” That is just a glitch in tense.

More significant is the mission’s other catchphrase – “Failure is not an option” – which we have taken to characterise Nasa as the sort of steel-willed organisation that steadfastly refuses to entertain the possibility of failure. But in truth nobody uttered those words during the mission. The quote itself derives from a line of script in the 1995 movie and Kranz then borrowed it as the title for his autobiography, published in 2000.

The scene at mission control minutes after the recovery of the Apollo 13 crew. Flight director Gene Kranz is on the far right. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

And while the flight controllers enjoyed regurgitating that particular strand of mythology to us, it was clear that the possibility of failure remained very real throughout the mission. Fifty years later, several of the flight controllers were still moved to tears when describing the moment when Apollo 13 finally reappeared after the communications blackout.

Despite their protestations, it became obvious that they all must have known how perilous the scenario was. But, importantly, what they didn’t do was devote any time to contemplating disaster. As flight director Glynn Lunney, who relieved Kranz’s first shift told me: “If you spend your time thinking about the crew dying, you’re only going to make that eventuality more likely.”

The Wet’suwet’en Protest and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline

No surrender.

After Police defend A Gas-pipeline Over Indigenous Land Rights, Protesters Shut Down Railways Across Canada

 

Ts’akë ze’ Howihkat, Freda Huson, passes an installation of red dresses as she waits for police to enforce Coastal GasLink’s injunction at the Unist’ot’en healing center on Feb. 9, 2020. The red dresses are a symbol of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Photo: Amber Bracken

 

The weeks leading up to Dr. Karla Tait’s arrest were tense at the Unist’ot’en camp, which for a decade has stood in the way of fossil fuel pipeline construction through the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s unceded territory in British Columbia. On New Year’s Eve, British Columbia’s Supreme Court granted an injunction barring members of the Indigenous nation from obstructing work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were authorized to enforce the order, but no one knew when they would come.

Tait’s aunt Freda Huson has lived on the territory since she built the first Unist’ot’en cabin in 2010, directly in the path of at least three proposed pipelines that would stretch across pristine mountain wilderness to export facilities in the coastal community of Kitimat. Unist’ot’en, which has grown to include a bunkhouse, a traditional pit house, traplines, and a three-story healing center, is associated with one of 13 houses that make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The camp is the oldest and most remote of a series of Wet’suwet’en camps established along an old logging road as an assertion of the nation’s right to decide what happens on their territory. Until this month, members controlled access to the area with gates constructed in the middle of the road.

One of the proposed pipelines, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway tar sands oil pipeline, was canceled in 2016. The future of a second, the Pacific Trails natural gas pipeline, was thrown into uncertainty after Chevron announced plans to divest its 50 percent share. But TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, has forged ahead with the Coastal GasLink project — despite opposition from the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s traditional leaders, the hereditary chiefs.

First/Top Left: Victoria Redsun, a Denesuline supporter, stands in ceremony with Huson and others as police arrive at the healing center on Feb. 10, 2020. Second/Top Right: Royal Canadian Mounted Police stage among red dresses as they prepare to enforce Coastal GasLink’s injunction. Third/Bottom: Nlaka’pamux supporter Autumn Walken goes limp as she is arrested at the Unist’ot’en healing center on Feb. 10, 2020. Huson and five others were arrested that day.

Photo: Amber Bracken

The hereditary chiefs, along with Unist’ot’en camp supporters, object to the pipeline on the grounds that it could contaminate land that is a part of who they are and that they rely on to harvest food and medicines and draw water. The land plays an integral role in programming at the Unist’ot’en healing center, where Tait works, which seeks to help Indigenous patients confront colonial trauma.

TC Energy obtained an initial injunction to force Unist’ot’en members to get out of the way of construction in December 2018. Royal Canadian Mounted Police commanders claimed “lethal overwatch” was required, according to documents revealed by The Guardian, and instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want.” After the RCMP arrested more than a dozen pipeline opponents that January, a strained peace was established. Police maintained a presence in the area, spending more than $3 million to establish a station halfway up the logging road to the camps. Unist’ot’en members negotiated access for pipeline workers as long as they followed an agreed-upon protocol, but TC Energy claimed the checkpoints continued to slow their work.

In the latest court order, the judge argued that the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s title claims and jurisdiction remained unresolved. In response, pipeline opponents abandoned the access agreement, and the hereditary chiefs demanded that Coastal GasLink vacate the territory immediately.

On February 6, Unist’ot’en members watched on social media as the RCMP mounted a dramatic pre-dawn raid on a smaller support camp down the road, arresting six people. But rather than serving to quell the resistance, the arrests inspired a wave of solidarity protests and transportation blockades across Canada. Protesters shut down ports, roads, and railways from Vancouver to Saskatchewan, and a blockade set up by Indigenous-led protesters from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario halted commuter rail traffic between Montreal and Toronto.

Victoria Redsun, left, waits with another supporter at the gate leading to the Unist’ot’en camp. The word “reconciliation” is written across the gate as a statement of what police, the government, and Coastal GasLink would destroy by forcing entry into Wet’suwet’en traditional territory.

Photo: Amber Bracken

At least 40 officers descended on a second Wet’suwet’en camp on February 7, arresting four Indigenous people who refused to leave. It took another three days for police to move on Unist’ot’en.

