Preet Bharara: From CAFE, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.
George Packer: Look at where we are today. We’ve closed our doors. We’ve insulted our friends. We’ve sucked up to our enemies, turned our foreign policy into a form of racism. I’ll just say if Trump gets reelected, this is a permanent change.
Preet Bharara: That’s George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of books on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the decline of American institutions over the last 40 years. His most recent book is Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. We discussed American hospitality and hubris, how human character strengths and flaws can drive foreign policy decisions, and why in the Trump administration we may need to accept allies from unlikely places. But first, let’s get to your questions. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.
Preet Bharara: Hey, Stay Tuned listeners. We’re taking the Stay Tuned Podcast on the road this fall, and I’m excited to announce a new stop. On November 5th, we’ll be in Minneapolis in the great state of Minnesota. Joining me is former marathoner, city councilman, civil rights attorney, son of professional ballet dancers, and now still in his 30s, mayor of the city, Jacob Frey. You’re not going to want to miss this rising star. In addition to Minneapolis, I’ll be in Atlanta with Sally Yates, in Denver with Shannon Watts, and in Detroit with attorney general Dana Nessel. To get tickets and details of all these upcoming live shows, head to CAFE.com/tour. That’s CAFE.com/tour. Hope to see you there.
Tom: Hey, Preet. My name is Tom. I live in Washington, D.C. I’m calling to ask about the difference between a right and something that is legal. For example, Trump recently said that he had the right to release a photo that he tweeted about Iran and a recent explosion in the country. While it is legal for Trump to release that photo, I’m not convinced that it’s his right to even question about it being legal given his responsibilities and duty to office. Thanks, I love your show, Preet.
Preet Bharara: Tom, thanks for your question. It’s an interesting distinction that you draw. Probably the better word than right is authority. What does the president have the authority to do? And there are lots of things that people in positions of power have the authority to do. Doesn’t make them wise or smart or good, and I think you’re getting at that point there. Because he’s the president of the United States and he has the ability to declassify something simply by making it public, it’s legal for him to do so. He has the authority to do so, but I think the most important thing to think about in this regard, as I’ve said many times, is that the debate and the discussion does not end with the idea that someone has the authority to do something. That’s when the debate and discussion begins.
Preet Bharara: That’s true for prosecutors, who just because they have the authority to charge a particular crime or the authority to pursue a particular case, doesn’t mean it’s right and just and wise to do so in every instance. As I pointed out on Twitter a few days ago, in response to the Iran photo leak, which by all accounts seems to be a leak and by all accounts seems to have given decently valuable information to other people who choose to benefit from it, people outside the country. I wrote, “As POTUS, Trump technically also has the right to release via Twitter the names of intelligence assets, the movements of nuclear submarines, the details of clandestine operations, etcetera. Having the quote unquote right doesn’t mean it’s not colossally irresponsible and stupid.”
Preet Bharara: Now, like a lot of other things, there may be a revisiting of what kind of authority a president can have. It will be difficult though, in practice, to take away from a sitting president the authority to do various things. It’s, as we’ve discussed on other occasions, exceedingly difficult to have a requirement that a president needs some standards or thresholds to get a security clearance in the first place. I think based on this alone, if some other person had done it who does not have the presidential power and authority, that person would’ve been fired or decommissioned immediately. And probably forever prevented from holding a security clearance in the future. These things don’t apply to the president.
Preet Bharara: In a larger context, I think it’s unworkable to have a sitting commander and chief who doesn’t have that authority. But in the context of someone like Donald Trump who doesn’t think too much and doesn’t consult too much, and engages in lots of actions and activities on a whim without getting advice and counsel from the most experienced and season people in the particular field, I think you have a real problem.
Preet Bharara: This question comes in an email from listener Elliot. “Hi, Preet. My father was a lawyer and used to tell me, ‘Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.’ I’m wondering if you have heard of this adage, if you have ever used it as a lawyer, and especially if you ever find it helpful now as an interviewer. Thanks.” Elliot, I hear that question all the time, and you hear people wonder about that adage, which I’ve heard of course for many years, when they’re talking about congressional hearings and also interviews like the ones that I do. What is the principle you should stand by? Do you ask a question you don’t know the answer to?
Preet Bharara: So the principle for lawyers is generally a good one. Not always, but generally a good one. And the point is, on direct examination, when you’re asking a question, to make your case, your principle case, you really should know the answer to the questions that you’re asking. Because you have legitimately prepared the witness, gone through the testimony to make sure that the person has been refreshed as to their recollection, and you’re not going to be surprised. So any time you see prosecutors, and for that matter in civil trials as well, generally speaking, if you’re putting a witness on, a friendly witness on, to help you build your case, you’re not asking a question you don’t know the answer to. The last thing you want is a surprise.
Preet Bharara: Where it comes into greater play probably is in cross examination. There’s a witness you have not had access to. There’s a witness who is adverse to you, who is possibly even hostile and angry with you, and trying to disprove your case. It could be the defendant himself in a criminal matter. There, the point is, you’re still trying to make your case through this other witness who is not on your side. And so there as well, surprise can be your enemy. And asking generally sharp, crisp questions to which hopefully the answers are yes or no, so you can build to your conclusion and build up your argument in favor of whatever position you have. You’re not asking questions you don’t know the answer to. I mean, there are exceptions to that, but that’s where that comes into play.
Preet Bharara: Now, as an interviewer, the interviews I do on the show are with people who I’m learning from, too. And in fact, I think a lot of the best questions that I’ve been able to ask are ones I do not know the answer to. I’m trying to understand what’s going on in the mind of the person being interviewed. I’m trying to understand their point of view. I’m trying to understand their expertise. My favorite moments in interviews are when I am surprised by the answer. That’s a very different thing from how you want to proceed in court. But I think a good and lively interview relies to a certain extent upon surprise. Many, many, many interviews if not all of them have a number of things that happen in them that I did not plan. And they just sort of unfold based on how the guest answers the questions. So there’s a time and a place for that adage. I think in a general interview situation, doesn’t hold in my case.
Preet Bharara: This question comes in response to a tweet I sent in the last few days. I was responding to a tweet from the New York Daily News that said “Trial date set for principal architect of 9/11 attacks.” The tweet went on to say, “The alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will face a death penalty trial in 2021 at the Guantanamo Bay military complex.” And I simply replied, “This trial could’ve happened a decade ago in SDNY.” A number of people, including Twitter user Chicago Cat asked, “Why didn’t it?” Well, this seems very recent history to me because I lived through it. But it’s maybe ancient history to some others because 10 years have gone by.
Preet Bharara: You may recall that at the beginning of the Obama presidency, there was a lot of discussion about what to do with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and for other co-conspirators who were being kept in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, was charged with the responsibility of making a decision about what forum those individuals should be tried and held accountable for the 9/11 attacks. And the options were civilian court, article III court as we call it in the U.S., or the military commission style in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And then within the first question, which court, which U.S. Attorney’s Office should do the prosecuting?
Preet Bharara: One of the first things that I had the responsibility to do when I became the U.S. attorney in the late summer of 2009 was, together with the excellent team of terrorism prosecutors in my office, advocate for the trial to happen in article III court. And more specifically, in the district where the most damage had been done, notably the destruction of the Twin Towers and the killing of 3000 Americans. There was a lot of back and forth and argument. The attorney general took it all into account and, on one Thursday evening in the middle of November, Attorney General Holder called me personally on the phone and said it was his decision, based on all the circumstances, that the most right, efficient, and just place for KSM and his cohorts to be charged and tried was the Southern district of New York, and that’s where the trial would take place.
