There is an undeniable mystique to the U.S. Presidency embedded in our collective cultural-psychological makeup. This is not lost even on me, sworn enemy of Presidents, Tsars, Kings, Emperor's, and - above all - principals. My involuntary fascination with Presidential history is a source of endless consternation and shame, similar to - though far more profound than - the consternation and shame of relapse.
My feelings towards several different President's exhibit an irrational and extreme variance, one which is at odds with my better judgment. The most pertinent and representative fact about this pantheon of tyrants is this: there has not been one President since at least the 19th century who was not morally reprehensible at a level beyond rationalization or forgiveness.
And yet I feel so differently about this President or that, all while keenly aware that they are all, each and every one, morally bankrupt and meticulously emptied of their former humanity.
Take the bloated, orange New Yorker cartoon who preceded Joe Biden . I sympathize with the rage and the loathing of the mainstream "Leftists," for once: he is uniquely impossible to like. It's not that he is morally 'worse' than any other President; that would be much too reductive an assessment. I don't think it has anything to do with morals per se; at least, if it does, it's the particulars, the style more than the substance.
It would be hard to argue that he is more immoral than Richard Nixon, for instance…
1. “Tricky” Dick Nixon & Objective Journalism
Richard Nixon, we have learned since his death, deliberately sabotaged peace talks in 1968 which without his intervention would have ended the war, by enticing the South Vietnamese to hold off on making a deal until after the election[1] with the promise that they would be rewarded with a more favourable settlement negotiated by an incoming Nixon administration.
That’s on example of his monumental immorality. There are certainly others. After being forced out of the White House in disgrace, Nixon beat his wife Pat to vent his anger. Severely - she sought medical attention. And not for the first time, either - another incident which has been discussed in at least one mainstream documentary followed an embarrassing electoral defeat. Again, the abuse was severe enough to require medical attention. In gut-punchingly spare, direct language, an inside source says of Mrs. Nixon's face: "there was damage."
"Tricky" Dick Nixon was not a good man.
And yet sometimes - in some regards, at least - I am in two minds about the man in a way I will never be about Donald Trump. This is the effect of that intoxicating, stultifying mystique of the office which the duller converts to the religion of State Power mistake for dignity. Sometimes I want to like him. God help me, sometimes I think I do. And whatever I do, I remain above all else intrigued.
This is where the difference between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon lies: for all his faults, and God knows they're cataclysmic, Richard Nixon is an engaging and complex figure. 'Complicated' was the word most consistently used to describe him, by close friends, colleagues, acquaintances and adversaries alike. Henry Kissinger believed him to be the most complicated human being he had ever met.
One aspect of Nixon I have always found uniquely intriguing and engaging is that he had no illusions about the kind of world politics is. Though he had a great respect for and faith in the power of government, his firmly held conviction was that politics, on the other hand, is an inherently and fundamentally immoral business and vocation. He therefore believed that, by choosing to embark on a political career, he committed himself to doing things he conceived of as immoral, in order to be successful politically and thereby have an opportunity to make a positive change in the world.
Here, at last, is something one can engage with. Needless to say, I find his premise unassailable, if one judges by the record, at any rate. Presidents of the United States, without exception, are responsible for the most profound moral violations as a matter of course.
This subject raises important questions for journalists about how they should approach their craft. Hunter S. Thompson took up these questions in his own inimitable style, reaching bold conclusions which much of the journalistic establishment found startling and difficult to accept. And more often than not, it was in relation to Nixon that his conclusions came most sharply into focus.
For the Nixon Presidency, there is no better epitaph than the one penned by Hunter:
HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND MAYBE HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.1
About how journalists should approach their craft, he said a great deal more. In defence of the scathing condemnation offered in that eulogy, he included the following caveat:
"These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum."
And similarly, in what may be the definitive statement of HST's journalistic ethics:
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
The extremity of his contempt and hatred for Nixon should serve as an example for us all. He saw and wrote about the man with the absolute vacuum of respect which is due to each and every other vile specimen to occupy the office from 1900 on.
And although I wouldn't hold up Hunter's scathing polemic as the ideal or standard for political journalism, journalists like Hunter serve an important purpose, and the end of the spectrum he occupied - alone amongst men of comparable talent - has a view all it's own, a perspective we would all profit from beholding on occasion, and especially when it comes to the American Presidency. And it is a view which is easily dismissed as the lunatic hyperbole of am inexcusably biased pamphleteer, but it still seems to me to demonstrate 20-20 vision:
“It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close...”2
2. Barack Obama: Uncle Tom Rains Impersonal, Robotic Death from the Sky
Born in 1991, I have seen Nixon only from a distance of many decades, which makes it hard for me to feel the kind of visceral enmity for him that Hunter S Thompson clearly felt. Closer to my heart, however, is the Obama administration and its legacy; and my feelings towards Barack Obama are every bit as bitter and alienated as Hunter felt towards Nixon.
