The Last Time Alcohol Poisoned a Defense Nomination

The nominee for defense secretary was in trouble for carousing, transgressing with women and liquor.

President George H.W. Bush was trying to save his choice, so he assigned a top White House official to have a private chat with two New York Times White House reporters.

Gerald Boyd and I went over to the White House one cold day in February 1989 to hear what the official had to say about John Tower, a Texas senator and the chair of the Armed Services Committee, so diminutive that he could barely peek over the top of some lecterns. Could the president justify putting a man in charge of the Pentagon who was prone to drunkenness and chasing secretaries around desks?

What if, the official asked us in a wheedling tone, Tower gave up hard liquor and drank only white wine?

Gerald and I just stared at the official. This guy was going to start bargaining with us over the type of alcohol that Tower could drink?

What if, the official pressed on, Tower had only two glasses of wine a night?

Gerald and I were nonplused to find ourselves the arbiters of louche behavior, pulled into a negotiating session over inebriants. What next? Tower would promise to chase only one secretary a week?

What if, the official said, in a last desperate bid, Tower had only one glass of wine a night?

White House officials kept trying to make a deal. They told Gerald that Tower had told the president and two key senators that he was sticking to two glasses of wine a day on the advice of doctors who had treated him for a malignant polyp in his colon. But doctors interviewed by Gerald said that this sort of advice for that sort of health problem was puzzling. The White House also volunteered that Tower’s medical reports showed no evidence of liver damage. What if, Bush officials asked, senators were allowed to choose a physician who would be permitted to interview Tower’s physicians?

In the end, the Senate rejected Tower’s nomination, the first time since 1959 that the chamber had refused to consent to a president’s cabinet nominee. It was shocking, given how clubby the Senate was in those days and how freewheeling many senators were. Some of the senators who went up to vote against Tower had alcohol on their breath.

Bush learned the hard way what Donald Trump will learn with Pete Hegseth: Sometimes you have to cut your losses. As William Gladstone said, the first requisite of a good prime minister is to be a good butcher.

Robert Byrd, the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, was steeped in the classics and in the history of the Senate. “Julius Caesar did not seize power in Rome,” Byrd declaimed on the Senate floor in 1993. “The Roman Senate thrust power on Caesar deliberately, with forethought, with surrender, with intent to escape from responsibility.”

In January, when the next Senate begins holding confirmation hearings, we’ll learn how many Senate Republicans will cede power to Donald Trump. With a 53-to-47 Republican majority, it will take only four Republicans to reject Trump’s assault on their constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on nominations to his cabinet.

The contours of this constitutional struggle aren’t clear yet, but I see two battles brewing. The first — a kind of test vote — could revolve around the nomination of Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Now that the Trump team has agreed to allow the F.B.I. to conduct background checks on nominees (though it’s not clear whether every nominee will be scrutinized), what will the Senate do if those checks turn up negative information? A damaging F.B.I. report on allegations that Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 — combined with his poor record as a manager of two veterans organizations and his alcoholism — might threaten his nomination.

The second battle would occur if Trump then tries to push Hegseth or other rejected nominees into office by appointing them after forcing Congress to recess (perhaps aided by a House-sanctioned adjournment), circumventing the Senate confirmation process. Then we would have a full-on constitutional crisis.

Just as two former Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, became household names when they challenged President Biden on some issues, might a handful of “constitutional Republicans” emerge early next year to stand up to Trump on the separation of powers?

It’s not naïve to think that many senators will want to hang on to their power. World-weary Democrats outside the Senate think Susan Collins’s assurances will melt like early December snow on first contact with Trump. But Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn and Mike Rounds have all been quoted in recent days referring to their solemn obligations under the advice and consent provisions of the Constitution and they just may mean it.

Mitch McConnell is stepping down as party leader but will assume the chairmanship of the Senate Rules Committee in order to protect Senate traditions and prerogatives. A few other Senate Republicans show no signs of being afraid of Trump. Bill Cassidy voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial and Todd Young, like Collins, Murkowski and Cassidy, refused to endorse him this year.

That’s seven possible constitutional Republicans and there could be more. The MAGA world’s choice for Senate majority leader, Rick Scott, won only 13 out of 48 Republican votes last month. The vote was by secret ballot but still significant. The winner, John Thune, said recess appointments were on the table, but that was meaningless; everyone acknowledges their utility in limited circumstances and Thune, too, made a point of standing up for the Senate’s independence.

Words only? We’ll see. In a 1998 lecture in the Old Senate Chamber, Byrd told his colleagues that they must be “eternally vigilant” in protecting their constitutional powers from the encroachments of a “despotic” executive.

The choice for the Senate in 2025 is clear: Hail the founders — or Caesar.