Preet Bharara: We would be conducting the trial coequally with prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern district of Virginia, led by my friend Neil MacBride at the time. And that seemed to be all well and done, so why didn’t it happen? Well, a lot of people have a lot of different reasons and a lot of different analyses. But in short, over a period of several months, that included the time when the underwear bomber, the famous underwear bomber, a guy named Abdulmutallab, flew into the Detroit airport with a bomb in his underwear. Some people I think became concerned about security issues surrounding a trial in lower Manhattan.
Preet Bharara: The police commissioner at the time, Ray Kelly, made a number of statements about how much it would cost to have a ring of security, to make sure that there was no troublemaking, there was no violence. Some other politicians I think became concerned about things, and there just ended up being something of a political firestorm on the issue of whether a trial was appropriate in lower Manhattan for KSM and his cohorts. We continue to believe that it was, continue to advocate that it could’ve been. And one of the main reasons we did was to make the point that in civilian court, where you have settled law and you have seasoned prosecutors like we have in our office in the Eastern district of Virginia, and a seasoned judge who would’ve overseen the case and has done numerous trials before among other things, the Southern district. Handled the first World Trade Center bombing case, handled the trial of various individuals charged with the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Preet Bharara: So there’s a lot of experience, there’s a lot of security. There’s a lot of expertise and settled law, and we would’ve imagined that within a year or two of the decision being made to bring the case to the SDNY, that there would’ve been a trial. That there would’ve been, my prediction, guilty verdicts as to anyone. And justice would have not only been done, but would have been seen to be done. And I think it would’ve been a remarkable display of American open democracy and the doing of justice. And the concern was, we made the arguments and advocated for civilian trial.
Preet Bharara: You have unsettled law and all sorts of other legal issues I don’t have time to go into here, but maybe in the future we can, where a military commission would get bogged down. And lo and behold, here we are, literally on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the decision initially to bring the case to a civilian court, they’re just setting a trial date for KSM. And that trial date is two years away. That’s what I meant when I said, “This trial could’ve happened a long time ago in SDNY.”
Preet Bharara: My guest this week is George Packer. Now a staff writer for The Atlantic, he’s also had bylines in The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones. And for 15 years, George was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote an article about me, but we’ll get to that. George Packer’s latest book is about the storied and sometimes infamous diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, who nearly six decades of public service and multiple administrations. The story of Holbrooke’s complicated rise and fall resonates in discussions about American politics and principles today. George Packer and I also get into what a second Trump term would mean for the country, the toxic appeal of ambition, and why Packer thinks it’s unpatriotic for administration defectors to stay silent. That’s coming up, stay tuned.
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George Packer: Great to be with you, Preet.
Preet Bharara: Congratulations on your book, the latest of many books as we were discussing before we started recording. This book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Great cover, we’re talking about that also. It looks kind of like a movie poster.
George Packer: Yeah, my idea was, this should look fun to read because I think it is fun to read.
Preet Bharara: It is.
George Packer: And it has a vintage feel, and maybe a little bit novelistic. So why look like a boring political book if I didn’t set out to write a boring political book?
Preet Bharara: I have to say a couple of things right off the bat. One is, we share a publisher, the great Knopf publishing house. The second disclosure I should make is, we’ve known each other for a while. When I was U.S. attorney, you wrote a profile of the office, me, and one of the people that we were prosecuting, Raj Rajaratnam, who was a massive insider trading defendant convicted at trial. And it was very good, and you’re a terrific writer. You are good at descriptive writing as well, but there’s one sentence, and I warned you that I was going to ask you about this, at the risk of being self referential at the beginning of this interview.
Preet Bharara: You wrote the following sentence in June of 2011. Quote, “The prominent curve of Bharara’s nose…” When you begin with a reference to my nose, you know my intent are going to be up soon.
George Packer: Go on.
Preet Bharara: “Prominent curve of Bharara’s nose and his striking pale green eyes give him an unsettling, falconine gaze.” What? So can you explain yourself? Because you should know that caused me quite a bit of grief in the office with photoshop, so I was annually depicted as some kind of weird bird man because of your sentence.
George Packer: Falconine, see, I have no memory of that word. I don’t know that word.
Preet Bharara: Oh, really?
George Packer: I think that word was added at the last minute by an editor. But I will say, Preet. Preet-
Preet Bharara: Nice try. Just own up to it.
George Packer: I will say this. No one should be happy with their physical representation in a profile. If they are, the writer has pulled the punches and tried to flatter them. Because all of us hate the way we are described as looking, and we should.
Preet Bharara: Okay, fine. I wasn’t going to dwell on this.
George Packer: Right.
Preet Bharara: But if you, I don’t know if you’ve had the occasion to interview a model, male or female, or a famous movie star…
George Packer: This is not my beat.
Preet Bharara: … who is fairly unflawed physically. What is the correct way for a writer to describe such a person?
George Packer: Well, first of all, I don’t write about those people. But if I did, I would not try to capture their objective screen appearance but rather, what is the psychic feeling you get from the way they look? What does their face do when it’s smiling, or when they look distracted? And then capture that. Because you have to get them off duty, off guard, in a way that distinguishes them from every other pretty face. For example, the book that we’re here to talk about, I have… the first page has a long description of Richard Holbrooke’s feet. Because I wanted to humanize him from the very beginning.
Preet Bharara: Because you have a particular fetish.
George Packer: I actually am quite averse to feet, but Holbrooke had a problem with his feet. They swelled up, they gave him no end of trouble. He had to carry multiple pairs of socks on diplomatic trips. He was constantly badgering his aids for more socks. And to me this was so human, almost literally not quite feet of clay, that I thought, this is where I should begin. Because it brings an almost great man down from the level of power to the level of humanity, and that’s where I wanted him.
Preet Bharara: So let’s take a step back. Richard Holbrooke. Why don’t you give us the thumbnail sketch? Who he is, why he was worthy of a fairly lengthy, detailed, as they say, warts and all, biography.
George Packer: He was a leading diplomat of the end of the 20th century, maybe along with Henry Kissinger or James Baker, the leading diplomat of that period. Although he never rose to the level of secretary of state, which was their office. He served under every democratic president, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. He was a believer in that post war vision of an America that had to lead the world in order for there to be not just order and rules, but for problems to get solved. Which led to bigger problems as well as to some solutions, which we can talk about.
George Packer: He was flamboyant, he was outsize, his appetites, his insecurities, his ambition were off the charts. And he pissed off as many people as he earned the respect of. He never reached the top because he was constantly getting in his own way. He had this combination of generosity and idealism and blindness and even cruelty that made him, to me, a great character. So it’s not so much his CV that led me to write about him. It’s his character and the period in which he was active, which is what I call the American century, that really I think came to an end around the time Holbrooke died. So he embodies certain American traits, for better and worse that reigned, that bestrewed the world like a colossus during those years.
Preet Bharara: How unusual is that combination of qualities in a person who has become somewhat famous, and has had impactful jobs, and a real consequence in the world? You described him as an interesting character, and he’s incredibly interesting. And you plumbed the depths of that at great length. Are there people who achieve what he has, and become sort of as important to the firmament of diplomacy or law or science or anything else, who are uninteresting?
George Packer: Yeah, I think so. I don’t think every famous person or even great person is worth the kind of exploration and excavation that a book like this gives them.
Preet Bharara: So he’s unique.
