American Resistance

INTRODUCTION

A Word of Thanks to the Deep State

Ring the bells that still can ring.

—leonard cohen, “anthem”

I think there are few places in the world as misunderstood as Washington, DC.

You would think that given all the coverage Washington gets in the news, all the times it has been depicted in film, television, and novels, the world would better understand its nature.

But it suits many in our political classes and in the media, and among both our friends and rivals overseas, to depict Washington, and in particular the large part of Washington engaged in the business of the government of the United States, as a caricature.

Some of the descriptions are more or less benign and only mildly derisive. John F. Kennedy, for example, borrowed a line originally spoken by Senator Warren Magnuson (of Washington, the state), when he described the capital as a “city of southern efficiency and northern charm.” The humorist P. J. O’Rourke cut a little closer to the bone and to the tone of more mainstream characterizations when he said: “The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”

For most of my lifetime, however, I have listened and watched as politicians from both parties argued that their greatest qualification for assuming a leadership role in Washington was how anti-Washington or un-Washington they were. It was a strange message. Donald Trump ran for president by arguing that he had no Washington experience, was not part of the “Washington establishment.” He was far from the first to do so. In fact, since Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, the candidate best able to present themselves as a Washington outsider has won every single election but one. (And even then, in 1988 George H. W. Bush—son of a senator, a former member of Congress, party chief, CIA director, and vice president—tried to depict his opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, as a member of the eastern liberal “establishment.”)

Why? The simplest explanation is that public trust in government has plummeted over the past sixty-five years. According to the Pew national election study, in 1958, 75 percent of Americans said they trusted the government. In the most recent version of the same poll, in 2021 that number was 24 percent. That is quite a collapse. So we must ask to what degree trust in government has fallen because government has been failing the people, because of gridlock, or because it has been too partisan? And how much of its fall has been because attacking government as being the problem has been a staple of politics, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, since the 1980s?

In 1981 Ronald Reagan said that in the face of the economic crisis the country was confronting at that time, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Today, as low as the overall level of trust in government is nationwide, among members of the GOP it is much lower still. Only 9 percent of Republicans, or those leaning Republican, trust the government in Washington to do what is right compared to 36 percent of Democrats.

As much of that distrust as may be due to the hypocrisy, corruption, and incompetence of elected officials, a substantial amount of it has historically been directed at the “permanent government”—the bureaucracy. Again, politicians have run against that bureaucracy throughout America’s modern era. Kennedy denigrated Eisenhower as a paper-pusher, implying he was consumed by the business of the bureaucracy. Nixon characterized bureaucrats as the principal obstacle to change in Washington. More recently, Newt Gingrich reflected how those arguments have evolved when he said: “We are at a crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is proud, solid reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.”

Most recently, the animus of the anti-government crowd has been directed at something characterized as the “deep state.” The idea was that the bureaucracy was too large, too powerful, and that it did not answer to voters. The implication was that therefore it was a threat to democracy.

The idea of a “deep state” or something like it has been with us since the dawn of history. Even in the era of monarchs, the influence of courtiers or the clergy was watched suspiciously. In the days just after the American Revolution, rumors swirled about the influence of a secret society made up of Revolutionary War officers, known as the Society of the Cincinnati. Originally convened as a club to help preserve the fellowship these officers felt and to commemorate their contributions to the new country, critics worried about their influence. When it happened that the group met in Philadelphia at the same time as the Constitutional Convention, those suspicions rose. They were not diminished when the head of the society, George Washington, became the first president of the United States and other members, like Alexander Hamilton and the society’s founder Henry Knox, entered his cabinet.

Later in history, the idea of a deep state became associated with everything from a secret network of military officers and civilians who sought to advance the ideology of Kemal Ataturk within the post–World War I Turkish government, to post–World War II concerns of such a group pulling the strings within the US national security community.

The most recent incarnation of the term “deep state” dates back at least a decade before Trump. It flowed from an idea floated by a second-string academic to the Infowars show of right-wing cheerleader Alex Jones, and then on to a 2016 book called The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by a former congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren. Lofgren argued that he was, according to an NPR profile of him, not a conspiracy theorist. Instead, he made the case that “big institutions, inside and outside of government, are so entrenched it is hard to bring any real change. Political options are limited.” Whatever his rationale, the idea was a hit with the American right wing, and whereas there were “according to TV transcripts” only sixty-four mentions of the term on TV in 2016, by 2017 that number hit twenty-three hundred and doubled the following year. It was catnip to media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart and Trumpists who saw in it a potential scapegoat that supported the right-wing’s long-standing argument that government is part of the problem.

