To enumerate my misgivings about Donald Trump’s conduct as president would fill several full issues of The Valley Reporter. But let me expound on one of Trump’s most objectionable tactics that strikes a personal note – the characterization of career government employees as conspirators bent on overthrowing the Trump presidency.
I take that characterization personally because my father was a “Deep Stater.” He toiled for a quarter of a century in the middle levels of the federal bureaucracy, first in the State Department after a stint in the Navy during World War II and then in the CIA when that agency came into being in the late 1940s.
Serving in the government was, in essence, a civilian extension of serving in the military. As in the military, Dad and his peers were committed apolitically to furthering national interests. To paint over that commitment with political bias – an obsession of Trump, it would seem – is to profoundly misunderstand the motives and dedication of career bureaucrats like my father.
Indeed, all government bureaucrats, like all soldiers, lean one way or another politically. My father was a Republican early in his life, having supported Wendell Wilkie against FDR in the 1940 presidential election, but switched allegiances to become a Democrat later in life.
So what? He worked faithfully under three Democratic and two Republican administrations in a period of American history featuring enormous challenges in international relations – the postwar reconstruction of Europe, the rise of Communism, the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. U.S. policy on these issues and others zigzagged through the years, and Dad didn’t necessarily agree with all policy details and changes. But underlying his work – and his colleagues’ – was the fundamental principle that the U.S. stood on the world stage as an honorable icon for the best in humanity, even if at times the country fell short of that standard.
It should be noted, however, that, during my father’s career, partisanship in American politics wasn’t nearly as caustic, confrontational or vindictive as it is now. Yes, such stuff as the Vietnam War divided the country, but in those days such a concept as a liberal Republican was possible. Guys like Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsey and Mark Hatfield jumped back and forth across the ideological divide. So did conservative Democrats like Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
Trump, of course, didn’t invent partisan division; conservatives would argue that Obama was an especially divisive figure. But no one has ever infected partisanship with the kind of personal rancor that Trump seems to relish. In fact, he hasn’t defined partisanship really as Republican vs. Democrat or liberal vs. conservative; his narrow, narcissistic view is that you are either for Trump or against him. Vilifying political opponents of either party as “human scum,” declaring the media as “the enemy of the people,” and characterizing Democrats as “driven by hatred, prejudice and rage” are all part of a playbook that, among other undesirable ends, ultimately assures dysfunction in the federal bureaucracy.
My father, presumably like all Deep Staters then and now, wouldn’t say that he worked for a president. He worked for the government or for the country. He certainly had his preferences when it came to presidents, but Trump’s notion that such a preference might influence any Deep Stater to work against the national interest would have deeply offended Dad. He enjoyed the intellectual and occasionally ethical challenges his job presented and, as he traveled the world (two extended stints in postwar Germany and trips to Southeast Asia and Central America), I think he appreciated representing a country that championed such crusty, old-fashioned ideals as liberty, fairness and charity.
Having watched federal bureaucrats testify before the House Intelligence Committee last week, I was struck by how much they seemed to have in common with my father. They exhibited intelligence, a staid demeanor and an absolute devotion to U.S. policy and national interests. Even their stodgy clothing choices were familiar. Trump, characteristically, went straight for the political hatchet, belittling such witnesses as Marie Yovanovitch and Alexander Vindman and implying that they were abettors in a partisan hit job.
In doing so, Trump demonstrated an absolute disconnect with what motivates bureaucrats like my father to choose government service as a career. What remains baffling to me is that so many Republicans, in both Congress and the executive branch, remain stalwart behind him. Elected officials, unlike Deep Staters, must obviously weigh electoral considerations. But in their continued endorsement of a tawdry leadership that demeans and corrodes the work of career government officials, I plead with them, on my late father’s behalf: Cast aside political considerations, as Deep Staters do, and do what is best for the country.
Oliver lives in Warren, Vermont.
