Time Sep

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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