When presidents played by the rules

This piece was originally published in the Berkshire Eagle on July 10, 2024

The Supreme Court has just given former President Donald Trump and future occupants of the White House the right to avoid criminal responsibility for actions that they can self-servingly claim are “official.” No other American president has ever had such sweeping authority to avoid responsibility for his actions. Americans can expect Trump to claim that anything he has done or will do is sanctioned by this Supreme Court decision, overriding the decisions and values of American courts and juries all over the country.

Sadly, this reminds me of a very different time: the early 1960s, when I arrived in Washington. My friend and former college instructor Fred Holborn had worked in John F. Kennedy’s Senate office and had even offered me a job with the senator that I was too dumb to take. I recently had been hired as a Foreign Service Officer, which paid me a real salary for the first time in my life, and I was no risk-taker. Besides, I was rooting for Sen. Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, to be the 1960 Democratic presidential nominee.

In 1961, Fred got a fabulous job in the Kennedy White House after JFK had beaten Humphrey at the Democratic convention and Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. The job was to read dozens of local newspapers every day and collect other reading materials for Kennedy, who was a voracious speed-reader.

Late on Saturday night, April 28, 1962, Fred told me he’d received a message from the president. Kennedy was having dinner at the White House the following evening with almost 50 Nobel Prize winners. The president told Fred that he did not know much about Nobel and wanted a couple of books on him before the dinner.

It was already after closing time at the Library of Congress, but Fred called there anyway. The operator told him to try the old white-marble Carnegie Public Library at 8th and K streets, NW, which stayed open until midnight. (The beautiful building is now a well-maintained Apple Store and a D.C. History Museum.)

Fred called and got the main desk. Yes, they he told him, the library was open until midnight. Yes, they told him, they had two books about Nobel. But the librarian told Fred that they could not let the president borrow any more books until he returned the ones he already had checked out. The president, like everyone else, would have to play by the rules.

Fred knew what JFK would want him to do. There was no thought of calling the White House lawyers or claiming executive privilege, no intimidation of underlings on the library staff, no threats of congressional hearings or reprisals. Fred and the people who were still in their White House offices on that Saturday night simply collected all of the president’s overdue books they could find and put them in a cardboard box.

They got a White House limousine with a driver and returned the books before the closing time, as any other borrower would have had to do. The library in turn sent Fred the two books on Nobel with the driver, probably bending the rules just a little for the president.

Fred said he looked at the two books, put a note to JFK on them that read “the top one looks better than the bottom one” and sent them upstairs to the living quarters before he left for the night. Alfred Nobel, President Kennedy certainly learned that evening, was a Swedish chemist and industrialist who invented dynamite in the 1860s and funneled money from the profits of his invention into what are still called Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize.

The next morning after 10 a.m., Fred got back to his White House desk. To his surprise the two books were there with a note from JFK: “Fred, you were right, the top one was better than the bottom one.”

The Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court might well have reflected on how Kennedy and other thoughtful occupants of the White House knew to behave. These Americans had a far better understanding of the founders’ values and insights about limited government than the right-wing knee-bending members of this neo-royalist court.