George Packer: There’s a mistaken view that in this book I’m saying, “You have to be as big a jerk as Holbrooke could be in order to do great things.” I don’t think that’s true. There are so many counter examples. In Holbrooke’s case, his egotism and his flaws were inextricable from his achievements. They fueled each other. He was both massively self absorbed and a real idealist who cared about the rest of the world. And I think that his great achievement, which was negotiating the end of the war in Bosnia, the greatest bloodshed in Europe since World War II, would not have happened if he hadn’t been this preposterously driven, relentless, almost shameless operator, who could get in Slobodan Milosevic’s face and bring him to the table.
Preet Bharara: There have been certain great folks who have achieved something enormous, and you might say in spite of their personality flaws or in spite of their character, or because of it. And you say in Holbrooke’s case, it’s because of it, but it had limitations. And I think of someone like Steve Jobs, and I think of someone like Lyndon Johnson. Each of them are chronicled by great writers just like you have chronicled the life of this person. Do we make too much of personality?
George Packer: I mean, no, we don’t. Because first of all, I’m not interested simply in foreign policy as a set of abstract ideas and geopolitical moves. That’s a book for other people to write. It’s not the book that interests me. I’m interested in how human character and circumstances, and national interest and errors, lead to history being made, because they really are interwoven. What I learned in writing this is that foreign policy especially is about human character. Because basically, we don’t know the rest of the world. We don’t understand it very well. We don’t have enough information. Holbrooke once said, “Policy makers might have 2% of the information they need in order to make a decision, so the rest is character, judgment, experience, etcetera.”
George Packer: And often, and it’s shocking to me how often this kept happening, the rivalries, the competitions of these ambitious people, mostly men, in a narrow space, the U.S. government, at the top or near the top, leads to ferocious infighting. It happened to Holbrooke again and again. He was constantly either threatening someone or being threatened by someone, and getting into kind of a dog fight.
Preet Bharara: And yet, as you said at the outset, he kept being invited back over and over and over again. So…
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: … what was it about him? Notwithstanding the difficulty of dealing with him. And you talk about people who opened up to you after his death, and harbored resentments, and remembered slights. And yet every time there was a democratic president, they wanted him back. What is that a testament to?
George Packer: Well, first of all, to how good he was, because he really was a good diplomat. He had a vision of how to get moving parts in motion and working together to reach an end. He had a strategic mind. He had a view of diplomacy as involving not just people sitting around a table in a chandeliered room, but the media, the nonprofit world, the business world. The mass of people who are invested in this. So he saw a diplomacy as being something way beyond just state to state relations and one diplomat sitting across from another. And it may also suggest that there was a shortage of talent.
George Packer: I think this is something his friend, Les Gelb, got me to see. Which is in that generation, coming after the generation of Acheson, Kennan, Harriman, George Marshall, who created the post war structures of the UN and of NATO, and of the IMF, etcetera. The next generation was crippled by Vietnam. That was Holbrooke’s first experience. Young, diplomat, but really as an aid worker in the Mekong Delta in 1963, just as the war was intensifying. And that shadowed him and his generation, and it kept them from reaching the top and from perhaps having the confidence and the faith in themselves and in the country to do what the previous generation had done.
Preet Bharara: Let me ask you a broad question, and you can answer it through the vision of your subject in the book, Richard Holbrooke, or in some other way. What is the right way to think about diplomacy? What is the essence of diplomacy?
George Packer: First of all, reading the other, whether it’s an adversary or not, deeply, in a sensitive and nuanced way.
Preet Bharara: Even though you only have 2% of the information perhaps.
George Packer: You have 2% of the information until you sit down with them. Then, information begins to come just from the interaction because so much becomes clearer once you’re talking.
Preet Bharara: Can we pause on that for a second, even though I asked you the broader question first?
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: That’s very interesting what you just said because you’re a layperson in the country or in the world, and you hear about these interactions between foreign leaders. And there are these famous things that journalists have said and that leaders have also said about their own interactions. The famous meeting first between John Kennedy and Khrushchev.
Preet Bharara: We now in the modern day, we have President Donald Trump talking about what he has learned from his meetings that are staged in some ways, with either Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin, or anyone else. Is it really the case that world leaders, when they come together and they meet, and maybe it’s different for career diplomats, which are Holbrooke.
George Packer: Right, they’re a rank or two below.
Preet Bharara: Are people really learning when you sit in a room with somebody? I mean, it’s not like a podcast where I’m going to learn everything about you in the course of the 60 minutes, and you will reveal the depths of your soul.
George Packer: I think Holbrookes’s style was to cut through the BS and get past protocol to forget the prepared speeches and the obvious talking points. He would start with talking points. He had goals in mind. He had his marching orders from Washington. In the Balkans, he was told, “Here are the pieces of a peace framework that you will negotiate with the warring parties.” But immediately he began to stray from the script, and to talk about anything and everything. His experience hitchhiking as a 19 year old through Yugoslavia in 1960, just to see how Milosevic would take that. Milosevic would then talk about being a banker in New York in the 1970s, and where he liked to shop, and all the Wall Street people he knew. And eight hours of this, with mounds of rice and lamb, and round after round of plumb brandy.
Preet Bharara: Much like we have here
George Packer: Exactly.
Preet Bharara: Except for the plumb brandy.
George Packer: We’re just living it up. Your listeners may not know how cushy it is here.
Preet Bharara: That’s why we maintain it as audio only.
George Packer: Right. All of that is information beyond that 2%, and a sense of where are this person’s weaknesses? Where are their political blind spots or their political pressures? What are they facing at home that we don’t understand, that we need to figure out in order to see how far we can take this? If you don’t understand the politics of your counterpart’s country, which is very hard to do, other country’s politics are byzantine, you can’t understand where you can get your counterpart to. So all of that is the human side of diplomacy, and to me with Holbrooke, it’s a lot of it. It’s most of it.
Preet Bharara: Could Holbrooke be disarming?
George Packer: Totally.
Preet Bharara: And could he also be tough and irascible?
George Packer: A bully.
Preet Bharara: Right.
George Packer: Yes.
Preet Bharara: So what kind of a mind does it take to figure out which think to be at which moment?
George Packer: There was one instance, when he was beginning his negotiations with Milosevic in the summer of 1995 in Belgrade. When his first encounter didn’t go well because he didn’t know Milosevic, and he probably thought he could do this, and Milosevic had seen so many Americans and others come through that he had learned how to stall them all. And Holbrooke went back to his residence and was told by his aids, “That didn’t go very well. We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know.” And he was so pissed at having been played by Milosevic that the next day, he staged a hissy fit and screamed.
Preet Bharara: He staged a hissy fit.
George Packer: He did. It wasn’t authentic.
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
George Packer: He wasn’t expressing molten rage, he was letting Milosevic know, you played me yesterday. You’re not going to play me again. I’m not going to be another of these polite diplomats who gets nothing out of this endless talking. You’re going to come to the United States to negotiate the end of this war, or we’re going to crush you with sanctions and bombs. So that got Milosevic’s attention. People overplay perhaps this side of Holbrooke. There was actually a word in Serbian, Holbrooke [Serbian 00:29:00], which means to get your way by sheer brute force. He was also persuasive and tenacious, never gave up. I mean, I think that stamina was the key in the Balkans because it was such a difficult not to untie.
Preet Bharara: How much of diplomacy is based on principle or moral reasoning versus just what is thought to be purely in the national interest of the United States of America? Do they overlap, or are they always separate, or do I have it completely wrong?
