HenryBriggsColumn

As you’re waiting in line to vote here are six quotes to consider: three from Republican Donald Trump, who wants to lead our bitterly divided country, and three from Republican Abraham Lincoln, who led the country the last time it was so bitterly divided.

Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Trump: “Can’t you just shoot them (protesters)? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Lincoln: “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

Trump: “We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”

Lincoln: “We the people are the rightful masters of both the Congress and the courts – not to overthrow the Constitution –  but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”

Trump: “If I don’t get elected … it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

uneducated and more,

your White Christian Nationalists yearning to be free 

of immigrants and anyone black, brown, or poor.

Send these, the fascist voters to me

As I preen and pose by the White House door.

This election brings to mind a brilliant old Englishman I knew years ago. His name was Hilary (a man’s name in England) and, although he graduated from high school, traveled in Europe, and started college in Vienna, he never finished it (WWII cut short the education of a lot of people). 

Instead, he served in the RAF and was involved in developing Britain’s first jet engine. After the war he was put in charge of dismantling the Krupps Works, Germany’s premier weapons manufacturer. He and his wife and daughter emigrated to the US in the early 50’s, where he worked as an aircraft engineer and later on the rocket program for Westinghouse. 

I guess some people just don’t need a college degree.

We had several conversations about WWII, about life before and after the war, and how a high school drop out, retired Army corporal, and mediocre artist created such a large, cult-like following, starting in the 1920’s, that changed the world.

Hilary told me that, in those days, people weren’t surrounded by entertainment the way we are now. They had books, newspapers, theater, and night clubs, but radio just a novelty then, movies rare, and TV nothing more than a weird science experiment. 

Germany was considered the most avant garde (in science as well as the arts) and sophisticated country in the world. But even so, there wasn’t a lot of entertainment available. So, for fun on a weekend afternoon or evening, they would go to their local park to hear speeches by aspiring politicians, or anyone with an axe to grind. Communists, capitalists, fascists and others would stand on boxes that had once contained soap so people could see them, and talk for hours. 

Hanging around a local park in those days was like going to a festival or carnival today.

One of the regular speakers was a charismatic man with a great act. He would start out speaking calmly and slowly. Then, over the course of an hour or so, he would get more and more animated, so by the end, he was shouting and flailing his arms in a crescendo of righteous outrage like a man on a mission from heaven. He would rail against the reparations ($500 billion in todays’ dollars) that allies demanded from Germany after WWI (it took 91 years to pay). He would rail against immigrants taking German jobs. He would disparage non-Christian and non-ethnic Germans, calling them “vermin” who took financial advantage of hard working, honorable – and pure – Germans. It was all fiction, but he repeated it over and over and over and over…until his now thoroughly frightened audiences believed it. And with each lie, he assured them that he and only he could protect them from these heinous humans.

The few film clips that exist from that time only show the last few minutes of his speeches, so most of us today have never seen his slow, deliberate arc from sober to explosive, or watched as the audiences were slowly drawn into the performance like fish chasing a lure, until they were screaming too, and pledging loyalty to the speaker. 

Hilary told me the whole presentation, from the low energy start to the spit spewing finish, was considered great entertainment by audiences. The basic message of German superiority and others’ inferiority never changed, but people loved the presentation.

Other speakers were also captivating in their own ways. Unfortunately many had opposing views, as did many audience members. Sometimes that resulted in shouting matches, sometimes fist-fights. Over time, the violence became more common, to the point that families stopped going to the parks. It was simply too dangerous.

Which was not good for the speakers, particularly the one with the great act.

So he began bringing a few friends with him to break up any fights, maintain calm, and make people feel safe. Soon he earned a reputation for having orderly events. People attended his speeches and avoided others’ speeches. His following grew and grew until, in 1933, he became Germany’s Chancellor….…and wreaked havoc on the world.

I had always wondered how Hitler managed to captivate and control so many people. Hilary, with his gentlemanly bearing and clipped accent, explained it as only an eye-witness can. 

We talked a bit about history repeating itself, but only in general terms. Fortunately, he died in 2008, without having to see another great entertainer frighten audiences into submission all over again.

I’m “old school,” meaning I’m old and so is the schooling I had. I get bemused smiles and disbelieving eyebrows when I talk about the rarity of cheating or lying during those days. 

“Oh sure,” people seem to say, “and everyone did their homework.” 

One day when I was in high school and well before computers, Bombo an old guy (at least in his 50’s) and favorite uncle, father, and friend, took me to his work on the Trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It was a cavernous area, with a ceiling several stories high overlooking a floor crowded with people and kiosks featuring specific groups of stocks. Traders would walk up a specialist and call out a price and share amount to buy or sell, sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The two might bicker until they agreed on a price. Then the specialist would yell “Sold!”, jot down the details on a palm-sized note, and pass it to someone inside the kiosk. That was it. No signed contract, not even a handshake. Bombo told me these verbal agreements were sacrosanct. If either party broke the agreement, he was not allowed on the floor – ever again. Their word was their bond (and stock in trade). It was the glue that connected thousands of investors to sellers and had been that way since the founding of the Stock Exchange.

