The report is in; the work begins

The Mueller report, or at least an interpretive summary of it, landed in a hostile landscape Sunday. Democrats had hoped for more than they got. Republicans are proclaiming not-quite-justified victory in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and associated issues.

According the Attorney General William Barr (who had already declared the president innocent of any wrongdoing), Mueller's report found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians. As to any potential obstruction by the president or his associates, Mueller did not find enough evidence to warrant an indictment. Barr, in his summary to Congress, claims prosecutorial discretion to decide that no indictments are justified. That is, he sees insufficient evidence to convict anyone of obstruction.

President Trump was quick to proclaim victory and vindication, saying there was "no collusion" and he was fully exonerated. That second conclusion exaggerates the situation. Not finding enough evidence to convict is not the same as being fully exonerated.

Regardless, Trump has much to cheer about. The "no collusion" he has been proclaiming for months appears to be accurate, but few people have seen the evidence on which Mueller based his conclusion. Several points should be remembered:
1. The letter to Congress was not Mueller's full report. Democrats in the House are pushing for a full release of the report and substantiating evidence. A different conclusion or a more nuanced conclusion could be forthcoming.
2. Trump has spent two years declaring that Mueller was biased, politicized and unfair in his investigation, which the president repeatedly called a "witch hunt." How can he now hold up Mueller's report as evidence of his own vindication?
3. The Democratic majority in the House will conduct its own investigation of what happened in the 2016 election and how Trump has presided over the Executive Branch of government. That investigation will have more impact on Trump's future than Mueller's report. Trump's troubles are not over yet.
4. Conspiracy, the crime sometimes referred to as collusion, is notoriously difficult to prove. A conspiracy takes place in the minds of its partners; prosecutors must persuade jurors of what the defendants were thinking, which is a difficult step.
5. Even if there was no collusion in the 2016 election, there clearly was Russian interference. Mueller's team has indicted a number of Russians for interfering in the U.S. election. We will never know whether that interference swayed election results, but there was clearly a Russian effort to aid Trump's election chances. Vladimir Putin himself (Trump's BFF) acknowledged that he wanted Trump to win the election.
6. Mueller's report isn't the final statement about possible criminal conduct in the Trump circle. Trump's lawyer, his former campaign manager, several campaign advisers and others have been indicted, convicted or pleaded guilty as a result of the Mueller probe. Investigations into Trump-related crimes in the Southern District of New York.

Where does all this leave Democrats and others who would like to see Trump impeached? They are going to have to find additional evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors" in order to get enough votes in Congress to impeach and remove from office. But Yoni Applebaum in an article in the March Atlantic magazine, makes the case for impeachment not based on criminal offenses but on misconduct/misbehavior in office. Applebaum says the Founding Fathers provided impeachment as a means of correcting an electoral mistake, removing a president who is incompetent, embarrassing, or a detriment to American democracy. By that standard, Applebaum says, Congress already has enough evidence, much of it from Trump's own mouth (or his fingers on his phone keyboard) to impeach him. He has berated grieving parents of American soldiers killed in action; he has insulted American heroes such as John McCain; he has embraced authoritarian dictators such as Kim Jong Un and Putin while castigating American allies; his administration has been chaotic and contradictory; he has worked to weaken or destroy NATO; he has sought to scuttle the post-World War II alliances that have prevented another world war; and he has profited from his office by accepting payments from foreign governments through his real estate properties.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of un-presidential behavior by Trump, it will be difficult to pass an impeachment bill. Democrats' best hope for getting rid of Trump will be the old-fashioned way: vote him out of office in 2020. Because Trump has such an enthusiastic, motivated, he-can-do-no-wrong following, even that won't be easy.

Biography offers a second look at U.S. Grant

This post was published in The Wilson Times March 23, 2019.

As a native North Carolinian with two great-great-grandfathers who served in the Confederate army and were killed in the Civil War, I never was a great fan of Ulysses S. Grant. But after reading Ron Chernow’s 1,000-page biography of Grant, simply titled “Grant,” I’m more sympathetic.

I thought I knew what I needed to know about Grant, the Union general who took over after President Lincoln had fired or demoted all of his predecessors, including McClelland, Hooker, Meade, Burnside, Butler, etc. Unlike his predecessors, Grant did not reverse course and head back to the Potomac after being defeated or badly outflanked by Robert E. Lee’s troops. From reading a number of Civil War books, my image of Grant was of a man who used superior manpower and resources to decimate the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and ultimately force Lee’s surrender. Grant stubbornly kept his Army of the Potomac on Lee’s heels until Lee finally had no place to go.