George Packer: No, I think diplomats are working for their government, and their government is carrying out what it perceives to be the national interest. So we’re never too far away from that. Holbrooke is not there to enforce Kantian universal morality or the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and no diplomat should be. I think that’s the wrong job.
Preet Bharara: Right.
George Packer: That job is more like an activist or a journalist, or a critic of government. If you’re inside government, let’s be clear, you don’t abandon all moral sense. If you do, then what are you in it for? And Holbrooke didn’t. He really cared about certain issues, especially refugees and other humanitarian disasters. He was very early on that in the 1970s with the boat people of South Vietnam when they were taken to the South China Sea and the Carter administration really didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Holbrooke pushed for them to be rescued and for them to be brought to the United States.
George Packer: And with the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, he was the first U.S. official to denounce the genocide. And then when Cambodians were pouring across the Thai border, he got Rosalynn Carter to go to Thailand to highlight the refugees there. So those things concerned him, but he was also a practitioner of a kind of realpolitik, which in some ways led to terribly embarrassing things. Like seating the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian chair at the United Nations, which Holbrooke voted for, because that was the position of the United States government. To me indefensible, but that was what he did.
George Packer: He said to a journalist, “I had to swallow hard.” And that phrase “swallow hard” became for me a kind of talisman of what it means to serve in government. You swallow hard. You’re not there as a crusader. If you are, you’re quickly going to become disillusioned and you’re going to leave, and some people do leave. He was too ambitious to leave, so he compromised these principles often in order to stick around and continue to be powerful. And that’s a recurring theme in the book, this illusion that some people have that as long as they’re on the inside they can be effective. But as soon as they compromise themselves and leave, they’ve lost their effectiveness. Whereas you can spend your entire life on the inside and never be effective because you haven’t been able to raise your voice in a way that made a difference.
Preet Bharara: These two examples you gave about Holbrooke caring about principle and decency and morality, both with respect to refugees from Vietnam and the situation in Cambodia, I think about current events now. Was his strong feeling about those things purely a matter of morality, or was there also some strategic and strategically articulable basis for it? Part two of the question is, how would he think about refugee issues if he were alive today? Because they occupy not just the minds and conversations of people who are involved in that business, but the president talks about it at rallies. And you have average Americans wondering, what is our role in the world with respect to accepting refugees? Because it seems that the view of America, in its official foreign policy, has changed dramatically.
George Packer: I mean, every word Trump utters about this subject and most subjects would have horrified Holbrooke. It’s the opposite of the view of the United States and of our foreign policy that Holbrooke had throughout his life, and that he didn’t develop as a student of international relations. It was in his DNA, he grew up with it. It was the postwar generation’s view of our indispensability, which had many illusions attached to it. But we’re seeing one alternative in action right now, and it’s not very pretty.
George Packer: So he would have been absolutely horrified, and refugees in particular, because he thought that was at our core. If we’re not open to helpless, suffering people who need a safe harbor, then we no longer stand for anything other than power. Which is Trump’s foreign policy, power alone. For Holbrooke, as much as he was a power politician, he never wanted to let go of the idea that we stood for something more than just our own power. So a good example is Dayton, his main achievement. He negotiated an end to the war. He forced-
Preet Bharara: The Balkan war.
George Packer: The Balkan war, which had killed 100,000 people. Saw a genocide four years after the end of World War II. He forced warring parties to sign a deal, and it was an unfair deal for the victims, for the Bosnians, because essentially they were signing away territory that had been won by the Serbs through genocide. And so you could say that’s immoral, and a lot of people said it then and have been saying it ever since.
George Packer: It also created the state of Bosnia we have today, which is a totally nonfunctioning three headed monster with Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs fighting each other for the crumbs of power all the time. So you could say Dayton ended a war, which is a good thing, and it also ratified genocide and created a nonfunctioning state, which is a bad thing. For Holbrooke, he looked at that and said, “That’s the most I can get. I’m going to take that because we have to end the war.” So it never is to our moral satisfaction, I don’t think.
Preet Bharara: I continue to find it interesting, the distinction that people often make between morality and utility, between idealism and pragmatism. In the occupation that I have occupied, it’s easier to have sort of principle approach to things because the law is supposed to be, at least in part, have some parallel to justice and morality. And it’s not just purely about power.
George Packer: You never had to make a decision that you thought might be compromising morality?
Preet Bharara: No, maybe.
George Packer: In the interest of utility?
Preet Bharara: Well, it depends on what you think the ultimate goal is. So you have competing conceptions of justice, and justice for whom? On the one hand, doing the right thing by the victim might be at odds with doing the right thing for accountability or for deterrents, or something else. So there are competing considerations, and you sort of think about them.
George Packer: Right.
Preet Bharara: And how they overlap and how they might conflict with each other. But I would often make the argument, when I would talk to people about corporate culture or other things, or maybe even with your own children. There are often two good imperatives to do something, right? Don’t punch your sister, first because it’s wrong. It’s not a good thing to do. It doesn’t make you a good person. And second, if you do, you’re going to get caught and you’re going to get punished. The first is the moral reason, the second is the pragmatic reason. And even though I sort of separated them out, I just wonder if in foreign policy, when you say Richard Holbrooke took the view that once we’re not open, then who are we? Can you bring a pragmatic argument to bear on that issue also?
Preet Bharara: I feel like in these foreign policy debates, there are the hawks and the doves and the people who say, “Well, you don’t understand anything. You’re naïve and silly and wimpy if you care about these ephemeral things like what we stand for as a nation…”
George Packer: Right.
Preet Bharara: “… and morality.” Because I don’t understand how this all works from my vantage point. Are those folks right, or is there a reasonable argument to be made that there are pragmatic and utilitarian reasons why the United States should act in a certain way that could also be described as moral, could also be described as welcoming, because in the long run it enhances American power? Or, is that silly?
George Packer: No, I don’t think it’s silly at all, and I think it’s true. Look at where we are today. We’ve closed our doors. We’ve insulted our friends, we’ve sucked up to our enemies. We, I should say the administration, has turned our foreign policy into a form of racism. And how has that enhanced our stature around the world, our influence? Are we more influential? Do other countries look to us for an example and for leadership? Are they willing to compromise on their end to some degree in order to deal with us? Do they want to be part of alliances and organizations that we lead? I don’t think so.
George Packer: I think it has diminished our reputation and our power immensely. So that is the practical side, and the other half of it is, refugees have been good for this country over and over and over again. How many times do we need to learn that when we let in German Jews or Vietnamese, they become engines of prosperity and of energy, and of real citizenship? So I can’t think of a good reason why we should keep them out. He would also have looked at Syria, which is the biggest foreign policy debacle of the Obama years, and seen that it’s not just a humanitarian cause for Syrian refugees themselves. It’s going to affect the rest of the world. It’s too big not to, because these things have a way.
George Packer: You think that they’re relegated to some obscure corner of the world where we don’t know that people, we can’t pronounce their names. Turns out, it does affect the rest of the world. Sometimes not, but in the case of Syria, yes. Europe has been profoundly affected by the Syrian refugee crisis, which was partly a crisis of the world failing to deal with Bashar al-Assad. So I think for both almost realpolitik reasons as well as for more reasons, if you try to ignore something for too long, it’s going to end up haunting you.
Preet Bharara: But what lessons has America learns generally, and did Richard Holbrooke learn specifically from Vietnam?