On February 10, a helicopter delivered RCMP officers and snowmobiles behind the Unist’ot’en gate. They watched from a hill overlooking the camp as more officers approached from the road. Surrounded on all sides, Tait, her mother, her aunt, and four supporters stood near the barrier, praying and drumming. Tait was the third to be arrested. “Two officers came around me and held my arms to try to prevent me from drumming,” she said. They continued to sing, even as they were loaded into the police van.

While the Canadian government continues to pursue a yearslong effort to heal its relationship with Indigenous people, for many, the arrests of the Unist’ot’en matriarchs were representative of the government’s unwillingness to take meaningful action toward reconciliation — especially when it comes to land rights. Indeed, documents uncovered by journalists and researchers confirm that officials have strategized furiously about how to prevent the Wet’suwet’en people’s assertion of land rights from getting in the way of the message that Canada is open for business.

“The violence of Canada and the emptiness of its commitments to us as Indigenous people were laid bare in their actions, and their forcible removal of us in the midst of ceremony,” Tait said. “The events we experienced leading up to February 10 are another culmination of the efforts of Canada to discredit and criminalize us for simply existing on our land as we always have — for defending our rights to our landbase and our historic economy, our ways of empowering ourselves — because of the threat to the capitalist economy.”

In the wake of the police raids, leaders of the movement declared, “Reconciliation is dead.”

Snow falls at Unist’ot’en camp near Houston, B.C., on Jan. 19, 2020.

Photo: Amber Bracken

“An End of Aboriginal Rights and Title”

The Wet’suwet’en Nation has never signed treaties or ceded territory to the Canadian government — a fact that its leaders have defended fiercely in court as well as on the ground. Its hereditary chiefs were behind a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision in 1997 known as Delgamuukw vs. the Queen, which recognized the existence of aboriginal title, whereby Indigenous people have the right to “exclusive use and occupation” of territory. However, because of a technicality, the court did not resolve the boundaries of the Wet’suwet’en’s claim to 8,500 square miles of land, stating that title would have to be sought through separate legal or treaty-making proceedings, which were never completed.

Documents obtained by the Canadian publication The Narwhal show that the Delgamuukw decision sent chills through Canadian extractive industries. The documents indicate that the government of British Columbia, a province largely made up of unceded territory, rushed to reassure industry officials, inviting them to provide input on a treaty-making process meant to settle questions over authority on unceded land.

In one memo, describing a meeting held in the wake of the ruling, Marlie Beets, then vice-president of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries, told B.C. officials that Indigenous nations must hand over their land to Canada. “The decision makes the need for certainty through surrender all the more clear,” she said. “We see no other alternative.”

Other industries echoed the alarm. “The oil and gas industry in particular has expressed concern about their ability to continue to do business in the province absent a clear direction from the government on how it will address the implications of the Delgamuukw decision,” stated a memo by a Delgamuukw strategy team formed by the government. At a meeting set up by British Columbia’s treaty officials, one lawyer, whose client is unclear, underlined that “what is needed is a clear exchange and an end of Aboriginal rights and title for a defined set of treaty rights.”

First/Top Left: Supporters look on as Wet’suwet’en women sing and pray at the sacred fire outside the healing center on Feb. 6, 2020. Second/Top Right: Wet’suwe’ten family and other supporters gather with Freda Huson, left, in the dining hall at the healing center on Jan. 15, 2020. Third/Bottom Left: Karla Tait beads her regalia on Jan. 20, 2020, hurrying to finish so her mother can wear it in ceremony. Fourth/Bottom Right: Victoria Redsun plays with a puppy at the healing center on Jan. 15, 2020.Photos: Amber Bracken

The Delgamuukw ruling took place just as discussions were coming to a head about how Canada should address the severe harms wrought by its residential schools. For more than a century, Canada had forcibly removed Native children from their families and sent them to remote schools where they were barred from speaking their language and practicing their culture. Many experienced physical and sexual abuse.

As officials were wringing their hands about the court decision, the federal government provided a grant of $350 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, meant for survivors of Canada’s residential schools. In a memo to the B.C. Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, British Columbia treaty negotiators suggested that the money could be used as leverage. Prioritizing it for First Nations that participated in the negotiations process could “sweeten the deal,” the memo stated.

“There were many ideas put forward as public servants brainstormed about how to move forward. The grant was never used for this purpose,” Sarah Plank, communications director for the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, said in a statement to The Intercept. The province’s approach has evolved over the past 20 years, she added, and does not require Indigenous nations to relinquish their rights. Plank described reconciliation as an “all-of-society journey” best achieved with feedback from stakeholders including industry.

The first Unist’ot’en checkpoint was erected a year after the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission created to offer recommendations for how the Canadian government should address the residential system’s impact. With the Unist’ot’en camp sitting in the middle of a planned pipeline corridor meant to bolster Canada’s status as an energy superpower, and with the Delgamuukw case undermining Canada’s attempts to override the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, the stage was set for a clash between reconciliation and fossil fuel interests.

Wet’suwet’en women, joined by Denesuline and Gitxsan supporters, sing at the sacred fire outside of the Unist’ot’en healing center.