That stubbornness also showed itself at Cold Harbor, where Grant ordered consecutive, suicidal charges against an entrenched Confederate line. Union troops were so resigned to dying as they prepared for one more hopeless charge that they pinned their names, written on scraps of paper, onto their clothing so their bodies could be identified after the killing was over. Critics North and South called Grant “a butcher.”

In a thousand pages, I should certainly learn a lot about Grant, and I did. I have a greater appreciation of the man who rode his Civil War fame to become the 18^th president of the United States. I’m still not convinced that Grant was a great military tactician, but his strong determination to finish his work, whatever it was, served him well in war.

Grant had a troubled childhood with a domineering, unloving father, and his marriage to Julia Dent gave him a difficult father-in-law, who was a demanding, slave-holding plantation owner who never liked his son-in-law and his anti-slavery family. Grant went to West Point for the free education and was not the best student. He resigned from his Army career and tried to succeed in private business but repeatedly failed.

Chernow frequently asserts that Grant’s lack of business success was the result of an inability to judge people who would take advantage of him. Grant lacked a healthy skepticism about dishonest people. As a result, Grant found himself broke more than once. The worst loss came after his two terms in the White House, when a slick financial adviser fleeced him of his life’s savings, leaving his family destitute.

One critic said Chernow has a tendency to see only the good in the subjects of his biographies, and that is certainly true of “Grant.” It is difficult to swallow the author’s excuses for Grant’s ignorance of basic personal finance and his trusting of shysters who saw him as an easy mark. Nevertheless, Grant was very successful as a military strategist, lauded by some as the greatest general of the century. His presidential terms were fairly successful but difficulties arose from Grant’s tendency to surround himself with untrustworthy people, making his presidency perhaps the most scandal-ridden in U.S. history.

One aspect of this history is the federal government’s failure during Reconstruction to stop violence against newly emancipated African-Americans. Chernow documents numerous incidents of violence and murder of former slaves and their families by Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists. Grant was more willing than others to call out federal troops to defend civil rights in the former Confederacy, but his actions were not enough to stop the murdering racists determined to keep the black population, as well as white Republicans, from voting, despite the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments. The failure to protect the rights of citizens should be an embarrassment to all Americans, and it has shaped U.S history for 150 years. The public and elected officials both North and South ignored cries for justice.

I don’t recall the U.S. history courses I took making clear just how widespread violence, intimidations and flagrant murders were in the post-war South. When I was in school, Reconstruction was taught as a lamentable era of scandal, graft and wasteful spending by state governments run by former slaves, some of whom were illiterate. The larger issue, it is obvious, is the refusal of many whites to accept the results of the Civil War that killed 600,000 Americans, gave former slaves the right to vote, and left half the nation destitute, its economy destroyed and its greatest form of wealth — African slaves — eliminated without compensation.

This biography of Grant is worth reading just for what it tells us about the Radical Republicans vs. white supremacist Democrats during Reconstruction. But there is much more in those thousand pages.

Hal Tarleton is a former editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

I'm afraid I have March Madness!

The post first appeared in the March 16 edition of the Wilson Times.

As I write this column, the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament is already under way. The oddity about this annual event is that I’m not paying any attention — yet.

Television networks are promising us “March Madness,” but all I’m feeling is a bit of anxiety. This is the second year that I have been retired with no office to go to, no demands on my afternoons, no commitments to be productive instead of mesmerized by fast-paced games in ever-larger arenas. I could be turned into a bug-eyed zombie by watching four tournament games in succession and being unable to remember, three hours later, who beat whom.

I’ve been a college basketball fan for more than 50 years. Let me correct that: I’ve been a fan of one particular college basketball team for 50-plus years. I watch games involving that team with a zeal and fixation that is mental, emotional and physical.

When my children were young, they learned to accept the fact that Dad would not be available during certain televised basketball games and that he would periodically shout (nothing profane, just “No-o-o!” or “Rebound!” or “How can you miss a free throw?”) and, when necessary, stomp the floor, sometimes with both feet at once. They survived the trauma and are now basketball fans.  

I’ve learned that such devotion can be hazardous to your health. When I was in college, I never missed my team’s home games. At one game, a particularly important late-season contest, I had tickets in the very top row of the university’s 10,000-seat arena (since downgraded and replaced by a bigger arena). I had a tendency, whenever things did not go the “right” way in the game, to jump from my seat, scream and shake my fists. My seat at this game presented a problem for me. When I stood at my seat, my head hit one of the monstrous steel beams holding up the roof. It took only one bad moment for me to realize the danger. Getting walloped by a ten-ton, foot-wide steel beam will get anyone’s attention, unless that someone is fixated on what is happening on a 94-foot basketball court 200 feet below someone. Throughout that game, which ended in a close loss for my team, I must have leaped from my seat two dozen times. To say I had a headache would be equal to saying Hamlet had a dysfunctional family.