George Packer: Right. The flip side of this positive view of American power and American generosity is American hubris and overreach, and too much faith in ourselves as the agents of good. Vietnam was the shaping experience of his life. He was 22 years old when he arrived, and he spent the next three years there. Really saw the war at the ground level because he was in the Mekong Delta, in a small town where the Viet Cong pretty much had him surrounded. So he saw the war as most diplomats don’t, and that was crucial.
George Packer: He had a lifelong impulse to see for himself. To go to the ground and see for himself and not trust reports or intelligence, or what people at the top of the government thought. And he had two conclusions right away within weeks. One, we’re losing because we’re using so much firepower, fighting this war as if it’s a conventional war, failing to see that it’s an insurgency and a civil war. Therefore, we’re creating enemies among the civilians by brutalizing with our firepower. And two, we’re lying to ourselves because our reports are full of false assessments. They’re going up the chain and reaching John F. Kennedy’s desk or Lyndon Johnson’s desk and leading to wrong policies.
George Packer: And those two things, the sense that we can’t militarize our foreign policy or we’ll end up failing, and that we have to tell the truth or else we will also fail, they never really left him. I mean, you could point to times where he himself was guilty of those same mistakes. But those early experiences were seared into him by Vietnam, and I think they made him a better diplomat.
Preet Bharara: You’ve said a couple of times that part of his personality, Richard Holbrooke’s personality and character, held him back from reaching the quintessential job to which he aspired, secretary of state. Would he have made a decent secretary of state? Was it just, he was held back from that appointment because of his personality and character?
George Packer: Well, he thought that reaching his life’s dream would have somehow gotten rid of all the little flaws that were holding him back. He would’ve been liberated to be a better person. I think that’s false because we remain ourselves no matter where we go, including the seventh floor of the state department. In 1996, he had just negotiated the end of the Bosnian war and was at the peak of his prestige. And Bill Clinton was trying to decide who to name for secretary of state for his second term, and it was going to be Holbrooke or Madeleine Albright. Clinton saw many good things in Holbrooke, but he said to Al Gore, “I don’t think he has the self awareness to keep his relationships from becoming toxic.” And that was an astute observation.
Preet Bharara: Which relationships was he talking about?
George Packer: Everyone around him.
Preet Bharara: Yep.
George Packer: With his colleagues. Because in the first Clinton term, and it’s all there in Holbrooke’s recorded diaries, which I have used because I had access to all his papers for this book. It’s a shocking display of envy and spite, and bureaucratic warfare that never ends. It seems far more preoccupying and intense than the war in Bosnia that he is supposed to be working on. The war with the National Security Council is the real war that is consuming his day. So Clinton saw him clearly, and I don’t think that would’ve ended if he had become secretary of state. I think he probably would’ve continued to make enemies, and maybe more because he would’ve crushed so many people in his march to greatness.
George Packer: This man had an almost demonic restlessness in him that I don’t think could’ve been satisfied by anything. It wasn’t satisfied by the end of the war in Bosnia. He then had to campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. He went to Oslo several times to…
Preet Bharara: How do you do that, by the way?
George Packer: You just chat up the secretary of the Nobel Committee. “Oh, I happened to be in Oslo. I was wondering if you wanted to have coffee.” And it turned out they actually don’t like that, and it may have even costed him the Nobel Peace Prize. You cannot lobby for yourself.
Preet Bharara: Right.
George Packer: So I think it would not have ended well, and his life didn’t end well. The last phase of his life, he was working for Barack Obama on Afghanistan. That was his last assignment, and maybe his hardest. Obama disliked him pretty intensely, found him long winded, flattering, conceited, taking up way too much room, and too much drama.
Preet Bharara: Drama.
George Packer: Drama.
Preet Bharara: No drama Obama.
George Packer: Yeah. So he tried to keep Holbrooke out of airplanes that he was on, and out of meetings, and eventually tried to fire him until Hillary Clinton, who was Holbrooke’s only real friend and supporter in that administration, said, “Over my objections.” So Obama kept him, but he never used him the way he could have because Holbrooke was such an annoying presence. In so many ways, the opposite of not just Obama’s temperament, but his way of seeing the world, because Obama was scaling things back and Holbrooke was always looking for more. So Holbrooke died unrealized in his last job, unable to even get a meeting with this president whose trust he so desperately wanted. He just really wanted to have a good relationship with Barack Obama, and Obama wouldn’t see him.
George Packer: David Axelrod let Holbrooke know on his last morning, “He’s not going to see you.” And then he goes to Hillary Clinton’s office for a previously scheduled meeting, and immediately his aorta tears, and that is essentially the end of his life, in the office he had always wanted to occupy. So I don’t think Holbrooke would’ve ever stopped being Holbrooke. He was himself to the very end, even in the ambulance to the hospital. He was giving orders to his aids saying, “Are you writing down my every witticism?” Asking them to take notes. Telling them who to contact.
Preet Bharara: “Are you writing down my every witticism?”
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: You think when Reagan was shot and going to the hospital, did he make sure his aids were writing down his many witticisms?
George Packer: I think people like Reagan were more deft. They did it without being so obvious.
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
George Packer: Holbrooke was, the thing about Holbrooke was he was so obvious, he couldn’t control it. He didn’t know how to be smooth. He was rough, which is something I like about him as well as something that’s often appalling about him.
Preet Bharara: You kind of know what you’re getting.
George Packer: You do, and you almost feel sympathetic because all of us have a child in us who wants to say something, or wants to yell or complain, and we try to control it. And Holbrooke didn’t control it very well.
Preet Bharara: Part of what makes the book great and your writing about Holbrooke so great is to learn about people dealing with difficult situations. And all sorts of timeless questions are presented that I think about all the time in different contexts. One of them is, what is the proper way to regulate ambition? I think ambition is good, I think ambition is great. I want my kids to be ambitious. I want them to be ambitious for themselves, for their community, for their country, and often those things overlap. And if you’re a good and decent person, in my view, you have good and decent goals for yourself. Whether it’s in medicine, or law, or writing, or teaching, or whatever it may be. It also will enter to the benefit of your community hopefully.
George Packer: All true. That’s not a book I want to read though.
Preet Bharara: No, but my.. No, no, yes, of course.
George Packer: Right.
Preet Bharara: My question though is, do you have advice to people who are ambitious based on the deep study you have done of Richard Holbrooke? And how his unending ambition, in some ways, maybe I’m not characterizing this right, caused him to die the way he did and not to achieve some of the things he wanted to achieve? I want you to a meditation, George, on ambition in the proper way.
George Packer: This is the farthest thing from the motive I have when I write a book, is to teach my readers lessons in…
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
George Packer: … in how to be human. Well, Tony Lake, who was Holbrooke’s best friend in Vietnam, tennis partner and buddy in the early years of his time in the foreign service, and became his enemy because of a personal betrayal and other things. Their mutual hatred had real effects during the Bosnian years because they were working at the top of the government on Bosnia. Lake said to his students at Georgetown, who asked, “How do you become secretary of state? How do you get there?” Lake never did. He was national security advisor, not secretary of state. But they asked him, “How do you become secretary of state?”
George Packer: And he said, “Well, if you spend your life eating turds in order to become secretary of state, people might not want you to be secretary of state because they don’t like someone who’s eating turds all the time. And if you do get there, you’ll find out that you’re not happy.” And I think that not happy is kind of key here, because this is in some ways a tragic comic story. Holbrooke has great comic qualities. He is larger than life. He is constantly breaking the rules and getting into trouble, and getting out of trouble. And there’s a lot of Rabelaisian life in his story.
