With the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in arriving this June, we should prepare ourselves for a deluge of Watergate- and Nixon-related material. This may well be the last good anniversary opportunity to revive and relive this massively frightening, entertaining scandal before the vast majority of those who cared about these matters as they were happening have gone off to join the Great Unindicted Coconspirator in the Sky.

After that, it will be interesting to see how much we hear about Richard Nixon again. Will he be studied, like Theodore Roosevelt? Mentioned, like William McKinley? Ignored, like Benjamin Harrison? Nixon was one of the largest figures of the third quarter of the twentieth century. But as his era recedes, he is overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—the liberal icon who preceded him, and the conservative giant who came in his wake, two leaders of consequence whose ideas persist decades after their deaths. With no enduring legacy to call his own—detente was at best a mixed bag; wage and price controls were an embarrassment; he may have opened China, but Deng Xiaoping was the more significant figure—Nixon now seems destined to be best known for the Watergate scandal and for being the un-Kennedy, dark to Jack’s light, ambitious and striving in comparison to Jack’s grace and ease, sweaty to Kennedy’s infinite cool.

And yet we remain interested in Nixon, welcoming him as a character the way the Brits always seem happy to see a new Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. Just three years ago we got Frost/Nixon, where we saw Nixon tortured by guilt and defeat; later this year we’ll see Elvis & Nixon, the third film about that weird, marvelous, and ultimately meaningless encounter. We have had Oliver Stone’s tragic Nixon, the Nixon of All the President’s Men, unseen and malignant, The Watchmen’s Nixon as the despot of the new dystopia. It is perhaps the unique accomplishment of Watergate, the excellent new novel by Thomas Mallon, to depict Nixon not as a moral to a story, a symptom of a political pathology, or a walking character flaw, but as a man.

(To read the rest of my review of Watergate in The Washington Monthly, click here.)

In the Times yesterday, Joe Nocera wrote a column that groused, if I read it correctly, about a man attaining excellence in his life’s work, and gently chided the man, it seems to me, for being great.

Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and economics, took as his subject today Robert Caro, who, Nocera aside, is enjoying generally excellent reviews for The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Reviewing the book, Bill Clinton not only called it “fascinating and meticulous,” but then awarded it a sort of special ex-presidential medal by saying that with this book, “Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.” (Writers get credited with many things, but providing a service to the nation is not frequently cited.) Last night I finished The Passage of Power, I’ll just say that it is a brilliant piece of work, reported by a master historian, told by a master story teller, comprehended by a shrewd and insightful student of power and politics. If I had a presidential medal to give, it would be Caro’s.

Nocera, however, thinks it’s long; and worse, it took a long time to write. “He would spend years — nay, decades — in the field, finding stray facts no one else had ever known existed. And then, when he started writing, he couldn’t stop. Other, lesser authors had deadlines, but not Caro. He turned in each volume only when he was ready, and sometimes a decade passed between volumes — so much time, in fact, that he began quoting his previous books in his newer books. Originally intended to be three volumes, written over maybe a half-dozen years, his L.B.J. biography eventually stretched to four, and then five.”

To which one might reply: So? Caro isn’t responsible for designing an emergency response system. He’s not charged with getting a liver to Pittsburgh to save the life of a 10 year old violin prodigy. And it’s not like Caro is in his room striving mightily in order to produce dreck; he’s using the time to produce quality stuff. The man has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, and, among other pieces of hardware, a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters. This is if you can take Wikipedia’s word for it, which we know Caro wouldn’t: he’d have delved into ancient archives and interviewed 150 people to vet those stats, but you can certainly see the effort on the page. If it takes a decade to produce such work, who is Joe Nocera to snark about it?

Nocera also complains about what he sees as Caro’s inconsistent portrayal of LBJ across the four volumes. “Johnson has almost no redeeming qualities in the first two books. Yet how could this same man, at the end of Volume 4, push through the landmark Civil Rights Act as president? How does Caro square this great achievement — as well as all the other liberal achievements to come — with his portrayal of the power-mad Johnson in the earlier volumes? In truth, he never really does.”