The Federal Trade Commission just took much-needed action against a company and its subsidiaries. You’ve probably never heard of those companies, but they’ve probably heard of you. More accurately, they know where you’ve been. Exactly where you’ve been.

A clinic providing reproductive services? A protest? The new place you just moved, while trying to hide the address from an abusive ex or a stalker? They know.

Earlier investigations revealed that the companies, Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, got that data through innocuous-looking apps, including weather and navigation apps. They sold that location data to third parties, including but not just law enforcement agencies. One minute you’re checking whether it’s raining, the next thing you know, immigration police are at the door, asking why you were visiting a migrant shelter. No need for a warrant, just a payment to a corporation will do.

These companies also sold, the F.T.C. says, “health or medical decisions, political activities and religious viewpoints” that they derived from the location data.

The new F.T.C. proposed order would ban these companies from selling “sensitive location data except in limited circumstances involving national security and law enforcement.” This would include places such as medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor unions, schools, shelters and military installations.

Also this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published new rules that would limit how credit data can be distributed — especially addresses, which are currently part of many people’s regular credit files. (If you receive a credit card or statements at home, your address is on there.) At the moment, marketers can easily purchase that data, and those purchases can result in more than just annoying ads.

Investigators from the publication 404 Media found that criminals can then purchase sensitive personal data for about $15 per person in Telegram groups where “members offer services for a price, such as shooting up a house, armed robberies, stabbings, and assault.”

The C.F.P.B. aims to limit distribution of such data to what’s defined as “legitimate purposes” under current financial laws, such as issuing credit or insurance or employer background checks.

To this, I’d say: Don’t get your hopes up. The proposed F.T.C. rule and C.F.P.B. guidance could easily be reversed under a new administration, and it’s not even certain if those agencies will survive the government dismantling Donald Trump has promised.

It’s a pity that Congress never passed proper privacy laws, so whatever the agencies can do will be limited and easily reversible.

Checking whether it will rain or playing a mobile game (another common source for such sensitive data) shouldn’t come at such a high cost, but when lawmakers don’t do what they should, that’s exactly what happens.

At first glance, the imposition of martial law in South Korea on Tuesday appeared to be yet another ominous sign for democracies around the world. President Yoon Suk Yeol suspended “all political activities” for the first time since the country was a dictatorship in the 1980s. He claimed that it was the only way to save it from “the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people.”

It didn’t pass the smell test. Sure, North Korea is a threat, but it has always been a threat. Yoon, who is deeply unpopular, has been locked in an intractable political dispute with the opposition, which has blocked his budget, investigated his wife for corruption and attempted a flurry of impeachments. It may be hard to imagine a country more polarized than the United States, but South Korea fits the bill.

But Yoon’s effort turned into a victory for the South Korean people. Protesters pushed back. Lawmakers voted unanimously to lift martial law, with some of them reportedly climbing fences to get back into the National Assembly building to vote. Even Han Dong-hoon, the leader of Yoon’s conservative People Power Party, said it was “wrong” to impose martial law and vowed to help stop it.

It worked. By early Wednesday in Seoul, Yoon was forced to back down and announced that he would rescind the order.

It was inspiring, and crucial, because in the absence of international pressure, domestic opposition will become all that stands in the way of the dismantling of democratic norms. In the past, a U.S. ally might have feared attracting harsh words or consequences from Washington for taking such an undemocratic action. This episode suggests that that’s not the case anymore. The State Department had a tepid response, saying only that the decision to impose martial law was “concerning” and that disputes should be resolved peacefully and according to the rule of law.

Yoon was already looking ahead to the Trump administration, which is far more likely to turn a blind eye to strongmen who use undemocratic means to quash the opposition. The South Korean Embassy in Washington has already hired Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm associated with the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to The Korea Herald.

People who are trying to preserve their own democracies can’t count on the U.S. government to come to their rescue anymore, if they ever could. But the protesters in Seoul have just shown that if enough ordinary people fight for democratic values, those values will endure.

Reports of the demise of moviegoing may be greatly exaggerated: In the last week, theaters drew the biggest five-day Thanksgiving box-office return ever, driven by “Moana 2,” which set a Thanksgiving record, along with “Wicked” and “Gladiator 2,” which both continued to draw massive crowds in their second week.

The nature of these films tempered some observers’ enthusiasm, prompting the reliable complaint that Hollywood is addicted to fattening up on sequels, prequels, franchises and familiar fare. But maybe this boffo Thanksgiving will put that objection to rest and allow us to express some overdue gratitude for the sequel — a oft-maligned industry staple that has long proved its commercial and artistic worth.