Photo: Amber Bracken

Stifling the Movement

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have played a key role in Canada’s attempt to protect business interests from Indigenous land claims. The law enforcement agency has closely monitored the Unist’ot’en camp since its inception, labeling those involved with the Wet’suwet’en resistance as extremists. The Aboriginal Policing Services branch of British Columbia’s RCMP circulated regular updates on the camp, keeping tabs on mundane activities such as the construction of a root cellar and garden, according to documents obtained by Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan, authors of the book “Policing Indigenous Movements.”

The camp was also targeted by an RCMP surveillance program called Project Sitka. The program was launched in the wake of massive Idle No More protests in 2012 and 2013, which were inspired in part by Indigenous objections to the Northern Gateway pipeline and legislation limiting Indigenous consultation on development projects. Using pseudo-scientific methods, the RCMP attempted to predict which participants in Indigenous social movements were most at risk of disruptive or criminal behavior, investigating 300 activists and compiling a list of 89 who merited ongoing monitoring.

Sixteen activists on the Sitka list were from British Columbia, the majority of them involved in the Unist’ot’en camp, according to a 2015 RCMP report. A risk assessment by Canada’s emergency response agency stated that the Unist’ot’en site represented the “ideological and physical focal point of Aboriginal resistance to resource extraction projects” across Canada.

To many, the RCMP’s involvement in defending the Coastal GasLink project represents another chapter in the agency’s history of enforcing the removal of Indigenous people from land desirable to settlers. The police agency did not respond to a request for comment.

First/Top Left: Pocholo Alen Conception rests with other supporters after waking up early in anticipation of possible police enforcement at Unist’ot’en on Feb. 6, 2020. In a raid that morning, RCMP had arrested six people at a nearby camp, though all were released without charges. Second/Top Right: A Nlaka’pamux supporter pauses after praying at the Wedzin Kwah, or Morice River. In addition to being salmon habitat, the glacial river provides drinking water for the people at Unist’ot’en, and continued access is a major part of their opposition to development in that part of their territory. Third/Bottom Left: Denzel Sutherland-Wilson and Victoria Redsun share a moment before Sutherland-Wilson leaves to hunt. Fourth/Bottom Right: A man hunts for moose in Wet’suwet’en territory.Photos: Amber Bracken

That same year that the RCMP circulated the Sitka watchlist, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its recommendations. Among them was a demand that companies obtain “the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples before proceeding with economic development projects.”

British Columbia has repeatedly pointed to the fact that five out of six Wet’suwet’en elected band councils were among 20 First Nation reserve governments to sign benefits agreements with Coastal GasLink. Seventeen also signed agreements with the B.C. government. But according to Shiri Pasternak, a Ryerson University professor and research director at the First Nation-led Yellowhead Institute, who obtained the documents published by The Narwhal, the agreements for Coastal GasLink were obtained coercively. In one 2015 agreement that Pasternak obtained, British Columbia promised $46 million over 40 years to a First Nation in exchange for consent.

“Here you have the premier of the province justifying over and over again to the public and to First Nations that these projects bring economic prosperity to First Nations, and we shouldn’t stand in the way,” Pasternak said. But it’s no real choice, she added, for communities that have long been starved for resources. “Programs the province and the federal governments have underfunded systemically for decades and decades are contingent now to signing onto these critical infrastructure projects. It’s so morally reprehensible and bankrupt.”

Furthermore, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs underline that while the elected First Nation governments may have jurisdiction over reserve land, the vast majority of which is not affected by the pipeline, the Delgamuukw ruling and a subsequent court decision affirm that in the traditional territory through which Coastal GasLink passes, it’s the hereditary chiefs whose authority matters.

British Columbia has been in government-to-government discussions with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs about land rights and title for almost a year, Plank, the spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, told The Intercept. However, the agency’s head, Scott Fraser, has stated that rescinding the government’s approval for Coastal GasLink is not on the table.

The spokesperson pointed to the provincial legislature’s recent passage of a bill that enshrines into law the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as evidence of British Columbia’s commitment to reconciliation. But despite the declaration’s language requiring “free, prior, and informed consent” from affected Native people for development projects, Fraser has said the law will not give Indigenous nations veto power over pipelines.

The continued involvement of the RCMP in Wet’suwet’en territory further challenges the province’s efforts to formalize Indigenous land rights. As the president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Okanagan Nation, asserted in an interview with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, “Reconciliation cannot be achieved at gunpoint.”

Huson, after police arrived by helicopter across the bridge from the Unist’ot’en healing center on Feb. 8, 2020. “You are trespassing, get away from that gate” she yelled. “You don’t have consent to enter our territories, you are invaders.”

Photo: Amber Bracken

The Blockade Continues

Nearly two weeks after the raid at the Unist’ot’en camp, the remote RCMP station in Wet’suwet’en territory remains active. Although police have not attempted to enter the healing center, they watch its grounds 24/7, said Tait. She and her family were released soon after their arrests, but one of the women arrested on the road, who goes by the name Lady Chainsaw, remained jailed for 11 days, refusing to agree to stop blocking construction.

Solidarity protests have continued, and the Mohawk blockade remains in place. Via Rail said that 100,000 people who rely on the train have had to find other means of travel, while the head of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters said that $425 million in products are being stranded daily. Blockade participants say they will not back down unless the RCMP leaves the Wet’suwet’en territory. The police have said they will withdraw, as long as the road remains clear for pipeline workers.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been holding desperate meetings attempting to find a way forward that would appear friendly to Indigenous people as well as the fossil fuel industry. But at news conference on Friday, he stated, “The fact remains the barricades must now come down. The injunctions must be obeyed and the law must be upheld.”