Bombo had a long and successful career, fueled by these verbal agreements.

Seems quaint, doesn’t it.

Then, over the next few decades, Bombo’s generation’s way seemed to fade. Lying in business became accepted as  “just business.” Legal lying – by omission or parsing of words – became rampant. Over twenty years after President Nixon’s exit for lying about Watergate, President Bill Clinton, when grilled in front of a grand jury about sex with Monica Lewinsky (which the whole world already knew about), famously countered with: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

Raising kids in those years, I started to wonder if the idea of integrity had become old school.

I decided to tell them why integrity works better than the alternative. I pointed out that, if they cheated on an exam instead of learning the course material, they’d be in trouble the next year when they needed to know that material for follow-on courses. I noted that, if they lied to a friend, what was to stop the friend from lying to them? And if they did that to everyone, why wouldn’t everyone do it to them? In which case, how could they – or anyone – count on anyone? 

Today, as the media replaces the word “lie” with more politically correct euphemisms (“misinformation”, “disinformation”, “false”, and “untruth”), and as I compare Hitler’s Big Lie about Jews to a presidential candidate’s Big Lie about immigrants (Haitian immigrants eating pets, FEMA paying for illegal immigrants instead of disasters, foreign countries emptying prisons and pouring illegal immigrants into the US and the like), I think about my day with Bombo and an incredibly successful trading system functioning solely on personal integrity.

Seems quaint, doesn’t it.

 When I was raising kids I was the Fact Checker and would frequently be brought into an argument to decide who was right. Usually it involved one of the kids being ill-informed about something like, say, Santa Clause.

“He comes down the chimney with presents!”

“No, he doesn’t! He’s too fat! And the presents are too big!

“You’re so stupid! He can shrink! ”

“Yeah?! He can’t shrink the presents! And you’re stupider!

“Yes he can! He can do any thing he wants! Stupider-Oopider!”

Or something like that.

Then I would calm them down with: “You’re both wrong. And if you keep it up, Santa will just skip our home. I know Santa. He doesn’t even need chimneys. Because he’s Santa!… And he doesn’t like fighting, especially at Christmas.”

See, that was my Fact Check.

As they grew older, I taught them to fact check on their own. All they had to do was learn facts from books or school or myriad other sources. 

And then the inevitable happened.

Me: “Eat your egg.”

Kid: “I don’t like the yellow part”

Me: “That’s where the protein is. You need to eat it.”

Kid: “Can I give the yellow part to the dog and just eat the white part?”-

Older kid: “- No, Dad. Most of the protein is in the white part.”

Me: “Wha-a? 

Older kid: “I asked my teacher after you told me that last year. She said 60 percent of the protein is in the white part. and only 40 per cent is in the yolk…Dummy Dad!” 

I got Fact Checked by my own kid!

As kids grow up, their teachers become fact checkers, along with their parents. When they leave school for the great land of adulthood and need help in separating grown-up fact from fiction, you know who become their Fact Checkers? Journalists.

Finding the facts and reporting them is THE job of journalists. One of the earliest examples in this country was Paul Revere who, on a midnight ride along with John Hancock, Samuel Adams and 38 others, reported loudly from Boston to Lexington: “The Regulars (British) are coming!”  

With few exceptions fact checking has motivated journalists ever since. Think of Walter Cronkite’s Viet Nam story, Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate story, and Woodward’s new book, WAR, which reports that Trump secretly sent Covid test machines to Putin during the pandemic (when American hospitals couldn’t get them) and has stayed in touch with him since the 2020 election.

Journalists find and check facts, then report them to us. They’re critical to democracy because voters need true facts to make good choices.

Without a free and unfettered press there is little to spotlight lies. Italy learned that from Mussolini. Germany learned that from Hitler. Russia learned it from Stalin and is relearning it – again and again – from Putin. Lies destroy democracies as surely as diseases destroy lives.

For decades CBS News was called the Tiffany Network because of its sterling reputation for truth, earned by Walter Cronkite, Don Hewitt, Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd, and others.

Then they nearly threw it all away when they promised not to fact check their broadcast of the Vance-Walz VP debate. Luckily the two journalists who anchored the broadcast defied their bosses. Nora O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan calmly and firmly fact-checked Vance’s lies, twice. And when he started to whine like a school boy caught cheating on an exam, they temporarily cut his mic.

A few days later CBS News’ 60 Minutes, the most watched news show in the country, also stepped up. In introducing this week’s show, which was to consist of two interviews, one with Trump, one with Harris, Scott Pelley announced that Trump had backed out, refusing to be fact checked. Pelley firmly stated that fact checking is what journalists do and 60 Minutes wasn’t going to stop just because Donald Trump – or anyone else – demanded it. 

As a result, for the first time since 1968, 60 Minutes interviewed just one of the final two Presidential candidates. Bill Whitaker  asked tough but fair questions of Kamala Harris. And he fact-checked her, LIVE, while Trump retreated into his cocoon of truth-deprived fans.

It’s what journalists do.