The case against sequels has always been that they’re nothing but lazy retreads that crowds out more interesting and original work. While you could justify, say, “The Godfather 2” as part of an epic ongoing saga, every “Jaws 2,” “Speed 2” or “Staying Alive” seemed like a cynical, dispiriting cash grab.

Yet surveying the 50 years since that second Godfather film, you could fill a festival with gold standard follow-ups. “Aliens,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Creed” are just a few sequels that equaled or surpassed the originals. Sequels have also become an intriguing tool for expanding, interrogating or complicating a story. Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy — ”Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight” — is as ambitious an examination of the arc of a relationship as Hollywood has ever attempted, and it could only have been attempted in the form of three films, spanning decades.

In addition to their artistic merits, sequels can provide commercial ballast exactly when Hollywood needs it. The reliable success of sequels can symbiotically support the production of riskier original blockbusters — films like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — in the way that, for publishing houses, best-selling cookbooks help finance literary hits.

It’s no secret that Hollywood is hurting — so if it takes a reconfigured TV series or a Denzel Washington-centric legacy sequel to revive the patient, we should be grateful for any signs of recovering health. As for “Wicked,” it’s not a sequel but its success is no less welcome — not least because its sequel is already set to be released, no doubt to great success, this time next year.

OK, I’m pretty sure when you began your week, you weren’t thinking, “Gee, I hope Joe Biden follows up Thanksgiving with a pardon for his delinquent son.”

I can’t really argue that this was a good move, particularly considering how many times Biden promised it would never happen. There are, however, a couple of lines of defense.

One is the whole Biden story. He’s been with us so long — so veeerrry long — that we’ve sort of forgotten how he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash back in 1972 and how Beau, the star son of that first marriage, died of brain cancer, leaving Hunter as the only surviving child.

While there apparently hasn’t ever been a presidential pardon for a son before now, we have had some other incidents that make the Hunter story look sort of second-rate.

Remember, for instance, Donald Trump’s pardon of Charles Kushner, father-in-law of Ivanka, after he pleaded guilty to a deeply, deeply disgusting crime involving the hiring of a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law into a motel so …

OK, not going into detail. You can read about it in the stories covering Trump’s announcement that he’s going to make Kushner the ambassador to France in his next administration.

Truly, compared with that, Biden’s decision to let his son off the hook for tax offenses and having lied about his drug use when buying a gun seems less shocking. At least he didn’t make Hunter ambassador to a major international ally.

The big problem with Biden’s badness is that he’d specifically promised never to pardon Hunter and that he blamed the about-face on “raw politics” that “led to a miscarriage of justice.”

Nobody believes that, Joe. If only you’d said: “Look, I know this is wrong, but I can’t stand the idea of my troubled son being shipped off to prison. Other parents will understand. I’d rather risk the stain on my reputation than let anything else happen to my boy.”

We’d have known it was wrong, but we’d at least have appreciated that it was true.

Last week I argued that the blows Israel inflicted on Iran and its most important proxy, Hezbollah, would have vast consequences for the military balance in the region. It has only taken a few days for those consequences to start showing up. Donald Trump reportedly wants the region’s conflicts quieted down by the time he comes to office. Hey — good luck with that.

For starters, with Iran and Hezbollah weakened by Israel, the leader they were protecting most, the beleaguered Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, took a body blow in the last few days when anti-government rebels in Syria swept in from their countryside redoubts and swept out Assad’s army from virtually all of Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria. Alas, though, many of these Syrian rebels are not boy scouts — the group leading the charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a former Al Qaeda affiliate — and if Assad were toppled from power in Damascus, Syria, it could draw Israel in and destabilize the whole Levant.

Interestingly, Turkey, which backs some of these rebel groups and had been restraining them, may have given the green light for the attack. Turkey has long been Iran’s archrival for regional domination.

At the same time, a Western intelligence source tells me, a rancorous debate is afoot within Iran’s leadership over who is responsible for letting Hezbollah drag both Iran and Hezbollah into a devastating war with Israel — on behalf of Hamas — when Israel had not even attacked Hezbollah. As a result, Hezbollah’s rocket forces, meant to deter Israel from ever bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, have now been shattered.

Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah, which had become the army of the Shiites of Lebanon and imposed itself as the sacred third part of the country’s trinity — “the army, the people and the resistance” — to which every Lebanese leader had to pay homage, has dramatically lost support.

Israel was so surgical in its bombing inside Lebanon, trying to hit only Hezbollah targets and pro-Hezbollah neighborhoods, that it sent the message: “If you live in places that are loyal to the Lebanese state, you are safe, but if you stay in places Hezbollah controls, you are not safe,” explained Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on Hezbollah at The Washington Institute.

The message to Lebanese Shiites: Move away from Hezbollah and sign up for the new trinity: the people, the army and the state.