George Packer: But in the end, it’s a sad story, maybe even a tragic story, and it’s partly because he was not happy. And why was he not happy? Because maybe ambition as a ferocious force doesn’t lead to happiness. If there’s something else, not just the goals you have with your ambition, but a sense of life that is separate from your ambition. So that when your ambition fails, as ambition always does. I mean, we never really quite get there.
Preet Bharara: Like family.
George Packer: Yes.
Preet Bharara: Or music.
George Packer: Yes.
Preet Bharara: Or painting.
George Packer: Yes.
Preet Bharara: Or something.
George Packer: Yes. He couldn’t be alone. He couldn’t look inward. He had an utter blindness about himself, which really cost him at the end because he didn’t understand why Barack Obama was reacting in that way. He was a bad father. He was often a bad husband, and he lost friends as well as keeping some friends. It’s not all one side or the other. There’s people who loved him and still loved him, but I would say there was an unhappiness at the heart of it. And that might have something to do with an ambition that isn’t in some way tempered by other things that one wants in life. And that’s the end of my career as a self help writer, because it’s not what I wanted to do.
Preet Bharara: You did a pretty good job there. Last question about Richard Holbrooke, then I want to talk about the modern era. It fascinates me. It seems that one of the strengths that Richard Holbrooke and why he did as much as he did, based on your descriptions, was be a masterful diplomat in many circumstances, be a masterful negotiator in many circumstances. Which actually requires, I think, some amount of self awareness.
George Packer: Yes.
Preet Bharara: And a great subtly of mind and adaptability to the circumstances.
George Packer: I think you can have all that without really knowing yourself. That’s knowing the other, which he did brilliantly. But when it came to himself…
Preet Bharara: Blind spot.
George Packer: Yeah, big blind spot. He couldn’t laugh at himself, which I think is a sign of not knowing yourself. He couldn’t tolerate what people thought of him. He would deny it. “People say I’m a self promoter.” He said this to me once. I’m walking alongside him with a notebook and pen, and writing down his comments, and he’s telling me, “How could they say I’m a self promoter?” And I thought, come on, let’s be serious. But no, he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t admit it.
Preet Bharara: How’s this for an awkward segue that you just provided me to use?
George Packer: Whatever it takes.
Preet Bharara: Is Donald Trump self aware?
George Packer: Absolutely not, no. But that’s different because I hate to compare them. I think Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, is a very good comparison for Richard Holbrooke at a much higher level of power and achievement. But Donald Trump, there’s no one inside to look at. There isn’t an inner life that is being obscured by self blindness. There aren’t values and sympathies, and connections to other people that constitute the self and inner life. He’s empty, so he doesn’t know himself because there’s no one to know. There’s a whole bunch of impulses and appetites, most of them aggressive and destructive. But there’s no self, that’s my armchair analysis of our president.
Preet Bharara: You’re very good at this, George. I’m going to ask you to do an armchair analyses now, 20 other leaders. You ready? No, no. It was a joke. You wrote another great book a few years ago called The Unwinding. Very well received, wonderful book that I also recommend to listeners, but read the Holbrooke book first.
George Packer: Our Man and then The Unwinding. Our Man is a little bit The Unwinding abroad.
Preet Bharara: Among other things you talked about in The Unwinding was Americans’ loss of faith brought upon by three things that you mention. Stagnation of wages slash income inequality, the Great Recession of 2008, and what you describe as the unraveling of social fabric. How do you connect your observations about The Unwinding, book you wrote, came out in 2013. How do you connect those observations and trenchant conclusions with the election of Donald Trump, if at all?
George Packer: So I did not predict Trump. I looked at the polls and thought, he’s going to lose like so many other people. But I do think The Unwinding described the landscape, portrayed the country in which Trump could ascend to the presidency. Because it was a portrait of an unraveling social fabric, as you said, where people’s connections to institutions like political parties and job security, and schools and the media, had been severed. I was in parts of the country that weren’t doing well and that the media weren’t paying much attention to, like rural North Carolina and Youngstown, Ohio and Tampa Bay.
George Packer: And what I saw was just an incredibly deracinated, disillusioned, even cynical American public. And they were prone to extreme views and to saying, “To hell with all of it. Let’s just burn it down and start over.” That was the impulse. This was back in like 2009, ’10, ’11 during the recession and just after. That led to the Tea Party, it led to Occupy Wall Street, but I think it also led to Donald Trump. Because he could not have been elected in a country where people still had some basic confidence that democratic institutions serve them, that the system could work for them, and that in a way, who you elected mattered. It was a kind of nihilistic move that suggested we had, yeah, lost our democratic faith. And that was the theme of The Unwinding.
Preet Bharara: So what does that mean for now then? Is there a way to unwind the…
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: … the unwinding?
George Packer: That’s hard. I’ll just say if Trump gets reelected, this is a permanent change. We will somehow move on from it, but we will be permanently changed by it, and in a bad way I think. If he loses next year, it won’t be an aberration the way Joe Biden sometimes suggests it is. It will have an effect, but it won’t have that deep structural and long lasting effect that I think two Trump terms will have. So I’d say, in a completely nonpartisan fashion, the only way to unwind the unwinding is for Trump to lose.
Preet Bharara: Even if Trump loses, he still ascended to the presidency he wants. And he still has a fairly sizeable block of voters.
George Packer: You bet.
Preet Bharara: Depending on what polls you believe, 40%, 42%, 43%, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Do you think there are lots and lots of folks who will still want to emulate Donald Trump in future elections because they can see how they can awaken that kind of passion for that kind of politics? Or, will people say, “Well, that’s the path to a one term presidency. It’s not for me.” In other words, how much is unleashed and will remain unleashed, even if Donald Trump loses?
George Packer: Yeah, I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a really popular celebrity candidate on the left. Someone like Oprah who at one point was being talked about as a potential candidate. It seems that the Democratic Party, which has its populist impulse, still seems to be playing within the old fashioned rules of party politics and institutional politics. If Trump gets reelected, I think the Democratic Party is going to begin to show signs of the same nihilism that the Republican Party has shown for many years now. Because the alternative hasn’t worked and has led to two terms of a man who should never have been anywhere near the White House. So yeah, that’s… I think this next election is everything.
Preet Bharara: There’s a lot that people say about Trump, both about his policies and also his rhetoric. And I tend to view those not as distinct things, and you wrote something very interesting. Quote, “Trump doesn’t create anything new. He amplifies existing bigotry and vulgarity by getting rid of taboos. He takes language that’s already popular at the level of talk radio, reality TV, social media, and sports bars, and uses it at the highest level of power.” What were the taboos? What are they and what will they be?
George Packer: I mean, calling for your opponent to be put in jail was a taboo. Threatening democratic countries because they won’t sell us part of their territory was a taboo. It wouldn’t have even occurred to any other president. And certainly talking about Americans and would be Americans in terms of bigotry and contempt, and unleashing those feelings, in a sense permitting those feelings in his followers so that they become okay in public. This is in some ways just as threatening as the corruption and all the stuff that you have been focused on and paying attention to. And the threats to the rule of law, the running down of the FBI and of the justice department.
George Packer: That is all terrible, and threatening to host the G7 at one of his golf courses. That’s all terrible, but the norms, the language that Trump… He’s destroyed the norms and introduced language that will now always be with us. And I see others who don’t like him beginning to use it, too. We all use it. We joke about it. People say “fake news.” My kids, when they’re having an argument with each other, they don’t like what someone else says, they use the sort of schoolyard rhetoric of the President of the United States, and it kind of dulls the language a little bit. It does, even profanity, which I don’t want to be a prude.
