RUTHFULLY YOURS

Early reports out the former FBI director’s book indicate a penchant for purple prose and navel-gazing only rivaled by his emo Twitter posts.

Michael Wolff, move over. Early reports out about former FBI Director James Comey’s book indicate a penchant for purple prose and navel-gazing only rivaled by the “A Higher Loyalty” author’s emo Twitter posts. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book a week early, and reports it contains gems like the following:

The 6-foot-8 Comey describes Trump as shorter than he expected with a ‘too long’ tie and ‘bright white half-moons’ under his eyes that he suggests came from tanning goggles. He also says he made a conscious effort to check the president’s hand size, saying it was ‘smaller than mine but did not seem unusually so.’

According to the AP, Comey’s book alleges this is how Trump repudiated opposition research allegations Trump had prostitutes urinate on a hotel bed the Obamas had used:

Trump said, ‘I’m a germaphobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.’

Comey writes that Trump raised the issue again, unprompted, during their one-on-one dinner at the White House and it bothered the president that there might be even ‘a one percent chance’ his wife might think it was true.

Comey then registers surprise, writing that he thought to himself ‘why his wife would think there was any chance, even a small one, that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in a Moscow hotel room.”

Hmm, I don’t know, maybe because the salacious (and later thoroughly discredited) story was all over every media outlet in the country?

The Washington Post reports more hilariously overpsychologized book excerpts, like this one about Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “Sessions just cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. He said nothing. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me.”

Is this “Twilight”? Weirdly backwards fan fiction?

Way back in July 1969, reporter Leo Damore covered Senator Edward Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick caper for the Cape Cod News. As he showed in his masterful Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up, everything Kennedy said about the incident was a lie.

Ted Kennedy rode his brother John’s coattails to win a seat from Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate in 1962. The next year, JFK was assassinated and brother Bobby fell to shooter Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. That led to speculation that Ted might be a contender for president by a simple process of family succession. For the full story, read The Kennedys: An American Drama, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.

In July 1969, Senator Kennedy came to Cape Cod for a regatta and stashed brother Bobby’s “boiler room girls,” in a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island. The film version of “Chappaquiddick” plays this covert hook-up like a ’60s beach flick with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and viewers won’t spot a single navel. Ted (Jason Clarke) slips away from the drunken bash with the beautiful Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara). Viewers don’t see what’s going on in the black Oldsmobile, but it is possible to guess.

Spooked by a cop, Kennedy roars away and promptly drives off a bridge into Poucha Pond. The senator somehow gets out and one of his first thoughts is “I am not going to be president.” The senator leaves Mary Jo in the car, where she dies, and does not report the accident until the next day.

As the film shows in great detail, Ted deploys squads of heel-clicking sycophants to control the press, the police, the hearing, the medical examination, and the handling of Mary Jo’s body. He gets off with a tap on the wrist. Family scribe Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols) pens Kennedy’s explanatory television speech, which as another handler explains is “all bullshit.” At the funeral for Mary Jo, Joan Kennedy tells husband Ted, “go fuck yourself.” Viewers may agree, but this does not wrap the story.

“You will never be great,” family patriarch Joe Kennedy (Bruce Dern) tells Ted. As the film explains in text, Joe died four months later, and Ted went on to become the “lion” of the U.S. Senate. The takeaway is that the drunken control freak who left Mary Jo Kopechne to die did eventually become a great man. As Millennials should understand, even liberal Democrats of the time never thought Ted Kennedy was great.

In fact, it wasn’t even close.

Hugh Hewitt is a host with the Salem Radio Network, an MSNBC host and NBC News analyst, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a law professor at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.

We are going to have to wait a long time for anyone to approach Donald Trump with, say, the detachment and scholarship that Robert Caro has brought to his study of Lyndon Johnson. Caro published his first volume, “The Path to Power,” in 1982, nearly a decade after LBJ died, and about 35 years later the biographer is still at work, on a fifth volume. So it will be with Trump — as it is with all men and women who change history. We will have to wait until we get the end of the story and have access to all the primary sources. We also will need a biographer with the talent and dedication to find the “figure under the carpet,” as Leon Edel described the biographer’s task. The many Trump books along the way should be regarded more or less as source material. They should be graded on how useful they will be to the ultimate project, and of course on the trustworthiness of their contents.

