{"id":285427,"date":"2025-01-20T12:01:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T12:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=285427"},"modified":"2025-01-18T06:10:21","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T06:10:21","slug":"what-we-dont-know-about-the-us-presidents-we-elect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/what-we-dont-know-about-the-us-presidents-we-elect\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Don’t Know about the US Presidents We Elect"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Navy proudly draws its newest, most devastating fighter, the McDonnell F4H Phantom II past the applauding President of the United States John F. Kennedy as he reviews the Inaugural Parade, in Washington, DC, on 20 Jan 1961.
Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Notes on the Occasion of an Inauguration<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Jan 2025 <\/em>– Like most Americans, I applaud the recent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was approved today by the Israeli security cabinet, and I was glad to learn that the incoming Trump administration was directly involved in support of the Biden team in the most positive way: by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a deal had to be made.<\/p>\n

I did not like much of the Biden administration\u2019s foreign policy, and I worried a lot, as a journalist and a citizen, about what Donald Trump\u2019s new team would do. But I learned long ago that you cannot tell a presidency by its cover.<\/p>\n

In late 1967 I was a freelance journalist in Washington and totally hostile to the ongoing American war in South Vietnam. I was persuaded to join the then nascent staff of the only Democratic member of the Senate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who was willing to take on President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, then running for second term, who had escalated the war he inherited with mass bombing campaigns. I would be the press secretary and, while traveling with the candidate, draft daily policy statements and work on speeches.<\/p>\n

McCarthy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was far from a shining star. But, as a devout Catholic, he saw the Vietnam War in moral terms and was troubled by the Pentagon\u2019s decision to lower the minimal acceptable scores on the Army\u2019s standard intelligence tests in an effort to enlist more young men from the ghettos and barrios of America, where educational opportunities were fewer, as they still are today. McCarthy publicly called such action \u201cchanging the color of the corpses.\u201d He quickly became my man.<\/p>\n

A few weeks into the job, I was traveling with McCarthy on a fundraising tour in California and found myself outside a Hollywood mansion where McCarthy was making a money pitch to the rich and famous. Such events were always boring, and I found myself hanging around outside the mansion with a few of the local and national reporters tagging along. One of those outside was Peter Lisagor, then the brilliant Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News<\/em>. He had joined our antiwar campaign out of curiosity, I suspected, since the chances of forcing Johnson to change his aggressive Vietnam policy seemed to be nil amid relentless US bombings. As I later learned, Lisagor had been one of the few journalists invited to fly in 1966 on Air Force One with the president on one of his early trips to Vietnam. The flight was kept secret until Johnson arrived in Saigon.<\/p>\n

Lisagor told me a story\u2014most likely he meant to cheer me up, since we were polling at 5 percent at the time\u2014about time he had spent in 1961 at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I do not recall whether he was on a reporting project there\u2014he had been a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1948\u2014but there he was on inauguration day of 1961, while in Washington the glamorous John F. Kennedy was being sworn in as president by Chief Justice Earl Warren.<\/p>\n

As Lisagor told it, he was watching the swearing in with a bunch of MIT students and faculty members at a cafeteria that had a TV, and just as Warren pronounced JFK president a young faculty member named Noam Chomsky stunned the small crowd by saying, of Kennedy and his Harvard ties: \u201cAnd now the terror begins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chomsky\u2019s point, as would become clear in his later writings, was that Kennedy\u2019s notion of American exceptionalism was not going to work in Vietnam. As it did not. And Lisagor\u2019s point to me, as I came to understand it over the years, was that one cannot always tell which president will become a peacemaker and which will become a destroyer. Lisagor died, far too young at age 61, in 1976.<\/p>\n

Joe Biden talked peace\u2014and withdrew US forces from Afghanistan\u2014but helped put Europe, and America, into a war against Russia in Ukraine and supported Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s war against Hamas and, ultimately, against the Palestinian people in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is always talking tough but one of his first major foreign moves after winning the presidency was to order his senior aides to work with Biden\u2019s foreign policy people to perhaps end a war in Gaza and save untold thousands of lives. And I hear serious talks are underway to bring an end to the Ukraine War.<\/p>\n

One never knows.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Seymour M. Hersh\u2019s investigative journalism and publishing awards include one Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles <\/span><\/em>\u201cLunch with the Chairman,\u201d \u201cSelective Intelligence,\u201d and<\/span><\/em> \u201cThe Stovepipe.\u201d In 2004 he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club award, the National Press Foundation\u2019s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award\u2019s most honored laureate. He lives in Washington DC.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 seymourhersh.substack.com<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Jan 2025 – Notes on the Occasion of an Inauguration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":229782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2197,276,392,249,70],"class_list":["post-285427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-democracy","tag-elections","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285430,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285427\/revisions\/285430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}