After college, I continued my fanatical interest in my team, but I made it a point not to sit beneath any roof girders, wherever I was. I watched my basketball team on television and was grateful for the development of color television and for expanded programming that put more than one or two college games per week on broadcast networks.

Through the expansion of the ACC from eight colleges to 16, I’ve followed the tournaments. I would try to arrange my schedule so that I could see my team play in afternoon games, and I would be sure to finish dinner before the 7 p.m. game started. When I first became hypnotized by ACC basketball, only the tournament winner advanced to the NCAA tournament. Now, more than 60 teams get into the tournament bracket, and fans are treated to endless speculation and drivel about who’s the top seed and who’s “on the bubble” as CBS, which is paying top dollar to broadcast the NCAA tournament games, encourages an outbreak of “March Madness.”

It’s an amazing illness. “Madness” is dependent upon fans catching the fever, but fans are mistreated with seemingly constant promotions of the next game or tomorrow’s game or an NBA game later on the network and with announcers who rarely say who was charged when a foul is called and with camera shots that ignore the game and focus on someone on the bench or in the stands. Isn’t there a basketball game going on?

The fans at least get an adrenaline burst from the games. The colleges and coaches get paid mega-millions for participating. The players, forced to fit into the NCAA definition of “student athletes,” do the work but get little in return. Their athletic scholarships get them a college education, but they don’t get a share of the monetary bonanza colleges, coaches and networks share.

Not that I’m complaining. I’ll put up with all the inequality, unfairness and bad calls on block/charge incidents if I can just watch the games and see my team win. Assuming my team makes it to the tournament finals, I will be watching Saturday night and all through the weeks of the NCAA tournament. I just can’t stop myself; it’s a madness.

Hal Tarleton was a newspaper editor and writer for 33 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

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Congress is unable to stop Trump

Given a choice between upholding the U.S. Constitution, which they have sworn to "preserve, protect and defend," or surrendering Congress' authority to a man determined to secure autocratic power over the entire federal government, Republicans in Congress chose the latter this week.

President Donald Trump will veto the resolution that overrules the president's declaration of a national emergency, and the GOP, which has surrendered its identity and traditions to a man who seeks only his own grandizement and unquestioned authority, will allow that veto to stand.

Both Trump and GOP members of Congress are looking only to the 2020 elections, which they are determined to win, even if the Constitution is shredded in their single-minded determination to remain in power. Nowhere has this determination been more obvious than in the flip-flop of Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Tillis initially vowed to vote for the resolution countering Trump's emergency authority, reminding the public, correctly, that Congress, not the president, has the authority to appropriate money. But threatened with a primary opponent and an angry Trump contingent of voters, Tillis cowardly switched sides and voted against the resolution.

Tillis (and other Republicans in Congress) knew that they had condemned then-President Barack Obama for using presidential orders to set policies. Their outrage disappeared when Trump used the same sort of authority to appropriate federal funds. Obama had acted when Congress failed to pass immigration reform; he established DACA (Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals) to protect immigrants who had arrived as small children. Obama's DACA went beyond the usual discretion the executive branch has in deciding how to handle prosecutions but did not directly contradict Congress' funding authority. Trump plans to shift federal spending to do what Congress refused to do, spend billions of dollars on a border wall many consider wasteful and ineffective. Obama acted where Congress had not. Trump does him one better, acting contrary to Congress' clear decision against more border wall spending.

The silence you hear in 2019 is the lack of outrage by GOP members who claim to be conservative and believers in the Constitution. They make it clear that they hold Trump in greater esteem than they hold the Constitution, and their vow to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution is a blatant lie.

In the great scheme of things, a few billion dollars for a border wall is not a make-or-break issue. What matters is not the border wall; it is the principle that we abide by the Constitution. If Trump can steal Congress' responsibility to appropriate federal funds, what more can he do? Declare martial law to disallow voting by Democrats? Declare the 2020 election fraudulent and proclaim himself the winner? Refuse to leave office after being rejected by a majority of voters? Dissolve Congress? Eliminate the Supreme Court? Only the Constitution stands in his way, but Congress and the public must protect the Constitution.

When elected officials sworn to protect and defend the Constitution no longer care, Trump's powers are infinite, and democracy is dead.