This is a ridiculous accusation. In each of the volumes, Caro has recognized the complexity of LBJ, while at the same understanding that a man is not a glass of chocolate milk, in which all the ingredients are smoothly blended. Men not only have not how conflicting and competing impulses, but at different points in time, different ideas, and different passions hold sway. Nocera’s reading doesn’t just lack insight, it’s just not correct. First, Caro does show that during this period of success and accomplishment, he nonetheless played politics with troops levels in Vietnam, and also took steps to insure that he could still manage his personal business interests on the sly. But more fundamentally, Caro shows that “the bad Johnson” was not much in evidence during the crucial two month period that is the focus of the book. Caro quotes Johnson aide George Reedy, who wrote “Almost at once, the whining, self-pitying caricature of Throttlebottom [a bumbling vice president from the musical Of Thee I Sing] vanished. During this whole period, there was no trace of the ugly arrogance which had made him so disliked in many quarters. . . The situation brought out the finest that was in him.” In fact, Caro closes the book with the comment that “this period stands out as different from all the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment.”

To sum up: one man spends decades researching a life, observes that the subject was different during one period than in others, and finds the subject’s different dimensions fascinating. Another man spends some days reading the books, observes that the subject seems different on one volume than in the others, and concludes that the biographer has failed to reconcile the subject’s different dimensions.

I’m looking forward to Volume V, however long it is, whenever it gets here.

Many thanks to The Group, who invited me to come speak about And the War Came at their monthly meeting last Friday at the Mt. Pleasant library in Pleasantville. The very attentive audience asked a lot of good questions, and I am very grateful for the chance to come and talk about the origins of the Civil War. As usual, the anecdote about Lt. Greene stabbing John Brown with too small a sword got the biggest laugh, (If you don’t know this anecdote, you need to invite me to come speak about the origins of the Civil War before your group!) Many thanks to Peter Eschweiler, the Group’s program chairman, for inviting me.

Thanks once again to Jackie Eberstein, Charlie Schultze and my other friends at the Civil war Forum of Metropolitan New York for inviting me to speak at their monthly dinner last Wednesday. With the sesquicentennial of the duel between the Monitor and the Merrimac coming up on March 9th, and with Lieutenant John Worden, the Monitor’s master, being a Briarcliff homeboy, my topic practically dictated itself, and so for an hour or so, I boomed and clanged my way through the tale. Once again, it was great fun being able to discuss a topic of interest with this highly informed and very interested group. I’m very glad they invited me. (Thanks to Nathan Burkan for the photo.)

The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was described beautifully by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and The Power, his amazing book about The New York Times. On the scene in Dallas, Wicker “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas,” wrote Talese. “It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.” To read Wicker’s report, click here. Talk about grace under pressure.

In Slate, Michael Moran argues that much of America’s economic difficulties has nothing to do with actual economic problems, and everything to do with the paralysis of the American political system. “Only about 30 percent of the trouble facing the U.S. today is economic,” he writes. “The U.S. economy, compared with all the other developed economies, is in the best structural and demographic shape to weather this storm and ultimately regain its health. But a cancer does exist: The real problem America faces is political, and once again today, it is on stark display.” Moran blames this problem on Americans who don’t vote in primary elections; by leaving the choice of candidates to the partisans of both parties who tend to favor more extreme standard-bearers. “The result: an American economic crisis that is eminently solvable has been trusted to the hands of political hacks representing fringe minority factions within each political parties whose primary incentive is to avoid providing ammunition to the other side. Thus has our political system turned a simple question of accounting into an economic version of the Arab-Israeli conflict – a conflict for which the solution has been clear for 40 years if only either side were willing to deal with reality.”

Well, sure, but blaming 120 million people is the same as blaming no one. I would point the finger at something simpler: the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate on a bill. This is usually incorrectly referred to as the number of votes needed to cut off a filibuster, which often leads people to wonder why a majority party doesn’t challenge the minority party to mount an old-fashioned, stand-on-their-feet, gum-up-the-works, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type babblethon. In fact, the super majority is what is needed to stop senators from adding amendments to the bill, which can be inconsequential and paralytic.