The 2008 election and the campaign preceding it, and subsequently the 8 years of Obama's Presidency. were a source of the most profound disillusionment I have experienced or, for that matter, could imagine experiencing. Barack Obama did more than any other single person or organization to undermine, co-opt, or otherwise stamp out the spirit of liberalism, anti-militarism, and anti-establishmentarianism in America and especially amongst American youth and youth across the globe. It is the unvarying pattern of Presidents to be duplicitous, authoritarian, and warmongers - what was different about Barack Obama was simply that he was extremely competent in all three of these vocations, at a level quite unlike any of his predecessors since at least Kennedy.
Of course, at least half of the fault belongs to my generation itself. Obama may have exploited their narrow, black-and-white, partisan world view and their extreme superficiality and narcissism, but they left themselves open to it. For them, George W. Bush made the perfect caricature of a conservative, Republican, WASP authority figure upon whom to hang all their angst. This was one of the factors which made it possible, during the Bush era, for the most significant resurgence of anti-war sentiment and activism since the Vietnam war, amounting to a full scale, organized, national (and to an extent international) movement, which mounted huge rallies and marches against the war in every major city in the country. Such dissent thrives under Republican administration.
And then along came Obama...
2.1. The Obama Foreign Policy: Remote-Operated Flying Death Robots Carry Out Casualty-Heavy, Extra-Judicial Assassinations
The wars dragged on in Iraq and Afghanistan. He expanded the ill-defined and malleable, not to mention unwinnable and therefore perpetual, "War on Terror."
He took up drone warfare with gusto. He...
"...chose to allow the CIA, a secretive entity with a long history of unjust killings, to carry out strikes; he chose to keep the very fact of drone killings classified, deliberately invoking the state-secrets privilege in a way guaranteed to stymie oversight, public debate, and legal accountability; and he chose to permit killings outside the greater Afghanistan war zone, in countries with which the U.S. was not at war. Those choices made more unjust killings predictable and inevitable.
That should have been obvious to a former senator and constitutional law expert who knew, among other things, that the CIA had recently run an illegal torture program."3
Charismatic, a popular talk-show guest who separated himself from his predecessors by adopting the easy charm of the A-Listers with whom he occupied the airwaves, and - not insignificantly - the first African American to occupy the office, his victory over Mitt Romney was celebrated by masses of Americans and middle-of-the-road, establishment "liberals" across the globe. The carnival atmosphere still lingered over the White House when, on the third day of his Presidency, he ordered his first two drone strikes, resulting in 20 civilian casualties. He had stepped over the threshold from the comfortable bureaucratism of a career in the Senate to the Captain's seat, the heir of enormous and unaccountable power, with the ability to make the call on whether men on the other side of the planet live or die. When he decided they should die, knowing the likelihood that numerous innocents would be eviscerated in the process, this was a writ of execution carried out with unbelievable swiftness and violence.
Try to remotely fathom the inhumanity of the use of drones to enable extra-judicial assassination to be conducted remotely, by military recruits reared on military movies and military games manning comfortingly familiar controls in a shipping-container Command Centre at home in the United States, the terrible reality of their occupation rendered distant and unreal by the separation and derealization of having only seen it on a screen, grateful to go home to their families after spending the work day murdering alleged militants in the Middle East. It calls to mind one of the perpetrators of the My Lai, Paul Meadlo, who after firing round after round of automatic rifle fire into elderly Vietnamese men, women, and children forced into ditches, could not carry out his superior's order to shoot the lone child who had crawled out of the ditch and began to run. The drone program is by far the most cynical, amoral exploitation of the psychology of war we have yet seen.
More than that, it was a slick and effective component of the well-oiled, professional con job which Obama and his cronies perpetrated on the American people. Democrats and Republicans may wage the same wars, but they sell them to different constituencies. The ostentatious flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground, pep rally of a ground invasion would not do for a hip, young, black President from the Democratic party. The use of drones was clearly calculated to be uniquely unlikely to arouse widespread public attention or criticism, a wager backed up by a propaganda campaign worthy of Kissinger and the most aggressive prosecution of whistle-blowers and journalists of any administration in American history. The propaganda was simple:
"The Obama administration has insisted that drone strikes are so 'exceptionally surgical and precise' that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting 'innocent men, women and children in danger'."4
The truth is that predator drones are the farthest thing from surgical, having caused 5,160 deaths of which at least 1,124 were civilians. And this seems like an incredibly low estimate given (i) the fact that drone strikes kill everybody in the strike area, and (ii) the administration's Orwellian insistence that a "militant" is any military-aged male who happens to be hit by an American drone.
2.2. Obama's Assault on the Free Press
Speaking of propaganda, his record on press freedom is abysmal, even by the low, low standards of U.S. Presidents. In his administration...
"Government officials [were] increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records."5
Over the course of his two terms, six government employees and two contractors were subject to felony criminal prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act, eclipsing the combined total of three equivalent prosecutions under all the administrations before him.
