Oath and Honor by Liz Cheney -- a book review

    This is a very hard review to write. Not because the book is not well-written. It is. It is very well-written. The language is direct and clear. The content is presented in a coherent, easy to follow way. Despite the great quantity of information presented, it is actually a pretty quick read. 

    And not because I think the book is unimportant. It is. In fact, it is so important for people in this country to read and read right now that I do not want to do anything that might cause  anyone NOT to read it.

    Today, as I write this, it is the 6th day of the year 2024. An election year. A year that very well may determine if my country, if this democracy, if this "government of the people, by the people, for the people," as Abraham Lincoln prayed "shall not perish from the earth."

    Let me say, right here. There are few policies that Cheney and I agree on. 

    Wikipedia quotes Lawrence R. Jacobs as saying "Cheney is an arch-conservative. She's a hard-edged, small government, lower taxes figure and a leading voice on national defense." And Jake Bernstein, "Liz Cheney is a true conservative in every sense of the word and she's only a moderate in relation to the radicalism that has seized the Republican party."

    Both Cheney and her husband, Philip Richard Perry, are attorneys with extensive experience in the government, which stood them in good stead for their work with the The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. They have five children, ages 17 down to 7. Which I think I can safely infer has given them some insight on time management. (Also there is one thing I can say that she and I have in common, we each have a daughter named Grace.)

     By accepting the position of Vice Chair of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Cheney put her life, the lives of her family, and of her staff in jeopardy.

     Cheney begins her book with the opening paragraph: "This is the story of the moment when American democracy began to unravel. It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize. It is the story of the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office and of the many steps he took to subvert our Constitution."

    The first part of the book is about the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol while Congress was meeting in joint session in the House Chamber to officially count the Electoral votes as certified by the states. Cheney gives details about what she was seeing inside the Capitol while it was happening. Of course she couldn't know what was going on outside, but they all knew they were in serious danger.

This was the view of the United States Capitol 

                    on January 6th, 2021.

And this.

                                                                                    And this.                                         

    I watched this in real time on television. On our PBS channel. Keeping in mind that I am a regular watcher of PBS's News Hour and feel like I know personally, which, of course I do not, the news people who were on the ground at the Capitol that day. It was terrifying. The crowd was so angry and violent, I truly feared for all the reporters there.

     I also watched the January 6th Congressional Hearings on TV. They presented information through video and testimony that I had not previously seen and heard. On the part of the panel, it was presented dispassionately, not as personal experience.

    But this book gives us, from Cheney's point of view, what Senators and Representatives and their staffs were experiencing without the emotional distance of the hearings.

    And after the Capitol was cleared of the mob, she describes walking through Statuary Hall,
     "the original chamber of the House of Representatives ... a room full of the
     history of our republic. Brass plaques on the floor mark the locations of the
     desks of presidents who served in the House, including Abraham Lincoln and
     John Quincy Adams. Statues of prominent Americans line the outer walls
     of the room. ...law enforcement officers in tactical gear were seated on the floor,
     leaning up against every statue and all around the walls of the room, exhausted
     from the battle they had fought to defend the Capitol. I walked around the room
     thanking them for what they had done.

     "One said to me, "Ma'am, I fought in Iraq and I have never encountered the
     violence I did out there today."

     Describing the actual assault is the hardest part of the book to read -- not because the words are big or fancy but because it hurts to realize this was perpetrated by Americans. 

     It was not the first time I experienced the danger to our democracy that can come from within.

     President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963, my 16th birthday.The assassin was an American. 

     The Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, including employees of my credit union where I had gone with
my 5-year-old daughter the week before to take care of some business. We could
easily have been there when Americans bombed it.

     Most of the rest of the book is about the Congressional investigation and hearings. It has the benefit of Cheney's law background and her determination to Honor and Defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

     She does name names. 

     Cheney ends her book with this warning:
     "In the era of Trump, certain members of Congress and other Trump enablers
      -- many of whom carry the Constitution in their pocket but seem
     to have never read it -- have attempted to hijack this phrase [we the
     people] to claim it gives them authority to subvert the rule of law or
     overturn the results of elections. They have preyed on the patriotism
     of millions of Americans. They are working to return to office the man
     responsible for January 6."

     Cheney exhorts us all:

     "We the people must stop them. We are the only thing that
     can stop them. This is more important than partisan politics. Every
     one of us -- Republicans, Democrates, Independents -- must work
     to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled,
     and collaborated with him are defeated.

     "This is the cause of our times."

 

November 22, 1963 -- a birthday remembered

It was Friday, November 22, 1963. My 16th birthday. 

After school, Daddy was going to take me from Edmond into Oklahoma City to pick up my best friend Vicky. I was three months into my first year in high school, the first time in six years that Vicky and I had not lived across the creek from each other and been in the same classes at the same schools.

We had been best friends since my family moved to Oklahoma City from my parents' very small hometown about thirty miles away. Of course that was a long time ago so thirty miles took an hour by car -- no Interstate Highways. It was a long way in other ways, too. No cell phones. In fact, telephone calls between towns were long distance and expensive. No internet for nearly instantaneous communication. Snail mail, which we called mail, usually took three days from that small town to The City.

