What Are Jewish Voters Supposed to Do?

27:08I mean, I want to make sure that, again, our elections are done in accordance with the legal processes and then they are legally certified. So that is the thing that I'm most focused on. I know that there's going to be some sort of interference from the federal government, and we're not going to get any assistance from the federal agencies that generally cooperate and work directly with us towards that end. There must be people saying to you, Attorney General, the Senate is turning on the state. This is the Abdul Al-Sayed. Maybe he's not great on Jewish issues, but he is the only Democratic nominee we've got.

27:45If he loses, the Senate may be kept by President Trump. Can you please just keep your concerns quiet till after November? Raise them after November if you must, but just be quiet till November. Are people saying things like that to you? Well, let me say a couple of things about this. First of all, to make this abundantly clear, I will amputate my right arm before I fill in the oval next to Mike Rogers' name. I think that keeping a majority, a Republican majority in the Senate is incredibly dangerous. I think Mike Rogers would be a rubber stamp for all of the worst excesses of, you know, the most corrupt administration we've ever had in American history.

28:27So he is a danger. He's an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as whatever form of imperfect democracy we are right now. So with Abdul, I will say this, you know, we have a lot in common in terms of our general beliefs and principles and policies. And I think it's important to say that. And I think it's important to, you know, to underline and underscore that fact. Trust me, I have much more in common with Abdul El-Sayed than I do with Mike Rogers in terms of my personal beliefs, my political beliefs, my philosophical beliefs about what should happen in the United States.

29:06And in the United States Senate. But with that, you know, I will say this when I won the endorsement of my party in 2018, you know, I had a really bitter. It's not technically a primary. It's a convention contest. But, you know, I I beat the UAW. I beat the AFL. The individual I was running against was African-American. So the black caucus wasn't entirely happy with my victory. So I had to spend a lot of time working with those groups. It took four months for the UAW to finally endorse me. So I think there's the understanding that in especially a very close race like the one that Abdul had with Haley Stevens, you know, he only won by some, I want to say, 14 ,000 votes.

29:53And we had a, you know, a heavy turnout for this primary. So I think it's only natural to expect that the winner is going to have to talk to those who supported his opponent. But, you know, for Jewish Michiganders, you know, this is not just a regular like, you know, we're arguing about what our tax rate should be, you know. Or I mean, this is something that, again, is so personal to Michigan Jews. And I think it's important. I think that Abdul understands this. This could be a very close race. And, you know, yes, we have, I think, one of the highest Arab American populations anywhere outside of the Middle East here in the state of Michigan.

30:39But we also have a pretty sizable Jewish population in Michigan. And the thing I will say about, you know, Jewish voters in Michigan, they are primarily Democratic. credit. They are, you know, about 75 to 80 percent consider ourselves Democrats or routinely vote for Democrats on the ticket. So this is not nothing. But for a lot of, and I will speak on behalf of American, sorry, Michigan Jews, we have some deep concerns. And we don't want to have to choose between the future of the state of Israel and Israel potentially not existing anymore, even though most of us are highly, highly, highly critical of the current government, highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, and highly critical, I will say, of AIPAC, which has become really, you know, I think the center of what people perceive is all the evils of corporate PAC money in America, especially here in Michigan.

31:40and we hear about it over and over again. But the thing is, is that like people are thinking about like, what are we exchanging? We absolutely don't want Mike Rogers to win. We absolutely want a Democratic majority in the Senate. But is Abdul going to spend six years railing against Israel, irrespective of who the government is there? That is a real concern. and an even greater concern is how that's affecting American Jews, because it really is, you know, turning up the anti-Semitism. And it's creating this dynamic where you have a lot of Democrats thinking, you know, there's good Jews and bad Jews.

32:20And the good Jews are the ones that don't believe in Zionism. And, you know, the bad Jews are the ones that believe that Israel is our biblical, religious, historical homeland. And for me personally, it's been a struggle because I have to tell you, for those who proclaim themselves to be anti-Zionist Jews, I don't know what you talk about during your Passover Seder. You can't follow the Maxwell House version of the Haggadah as I do in my family. I don't know what you say. It's so baked into our religion. So it's a real struggle for us right now as Michigan Jewish Democrats. It's a conversation we're having over and over.

33:02I was just on a call last night with a number of Michigan Jewish Democrats. And frankly, candidly, many of them are now supporting Mike Rogers. I don't respect that at all, even though I understand this is a choice that everybody has to make for themselves. But I really wish that between the Michigan Democratic Party, who, by the way, I think this is important to say, you know, you have five members of the Michigan Democratic Party who have been criminally indicted with acts of vandalism and terrorism and harassment and intimidation against the Jewish Federation of Detroit, against Jewish elected leaders at their homes.