But the super majority is just a rule of the Senate, as changeable as any. Prior to 1975, Rule 22 of the Senate said that it took two-thirds of the Senate to invoke cloture and end a filibuster; in 1975, that number fell to 60. Thirty-five years later, we can see that 60 is still way too high. I understand that the Senate prides itself on its role as the more deliberative of the two houses, the one less reactionary to tides and trends. But as we see, sixty votes doesn’t protect deliberation; it empowers obstruct. It doesn’t protect minorities; it neuters the will of voters.

Just to be clear, protecting the filibuster may be a long-honored custom, but it ain’t the law of the land. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.” For the first 15 or 20 years of the Senate, there was no right to unlimited debate. After that, the right to filibuster was enacted. By 1917, after a long era of Senatorial obstructionism, the two-thirds threshold was established. The Founding Fathers almost certainly did not envision the establishment of any kind of a super majority, because the gave the Vice President the right to break deadlocks in the Senate when the body was “evenly divided.” Now the body can be deadlocked when the vote stands at 59 to 41, a state of affairs that clearly disenfranchises the Vice President. Although I bet most people don’t care about that.

Let’s start a campaign: Bring Democracy to the US Senate. In January 2013, when a new Senate convenes as part of the 113th Congress, it will have to adopt the rules that will govern its proceedings. Those rules will be adopted by a simple majority vote. We must begin a campaign to persuade the Senate to change Rule 22. to either get rid of the super majority, or at very worst, lower the threshold to 55 votes. Since pledge-signing seems all the vogue these days, let’s get the people who are going to run for the Senate in 2012, incumbents and challengers alike, to pledge that they will end the tyranny of Rule 22.

Nothing in John Brown’s life more became him than the way he took leave of it. One of the strangest and most challenging figures in American history, a combination of practical fiasco and undiminished confidence, Brown was a failed tanner, a failed farmer, and in narrow terms, a failed insurrectionist. As much as anybody, he put the blood in Bleeding Kansas; his activities there in the mid-1850s were crowned with the cold-blooded midnight murder and dismemberment at Pottawatomie Creek of four unarmed men who had the misfortune of having a different point of view than the country’s most driven abolitionist.

Brown was a terrorist in the cause of God’s will, no less than Mohammad Atta. Terror was the only thing he was good at, and murderous, bloody terror was what he intended to ignite when he and his platoon of twenty-one true believers seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. The raid was a dismal botch, and within forty-eight hours, Brown and his men had been easily vanquished, ten of them killed in action. Brown himself was bludgeoned into unconsciousness in the final assault on his stronghold in the armory by a marine lieutenant named Israel Green, but only after had attempted to kill him with his sword. Hastily mustered the night before, Green had brought a light ceremonial sword instead of a battle sabre, and when he stabbed Brown, the blade bent in half. Had he successfully killed Brown, it is unlikely that the raid would have inflamed the country as it did, and the incident would eventually have become eclipsed in memory, overcome by other events.

Instead, Brown survived, and in ensuing six weeks, became a most eloquent champion of ending slavery. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done — as I have always freely admitted I have done — in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right,’’ said Brown at his trial. “ Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments– I submit; so let it be done!’’

Throughout the north, and in Europe as well, Brown’s noble attitude elevated him to the status of martyr, and stirred the anti-slavery feelings that in most of the population had been largely latent. Emerson and Thoreau applauded him, John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated him in poetry, and Victor Hugo honored him from abroad. “Living, he made life beautiful,” Louisa May Alcott wrote on the day he died, “Dying, made death divine.” Feelings were stirred in the South, too; the whites of the South were rightly alarmed that a blow had been struck, however ineptly, at their slaveocracy, and were entirely shocked that their northern cousins were far more sympathetic than outraged. Brown may have failed to incite a rebellion, but he had polarized the country, and made the continuation of a country half-slave and half-free an impossibility.