The popularity of such ideas—and there are many parallel but similar conspiracy theories, from those that warn of the influence of the Illuminati to those that assert the all-powerful nature of Freemasons or the world Jewish conspiracy—is due to the fact that they neatly explain to many in the public why they feel powerless. Alternatively, or in addition, such theories provide a useful target at which the frustrated may direct their anger. And invariably the conspiracy theories, as in the case of the deep state, are not just casual figments of overheated imaginations, but opportunities for mischief and more by people who use them to help gain power for themselves.

The general public in the United States has not been helped in discerning the real nature of their government in Washington from how it has been characterized by opportunistic politicians or the spinners of conspiracy theories. Nor has it been aided by the recent evolution of the media by which most Americans learn of what is going on in Washington. Once the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, broadcasters no longer had to present opposing sides of important public issues. This was one among several factors that led to the growth of a new phenomenon: media franchises that catered to specific political groups with news and opinion designed to reinforce rather than simply report the facts, or challenge or broaden the views of the listeners.

From the growing popularity of radio shows like that of Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh, to the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s and Roger Ailes’s Fox News in 1996, to the emergence of internet platforms built around the same premise (like Breitbart), the American population increasingly came to live in media bubbles. (More progressive outlets also emerged during this period, as well.) They listened to the news that described the world as they believed it was and featured analyses that supported their worldview.

The rise of these new media forms also contributed to deepening political polarization in the United States. This has been compounded by the fact that during the past forty years, the gap between America’s haves and have-nots has grown. There are multiple metrics that show this. The incomes of the top one percent grew five times as fast as the incomes of the bottom 90 percent. According to a paper published by a Harvard researcher named Robert Manduca, whereas “in 1980 only about 12 percent of the population lived in places that were especially rich or especially poor, by 2013, it was over 30 percent.” The ratio of income in the 90th percentile of income to that at the 10th percentile has grown from 9.1 in 1980 to 12.6 in 2018. Ninety percent of the gains following the Great Recession of 2008–2009 went to the top 10 percent of individuals.

At the same time as these gains were taking place, the role of money in politics was changing. With the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010, it was determined that money in politics could not be regulated as before, thus enabling the richest Americans and big corporations to spend far more (because they had far more) on political campaigns than average Americans. This bought influence that in exchange produced changes in the tax code and corporate regulations that enabled those with the most to carve out an even bigger piece of the economic pie, and thus gain more power. As far as representative democracy was concerned, it was a vicious cycle. (“Less government” is a slogan that often meant “more for me” for those who were bankrolling its popularization.)

As money played an ever greater role in American politics, perceptions of corruption grew. If you combine that with a general skepticism about Washington; a political movement focused on making the government the villain; a special focus of attacks on a part of the government that was, at least in theory, beyond the reach of voters; growing polarization; growing inequality; and an acute sense that DC was not working for all the people equally, then the poll numbers about plummeting trust in our institutions make sense. (The effort by the party that was most associated with the interests of the top one percent to redirect the anger of the people away from their super-empowered benefactors to the bureaucracy also makes perfect sense.)

But there is a problem with all of this.

The view I have developed over nearly forty years of working in and around Washington, despite my acute familiarity with the flaws of our system, is very much at odds with the negativity you read in op-ed columns, or hear from certain politicians in their stump speeches.

I warn you in advance. Some people may find this point, which happens to be the central thrust of this book, triggering. But take a deep breath and hear me out. Not only are there good people in Washington, but most of the people who work in the US government are actually fundamentally good, well intentioned, and trying to make a positive difference for America.

Good People Doing Good Work

To begin with, greater Washington, DC, by definition as home to the federal government, the largest organization in the world, has a higher percentage of residents who have devoted their lives to public service than anywhere else in the world. Again, I am not excusing the behavior of the corrupt and the odious in the system. Instead, I am suggesting that the character of the community in which the business of our nation takes place, of the government, and of the people within it is quite different from that which current conventional wisdom suggests.

My perspective is, of course, shaped in part by my own experience.

Growing up, my exposure to the world of the US government was limited to lively dinner table conversations in our suburban New Jersey home. I think we made one trip to DC when I was a kid. My parents took us to the Capitol, to the office of a senator from New Jersey, to the FBI building, and to the US Mint. We had dinner in a smoky Washington steak house called Blackie’s and I remember spending the entire night, age ten or so, huddled over the tickertape machine by the front entrance, amazed there was a device that could reveal news as it happened.

Other than the confident predictions of a long-gone aunt whom I believed would surely be America’s first Jewish president, that was the totality of my exposure to the nation’s capital, or what went on there, until I began to look for a job following a brief, undistinguished stint at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

On the job board in that school’s career placement office was an index card indicating that a young congressman from Brooklyn named Stephen J. Solarz was looking for a press secretary. While I had no experience, the Columbia credential was apparently a good one. I had founded and run the student television station while I was an undergraduate, and I had co-written a slim textbook on the European community (admittedly, my co-author was my mother). Due to all these factors—and perhaps also a result of the fact that I had removed the job card from the board and taken it with me so there would be no one else who could apply for the position—I got the job. My first in the US government, my first in the world of Washington, DC, and politics.