“It doesn’t come as much of a surprise if Canada is ultimately wishing to continue that agenda of seeking profits and wealth at the cost of human lives and rights,” said Tait. She added that railway disruption is a reminder of the economic devastation wrought by the Canadian government’s centuries of attempting to forcibly access Indigenous people’s land. “It’s really sad that it had to get to this point.”

One of dozens of red dresses hung throughout Unist’ot’en camp to represent the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Photo: Amber Bracken

Malcolm X is still misunderstood – and misused

 

Every semester in which I teach a course on Muslims in the Civil Rights Movement at Southern Methodist University, I give my students a selection of quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and ask them to guess who said what. So for example, I will posit the following two quotes and ask for their proper ascription:
“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore, we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a United front will be brought about.”
“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
And every single time, they have been unable to identify the first quote as belonging to Malcolm, and the second to Martin. But it is not just a few students that have gotten it wrong. The American education system and most mainstream portrayals of Martin and Malcolm have been simplistic and sanitising.
Martin is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history, but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us to filter political programmes according to how “King-like” they are. Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.
Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves, and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.
Malcolm knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King, which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or else.

But he never actually said what the “or else” was, placing a greater urgency on America to cede to King’s demands. Malcolm had no problem playing the villain, so long as it led to his people no longer being treated like animals. And while King may have been steadfast in his commitment to non-violence, the thrust of Malcolm fully served its purpose.
As Colin Morris, the author of Unyoung, Uncolored, Unpoor wrote, “I am not denying passive resistance its due place in the freedom struggle, or belittling the contribution to it of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both have a secure place in history. I merely want to show that however much the disciples of passive resistance detest violence, they are politically impotent without it. American Negroes needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X …”
But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the Southern reality where even that was not possible.

Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of black people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late James Cone states, “King was a political revolutionary. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how black people thought about themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After Malcolm, he helped us become black.”
That is why, despite the diminishing of Malcolm in textbooks and holidays, he has been consistently revived through protest movements and the arts. He has lived through the activism of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, inspired the black power movement, and been an icon for American Muslims on how to exist with dignity and faith in a hostile environment.
And even in those claims to Malcolm as a symbol, Malcolm himself in the fullness of his identity is erased. In championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him, intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: “For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.”
Muslims too should be cautious not to sanitise Malcolm, as the US has sanitised Dr King. To restrict Malcolm solely to his Hajj experience is similar to restricting King solely to his “I have a dream” speech. Malcolm was a proud Muslim who never stopped being black. And while he no longer subscribed to a condemnation of the entire white race, he was unrelenting in his critique of global white supremacy.
Malcolm was consistently growing in a way that allowed him to not only champion his own people’s plight more effectively but to tackle a broader set of interconnected issues. And while history seems to posit Malcolm as his polar opposite, Dr King had begun to articulate many of the same positions that made Malcolm so unpopular.

In the words of the great James Baldwin, “As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men, coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions, originally, were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.”

Perhaps it is time we ask why we only seem to celebrate one of them.

Impunity Guaranteed for Torturers (and Presidents)

 

“The right to do whatever I want as president.”

by

Rebecca Gordon

Thanks to the cowardice of the Obama administration, no CIA officer or any higher official in the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no psychologist, no doctor, no one at all has yet been held accountable for the years of torture practiced on a global scale in the war on terror. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump’s pre-election boast that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters” proved something more than high-flown hyperbole. (To be fair, he did lose one Republican “voter” in the Senate—Mitt Romney—but it wasn’t enough to matter.)

The Senate’s failure to convict the president will only confirm his conception of his office as a seat of absolute power (which, as we’ve been told, “corrupts absolutely”). This is the man, after all, who told a convention of student activists, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president. But I don’t even talk about that.” Except, of course, he does.

The day after the Senate vote, a decidedly unchastened Trump spoke at a National Prayer Breakfast, brandishing a copy of USA Today whose banner headline contained a single word: “Acquitted.” After disagreeing with the prayerful suggestion offered by Arthur Brooks, former head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (and a couple of millennia earlier by one Jesus of Nazareth), that we should love our enemies, the president promptly accused both Mitt Romney and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of inadequate prayerfulness. He lumped Romney in with people “who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong” and accused Pelosi, not for the first time, of lying when she says she prays for him.

Trump’s endless boasting about his invulnerability can certainly be blamed on the dismal swamp of his own psyche, but there’s another at least partial explanation for it—and it lies in the country’s collective failure to hold anyone responsible for crimes committed since 2001 in the “war on terror.” If one administration can get away with confining detainees in coffinlike boxes and torturing them in myriad other ways, why shouldn’t a later one go unpunished for, to take but one example, putting migrant children in cages?