Let's get organized, and other fads

This post appeared in The Wilson Times March 9, 2019.

One of the hazards of aging is that you begin to feel left out of all the latest trends in food, music, movies, fashions, health, sports and organization. I’ve quit watching awards shows because I don’t know who the popular musicians, actors and scriptwriters are. Most of the “latest” fads are remakes of past fads, and after a few decades, one can see the same fads return to fashion not once but two or three times.

Consider women’s fashions. I’ve seen hemlines go from mini to maxi and back again. I’ve seen jeans go from skinny to bell bottoms and skinny again. Foods go in and out of style. Two or three decades ago, food companies competed to have the lowest or even zero fat. Now, it appears that fat is not all that bad. Eggs were bad for you, and then they were good for you. Should I take a daily baby aspirin or not? It depends on the year in which you are self-medicating.

The advice swings like a pendulum. Automotive designs flip-flop, too. A few years ago, we experienced a “retro” trend, in which you could buy a new car that looked oddly like a 1930s or 1940s vehicle. Several years ago, carmakers adopted boxiness to maximize interior space. Now, auto designers are giving us sweeping designs that are as curvaceous as the Chrysler Airflow of the 1930s. How long before tailfins from the 1950s come back?

All these changes in fashion and design, as well as rapidly accelerating advances in technology, have created another problem for the modern world: clutter. Without any embarrassment, I admit that I have a suit that I bought in the early 1980s. I still wear it, and it’s more in fashion today than it was 20 years ago. My closet also has more recent vintage clothing, such as pleated slacks, that is clearly no longer in style. I should get rid of the pleated slacks, but they are still in great shape, and that seems so wasteful.

Some of us become “hoarders” who just can’t stand getting rid of a perfectly good item in the belief that we might need it someday. An older friend used to quote his father’s wisdom: “It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” So we have houses cluttered with out-of-fashion clothes, car parts, once-used tools, chipped glassware, mismatched dinner plates and old photos of people we don’t recognize.

Marie Kondo has come to save us, thus making her the latest trend that will someday be forgotten until its next iteration. Kondo has apparently made quite an impression with her YouTube videos of how your house should look. She preaches a sort of hard-line practicality in demanding that we all face the music and get rid of all that junk that is cluttering our closets and homes, not to mention storage units. Does it bring you joy? If not, toss it out.

I am not offended by Kondo’s principles, although I am not an obsessively organized person. My desks throughout my working decades looked cluttered, but I knew that each stack of paper had a purpose, and if anyone moved things around, I wouldn’t be able to find what I was looking for. I am, however, a bit obsessive (and I would guess Ms. Kondo is, too) in that I like having “a place for every thing and every thing in its place” (a principle I learned in Coast Guard Officer Candidate School, where that rule was strictly enforced).

I’m not spending my time watching Marie Kondo videos or reading her books, but I am trying to tidy things up a bit while I still can. But one thing bothers me. Kondo recently decreed to her disciples that you should get rid of your books, but then she softened her dictate to allow 40 books per household. That will never happen at our house. We have at least ten times the allowable number of books. Just in the bookshelves above my computer desk, I can count 37 books, and there are other books in this spare bedroom and a large, jammed bookshelf just outside the door. We’re not even counting the books downstairs in the built-in bookcases, where there must be a few hundred books.

Kondo says you should only retain items that “bring you joy.” Each of those books scattered throughout the house brings joy to my wife or me, or both of us. So there! We’ve kept these books (admittedly, we have given away 100 or more books in the past few years) because they meant something to us, and we thought we’d like to reread them. It’s cheaper to keep a book to reread than it is to buy it twice.

Sitting in the living room with all those books and discussing literature, my wife and I came to the realization that, at our ages, we might never get around to rereading all the books we want to reread. But if a house cluttered with good books is our legacy, that is just fine.

Hal Tarleton edited newspapers for 33 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

In a crowded room, two people can be all alone

This column was published in The Wilson Daily Times on Nov. 29, 2013.

The two of us sat alone in the crowded bar, the late afternoon, post-game crowd undulated shoulder to shoulder all around us, but we were as alone as if we were on an island.

Credit cards and greenbacks passed back and forth on either side of us. The crew of bartenders busily filled glasses and picked up tips scattered on the bar. Another football game was on the television to the left, and my eye occasionally veered toward it to check the score.

All around the room the size of a back yard, people were talking, laughing and greeting with a joyfulness typical of a weekend scene in a college town. Most of the patrons were our children’s age or younger, though a few were our contemporaries, and a handful were older. We hardly noticed.