I would not count Hezbollah out, but it is going to be hard-pressed to come up with the money from Iran to pay for the reconstruction of all the neighborhoods and villages it controlled that have been devastated. And without that money and a resupply of arms from Iran, the other Lebanese political parties will surely try to remove Hezbollah’s veto power in the cabinet over who can be Lebanon’s next president and prime minister.

A senior U.S. official remarked to me, though, that precisely because Iran is so wounded now, it may feel that the only way to protect itself is by making a mad dash for a nuclear bomb. The Middle East will be anything but “over” when Trump arrives.

If Democrats want to understand one of the reasons the Republican Party is ascendant, they can look to President Biden’s pardon on Sunday for his son Hunter. In its rank mendacity, political hypocrisy, naked self-dealing and wretched example, it typifies so much of what so many Americans have come to detest about what the MAGA world calls “the swamp.”

Start with the mendacity. Last December, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, insisted, “I’ve been very clear: The president is not going to pardon his son.” The president reiterated the point in early June, when he told ABC’s David Muir that he would not pardon Hunter if his son was convicted, as he later was, of three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun while he was addicted to drugs. The younger Biden also faced separate criminal tax charges.

It was always a good bet that the president would break his word as soon as it was politically safe to do so. But he doubled down on dishonesty in his statement about the pardon, claiming Hunter’s prosecution was a result of “political pressure” on the judicial process. Nonsense. The charges stem from Hunter’s reckless lifestyle, abetted and financed by his willingness to trade shamelessly on the family name. A previous plea agreement between Hunter and federal prosecutors fell apart last year under scrutiny from a federal judge.

More obnoxious is the hypocrisy. Every year, federal prosecutors file hundreds of cases against persons charged with lying on the Firearms Transaction Record, or Form 4473, which is required from anyone buying a firearm from a licensed gun dealer. In 1993, then-Senator Biden made that form a key part of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. How is it that the same president who made both gun control and stricter tax enforcement key parts of his political message suddenly sees his own son’s transgressions as nuisance offenses?

As for the self-dealing, it’s touching that the president invoked his feelings as “a father” in letting his son off the legal hook. Too bad that luxury isn’t available to so many other parents who watch helplessly as their children run afoul of the law — and pay the legal consequence.

After the news of the pardon broke, a liberal friend wrote to say that perhaps it wasn’t such a big deal, at least when considering Donald Trump’s choices for attorney general and F.B.I. director. OK. But when a Democratic president behaves as Biden just did, it fuels the corrosive public cynicism that helped elect Trump yet again while licensing and excusing whatever plans the president-elect may have for politicizing justice and using it for the benefit of friends, family and self.

What a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.

The perfect expression of the authoritarian approach to the rule of law comes from a former Peruvian president, Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” The truly corrupted legal system combines impunity for the ruling class with punitive repression of political dissent.

When Jack Smith moved to dismiss his federal cases against Donald Trump, that clearly signaled Trump’s impunity. It was a representation of the adage that might makes right. He won, so he now enjoys a privilege from prosecution.

The selection of Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. — a move that would require firing or forcing the resignation of Christopher Wray, the current F.B.I. director, well before the end of his 10-year term — demonstrates Trump’s commitment to repression and revenge.

Patel is the ultimate Trump loyalist. I strongly recommend reading Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Patel in The Atlantic. Much of her reporting was based on interviews with Patel’s former colleagues in the first Trump administration.

“Patel was dangerous,” Calabro wrote, summarizing their thoughts, “not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the C.I.A. or F.B.I., but because he appeared to have no plan at all — his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow.”

Patel is so absurdly devoted to Trump that he wrote a children’s book about Trump, called “The Plot Against the King,” in which he describes the Russia investigation as a plot by “Hillary Queenton” against “King Donald.”

In December 2023, he told Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

“We’re going to come after you,” he continued, “whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out.”

To be clear, this isn’t conventional tough-on-crime language. He’s not telling criminals that he’s coming after them. Instead, he’s clearly targeting people who blocked Trump’s illegal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Biden did not rig a presidential election. Trump lost.

The danger to the rule of law is magnified by the circumstances. Wray is a Trump appointee, and his term doesn’t end until 2027. The only reason to replace him is to find someone who is more responsive to Trump.

Trump has clearly learned the lessons of his first term. When he nominates establishment Republicans, they’ll often (but not always) resist his worst and most unconstitutional impulses. Even Bill Barr, his second hand-picked attorney general, drew the line when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.

But now he’s nominating people who possess few, if any, moral lines at all. The danger of Patel isn’t primarily his ideology; it’s his loyalty. He is, as Calabro wrote, “the man who will do anything for Donald Trump.”