I came to Valley Brook Elementary School as a member in good standing of the Baby Boomer Generation which meant there were too many of us kids and not enough teachers. So five of us Fifth Graders were chosen to move up to the Sixth Grade classroom -- three boys and two girls. Being the new kid, I didn't know anyone yet. Neither class knew me from Adam Allfox. It didn't help that the regular Fifth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us because we were too smart or something. The Sixth Graders wouldn't have anything to do with us for what to them was a much more obvious reason, we were "too immature." So we five were pretty much on our own socially. Vicky and I were the two girls. Plus, Vicky was really nice and she could do the splits and cartwheels! Instant best friends.

By the time we moved up to Junior High School, the Oklahoma City schools were adhering to President Kennedy's program to turn out more scientists. The Cold War had taken on Space Race attributes following the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik. Consequently, we were all tested and those who tested well in math and science were put on accelerated educational tracks.

When we moved to Edmond, their schools were not putting students in advanced classes. I again needed to make new friends. But because I'd already had the normal math and science classes for Tenth Graders, I was put into classes with upperclassmen. Add to that, I had pierced ears and all my hems were well above the knee. Neither fashion had yet arrived at Edmond High School.

After lunch that Friday, November 22nd, when I came into my English Class, a particularly aggressive classmate who regularly made fun of me told me, "Someone shot Kennedy."

I thought he was just being mean, but the principal came on the intercom and announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was in the hospital. Then in Physical Education Class an announcement came over the intercom that a priest had been called in. I knew it was for Last Rites. They thought he was dying.

Vicky's father, a Master Sergeant in the Air Force, was based at Tinker Air Force Base, a few miles from where we'd lived in Oklahoma City. He'd flown missions during the Berlin Air Lift over Soviet controlled ground. We knew that what he was doing was very dangerous. We also knew what number Tinker was on the Soviet's missile target list.

We'd held our breath during the face-off between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba. Plans were made about how to get back with our families if "something" happened while we were at school and they were at work or home.

Magazines at the grocery store check-out had recipes for Jello salads and blue prints for backyard bomb shelters. Official bomb shelters were marked by yellow and black signs on doorways into school basements and government office building basements. They were stocked with big olive drab cans of water and nonperishable food.

The Cold War and its attendant threat of becoming hot was a daily reality. But no shots had yet been fired on American soil.

In 1963 TV shows were not commonly interrupted by news stories and the term "Breaking News" was not used. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns with the news of President Kennedy's assassination.
Click here to watch https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=walter+cronkite+jfk

That Friday no one knew who killed President Kennedy. Then when they did identify the killer, we still didn't know why. As if that were not horrendous enough, the murderer was killed two days later, live on TV. Had the killer and his killer been the opening salvo of World War III?

Pearl Harbor ended my parents' generation's Age of Innocence. My generation's tenuous hold on innocence was destroyed by two murders in Dallas.

Vicky spent the weekend with us. We had cake and went to the movies. I don't remember what kind of cake or what the movie was. Our world had changed. Cake and movies were not important.

November 22, 1963 -- November 22, 2013

 President Kennedy's Grave

with the Lincoln Memorial in the background

 

   I knew this year would be worse than last year or eleven years ago or forty-three years ago. I knew the media would fill the days leading to my birthday with questions and comments and constant reprise of the Zapruder film. That's right. My birthday.
   Sometimes Thanksgiving falls on my birthday, but the anniversary of President Kennedy's murder always falls on my birthday.
   November 22, 1963, my sixteenth birthday. My world was already dangerous. We were in the middle of the Cold War. My best friend's father had flown in the Berlin Airlift several years before and we had been afraid a Third World War would start then. President Kennedy had threatened the Soviet Union if they did not remove their missiles from Cuba. And we had been afraid of nuclear war then. Women's magazines had recipes and diets and articles about home bomb shelters. We had tornado drills at school and bomb drills.
   Fear was already a backdrop for my life. But like other almost-sixteen-year-olds, backdrops are just that. Mind catching each time they change, but quickly moved to the background as the activities of  life took center stage. And each time the scary moment passed, somehow my sense of security was recovered and all the dangers of the world receded.
   And then a man murdered President Kennedy. An English-speaking, white American whom I would not have recognized as different from my neighbors or me had I met him on November 21, 1963. And he did it in Dallas, Texas, a city more like my Oklahoma City than any other major American city. It was too close to home. It would not recede into any background.
   The murder of President Kennedy was the end of my sense of security, just as Pearl Harbor must have been the end of my parents' and the murder of President Lincoln must have been for Walt Whitman's generation and the burning of Washington, D.C., must have been for the young people of the War of 1812.
   Each of us must surely come to the realization that the concept of 'security' is false. That the concept of ideal is illusion. For me it came with the assassination of JFK. For my son it was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. For my daughter, fifteen years younger than my son, it was September 11. I don't know what it will be for my grandchildren, but it will surely happen. And the event will be just as shocking and just as threatening. It will not recede into a backdrop but become the next layer of tragedy on which our human condition rises.
   For every tragedy that reminds us how fragile and flawed we humans are, there are countless triumphs. The English burned our capital city, but with each generation we come closer to achieving a class-free society. And truly, so do those English and the rest of the world. President Lincoln was murdered and freedom and equality for all may have been delayed, but with each generation we come closer. And Pearl Harbor did not begin the end of human civilization, but began the end of another in the list of tyrants who would subjugate humanity. A long list that each generation faces.
   I gave up on security and ideals a long time ago. Fifty years ago, to be precise. But I do not give up on humanity. And hope is a great replacement for security.