A tall glass of the microbrew du jour before each of us, we talked in soft tones, nuzzling close so that we heard each other’s quiet tones despite the cacophony all around us, rubbing elbows and shoulders and hips.

Twenty-five years before, in this same city, the city where we met, we had sat in a booth for an anniversary dinner, fingers happily intertwined, and watched two other couples, older, wealthier, more content with their lives.

They were out for a social evening, laughing and enjoying a midweek dinner with friends. For those other couples, dinners like this might have been routine, a standing date, unlike ours, a once-a-year occasion, our small children left with relatives for a few hours so that we could “date” and pretend.

We only pretended that we were carefree; they really were. But those other couples that night were not happier than we.

Now, 25 years and three grown children later, we are standing at the bar, spending money at leisure, and enjoying the company of each other, oblivious to all around us. This is the carefree life we never had when we were as young as the masses surrounding us.

They are flirting with new acquaintances or joking with old friends. They are enjoying the ambiance of the crowd and the noise, but we, in the midst of it, have found a quiet solitude for just the two of us.

We, the ones who know no one else in the whole restaurant, just talk as we wait for a table, no hurry at all. Our talk, as it so often does, turns to the children we’ve reared.

No longer under foot, they call us now on cell phones and ask what we’re doing, expressing surprise that we’re out on the town. That’s not like us, not like the frugal parents who scrimped for grocery money and patented cheap vacations when they were growing up. They know our outdated clothes and our flea-market furniture, not this.

The children are grown, no longer dependents, but still our first concerns. As we talk about the children and their needs, she turns to me, reflectively, and says, “I think the best thing we ever gave our children was the example of our marriage.”

I nod in agreement, brushing her hair with my forehead we’re so close. “It’s like the old saying, 'The best thing any man can do for his children is to love their mother,'” I tell her.

After so many years of anxiety over money, illness, adolescence and all the rest that goes into parenting, we’ve discovered we can relax and be content.

This is our small reward — a quiet dinner just for two in a crowded, boisterous restaurant in a place where time disappears.

Hal Tarleton column, WDT 11/29/2003

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Threescore and ten ... and then?

“The days of our life are threescore and ten, and even by reason of strength fourscore years; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.”

Psalm 90:10

Here I am at threescore and ten, or as we would phrase it today, the Big Seven-Oh. I can’t say that age has snuck up on me. I’ve seen it coming for years, decades even. I know my face and body have aged. I see it and feel it every day. My joints and muscles hurt most days, and some foods tend to tie my digestive tract in knots. My faltering memory embarrasses me nearly every day. I often can’t recall someone’s name, although I know it perfectly well; it just won’t show itself. It’s as if my brain were an overstuffed Rolodex, and some days the right card just won’t pop up.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful to be here at this biblical age. My threescore years and ten have been good, better than I deserve. I have experienced disappointments and tragedies, along with joys and pleasant surprises. Friends from long ago have preceded me to the grave years before they reached this epoch. I have stood by the graves of parents, siblings, cousins, and friends. The Psalm’s threescore and ten years is not a promise; not everyone will make it. Nor is it a delimiter. Some will live past 70. My parents made it to their late 80s, but their last decade was sad and painful.

Genes from my parents might get me through a few more years, but if those extra years involve the kind of dementia and residence in a nursing home that they experienced, I’d rather leave the stage now.

Yes, this span “is but toil and trouble,” and the years “are soon gone,” after which “we fly away.” We will soon get a reminder of our mortality on Ash Wednesday: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Maybe not imminently, but certainly.

I’m hopeful for another decade or two past this milestone if my body and brain will continue working. I don’t want to end the romance that began nearly 50 years ago; we have other things to see, places to go, conversations to have and hugs to share. I want to see my grandchildren, no longer babies, grow into adulthood. I have lived to see “your children’s children” as the biblical blessing promised (Psalm 128:6). Now I want to see them grown and living their own successful lives.

For the most part, I have found that life keeps getting better. I rather dreaded my forties, which began with an “over the hill” party, because I was no longer a young man. My fifties were better. The children were mostly on their own, and our “empty nest” wasn’t at all bad once I got used to the quiet in the house. My sixties were difficult as loved ones died, and my career took an abrupt turn, but our marriage grew stronger as we faced that decade together.

Now I bid farewell to my sixties, no longer joking that “it’s the sixties all over again!” Most of all on this threescore and ten, I am grateful for a life different from the one I imagined at the one-score mark. This life, however long it may last, has been as wonderful as George Bailey’s life in Bedford Falls.

This post originally appeared in The Wilson Times March 2, 2019.