George Packer: It’s the language we all speak, but it has become normal language for public figures to use. And that worries me not because I don’t want my poor children’s ears to be damaged by it, but because I think that means other things will also go. Other restraints will be unleashed, and Trump has done all of that, and there’s really not much we can do to undo it. The problem with taboos is once they’re gone, they’re really difficult to put back in place.
Preet Bharara: I will suggest, as a lot of people have over the last few days, reminded the public of this horrible taboo and norm that was trampled on by Barack Obama, and that was wearing a tan suit. So that taboo was broken and George, people have not gone to wearing tan suits in the oval offices.
George Packer: But you’re reminding me of an interview I did the day of the 2010 midterms, which was the big Tea Party sweep. And I was in a small town in Southwestern Virginia and interviewing a woman who was furious with Barack Obama and was going to vote for every republican on the ballot. And I asked, “What are you so angry at him about?” “He has lowered the level of the oval office. He has disgraced that office with the way he talks, the way he dresses. We need someone who will win back respect for the presidency.” And I’m fairly certain, although I can’t prove it, that that woman voted for Donald Trump six years later.
Preet Bharara: So you think that was racism?
George Packer: Yeah, of course it was racism. She would deny it.
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
George Packer: But I know it when I see it. And it also shows you just how impossible it is to argue today, because what do you say when you compare the dignified comportment of Barack Obama, our most dignified president since Abraham Lincoln, with this satyr? “Hyperion to a satyr,” to quote Hamlet. He was now in the oval office, and find that she can’t be moved. That’s where we are. We just are in a state of almost impossibility, which is why to me, persuasion is no longer the main imperative of politics because it really isn’t working.
Preet Bharara: Outside the courtroom. I mean, one of the arguments that I’ve been making for a while is, to the extent that people denigrate lawyers and they think we argue too much, litigate too much, the courtroom still happens to be a place where you enforce norms not because they are norms, but they are rules written into the law to prevent the hijacking of logic and the obscuring of truth. You’re not allowed to do character assassination to try to convict someone, or argue for liability on the part of a company. You’re not allowed to hide from the arguments. If you fail to respond to an argument, the jury will draw an inference that the other side is… All those things that happened in the public square, you can’t do in a well run courtroom.
George Packer: So do you think the courts have been insulated from all of this?
Preet Bharara: No, I think there’s… I think the founding fathers were smart in various ways. Not in other ways, but one that we’re seeing borne out now is life tenure for federal district court judges and appellate judges is good. And it’s a little bit harder to intimidate somebody when you have life tenure. And that separation between the branches I think affects a lot. I think the judiciary is changing in a way that a lot of people don’t like, myself included, both in terms of lack of diversity and also in terms of ideological swing.
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: A little too far. But as far as institutions go in our government and outside the government, the courts are doing better than most actually.
George Packer: It’s interesting because when Trump took over and we all were wondering, how are our institutions going to hold up? Are they all going to collapse? Because it seems like the federal government has collapsed with remarkable speed, and the congress and the Republican congress’ willingness to resist him was never there from the beginning. So where’s it going to come from? And I’d say two places. The courts and journalists, who have not been perfect by any means, but who have continued to apply pressure and to dig, and to find facts. It may not matter because people’s minds are made up, but they’re still doing it.
Preet Bharara: Something just occurred to me to ask you about, but it’s something that I think a lot of people have been struggling with. So obviously the entire left is opposed to Donald Trump. You have this group of people, the Never Trumpers, who didn’t like Trump during the campaign. And then you have these people, these new people who are sort of celebrity folks, like Anthony Scaramucci, dare I say his name on the podcast, and a one term congressman named Joe Walsh. And there seems to be a little bit of an argument on the part of people who don’t want the president to win reelection.
Preet Bharara: Do you welcome their changed view or ostensibly changed view about the president? And do you welcome Joe Walsh’s primary challenge and Anthony Scaramucci, and other people like that, because they will open the flood gates to other people who once upon a time, all they did was praise Donald Trump, make excuses for Donald Trump, normalize Donald Trump? And that helps the ultimate cause that these people believe in, which is a defeat of the president? Or, do you think to yourself, God, what have we come to that this is the kind of person I need to root for? And I’m speaking in particular about Joe Walsh, who has said very, very terrible things…
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: … that he is now on an apology tour for.
George Packer: I mean, there are some people on the left who will never accept a neoconservative like Bill Kristol or Max Boot, who have both been vigorous in denouncing Trump but have also got records and views and histories that people on the left don’t like. I think it’s kind of foolish to refuse allies when we all know how closely divided this country is. I think it’s foolish, and if you can’t accept an apology even if it’s somewhat opportunistic and meretricious, then there’s no incentive to apologize and we’re all going to just be dug into our positions. I hate what Joe Walsh said and I don’t particularly care about his candidacy because I think it already seems to be coming to an early end.
George Packer: But I think in principle, you don’t dig up every last old tweet in order to refuse to sully yourself with the impurity of someone who now has come around, and sees things the right way. You should accept it and even welcome it. What do you think?
Preet Bharara: What do I think? I ask the questions.
George Packer: Oh, you sound like a journalist now.
Preet Bharara: I tend to have your view, and I tweeted over the weekend about this because I’m also struggling with it. And sort of how you think about diplomacy. There are principles and there is idealism, but then there’s also the goal. I agree with what you said earlier, which is a second Trump term is disastrous for the country. I think that the most important public service anyone can engage in, democrat, republican, independent, college student, nurse, you name it, whoever you are. When you say, “How can I help the country?” Is to do whatever is appropriate and righteous and helpful to making sure that doesn’t happen.
Preet Bharara: But then I also take into account people who say further, “Look, this is a little bit what got us into this mess in the first place.” If you embrace someone like Joe Walsh, I’m not saying I fully agree with this, because you have to make a decision. But I respect the view of people who say, “Look, Joe Walsh is this odious person,” they believe based on things he’s said. As recently as five minutes ago, by the way, this is not…
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: … a guy who was a senator in the ’60s.
George Packer: This is why I’m not going to the mat for Joe Walsh.
Preet Bharara: Yeah, and you say, “Look, now we kind of welcome him.” And there are also degrees of welcoming, and you cheer him on because he’s going to shave a point off of Trump’s numbers. Then what have you created along the way there? And it’s a little bit of what I think happened when people accepted Palin. And if you’re going to start accepting members of the circus into this thing, when your ultimate goal is to have something better than the circus in the future, just be careful of the path that you are creating.
George Packer: Well, Palin, I don’t know quite what you mean by accepted Palin. To me, she was John the Baptist for Donald Trump. I mean, she was the early warning indicator of what right wing populism was producing in the Republican Party. And now she has been fully outdone by the president, but she was the first sign of it. I mean, what you say is true, and yet I have a fear that democrats and progressives have a talent for hunting out heresies and demanding purification that can be self destructive. And if next year the democratic primary turns into a heresy hunt, and a campaign of party purification, there’s only one person in the country that that’s going to help.
Preet Bharara: I agree with all of that. There are categories of people, right? You can have a purity test with respect to Joe Biden, which is very different from talking about Joe Walsh.
George Packer: Joe Walsh, absolutely.
Preet Bharara: Or, even someone like Kamala Harris, who spent a lot of formative years being a prosecutor just like I did.
George Packer: I have a friend who’s 29 and who says, “No one in my generation will vote for her because she was a prosecutor.” I don’t think it’s accurate, but it’s also-
Preet Bharara: Yeah. Well, I think that’s silly. It offends me.