From my first days in that very first job, I was struck by the qualities of people in Washington you do not much hear or read about. Virtually everyone in the office in which I worked was really deeply interested in public policy, in making life better for average people. But it was more than that. The congressman for whom I worked, Steve Solarz, was deeply interested in foreign policy and, as it turned out, I was too. He took pains to teach me a great deal. I learned by writing op-eds and bits of speeches for him, and he generously played the role of professor in correcting and reshaping and improving my work.

The chief of staff in his office was a man named Michael Lewan. Mike was generous with his time and a mentor to the generally young staff (and to be fair, he was not much older than most of us). My direct boss was a woman named Mary Jane Burt. I remember that when I would go to Washington to visit the DC office, she would let me sleep on her couch; and one or two times I also was invited to stay with the Solarz family. There was a sense of welcoming and teamwork that, to be honest, I have felt in many if not all of my Washington jobs.

Most of the time, to my chagrin, my work was not on Capitol Hill, which I found very glamorous, but instead was in the Brooklyn field office of the congressman. There, most of the operation was devoted to constituent service. We sat in one big room at two rows of desks, so I could hear all the calls. One day, at the desk immediately behind mine, one of the staff, a much older guy, answered the phone and I heard him say, very seriously, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Now, now, ma’am, please calm down and tell me what is wrong.” And there was silence and periodically he would offer a sound of listening and taking it in: “Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm. Yes, ma’am.”

After about ten minutes of listening, he said: “Well, you know, ma’am, I really think this is a police matter. If you like, I can connect you to the precinct.” He was comforting in his tone. Soon after, he hung up. I asked what the call was about and he said that it was an old woman who sometimes called. She was mostly lonely and wanted someone to talk to. This time the call was about a plate of cream cheese that had gone missing from her refrigerator. I looked at him and he offered a small smile. But it was compassionate. He was not making fun of her. He was just offering her a willing ear when she needed one.

That does not sound very dramatic, I know. But there was an aspect to that moment and that call that cut to the essence of much of what I saw at many different levels during the past four decades, including the last thirty years of almost constant involvement in Washington at a fairly high level.

Time and time again during my years in Washington, I have been struck by the quality of the people with whom I worked. Whether they were top officials—presidents and cabinet members—or young bureaucrats or military officers or diplomats just starting out, they were all actually making the choice to serve their country. Many could have made much more money had they chosen a different career path.

In my particular field of work, which thanks in large part to the inspiration and guidance of Steve Solarz became international relations and national security, there was for most of my time in Washington a real effort to set aside partisan differences. Among the policy community with whom I dealt, most of the people I worked with were genuinely interested in advancing national interests.

Yes, Washington has its share of operators and sleazeballs. But in my nearly four decades of dealing with the place, they were in the minority. Yes, many in Washington were a bit too risk averse, a bit too conformist, too afraid to rock the boat—but there were exceptions to these rules as well. The place is a little too Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor for my taste. But there was from almost everyone I encountered in and around the US government almost all the time an essential quality that I have come to value a great deal. It is a commitment to service. Periodically it is obscured by ambition or ideological factors. But time and time again, in far more cases than otherwise, watch carefully enough and you will see it is there. What is more, it endures no matter which way the political winds are blowing.

We are fortunate that it does. Because if you want to build a resilient system, if you want to be sure that an organization, no matter how large or small, can survive whatever fate may have in store for it—although having clear organizing principles, rules, and institutional structure matters—in the end your strength, your ability to adapt, your ability to identify and correct errors, and your ability to grow all depend first and foremost on people, the human factor.

When I researched my first book on how Washington works at the top, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, my biggest takeaway was that while most analysts, academics, and commentators focused on “the three Ps”—politics, process, and policy—the crucial difference between successful and unsuccessful administrations was a fourth P—people. In the same way, it is the people who occupy the more than one million positions in the US government that ensure the American experiment survives from administration to administration, no matter who passes through the revolving door at the top.

The story of those people is often mundane. Many of them, even those at very senior levels of government, operate far from the public eye, doing work that might seem to people in the outside world arcane or even tedious. But it must be done in order to make the government work. And, periodically, events conspire to remind us how important that work is.

Heroes and Villains

Among the times that the value of official Washington becomes most clear is when our system of government is tested. Sometimes those tests come from without, from natural disasters or wars, civil unrest, or pandemics. Ironically, as we have recently learned, another time that we are reminded about what is best and most valuable within our system is when our government is abused or mismanaged or attacked from within.

