32 TIMESeptember 3–10, 2018
PAST IS
PROLOGUE?On Aug. 19,
Trump urged
Twitter
followers
to “study”
former
SenatorJoe
McCarthy,
likening his
Red Scare
campaign
to Mueller’s
investigation,
which he calls
a “witch hunt.”The same day,
Trump tweeted
that his
White House
counsel isn’t
a “rat” like
Richard Nixon
counsel John
Dean, whose
cooperation
with
Watergate
prosecutors
helped end
Nixon’s
presidency.THE EVENING ENDED BADLY. ON DEC. 13, 1950, THE
Washington columnist Drew Pearson was being feted at a
birthday dinner at the Sulgrave Club near Dupont Circle.
A vocal opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pearson had
relentlessly attacked the Wisconsin lawmaker ever since
McCarthy launched his red-hunting campaign that February.
Still, small-town Washington being small-town Washington,
McCarthy was invited to the party. He was, one notable
guest recalled, spoiling for a ight. Emboldened by shots of
bourbon, McCarthy asked Pearson to step outside, but the
columnist demurred.
At the end of the party, Senator Richard Nixon—the guest
who noted McCarthy’s belligerence—walked into the club’s
cloakroom to ind McCarthy’s “big, thick hands around
Pearson’s neck,” Nixon remembered in his memoirs. The
Senator had kneed the columnist twice in the groin, and in
front of Nixon he “slapped Pearson so hard that his head
snapped back.” McCarthy grumbled, “That one was for you,
Dick.” Nixon tried to play peacemaker, stepping between the
two men. Pearson hurried away, and McCarthy strutted a bit,
remarking, “You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick.”
A street ight in the cloakroom of the Sulgrave may seem
like a relic from a diferent era, but the scene is actually a
perfect image for the Age of Trump. A headline-hunting
demagogue is once again lashing out at the press, and both
McCarthy and Nixon have been vaulted back to the fore of the
national consciousness.
The 45th President, to put it charitably, is hardly a student
of history, so his forays into the American past tend to repay
attention for whatever light they may shed on the curious
chambers of his mind. A showman who prefers to act on
instinct rather than cool consideration, he has nevertheless in
recent days turned backward in search of aid in the battles of
the present, invoking both McCarthy and Nixon as he struggles
to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation
amid the conviction of his former adviser Paul Manafort and
the guilty plea of his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
THAT TRUMP HASmused about McCarthy and Nixon is
revealing, for the analogies draw on two politicians whose
public careers ended in disgrace and defeat: in McCarthy’s
case, censure by the Senate; in Nixon’s, resignation
from oice. It’s as if the President identiies with these dark
igures and may well see his own predicament in similarly
existential terms as he awaits Mueller’s report and the
inal outcomes of Manafort’s and Cohen’s legal travails.
As Mueller has closed in, Trump has not tweeted about
Iran-contra, for example, or Whitewater—crises that other
Presidents survived.
In a moment that stretched the boundaries of irony beyond
recognition, the President took to Twitter to accuse Mueller
of McCarthyite tactics, itself a McCarthyite maneuver. Yet
Mueller is not the McCarthyite igure;
Trump is. Both McCarthy and Trump
were opportunists who used whatever
issue might be at hand to dominate
the news and seek power. McCarthy
turned to anti-communism, his lawyer
Roy Cohn said, the way other people
might buy a car: as a means to an end.
For McCarthy, the end goal was fame
and inluence. Trump embraced the
disproved conspiracy theory that
Barack Obama was not born in the
U.S. to launch his foray into right-wing
politics, eventually gaining enough of a
foothold to seek the presidency in 2016.
(And then there’s the Cohn connection:
McCarthy’s lawyer also represented
Trump in New York’s real estate wars
and served as a key mentor.)
Both McCarthy and Trump
understood the media of their day,
manipulating it while simultaneously
attacking it as corrupt and biased. And
both had little regard for the truth. “He
was impatient, overly aggressive, overly
dramatic,” Cohn recalled of McCarthy
in 1968. “He acted on impulse.”
Trump’s tweet about Mueller
was followed by one returning to
the minutiae of Watergate. In an
assault on a New YorkTimes report
about White House counsel Donald
McGahn’s cooperation with Mueller,
the President wrote that McGahn was
not “a John Dean type ‘RAT’”—an
allusion to the 1973 testimony of the
Nixon White House counsel that helped
reveal the cover-up of the Watergate
burglary. The President’s own parallel
between the two events shows that
he has now evidently begun to see the
Russia investigation as something akin
to Watergate, a scandal that cost the
President his job.
Analogies, of course, are frequently
imperfect. Most of the time examples
from the past are useful not because they
neatly predict the future but because
they can create a sense of proportion and
perspective about the present. Yet as the
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used
to say, history is to a nation as memory
is to a person, and all of us tend to judge
the moment in reference to what’s come
before. That Trump is alluding to the
falls of two lawed leaders suggests
that he may, at least subconsciously, be
thinking about his own. □Trump and the ghosts
of scandals past
By Jon Meacham
TheView History
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