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Putin, America, and the Politics of Being

          The Trump administration is trying to coerce Ukraine into accepting a peace settlement with Russia even though Russia may not want peace. The deal would basically have Ukraine capitulate to Putin. This reminds me of the books The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) by Timothy Snyder and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) by Masha Gessen. Both books were written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our 2020 and 2024 elections, but the two books complement each other in their portraits of Putin and Russia. They present pictures that aid in understanding the present Ukraine situation and illuminate for me aspects of our own politics. Reading them did not lead to a full-blown depression, but it did not improve my mood.

          Putin’s obsession with Ukraine is longstanding. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922, was a federation of national republics that included Ukraine. However, during the 1970s and 1980s every Soviet Republic increasingly felt as though they were being exploited by some other republic. In March 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the USSR, organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as a single entity. Voters in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor of unity, but six republics boycotted the vote. A few weeks later, Georgia held its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR. Two months later, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which had been part of Russia. The latter led to a destructive war with Russia. (In August 1991, President George H.W. Bush went to Kyiv and urged Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union, saying “Freedom is not the same as independence.”) More than 90% of the Ukrainians voted for independence.       A coup to remove Gorbachev failed, but in the aftermath, Gorbachev resigned and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, became increasingly popular. He was soon head of the Soviet Union and removed Russia from the USSR ending the federation. Putin followed him as president of Russia in 1999. After a brief hiatus (2008-2012), Putin has been elected president ever since.

          Putin proclaims religious, ethnic, and near mythical connections between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder says Putin sees Ukraine as “an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body” and that Putin has said that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people.” The independent Ukraine that came into being in 1991 may have been tolerable to Putin as long as it remained receptive to Russia’s desires and provided it with oil, food and precious metals. Viktor Yanukovych was elected head of Ukraine in 2010 and, according to Snyder, began his term “by offering Russia essentially everything that Ukraine could give, including basing rights for the Russian navy on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.” At the time it was understood that this installation would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

          The Ukrainian population, however, increasingly looked not to Russia for guidance and inspiration but to the West. When Yanukovych canceled an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, pro-European demonstrations broke out in Ukraine. After several elections, the present government took power, and as we all know, this is not a Ukraine that takes orders from Moscow.

          The westward turn by Ukraine has been especially troubling for those who have “Mother Russia” feelings about Ukraine. While former Soviet satellite countries and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007, the EU had not extended into any territory that had been part of the original Soviet federation of 1922.

          This history and Putin’s viewpoints about Ukraine struck me as quintessentially Russian. The first time I read in Crime and Punishment about Raskolnikov’s kissing the soil at the crossroads, I tried to understand his semi-mystical feeling for Mother Russia. Snyder writes that Russian slavophiles believe “that Russia was endowed with a particular genius. Orthodox Christianity and popular mysticism, they maintained, expressed a depth of spirit unknown in the West. The slavophiles imagined that Russian history had begun with a Christian conversion in Kyiv a thousand years before.”

          But as I thought about these aspects of Russian culture, I wondered whether there were counterparts in American history. Putin apparently believes that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, and it is Russia’s destiny to include Ukraine. How much different is that from the nineteenth century American faith in “manifest destiny”? At the time, many felt that it was the express mission of Americans to push onward to the Pacific even though other peoples already lived there. Didn’t the use of the word “destiny” imply that this path was preordained by the Almighty? Putin and others believe that Russia is exceptional, distinct and more holy than other lands. And Americans? Of course, America is exceptional, and just below the surface of that notion is a kind of religious belief. Surely when Jesus returns, he will not go to Galilee, but instead will come to the holiest of holies, America. (That is, if he can navigate our immigration laws, for nothing in them would allow him to enter. He might be able to walk over the river, but what if a border wall keeps him out, and he is consigned to a squalid camp on the Mexican side?)

          Perhaps finding links between Mother Russia, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism is a stretch, but comparing some aspects of recent Russian and American political history is not.

(Concluded April 30)

Posted on by rjonakait

A Day for Presidents

Ulysses S. Grant liked to say that he knew two songs. One was “Yankee Doodle” and the other was not.

John Ganz in When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024) says that George H.W. “Bush was the representative of a class bred to govern, not to lead.”

Grover Cleveland vetoed more bills in his first term than all previous presidents combined. (Many, however, were private pension bills.)Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

Lincoln said about General Phil Sheridan, who had a distinctive body, that he was a “chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch, he can scratch them without stooping.”Scott W. Berg, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul (2023).

Warren Harding, when President, privately said that his vote for World War I was a mistake. Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022).

Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s summarizes President Ronald Reagan as being fueled by anticommunism, which gave him “a preference for more-open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs and a stingier social net. Anticommunism mattered more to him than democracy or small government. He wanted a sharp increase in military spending, a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union, and more extensive aid to right-wing illiberal regimes in place in South and Central America and Southern Africa.”

Hemmer also reports that Reagan’s 1980 presidential race was the first with a partisan gender gap.

Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) reminded me that Reagan, in response to Black Panthers, said there is no reason why anyone should carry a loaded gun on the streets.

Joshua L. Powell writes in Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed, and Paranoia within the Most Powerful Political Group in America (2020) that gun owners voted for George W. Bush by 25 points over Al Gore.

Al Gore is younger than Donald Trump.

Ted Widmer in Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington (2020) refers to a historian who said that to discuss Millard Fillmore was to overrate him.

One modern president who was religious believed strongly in the separation of church and state. Jonathan Alter writes in His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (2020) that when he was the Georgia governor, Carter canceled a weekly worship service for government employees because it violated separation of church and state. President Carter did not allow religious sermons in the White House because of separation of church and state.