Forward, Not Backwards

In 2009, Barack Obama prepared to enter the Oval Office promising to end the worst excesses of the previous administration’s war on terror. Although he did close the CIA’s detention centers and prohibit torture, he also quickly signalled that no one would be held accountable for the already well-documented practice of torture promoted by the administration of George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney. A week or so before Obama’s inauguration, the president-elect was already assuring ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that, although there would be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law,” on the whole he believed “that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

In particular, Obama was concerned that government operatives should not be hampered in the future by fear of prosecution for past acts sanctioned by top officials:

“And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

As it turned out, they need not have worried. On April 17, 2009, as Carrie Johnson and Julie Tate reported in the Washington Post, “President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. reassured CIA employees anew yesterday that interrogators would not face criminal prosecution so long as they followed legal advice.” As Holder put it, “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.”

The legal advice in question had been contained in a series of infamous memos written by that department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) between 2002 and 2005. In them, the legal definition of torture was “clarified” for a nervous attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, and the CIA. One memo, drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and signed by Assistant Attorney General for the OLC Jay Bybee, explained that to “constitute torture” under the law, physical pain “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To meet the legal definition of psychological torture, mental suffering “must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”

Not surprisingly, despite the previous administration’s stamp of approval on what were euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a three-year investigation by the Obama Justice Department into CIA interrogation practices came to a whimpering end in August 2012, when Holder announced that the only two remaining torture cases, both of which involved deaths in U.S. custody, would be dropped.

A year earlier, as Glenn Greenwald reported in the Guardian, Holder had decided not to prosecute anyone in 99 other cases of “severe detainee abuse.” The two remaining cases concerned the death by torture and hypothermia of Gul Rahman in the CIA’s notorious Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan in 2002 and that of “Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in CIA custody after he was beaten, stripped, had cold water poured on him, and then [was] shackled to the wall” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those Holder presumably chose not to charge were the men responsible for designing and implementing the protocols that led to Rahman’s death, along with tortures like waterboarding and “walling” (the slamming of the back of a prisoner’s head repeatedly into a wall). Thus ended any hope of holding torturers legally accountable in the United States of America, early proof of the kind of impunity that has, in the Trump years, spread elsewhere.

Torturer Redux

Shortly before Donald Trump’s recent triumph in the Senate, one of those “extraordinarily talented people” hailed by President Obama resurfaced in a courtroom not as a defendant, but as a hostile witness. James Mitchell was called to the stand by the defense at pre-trial hearings at the Guantánamo detention facility in Cuba, the offshore prison for detainees in the war on terror set up by the Bush administration in 2002. In the dock almost 18 years later are five men, long held there, who have been accused of involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The most notorious is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, often described as 9/11’s “mastermind.”

Mitchell is one of the two psychologists—the other being John “Bruce” Jessen—who designed the CIA’s main torture program. He has the honor of being considered the inventor of waterboarding, a series of techniques aimed at producing water-induced suffering that have formed part of the armamentarium of torturers for centuries. (Perhaps “reinventor” would be the more accurate term.) Mitchell was, in fact, the first person to perform waterboarding in the war on terror, as well as being the architect of walling, of confining victims in tiny boxes, and of a variety of other grim “enhanced interrogation techniques” first employed at CIA “black sites” set up around the world in those years.

Called by defense attorneys to describe the torture their clients endured, a “defiant” Mitchell told the courtroom, “I’d get up today and do it again.”

As New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg explained, Mitchell was not actually talking about what he did to any of the five defendants in the dock at Guantánamo, although he did torture some of them. He was referring to the first prisoner to be waterboarded under the CIA torture program, Saudi national Abu Zubaydah who was waterboarded a total of 83 times over the course of a single month. President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed (falsely, as it turned out) that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number-two person in” al-Qaeda and that he had run an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

In fact, as the Obama administration acknowledged in 2010, Abu Zubaydah was never even a member of that group, let alone one of its key lieutenants. Captured in a joint CIA-FBI operation in Pakistan in 2002, he would be shuffled between CIA black sites for the next four-and-a-half years, including the Agency’s secret “Strawberry Fields” site at Guantánamo. In part because of what the CIA did to him, Abu Zubaydah remains imprisoned there to this day. According to CIA recommendations, he is never to be “placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.”

Nevertheless, Mitchell oversaw the 83 times Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded in a single month at a CIA black site in Thailand, during which he came close to death by drowning. On one of those occasions, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on CIA torture revealed, he was observed to be “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

Not unlike our president, Mitchell seems to be deeply hurt by what he perceives as unfair criticism. “You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. Jessen for years,” he complained to defense attorneys at the Guantánamo hearing. People may have said mean things about him, but in reality, far from being held accountable for torture, James Mitchell has luxuriated in his impunity, earning royalties from his book Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying To Destroy America and giving speeches arranged through the Worldwide Speakers Group (which advertises him as “psychologist, CIA interrogator, author”) at $15,000 to $25,000 a pop.

Nor did Mitchell fare poorly while employed by the CIA.  In fact, the Agency paid the company Mitchell and Jessen formed $81 million for their work. In addition, their contract included language guaranteeing that the U.S. government would cover any legal costs they incurred as a result of that work through the year 2021. This would turn out to come in handy when, in 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the two of them on behalf of three of their victims: Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed ben Soud, and the family of Gul Rahman, the detainee who had died of exposure to cold at the Salt Pit. Mitchell and Jessen settled the case in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, also paid by the U.S. government.