George Packer: That’s why I’m saying it.
Preet Bharara: Yeah.
George Packer: Just to get… That is the way a fair number of younger people might see some of the democratic candidates. I think it’s folly, but it’s a reality that has to be addressed and argued against, argued against in the way you’ve been saying.
Preet Bharara: Right.
George Packer: Because otherwise, there is only one victor of that struggle.
Preet Bharara: Have you heard the news about General Mattis’ new book?
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: And his interviews? Do you-
George Packer: Doesn’t sound all that shocking to me. I could’ve predicted it.
Preet Bharara: Well, I think he’s said things like, “I think there’s a period of time during which I should be quiet, but that doesn’t last forever.” Do you think people like General Mattis should have said more, should have had noisier exits?
George Packer: Absolutely. I’ve been really disappointed in some of the good members of the Trump administration who left early, who did it for the country and then went back to lucrative private sector jobs and said nothing. Because what did they owe to the president that was more important than what they owe to the country? What they owe to the country is for us to know what goes on, what it’s like. For us not to have to dig it out one little bit at a time through investigative journalism or through congressional hearing. But to actually hear it from people who were there because they care about the country. And for them to think that there’s some kind of higher loyalty or higher dignity in silence, to me is, it’s actually unpatriotic.
Preet Bharara: How do you think about patriotism and what it means?
George Packer: First of all, patriotism to me is not nationalism. Nationalism is aggressive. It requires a victim, it means we’re better than you and we’re going to kick your butt, and it means my country right or wrong. Patriotism is the right to criticize your country. It is a critical view of one’s own country. It is a sense of reckoning honestly with who one is, who we are, but it is love. If there isn’t love, then it’s not patriotism. There has to be some basic attachment, like an inability in some way to live without it. And to me, the best analogy is the family.
George Packer: We are more critical of our own family members than we’ll allow anyone else to be, but we also, when faced with some outside adversary, will circle the wagons. We will let them in when they have nowhere else to go, and we’ll love them till the end no matter what. And I think that’s the best analogy for patriotism that I can come up with. It has to mean love, but also the right to call them a son of a bitch.
Preet Bharara: But no one else can.
George Packer: No, no. I mean, when you’re abroad, you don’t really want to hear people trashing your country. But look, when you’re at home-
Preet Bharara: That’s one of the most amazing things, when you travel abroad, it’s in some ways the time you feel most patriotic and protective of your country. And then when you return also…
George Packer: Yeah.
Preet Bharara: … you think how great your country is.
George Packer: Yeah, yeah. I’ve spent quite a bit of time overseas, and it’s been great and widening and important. But it always told me I was an American. For better or worse, that was the basic lesson. This is what made me and shaped me, and I’ll never be able to escape it.
Preet Bharara: George Packer, you are a joy to read and an equal joy to talk to. Thanks for being on the show. Everyone, please go get your copy of George Packer‘s Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Thank you.
George Packer: It’s been great being with you again, Preet.
Preet Bharara: The conversation continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, I talk with George Packer about the state of conservative ideology and the dangerous trap of rigid progressive identity. To get the Stay Tuned bonus and the exclusive weekly CAFE Insider podcast, go to CAFE.com/Insider.
Justin Herdman: He is charged with one count of making threats using a facility of interstate commerce.
Preet Bharara: So I want to end the show by talking about something that has been generally on people’s minds given some of the shootings that have happened recently, and what seems to be an increase in hatred and white nationalism in the country. And there are some people who are concerned it’s on the uptick, and there are some people who are also concerned that not enough is being done about it, that not enough is being said about it, that the laws aren’t keeping up with the times. In that context, I wanted to mention something that got some attention, but I don’t think enough.
Preet Bharara: Last week, on August 29th, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio brought federal charges against a man named James Reardon, who is a 20 year old white nationalist. According to court papers, Reardon had plotted to attack a local Jewish community center. He had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, and made all sorts of statements about the use of violence against people of the Jewish community.
Preet Bharara: In the course of the investigation, agents found guns, ammunition, and armor in his home. And the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged this would be domestic terrorist. James Reardon, of course, is presumed innocent, and his case will unfold in court. But the fact that you have an office taking this seriously I think is a good thing. Just as compelling to me though, and I felt this way as U.S. attorney, that it was not just enough in some instances to bring the case. But where appropriate, to also talk about the thing, talk about the evil that you’re trying to eliminate and you’re trying to deter. And in this instance, the sitting U.S. attorney Justin Herdman made somewhat extended remarks in addition to announcing the charges last week.
Preet Bharara: They’ve gotten a bit of praise, and that’s for a good reason. U.S. attorney Herdman said this, “Now let me speak generally to those who are advocates for white supremacy or white nationalism. I am talking directly to you. The constitution protects your right to speak, your right to think, and your right to believe. If you want to waste the blessings of liberty by going down a path of hatred and failed ideologies, that is your choice. Democracy allows you to test those ideas in the public forum. If you want to submit your beliefs to the American people and get their reaction, please be my guest. Keep this in mind though. Thousands and thousands of young Americans already voted with their lives to ensure that this same message of intolerance, death, and destruction would not prevail.
Preet Bharara: You can count their ballots by visiting any American cemetery in North Africa, Italy, France, or Belgium, and tallying the white headstones. You can also recite the many names of civil rights advocates who bled and died in opposing supporters of those same ideologies of hatred. Their voices may be distant, but they can still be heard.”
Justin Herdman: What you don’t have, though, is the right to take out your frustration at failure in the political arena by resorting to violence. You don’t have any right to threaten the lives and wellbeing of our neighbors. They have an absolute God given and inalienable right to live peacefully, to worship as they please, to be free from fear that they may become a target simply because of the color of their skin, the country of their birth, or the form of their prayer.
Preet Bharara: The U.S. attorney went on to say, quote, “Threatening to kill Jewish people, gunning down innocent Latinos on a weekend shopping trip, planning and plotting to perpetrate murders in the name of a nonsense racial theory, sitting to pray with God fearing people who you execute moments later. Those actions don’t make you soldiers, they make you criminals. Law enforcement doesn’t go to war with cowards who break the law. We arrest them and send them to prison.” I applaud the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio for its commitment to combating white nationalism, and I especially commend the U.S. attorney, whose morally clear voice and obvious dedication to the issue is something that is welcome words I think to all of our ears, especially at times like this.
Preet Bharara: Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, George Packer. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can tweet them to me at PreetBharara with the hashtag ask Preet. Or, you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. Or, you can send an email to StayTuned@CAFE.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Aaron Dalton, and the CAFE team is Carla Pierini, Julia Doyle, Calvin Lord, David Kurlander, Vinay Basti, and Geoff Isenman. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.
Preet Bharara: Stay Tuned is supported by Quartz. Quartz provides coverage of the global economy with topics and questions of importance to today’s business professionals. There is no shortage of news today, but what should you be paying attention to? That’s where Quartz comes in. With a Quartz membership, you’ll be part of a community for the new generation of global business leaders, and get access to members only articles like their deep dive on the evolution of the micro-influencer economy.
Preet Bharara: To get 25% off your first year membership, go to QZ.com, click become a member, and enter my code Preet at checkout. That’s QZ.com, click become a member, enter code Preet for 25% off your first year of membership. Hey, Stay Tuned listeners. This fall, Stay Tuned is going back on the road. Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Head to CAFE.com/Tour now for tickets. That’s CAFE.com/Tour. Hope to see you there.