The invocations of the Espionage Act are the most egregious and heavy-handed examples of his administration's routine harassment of journalists, but far from the only examples. They threatened to put an investigative journalist for the New York Times, James Risen, in jail if he wouldn’t reveal the identity of an anonymous source he quoted in an article. On one occasion, the administration used the access records of one reporter's security badge to track his comings and goings from the state department. They induced a judge to grant them a warrant to access his personal emails. They even surveilled his parents and colleagues. In another probe against leaks, they obtained “over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.”6
The Administration's record also breaks with tradition when it comes to Freedom of Information Act requests. The requested material was refused or censored 39% of the time, and subsequently admitted when challenged that one-third of these refusals had been improper under the law.
The effort to exert control over information and opinion by his administration made use not only of the stick as we have just seen, but the carrot as well. Although a better metaphor for the effect of flattery on the Washington press corps would not be a carrot but a potent combination-aphrodisiac-and-sedative. To complacent lifers, his bland, mellifluous oratory was laudanum, his press conferences paregoric.
As Glen Ford wrote in The Black Agenda Report:
“We have learned that even in failure and collapse, the Lords of Capital are smart enough to know they desperately need a new face, and are willing to bankroll the black man who can provide.[9]”
Few commentators perceived the grim significance of Obama’s cynical co-optation of the public affection with such lucidity.
“We have learned that this generation will have to learn from damn near scratch what a real social movement looks like - which will be doubly hard, since they have been misled to believe that this year's frenzied electioneering was actually a 'movement.' Now it is over, and one black man is moving - into the White House, having never promised his black supporters a single thing of significance.”
Both as a candidate and as President, his strongest skill turned out to be marketing. He built himself up as a brand with as much success as any other product or personality of our era bar none. As I said above, one of his most shrewd innovations was to copy the blueprint of the celebrity talk show guest:
“He did tons of interviews, but many of them involved celebrity conversationalists who pitched softball questions. During a visit to Vietnam, he chatted with Anthony Bourdain, the globe-trotting TV chef. He got raves for his interview with the comedian Zach Galifianakis on the faux talk show ‘Between Two Ferns’. And he hung out in podcaster Marc Maron’s garage, talking about fatherhood and overcoming fear.
Great for brand-building. Not so great for serious accountability.”7
These examples are informative, but barely scratch the surface. Only a few short months after his inauguration, he became the first sitting President to do a guest spot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. And as an article in Vogue, gushingly titled ‘Obama’s Funniest Late Night Appearances’8, notes: he also “[slow-jammed] the news with Jimmy Fallon, [danced] with Ellen DeGeneres, and [read] mean tweets with Jimmy Kimmel.” He appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart no less than 7 times, and another two times after Stewart was replaced by Trevor Noah. For good measure, he also appeared on The Colbert Report 3 times. He appeared on Letterman 6 times; Leno 6 times, to boot; Jimmy Kimmel Live 4 times; 3 episodes of Oprah; and even 5 episodes of The View
Meanwhile, the L.A. Times tells us about the movie Southside With You, inspired by Barack and Michelle’s first date. The lead paragraph moves seamlessly from a prescient observation to a nauseatingly sycophantic swoon:
“While the love story of a sitting president may not seem like usual romantic movie fare, breaking away from the status quo is what the Obama’s do best.”9
Gross.
The First Lady, by the way, has made her fair share of TV appearances, including carpool karaoke with James Corden, a cameo on Parks and Recreation.
It would be indecent and irresponsible to conclude this my remarks about President Obama without saying something about the significance of an African-American being elected to the office for the first time. And in some regards, it isn’t my place to talk about. In other regards, however, it is not only the right but the responsibility of every thinking person to comment – especially if one regards themselves as a journalist. The best I can do is to treat the subject with corresponding care.
I am fully aware, for one thing, that I cannot possibly understand what it must have felt like for black Americans to see a black man elected President, or what it must mean to young black kids now and into the future to be able to see a face among the pantheon of past Presidents which is at least superficially relatable. I do not think that recognizing and celebrating this aspect of the subject, the emotional experience of real human beings, prevents us from seeing the man or his Presidency clearly. It does not even preclude a critical discussion of whether, perhaps, admission of one particular black man to the halls of unjust and unearned power ought to be a matter of such great import. I do not think it is disrespectful to suggest that the mere existence of a man like Malcom X is more important than the election of Barack Obama, in this regard, by an order of magnitude. And lastly, the fact that he means so much to so many black Americans as a symbol only makes the reality I’m describing all the more shameful, a betrayal of what he means to those people.
‘He Was A Crook’, Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, Hunter S. Thompson, Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
‘Obama’s Weak Defense of his Record on Drone Killings’, Connor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 23, 2016.
‘Obama’s Covert Drone War In Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush’, Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017.
‘Report: Obama brings chilling effect on journalism’, Brett Zongker, Associated Press, October 11, 2013.
‘A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe’, Ann E. Marimow, May 19, 2013.
‘What Obama gets right — and very wrong — about the media’, Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post, November 17, 2020.
‘Obama’s Funniest Late Night Appearances’, Patricia Garcia, Vogue, June 10, 2016.
‘The Obamas’ most notable pop culture appearances’, Tracy Brown, The Los Angeles Times, August 30, 2016.