Scenes from an Allen Drury novel
Dr. Ford was a credible and sympathetic witness. She was clearly terrified. She clearly would have preferred to avoid the nightmare she has lived in the past weeks, and it clearly has taken its toll on her personally and psychologically. As I listened to her testimony it was very hard for me not to believe that she was telling the truth as she remembers it. And there can be no doubt that she showed a great deal of courage this morning.
Dr. Ford is a psychologist. I am not. But I do know that eyewitnesses are not the gold standard for the giving of evidence especially when it comes to highly traumatic events and especially concerning things which happened 26 years ago when both parties to this incident were high school kids. As I said, I have no doubt that Dr. Ford told the truth as she remembers it. But it should be noted that while they have not been subpoenaed to testify the two other people Dr. Ford says were in the room when the incident supposedly occurred, have stated under oath that it never happened.
Did they perjure themselves? I don't know. But it seems that there were four people in that room and three of them deny Dr. Ford's allegations. Of course, that's hardly definitive, since if they said anything else they would be publicly admitting to being involved in a crime, even if it did happen long ago and prosecution was no longer a possibility. But the ineptitude with which the Senate majority and the White House have handled this affair has meant that not only have those with the most experience and best resources for investigating the facts, the FBI, not been involved despite the fact that by all precedent they should have been and even though the Democrats and today even Judge Kavanaugh today favored it. Few Americans know that Judge Kavanaugh's story is collaborated by the two other men Dr. Ford says were present. The fact that the others present in the room according to Dr. Ford's account were not themselves called to testify before the Judiciary Committee and before the American people is unfair both to Dr. Ford and to Judge Kavanaugh. After all, how many of those saw the hearings today even know that the others allegedly in the room support his statement that the events Dr. Ford described never happened in their presence?
This whole affair makes me want to take a shower. I wish it were as simple as letting Brett Kavanaugh go back to being a judge and the White House submitting a new nomination. But it's not. In this highly charged and highly partisan atmosphere, I have little doubt that if Judge Kavanaugh is not confirmed and someone else nominated in his place, if that someone is male somebody is going to come forward to allege sexual misconduct on his part. As I said in my last post, this isn't a question of whether "women" voluntarily submit themselves to the kind of hell Dr. Ford has been through just to make a partisan point. It's a question of whether at a time at which so many fanatics of both genders with few scruples and a keen awareness of the stakes involved are running around on both sides, a population the size of the United States would not likely yield at least a few willing to "take one for the team" if it meant safeguarding Roe v. Wade and the other decisions the left fears could be imperiled if the originalist position gains a clear majority on the Court.
I hope I'm wrong if things go down that road. But I fear that I'm not.
Beyond that, Dr. Ford was not the only witness today. Judge Kavanaugh, too, was an effective witness. I am less amused than disgusted by those on the left who have cited his emotional testimony as evidence that he lacks a judicial temperament. As he himself stated in his testimony, the accusations against him have repercussions for his personal life that are irreversible and unavoidable. Dr. Ford is not the only one whose personal life has been disrupted by these charges. As Judge Kavanaugh said this afternoon, because of these charges whatever else may or may not happen he may never teach again. He may never coach again. His good name has been sullied in just as permanent and just as destructive a way whether or not he deserves it. Hi's wife and daughters have been made to suffer their own trauma, and they certainly do not deserve it. Yet their suffering will continue. The damage done to the Kavanaugh family is devastating and irreversible no matter what the truth is in this matter, and Brett Kavanaugh's reputation has taken a blow from which it will never recover.
How the hell do his critics expect him to react to the ordeal- especially if he is innocent, but even if he is not?
Judge Kavanaugh's emotion added to his credibility. I've mentioned previously Donald Trump's habit of making himself look guilty whether he is or not by his habitual lack of transparency, confrontational response to accusations or even criticism, and instinctive obstructionism and stonewalling. Whether or not there is anything in his income tax returns he wants to hide, he feeds the suspicion that there might be by refusing to release them. Whether or not he personally has anything to hide from the Mueller probe, he makes it appear that he very well might have something to hide by trying to discredit the investigation rather than cooperating with it in an effort to clear his name.
Just as Donald Trump has the unfortunate habit of acting like a guilty man and then being outraged when people suspect that he might, in fact, be guilty, today Brett Kavanaugh acted like an innocent man. Far from displaying a lack of judicial temperament, he acted precisely as any decent man with a shred of decency whose daughters have had to hear their father and whose wife has had to hear her husband falsely portrayed as a sexual predator before the entire world would react. He was outraged. He was furious. There will doubtless be sanctimonious Democrats who will also be outraged by my saying this, but he acted like someone who has been victimized. Whatever happened or didn't happen in the summer of 1982 happened between two fifteen-year-old kids. If there is any truth at all in Dr. Ford's account that in no way excuses much less justifies Brett Kavanaugh's behavior. But whatever the facts may be, today we saw a grown man with a wife and family who has built a successful and honorable career of service and has good reason to be proud of it. It went up in smoke today because he was being called to account for something a very different person, a drunken and randy fifteen-year-old, may or may not have done in a different life entirely.
