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What’s cool about Presidents’ Day (designed to come close to George Washington’s birthday), and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is that they both fall smack in the middle of African-American History Month, which makes folks reflect on what these two iconic presidents have to do with the central problems of race and slavery in American history. I talked about Lincoln in my last post.

We can never over-emphasize the fact that four of the first six American presidents were slaveholders, and that slavery, and attitudes toward slavery, played a huge role in shaping colonial life and the early United States. That Thomas Jefferson, author of our “inalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence, did not free his slaves when he died, has always stuck in my craw. And then George Washington, that austere, proud, distant fellow I’ve never been able to warm to, freed all of his!

So, in honor of Presidents’ Day (ok, it was yesterday, but GW’s birthday isn’t until the 22nd), I’ll post a piece I did a while back for the Hartford Courant on the occasion of my University hosting the National Archives’ American Originals exhibit, which included a letter of Washington.

On June 16, 1775, the American Colonies were still more than a year away from the Declaration of Independence, but the revolution had begun. Popular protest against British authority had bubbled during the Stamp Act crisis 10 years earlier (when a determined Boston mob had sacked the home of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson) and had periodically boiled over into near-rebellion. The Boston Tea Party in December 1773 infuriated the British Parliament, which promptly passed acts that inflamed the Colonists still further, leading them to call the First Continental Congress in September 1774 and then a second Continental Congress in May 1775.

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On Lincoln’s birthday, it’s time to think about the man called by the historian Sydney Mead “the spiritual center of American history.” Why was Lincoln at the center? Because it was on his watch that the nation confronted—in bloody ways—its failure to deal with African-American slavery either at its founding or in the 85 years that passed before the Civil War.

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Way back when, before the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, I used to think that if you worked in the White House, you had to be really, really smart, sort of like Josh Lyman in the TV show The West Wing. Then I got to read the tapes of Nixon and his aides talking about how to muzzle that investigation, and figured out that for all their political and PR experience, this was still a bunch of guys caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and they might as well have been on my high school student council, for all the sophistication they showed.

This past week we’ve been treated to a similar spectacle in the Scooter Libby trial. Witnesses painted a picture of a Vice President’s office so traumatized by Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s non-confirmation of Iraq’s effort to buy nuclear material in Niger, that the staff put out the equivalent of a political hit on the guy’s wife–and broke U.S. law, I believe, by outing a confidential CIA operative. Not once or twice, but all over Washington. President Bush’s former press secretary (that’s C.J. Craig for West Wing junkies) only testified after he’d wangled a grant of immunity from prosecution!

Not once did these characters show any concern about the substance of Wilson’s story–that Saddam Hussein wasn’t about to detonate a nuclear weapon. That includes the Vice President, who took an oath of office to defend the United States of America. No, instead of being happy we were not under nuclear threat, he was furious that the case for going to war was being undermined by . . . the facts.

Here’s a piece I wrote several years ago, putting this case in some historical perspective. When I wrote it, I didn’t really think we’d get a special prosecutor. I’m finding the trial both delicious and appalling. Delicious because watching allegedly principled folks turn on each other when confronted with jail time shows the real strength of this administration’s moral fibre (see my post on Martin Luther King, below); appalling because, you know, these were the people running the most powerful nation on earth–and some of them still are.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel October 5, 2003

CIA outing: Time for an apology and a special prosecutor

The Bush administration’s outing of its own employee, CIA officer Valerie Plame, is a grave — though not historically unprecedented — abuse of executive power

History, alas, demonstrates that the desire for power, or the thrill of exercising it, has strained the moral capacities of too many of our presidents.

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