[Ronald Kessler’s “The Secrets of the FBI”]

Ronald Kessler’s new book, “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game,” is trustworthy, and, in an unusual twist these days, it’s favorable to the president. “Because of the liberal bias of the mainstream media,” Kessler writes in a poker tell as obvious as any ever seen, “many of Trump’s achievements are either underplayed or not reported at all.” Kessler doesn’t underplay them, and overstates some, but gets almost everything down — good and bad — of Season One of the Trump presidency. Among Trump’s triumphs, Kessler points to the two most significant: the seating of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, and the massive tax cut and tax reform bill. Kessler also got Trump to sit down for an interview on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, a conversation that shows the president confident and comfortable in his role.

I checked with one of Kessler’s sources, who is quoted quite liberally, and discovered that indeed the source spent time with the author. The source hadn’t read the book yet but the voice he projects in the pages sounds right to me. Thus, Kessler’s note-taking or tape-recording seems reliable, which is an odd but increasingly necessary assessment to include in a book review, but we are in an era when facts and sources are sometimes elusive. Kessler’s book seems to me professional and ethical, a workmanlike, useful contribution to the accumulating pile of source material on this presidency (beginning of course with the tweets. All of them. Pity Trump’s Caro).
“The Trump White House,” by Ronald Kessler (Crown Forum)

Kessler, a former reporter for The Washington Post and a former chief Washington correspondent for the conservative news site Newsmax, has published 21 books. For this one, he interviewed the major players in the 2016-17 season: Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and others. “The Trump White House” deserves a careful reading as a chronicle of what went on inside Trump World in 2017.

Announcements of scheduled appearances for the widely anticipated $850-to-attend book tour by fired FBI Director James Comey foreshadow a much-ballyhooed return to the public square. Media outlets eagerly booked the former director, and his opus, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” briefly jumped to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.

But should Comey — a central witness in special counsel Robert Mueller probe — be making public his version of events which will certainly differ significantly with what President Trump, the central target in the special prosecutor’s probe, has repeatedly stated?

Comey was humiliatingly removed by the president last May and enjoyed a brief period of bipartisan sympathy for the disgraceful manner in which he was dispatched. The FBI’s seventh director learned of his termination via televised news reports while appearing before an FBI audience in Los Angeles. This is not the manner with which career public servants should ever be separated from service. Yet, with the current president, it has become de rigueur.

Initially taking the high road, remaining silent, professional and above the fray, Comey has now resorted to directly confronting the president at his own game. He shed his original anonymous Twitter nom de plume, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and directly waded in to criticize and taunt his tormentor. In the immediate wake of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing and Trump’s Twitter gloating, Comey ominously warned, “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

And, just like that, Comey conceded the tiny sliver of moral high ground he precariously clung to and reduced his position as an advocate of the pursuit of facts into a narcissistic quest to sell books. He unwittingly joined Trump in the pig-wallow that currently serves as civil discourse.

Jordan Peterson, a clear-eyed traditionalist advocate on political and social issues, has inspired and compelled sensible people to support his efforts. I predicted back in January that he would be subjected to the intolerant thugs of Canadian and international speech police totalitarianism, and so it goes.

On March 5 at a Queen’s University (founded in 1841 in Kingston, Ontario), he was an invited speaker for the law school-sponsored inaugural lecture in a series intended to promote liberty. Dr. Peterson, professor at the University of Toronto, presented by the dean of law, discussed “The Rising Tide of Compelled Speech in Canada” to a packed house of almost a thousand. A leftist thug rent-a-mob started disruption proceedings, banging on walls and even breaking a window.

Dr. Peterson’s eloquence, mastery of the science of psychology and sociology and social science research, and insight are extraordinary. I recently downloaded his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018 Random House, Canada), which puts to print his commitment to moral philosophy and social science. He reminds the reader of the teachings of many – Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Aristotle – with an emphasis on his study of the classics from many cultures along modern neuroscience and the social sciences. This is scholarly but commonsense advocacy of the Peterson canon of virtuous adulthood and good citizenship. He teaches what parents hope to be proud of in their children.

In the foreword to the book, Norman Doidge, M.D., psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, colleague, and friend of Peterson, provides a great deal of information on why Peterson is so well received and so energetically committed to fight the speech police and totalitarianism. Doidge relates that Peterson, a child of the isolated and cold Fairview, Alberta, married his hometown sweetheart and went on to great academic success at Harvard and then the University of Toronto. On the way, he worked in all kinds of blue-collar jobs and never forgot his roots. Doidge describes the unique goodness (yes, I said goodness) of Peterson and his indomitable desire to stand for individual freedom and liberty.