Jill Lepore states in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) that Lyndon Johnson had broad support among evangelicals in 1964.

Something that would not happen today: Doris Kearns Goodwin reports in An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s that she thought that she would lose her position as a White House Fellow in 1967 because she had co-authored a piece in The New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.”

Jonathan Alter maintains that Jimmy Carter had a photographic memory for names, which reminded me of a story a former colleague told me. Ed grew up in a small Arkansas town where his parents had a modest, but successful, business. When Bill Clinton ran for state attorney general, Ed’s parents attended a fundraiser in their hometown for the candidate. Eight years later, when Clinton was out of office between his non-consecutive gubernatorial terms, Ed’s parents were in Washington, D.C. They spotted Clinton on the opposite sidewalk. They debated whether they should go up to him because of their one meeting. Before they had made a decision, Clinton strode across the Georgetown street, stuck out his hand, and greeted Ed’s parents by their first and last names.

This is not the first time we have had an administration with strange opinions about vaccinations. Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) states that Dwight Eisenhower and his Health Secretary said that the free distribution of the polio vaccine was socialized medicine.

According to Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), Trump in 2016 did best in counties with a public health crisis, especially where the suicide rate and opioid use was high.

Posted on by rjonakait

Bill Cosby is Free. So is Oliver North.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s conviction for sexual assault. After three years in prison, he was released.

A fundamental right, the protection against self-incrimination, was at the heart of the court’s decision. Popular culture has made us aware of this constitutional provision. The Miranda warnings are based on it. From an earlier era, many remember witnesses at congressional hearings droning that they would not answer questions because of the possibility of self-incrimination. Fictional and real trials teach that criminal defendants cannot be forced to take the stand in their criminal trials because of their rights against self-incrimination.

 However, if witnesses are given immunity against prosecution, they can be forced to testify in criminal trials even if their testimony implicates them in crimes. This is because immunity is a governmental promise that the witness will not be prosecuted or that their forced testimony will not be used against them in a criminal prosecution. If this promise is followed, the testimony cannot legally incriminate the witness, and the prosecution can force the witness to testify.

Civil cases are different. They are not prosecutions, and the parties can be forced to testify. The usual practice is for the defendant in a civil case to take the deposition of the plaintiff and often to call the plaintiff to testify at trial. The plaintiff has the same right to have the defendant testify at a deposition or trial. Even though private parties are the litigants, such testimony is forced by the government because it is the court that orders the testimony. The required testimony can be enforced by contempt sanctions carried out by government officials.

Normally a civil proceeding does not raise self-incrimination problems because the civil case raises no criminal issues. However, a problem arises when a civil case potentially intertwines with a criminal prosecution. That was the Bill Cosby situation. He was sued civilly for a sexual assault that could lead to criminal charges. Under accepted self-incrimination law, he could be forced to testify in the civil case, but he had the right to refuse to answer any question that might incriminate him in a criminal prosecution. The state prosecutor who had jurisdiction over the potential criminal matter stated that he would not prosecute Cosby for the sexual assault. With that promise of immunity, Cosby did not have a self-incrimination right to assert in the criminal case, and he testified.

Years later, a new prosecutor, who, if memory serves, campaigned promising a Cosby prosecution, disregarded the former prosecutor’s decision and criminally charged Cosby with the sexual assault Moreover, he used Cosby’s damaging statements from the civil proceeding in the criminal trial. At the time, I and many others thought that this was a due process violation, and now the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has agreed.

Cosby’s release,of course, brought reactions about sexual violence, black lives matter, and unjust convictions (so far I have not seen anyone trying to tie this outcome into defunding the police).  His release for me, however, dredged up memories of Oliver North, a frequent commentator on conservative news outlets. North was a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. This is not the time to rehash those scandals, but I urge all to read about it. It was a dangerous time for the country as members of the Reagan administration worked to subvert the Constitution by secretly selling arms to Iran, our supposed enemy, and using the proceeds to fund groups fighting in Nicaragua, violating a congressional mandate. In the Iran-Contra aftermath, many high officials were indicted, including North, who was convicted of several felonies. He appealed, and something I have not heard North mention on his many television appearances on Fox and elsewhere, his appeal was supported by the ACLU.

Before North’s trial, he was called to testify by a joint congressional committee in a televised hearing. In order to compel his testimony, the Committee gave him immunity. Congress, the legislative branch of government, does not have the authority to prevent prosecutions, which are done by the executive branch. Instead, as Supreme Court cases had made clear, a grant of congressional immunity, while not preventing a prosecution, does prevent a prosecutor from using the compelled testimony or anything derived from that testimony. However, a prosecution that did not rely on the immunized testimony was permissible. Hoping to bring a criminal prosecution against North and to satisfy the self-incrimination clause, the prosecutors in the North case insulated themselves from North’s compelled testimony. They did not watch North’s congressional testimony, did not read a transcript, and refrained from being exposed to the news outlets reporting it. They segregated the evidence they had gathered before the testimony to show that this evidence was not influenced by the congressional hearing.

None of the congressional testimony was used at trial and nothing at the trial revealed that the prosecutors were in any way influenced by it. Even so, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, then known as one of the most conservative federal courts, reversed the conviction. The court concluded that witnesses at the trial may somehow have been affected by the televised public proceedings, even though there was not a scintilla of proof of such influence. This court standard, new at the time and (I don’t think) ever applied again, meant that there was no way for the prosecution to establish that North’s immunity would not be violated in a new trial. All charges against him were dismissed. The other Iran-Contra participants who had also been convicted but did not have their convictions reversed, were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

Oliver North did not spend one day in prison.