It Never Gets Easier

You’d think it would get easier over time. For almost two decades, I’ve been writing about torture. By now, you might imagine that I’d be at least somewhat desensitized to details about and descriptions of it. Instead, each time I dive into that cesspool, it appears even more disgusting and frightening.

If it’s hard for me, someone who has never been tortured and has spoken face-to-face with only a few torture survivors, imagine what it must be like for those who have survived the Bush-era torture programs, which went on for an unknown number of years. Actually, you don’t have to do too much imagining, since their testimony about how such abuse affected some of them and how lasting those effects were is available. In 2016, New York Times reporters Matt Apuzzo, Sheri Fink, and James Risen publisheda series of articles under the title “How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds.”

One of those profiled was Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a plaintiff in the ACLU suit against Mitchell and Jessen. A Tanzanian native, Salim was picked up in Mogadishu, Somalia, and turned over to U.S. operatives for reasons that remain murky. It’s most likely he was a victim of mistaken identity (and he wouldn’t have been the only such prisoner in the war on terror). We know, at least, that the Americans who bundled him onto a plane were expecting a Yemeni Arab and someone with much lighter skin. He ended up in Afghanistan at a black site he recalls as “the Darkness,” which was, in fact, the Salt Pit. There he was beaten, walled, shackled in complete darkness, exposed to relentless loud music, confined in a coffinlike box, repeatedly hung by the wrists—once for 48 hours straight—and drenched at times with ice water until he feared he was drowning.

Eventually, the CIA moved Salim to a prison at Bagram Airbase outside the Afghan capital, Kabul. In 2008, he was turned loose in Afghanistan with only the clothes he was wearing. The International Red Cross arranged a flight home to Zanzibar, Tanzania, where he still lives, haunted by the Darkness.

In 2010, the Times‘ Risen wrote, “Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston University School of Medicine, a physician, a Navy reservist and an expert on torture, was asked by Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based group, to evaluate Mr. Salim.” She found that he was emaciated “like a skeleton” and “plagued by profound distress, inability to eat, and inability to sleep.” Risen’s report continues:

“‘He describes himself as a ghost walking around the town,’ she added. She noted other symptoms: flashbacks, short- and long-term memory loss, distress at seeing anyone in a military uniform, hopelessness about the future and a strong avoidance of noise. ‘He reports that his head feels empty — like an empty box,’ she said.”

The Times series also chronicled the suffering of another plaintiff in the case against Mitchell and Jessen: Mohamed ben Soud. He, too, was held at the Salt Pit, where his ordeal involved many of the same torture methods Salim had endured. Today, he has full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. “He is racked with self-doubt and struggles to make simple decisions. His moods swing dramatically,” reported the Times.

First, Do No Harm?

The pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo have also revealed the rarely discussed role of doctors and other medical workers in the U.S. torture program. Apparently the reason we know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times is that, as James Mitchell testified in January, a doctor was indeed present inside the torture chamber and used a little metal click-counter to keep track. According to the Times‘s Rosenberg, however, doctors

“did more than count waterboarding sessions. Government investigations and evidence in the pretrial hearings of the men… show doctors conducted ‘rectal rehydration,’ carried out rectal cavity searches, and examined swollen feet and legs of captives who were sleep deprived for days by being shackled in painful positions.”

There is undoubtedly more to be uncovered about the role of medical personnel at the CIA’s global black sites. Indeed, there is more to be uncovered about all the ways in which detainees were stripped not only of their human rights but, at least in the minds of their tormentors, of their very humanity. At one point in his testimony, for instance, Mitchell turned to the attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five 9/11 defendants. Speaking of Charlie Wise, the CIA interrogation chief and the rest of his crew, Mitchell said, “Looks like they used your client as a training prop.” According to the Guardian‘s Julian Borger, in fact, under Wise’s leadership, “trainees had to use each of their techniques on Baluchi and other inmates in order to earn certification.”

And Mitchell himself used Abu Zubaydah as a demonstration prop, so bigwigs at the CIA would be implicated in what he was doing. Borger reports that “he waterboarded Abu Zubaydah even though he was quite sure the detainee had no actionable intelligence to surrender. It was done purely as a demonstration for the agency VIPs.”

The Price of Impunity

Thanks to the cowardice of the Obama administration, no CIA officer or any higher official in the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no psychologist, no doctor, no one at all has yet been held accountable for the years of torture practiced on a global scale in the war on terror. Donald Trump himself, of course, got elected while publicly proclaiming about waterboarding that “I like it a lot” and he reportedly considered Gina Haspel’s black-site torture experiences a positive part of her resume when considering her for CIA director. Mitchell, of course, continues to make speeches and collect his royalties. George W. Bush has been rehabilitated as a kindly portrait painter.

Is it really so surprising, then, that we now have a man in the Oval Office who believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president”? The history of the twenty-first-century war on terror suggests that, if he doesn’t have the right, he certainly appears to have the power.

Rebecca Gordon is the author of the new book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and previously, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.

Why the Presidency Can’t Just Go Back to ‘Normal’ After Trump

 

www.politico.com

 

The “norms and traditions” that Trump has incinerated aren’t timeless features of American democracy; they’re actually quite new—and brittle.