Again, age is no excuse. But it is, as they say at West Point, a reason. Even if Dr. Ford's accusation is accurate in every detail despite the trauma she evidenced having endured when she testified this morning and the passage of the years, the story of Brett Kavanaugh would still be a tragedy.
As it happens, I was exactly the age Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey were back then the summer when I, a politically obsessed kid between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, read Allen Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Senate confirmation process, Advise and Consent. It was the first in a series of novels involving many of the same characters written by that rarest of birds, a conservative journalist. It was a flawed series which at some points strained credibility and more than once went off the deep end in portraying Washington and the nation as Drury saw them. But especially this, the first in the series, was nevertheless a tale well told, and well worth reading.
The characters were vivid, believable, and relatable. With a handful of exceptions- far-left Sen. Fred Van Ackerman being one and network commentator Frankly Unctuous another- the characters on both sides of the ideological divide were portrayed as fundamentally decent, patriotic men who worked collegially in a way which, alas, belongs to a bygone era, as much friends and co-workers as rivals and certainly not as enemies. Majority Leader Robert Munson and his less prominent counterpart, Minority Leader Warren Strickland, both lead Senate caucuses full of (mostly) decent and honorable people, their characters well-drawn and their motivations, for the most part, sincere.
Yet in many ways, Advise and Consent is a tragedy. The novel concerns the nomination of Robert Leffingwell to be secretary of state. Leffingwell, a distinguished and well-qualified though extremely liberal gentleman, had briefly been a member of a Communist cell at the University of Chicago and perjures himself during the confirmation hearings when that comes to light. Drury portrays this as a moment of weakness on the part of an otherwise honorable man who makes a bad decision essentially because he wants the job so much.
Leffingwell is a recurring figure in the subsequent novels, during the writing of which Drury himself grew from a somewhat curmudgeonly conservative into something of an extremist like the villainous Sen. Van Ackerman, only on the opposite side of the spectrum. Leffingwell is always portrayed sympathetically, and ultimately becomes a hero, nominated once again to be secretary of state by the very man responsible for his defeat in Advise and Consent.
One of the book's most memorable characters is Sen. Seab Cooley of South Carolina, an opponent of the Leffingwell nomination who, though basically good-hearted, is a hidebound Southerner of not entirely enlightened racial attitudes becomes involved tangentially in a scheme to blackmail a senator into voting against Leffingwell. That senator commits suicide, and Cooley is plunged into honorable remorse. Even those whom events place in the worst conceivable light are only rarely portrayed as irredeemable villains, and throughout the novel runs the acknowledgment that honorable men sometimes do dishonorable things,
This is the age of the Fred Van Ackermans or at best of the Seab Cooleys, those on the ideological fringes whose voices are shrill and whose view of the world is not only basically black and white but with few shades of gray. As I sat with (Democratic) neighbors watching Dr. Ford's testimony this morning, I was well aware that they saw Judge Kavanaugh as the devil incarnate. Similarly, the vitriol that has been poured on Dr. Ford has been equally intemperate.
In my post this morning, I said that there are no good guys or bad guys here. I'm left even more strongly with that impression tonight. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh would have made a very good political novel, though one set in a meaner, more simplistic, coarser and less civilized age than the late Fifties and early Sixties of the Drury novels. The real-life Bob Munsons and Warren Stricklands and Lafe Smiths and Stanley Dantas and Orrin Knoxes and Harley Hudsons have disappeared and been replaced by less moderate men, rarely as "ripe" as Fred Van Ackerman but often with equally simplistic and ideologically constipated worldviews no matter on which side of the aisle they sit. Friendships and a degree of collegiality remain, but ours is a time in which it's harder than it used to be for opponents not to become in some sense enemies.
This is the age of Donald Trump- yes, and of Barack Obama, who also was not above dividing us in order to conquer.
We have watched this drama unfold more or less divided between those who see Christine Blasey Ford and the others who have made charges about Brett Kavanaugh as the victims and Kavanaugh himself as a monster and those who see Kavanaugh as the victim and the accusers as ideologically-driven harpies. For a variety of reasons I won't get into here for reasons of space, the other two women who have come forward are considerably less credible than Dr. Ford and their accusations in and of themselves probably would not have created the controversy hers did.
They should have testified anyway so that the American people could see that for themselves, and it is a disservice to Judge Kavanaugh that they have not. Yes, the committee has interviewed them and has been apprised of their accounts. But the public only knows the charges, and Judge Kavanaugh has been denied the opportunity to answer them before the public.
Donald Trump is not a very smart man, and he's shown it yet again in the way the Kavanaugh nomination is being handled.
But I didn't hear any monsters testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. I heard a sincere and obviously traumatized woman to whom something terrible happened 26 years ago. And I saw a grown man with a family and a distinguished record of service called to account for the alleged actions of a drunken, horny teenager who in any case was a different person than he is today.
I expect the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote tomorrow- prematurely- to recommend Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation. I do not know where events will take us from there.
But it will not be to a place where any reasonable person will have cause to rejoice.
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