It is at those moments, a period like we lived through during the eventful, often deeply disturbing years of the Trump administration, when we discover that far from being unaccountable, officials within our government reveal how seriously they take the idea that they serve the American people, how seriously they take their oath to the Constitution and the concept of duty. In so doing, through their actions they reveal a far different side to Washington than that which is typically offered up on the news, or snarked about on Twitter. It is not just a story that happens to conform more closely with my own personal experience of many years in Washington. It also offers insights into how our government really works, which is far different from what is written about in textbooks or taught in university classrooms.

Anyone who watched the January 6 Committee hearings or who followed their progress knows that there were many people in the Trump Administration who, though loyal to Trump at one time, ultimately came to recognize the threat posed by Trump. Some questioned the president’s actions from within. Some challenged them publicly as they happened by resigning. Some ultimately helped make the case against Trump for the committee by cooperating with investigators and telling the truth. Often taking a stand took a toll on their careers. Many faced—as did Trump’s own Vice President on January 6—grave threats to their lives from the extremists who formed the core of former president Trump’s base.

It became clear that for many, Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election was too outrageous for these public servants to endure. One by one, we listened as they bore witness. Some, like former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen; acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue; former White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Greg Jacob, top aide to Vice President Pence; and Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows were spotlighted by the committee. Others testified behind closed doors. But it cannot be denied that the strongest case against Trump and one of the greatest obstacles to any future political plans he may have, ultimately came from people within the administration. Indeed, it also must be acknowledged that the two Republicans who broke with their colleagues to participate on the committee, Representative Liz Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger, played an absolutely central role in ensuring that the crimes of the former president and those closest to him were revealed and that the process by which that was done was, in fact, bipartisan.

However you may assess the actions of these individuals at other points during their service to the Trump Administration, it cannot be denied that at a moment when former president Trump tried to claim an office to which he was no longer entitled, we were fortunate to have in and around our government people who in different ways stood up to protect our institutions and values.

That is both a remarkable thing and an encouraging one. But, vast as the Trump conspiracy was and as extensive as the efforts to stop him and call him out may have been, the story told by the January 6 Committee is just the tip of the iceberg. Similar stories of resistance occurred throughout the government and protected us from outcomes at home and around the world that were even more dire than what we actually experienced during the Trump years.

I have tried to tell some of those stories here in this book, stories of how an informal alliance of women and men working in agencies across the US government, some at the highest level, some several levels down, some well known, some obscure, some Republicans, some Democrats, some Independents, worked together to keep a dangerous, unhinged, ill-prepared president and his closest allies from doing irreparable damage to the United States, its people, our allies, and to the planet as a whole.

It is a story of preventing wars, crimes, needless deaths, and the undermining of US democracy.

It is not a simple story. Many very disturbing things happened along the way. And sometimes the people who did not do enough to stop one set of bad events from unfolding—or even contributed to deeply misguided or dangerous policies or actions—later stepped up and played a vital role to ensure even worse things did not subsequently happen.

As a result, it is a story of heroes and villains in which sometimes those who served the country in important ways let the country down in other ways. Each reader can make their own judgment about the overall quality of the service or the character of those whose stories are told here. But it should also be clear that sometimes what the news presents as black and white while it is happening is actually something else, and that partisanship is a distortionary lens through which to view complex issues and events. And it should also be clear that as bad as much of what occurred during the Trump years was, it could have been much, much worse.

In fact, I think in the end this book will reveal that during a period in which the threat to our democracy was greater than at any time since the Civil War, time after time it turns out it was those who some condemned as members of the (nonexistent) deep state that actually helped save the country… or at least did their best to protect it. It was their commitment to the Constitution and character that defeated, slowed, or diluted many of the most insidious and dangerous ideas of President Donald Trump and his small inner circle of loyalists.

It should be noted that some of those whose stories are featured in this book were actually political appointees, hand selected by the Trump administration. These included members of the cabinet, the sub-cabinet, and senior officials who despite being committed Republicans placed the interests of the country first—even when it triggered the Twitter bombs, behind-closed-door tantrums, and retaliation from Trump and the sharpshooters around him.

While my view of Washington, forty years after I first got that job with Steve Solarz, may not jibe with the partisan tropes or lazy Hollywood depictions, one of the reasons I am writing this book is because those views are not only deeply wrong, but they have been weaponized to attack the vital institutions of our government. Weakening those institutions is good news for billionaires and big companies who would like to set their own rules for doing business. And, as we have seen more recently, it serves the interests of wannabe autocrats who would like to gut the very idea of democracy. Also, as we saw during the Trump administration, framing career officials or others who have devoted much of their lives to government as part of some shadowy, untrustworthy secret club made it easier to justify firing them and replacing them with those who placed loyalty to the president ahead of loyalty to the Constitution or the country.