Take, for example, three cherished institutions—White House news briefings, independent courts, nonpartisan law enforcement agencies and a nonpartisan civil service. Their foundations are more young and shaky than you might think, and once altered, they may not be easily restored. Future presidents may regard newer precedents as more binding. A once-sturdy nonpartisan civil service and equally assured nonpartisan courts may be too weakened to enforce a return to prior norms. A public once conditioned to expect certain things of its presidents may have lost a critical amount of muscle memory. In short, anyone who expects a restoration of the status quo circa 2017 may be in for a rude awakening.

Though at critical junctures—the Civil War, the Progressive era, World War I—it swelled temporarily in size and importance, the presidency for almost the first century and a half of its existence remained a limited office with a small staff and constrained purview over national affairs. That changed in the 1930s and through 1950s, as first the New Deal, then World War II and—finally—the Cold War necessitated a vast expansion of permanent federal authority and, with it, an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch.

Recognizing the growing importance of the office,Congress in 1939 passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the Reorganization Act, which enabled the creation of the Executive Office of the President, an administrative umbrella that included the Bureau of Budget, National Security Council, Council of Economic Advisers and Office of Emergency Planning. It had 1,350 staffers by the 1960s and an enlarged White House staff numbering roughly 250 political, policy and clerical workers. In addition, the growth of the welfare and warfare states gave rise to myriad Cabinet departments (the Defense Department in 1947; Health, Education and Welfare, 1953; Housing and Urban Development, 1965; Transportation, 1966—and so on) and affiliate agencies whose combined workforce numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

While these departments and agencies have been led by political appointees since their inception, much of the outrage at the Trump administration’s politicization of the bureaucracy—particularly, intelligence and law enforcement agencies that are supposed to eschew partisanship—stems from a tacit belief that civil servants have always operated free of political influence. In fact, in the early decades of the “imperial presidency,” nothing could have been further from the truth. It wasn’t until several decades after the emergence of the modern state and modern presidency these norms emerged.

 

From the 1940s through the 1970s, intelligence agencies including the FBI and CIA (founded in 1947), as well as other branches of the federal government, functioned in large part as political arms of the presidency. Under President John F. Kennedy, the Department of Justice approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. and ordered the IRS to audit Richard Nixon, JFK’s once and presumed future opponent. On President Lyndon B. Johnson’s watch, the FBI illegally bugged King’s hotel rooms, attempted to blackmail him into suicide, and famously infiltrated and attempted to sabotage the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Under LBJ, the CIA also ran extensive, extra-legal sabotage of domestic political organizations, while the FBI placed violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.

President Nixon, whose abuses of office are well-documented, built on this sordid tradition when he instructed the IRS to audit wealthy Jewish Democrats, whom he privately denounced as “cocksuckers.” At White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s request, the agency subjected Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington Post’s attorney in the Pentagon Papers case, to three consecutive audits. (“I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’ … position after this election,” Nixon told his staff members. “I think we’re going to fix the son-of-a-bitch. Believe me. We’re going to. We’ve got to, because he’s a bad man.”) On the advice of Pat Buchanan, a conservative White House speechwriter, Nixon ordered the IRS to investigate the finances of liberal organizations like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution; the agency complied, compiling data on over 1,000 institutions and 4,000 individual citizens.

It wasn’t just the IRS. When news of the highly secret bombing campaign in Cambodia broke on the pages of the New York Times in late 1969, then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered FBI wiretaps on 13 of his own aides and four journalists. When even the FBI balked at tapping the phone of Joseph Kraft, a highly respected syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser, hired a private detective to do the job without the cloak of legal authority. Nixon even ordered FBI taps on his younger brother, Donald, whom he suspected of trading on his name for business purposes. The Supreme Court later ruled that all unwarranted taps against American citizens were unconstitutional, even when purportedly undertaken in the interest of national security.

Nixon also ordered the FBI, CIA and NSA to surveil New Left organizations and instructed the Justice Department to arrest several thousand anti-war protesters who marched on Washington, D.C., in May 1971. The federal courts overturned many of the convictions. But the judges did not know the half of it. Coordinating the arrests from the Oval Office, Nixon heartily approved of plans by Charles Colson, a top political aide, to have rank-and-file teamsters rough up the protesters before their detention. “They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” the president beamed. Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, confirmed this point. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do … they’re going to beat the shit out of some of these people.”

In the wake of Nixon’s disgrace, Congress undertook a sweeping investigation of these abuses, leading to new congressional oversight mechanisms and restrictions on FBI and CIA political activity.

All of which is to say, the idea of independent agencies staffed by nonpartisan career public servants, free of political interference, is a very recent development. Once unravelled, it is not certain to be reassembled.

 

Critics are also wringing their hands over the Trump administration’s phaseout of the White House news briefing. It’s been almost a year since the White House press secretary has taken to the podium to answer reporters’ questions, pausing a cherished—or at least familiar—institutional norm.

At least since 1896, when President Grover Cleveland’s staff designated a fixed work space for reporters assigned to the White House, presidents have acknowledged the importance of accommodating the journalists who cover their administrations. President William McKinley made a habit of traveling with a press pool and, on one occasion, declined to visit the Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore Estate unless reporters were permitted to accompany him. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to meet regularly with trusted journalists.

But it was President Woodrow Wilson who initiated the practice of staging regular presidential news conferences. In his two terms as president, he held 159 formal news conferences. His successors took to the practice: President Calvin Coolidge spoke to the White House press corps 521 times; President Herbert Hoover, 268 times; Franklin Roosevelt, over 1,000 times in his 12 years as president.

Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, also initiated the practice of briefing reporters regularly, a tradition that was later formalized by presidential press secretaries Steve Early (FDR) and Jim Haggerty (Dwight Eisenhower). With the advent of television news in the 1960s, JFK and his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, made on-camera news conferences and briefings a staple of political life. And so a relatively new tradition entered the canon.

Understandably, people are upset that the administration has ended this custom. People assume naturally that if in their lifetime or memory the presidential press corps enjoyed certain prerogatives, those prerogatives must be deeply woven into our political fabric. Not entirely the case.

Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt through Franklin Roosevelt enforced a strict off-the-record rule when they addressed reporters. In effect, their news conferences weren’t news conferences in the way we think of such affairs today. Staff briefings were also generally conducted on background, without attribution, excepting cases when Tumulty or Early might have authorized publication of a canned statement. Only with the advent of television did briefings and presidential press “avails” become what we know them as today. In effect, the institution is scarcely 50 years old.

Neither should we romanticize the relationship between presidents and their press secretaries and the Fourth Estate that covered them. Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson cultivated reporters because they saw political value in it—not out of a heightened sense of obligation. “I feel that a large part of the success of public affairs is the newspaper men,” Wilson remarked shortly after taking office in 1913. “Unless you get the right setting to affairs—disperse the right impression—things go wrong.” Though he had worked since his days as governor of New York at providing reporters with a veneer of access, FDR happily disintermediated the press by speaking directly to citizens by radio, much as Trump has proved a master practitioner of social media.

Two of Johnson’s press secretaries, George Reedy and Bill Moyers, struggled to retain their credibility with an increasingly hostile press corp. By late 1966, some members of the press spoke openly of the “Moyers Gap”—that yawning gap between truth and dissemblance, particularly on the administration’s Vietnam policy.

Under Nixon, the relationship turned positively toxic. Ronald Ziegler, a former barker at Disneyland who transitioned at age 29 from midlevel account executive at the J. Walter Thompson company to presidential press secretary, could scarcely conceal his contempt for reporters. Reporters, in turn, found him utterly hapless and tongue-tied. “This is getting to a point beyond which I am not going to discuss beyond what I have said,” he once told the press room. “I am completed on what I had to say,” he informed them on another occasion. Nevertheless, it was the Nixon administration that constructed the press briefing room over what had once been the White House swimming pool—the same room that is collecting cobwebs today.

In the aftermath of Watergate, a succession of presidents—some media-savvy (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama) and others less so (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush)—attempted to create a more courteous relationship with White House reporters. It’s that pattern we remember today. But it’s a recent innovation.

While many observers have taken umbrage at the seemingly too-close relationship between Trump’s federal judicial nominees (including and especially his Supreme Court picks) and partisan conservative organizations, in reality, it is a fairly recent development that members of the federal bench are expected to be clean of politics.

As late as 1954, the Supreme Court that unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education included three former United States senators (Hugo Black, Harold Burton and Sherman Minton), a former governor of California (Earl Warren), and a former law professor (William O. Douglas) who was a perennial and often active candidate for the presidency or vice presidency while on the bench. Indeed, as late as 2006, the court included one justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, who had served four years as a state senator in Arizona.

As late as 1968, Johnson frequently sought the political counsel of Justice Abe Fortas, just as FDR had done with Felix Frankfurter 30 years earlier. Aides viewed the relationship as unusual but not so much so that they advised Johnson or Fortas to scale back their relationship. Fortas was compelled several years later to leave the court over a string of financial and ethical improprieties. It was one of several scandals, including Watergate, that forced a wholesale reimagination of government ethics, including a more scrupulous insistence on judicial independence and ethics. Going forward, justices would keep a marked distance from the presidents who appointed them and keep their noses out of politics.

The takeaway is not that certain traditions lack value. On the contrary, it’s pretty reasonable to expect that presidents not misdirect law enforcement and civilian officials to do their political bidding, that presidents be transparent with the media, and that courts remain free of political influence. The point, rather, is that these norms were not timeless features of our system. They emerged over 50 or so years in response to excesses that accompanied the growth of the federal state and in response to a popular sense that citizens required greater visibility into, and accountability from, federal officeholders whose purview grew enormously in the modern era.

Practices that young may prove fragile constructs. The protections that emerged in the 1970s haven’t planted deep enough roots to survive every storm. Who’s to say that the next president, if he or she is a Democrat, will immediately resurrect and submit to an unwritten code that’s been left in tatters? Already, some presidential candidates have pledged to instruct the Department of Justice to investigate specific political opponents and business leaders—the same kind of targeted use of law enforcement that caused so much hand ringing in 2017 and 2018. Or, if the next president is a Republican, who’s to say that he or she won’t decide that eight years of precedent has created a new set of norms and traditions? Already, there seems to be consensus among some senators that it’s really not that big of a deal to invite foreign interference in an election. Take that norm to its logical conclusion

Much like an unwritten constitution, political culture evolves contingently, and presidents—especially in recent decades—enjoy sweeping ability to leave a lasting imprint on that culture. They also have broad authority to smash old ways of doing things. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, who did his share of norm bending: Broken eggs can’t be mended.