In his excellent new book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz has done a terrific job in explaining the raid and its effects. More than anything, he has restored Brown’s humanity. Long portrayed as a fiery-eyed zealot, Brown here is portrayed as a man defined by a willingness to act on his convictions. If slavery was immoral, then acting to end it could not be. Prior to his capture, Brown could be defined by all the things that he wasn’t—a successful farmer, a successful businessman, a shrewd strategist. After his capture, he became the thing he was at his core: a man who saw evil and could not countenance its continuation. Not two years after his execution, as his countrymen took arms against the slaveholder, they went into battle singing that his truth was marching on.

For eight or nine months after 9/11, I felt pretty depressed about the mass murder of people who were exactly like me and who on another day could easily have been me, and about the brutal attack on the city where I had made my home. Sometime in the spring, however, I read an article about a deputy fire chief named Orio Palmer, a marathoner who on 9/11 ran up eighty-some flights of stairs to reach a sky lobby that had been the point of impact, and who took charge of the scene and began directing rescue operations until, quite terribly, the building collapsed.

I cannot say why, but my mood was lifted when I learned about Orio Palmer. His magnificent courage, his steadiness, his calm determination to do what he had trained his whole life to do, just uplifted my entire spirit, and the terrible gloom I had felt for months fell away.

Later I began to collect stories of other acts of courage that day. Like that of Welles Crowther, a 25 year old kid who went to the floor of impact and rescued survivors. Only a handful of people who had been on that floor survived, but all of the ones who survived where helped by Welles Crowther, who himself did not survive. And Rick Rescorla, the old soldier who was head of security of Morgan Stanley, and who got nearly every one of the 500 people in his company out safely, singing as he went the ancient battle song Men of Harlech (amended to reflect his birthplace in Cornwall). He did not survive. Ed Beyea, a quadriplegic who was being carried down the fire stairs in his wheelchair because the elevators were out, and who took himself off the line because he was causing a back up. He did not survive, and neither did his friend Abe Zelmanowitz, who stayed with Ed with rather than leave him to face his fate alone. Dave Karnes, the retired marine from Wilton, Connecticut, who walked out of his office, went home and put on his old uniform, drove down to Ground Zero, and started climbing the wreckage, and who, on that night of 9/11, located two Port Authority officers buried in the rubble, two of the last people to be pulled out of the rubble alive. Bill Feehan, a fire chief who led his men from the front, and like Davey Crockett fighting to his last breath at the Alamo, was pulling rubble off of people with his bare hands when the second collapse overwhelmed him. Jan Demczur, a Polish immigrant window washer who was trapped in an elevator with some other passengers, and who used the handle of his squeegee to scrape through the drywall of the elevator shaft, creating a hole through which he and the others escaped. Bryan Clark and Stanley Prainmath, two men who found themselves alone in an stairwell, and who helped each other escape. What amazed me at the time, what amazes me to this day, is that so few people know these stories.

We cannot help but get swallowed up in the terrible tragedy of the 3000 people who died that morning, but maybe 10,000 people or more survived, thanks to courage and resolve of people like those whose names I’ve mentioned, and many, many more. We think of the event as a tragedy, and it manifestly was, but it was also our Dunkirk. Our inability to allow that view, our inability to recognize the acts of heroism, left us feeling weaker and more fearful, and frankly more vulnerable to the manipulations of our government. But we should not forget: Under the most terrible of conditions, courage emerged. Grace emerged. Determination emerged. Orio Palmer and Rick Rescorla and Welles Crowther rose up and wrestled the lives of thousands from the grasp of our enemies.

(For a time I tried to tell these stories in a screenplay and then later in a graphic history. An artist named Paul Maybury did these sample illustrations. At top, Rick Rescorla, wearing a black suit, leads his people to safety. Below, a triptych showing an isolated Stanley Prainmath escaping to safety with the help of a stranger on the other side of a pile of rubble, Bryan Clark. Thanks once again to Paul for his work and enthusiasm for this project.)