33:46And despite that, you know, they seemingly are refusing to even suspend their membership to allow them to come to convention? How are you supposed to feel if you are an elected person who was a Democrat in Michigan and you want to go to the convention and you know those people are going to be there, especially with all the issues that we've had at convention lately with people who are targeting Jewish electeds or just electeds that are in any way, shape, or form supportive of Israel and chasing them around and screaming and yelling at them and harassing them and not allowing them to speak, shouting them down so that they can't even speak at convention, it's making a lot of us feel really uncomfortable.

34:27Well, let me take you back to the AIPAC question. Look, not all Black Americans support the work of the NAACP. Not all Hispanic Americans support the various groups that purport to speak for Hispanic Americans. But even if you're one of those minorities who doesn't support that group, if there are a political candidate whose entire campaign was about the NAACP is the root of all evil in American politics, I am here to fight the NAACP. And I say that in every speech, your ears would pick up a little bit. I don't think he's talking only about those people. I think he's talking about me too, because there's some part of me.

35:01I mean, AIPAC is a group that has taken some more partisan stances in recent terms than it recently has. It has leaned more toward the Republican side. And I think that's a strategic and tactical mistake for the pro-Israel community. But nonetheless, I don't think that's what we're talking about. I think we're talking about American Jews who support Israel, which is the overwhelming community of American Jews. And by the way, for profound reasons, as you say, that are non-severable from a Jewish identity. Yeah. So that's how I feel as well, even though, you know, I'm not a supporter of AIPAC. Whenever I say anything about this topic, the first thing that you'll see, you'll see hundreds of comments pop up and say that I'm an APAC whore, bought and paid for by APAC.

35:41Firstly, APAC, and I can't say this enough, does not support people who are in state offices. Why? Because as state attorney general, my job has literally nothing to do with foreign policy at all whatsoever. I don't get a vote. I don't get a say in it. And so I've had nothing to do with APAC during the course of my time in office. But if I, God forbid, I say anything about this subject, which I rarely do, I normally only talk about anti-Semitism in the context of how it's hurting Michigan Jews and how I want to fight back against hate crimes and anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric and all the rest of it.

36:22But that is the first thing people will say, even though, of course, I've never had anything to do with AIPAC. But that has been the boogeyman for everything. And I've said to Abdul, And I've said it multiple times. You can't make AIPAC the central villain in every story. When you're talking about health care, what does AIPAC have to do about that? When you're talking about affordable housing, you know, when you're when you're talking about, you know, medications that people can't obtain or people have been price gouged or environmental issues that we have. Like, what does AIPAC have to do with any of that stuff?

36:54But, you know, I got a text recently from his campaign and it said, you know, we're fighting back against AIPAC, Mike Rogers and Donald Trump in that order, in that order. When I hear that, I always feel like Liz Lemon and 30 Rock. Just say Jewish, Jack. This is taking forever. By the way, that was one of my favorite shows of all time. Just so I'm I'm very familiar with all that. With all that is at stake in these midterms, and all that is at stake for, and most Jews are on the side, I think, that has supported the lowercase d Democratic coalition against Donald Trump, that in race after race, and Michigan is the white hot center, but in many others, the message from the Democratic Party is we are making it a litmus test that you say that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

37:41That is an intentional inversion of the truth of the Holocaust, a central event in modern Jewish history. And it's also being used to say, if you don't, if you as a Jew cannot go along with this abhorrent lie that is designed to destroy your own history and transfer your history to someone else's custody, then you're out of the party. And all Jews need to understand that this is their moment to take a backseat, not only for their beliefs, but even for their physical safety, for the greater good. And that's sort of a very paralyzing position to be in because there is a greater good. But why are Jews the ones who are being asked to say, your safety, your beliefs, your history, those have to be secondary to everyone else's safety?

38:19Let me bring up something that is really fresh in my mind because it just happened over the course of the weekend. Abdul brought Hassan Piker, the streamer, to our state. For old people like me, I had no idea who this guy was. but he brought him to a number of different universities and he really helped to elevate his profile in this state. And of course now I sort of, you know, it's, it's in all my algorithms now, the things that he says, but one of the things that he did over the course of the weekend, or at least came to my attention over the course of the weekend, he made some statements. Because people don't f*** with Israel any longer.

38:54And if, and if Jews in America keep putting this, this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews. And during the course of it, they actually showed flash on the screen a guy by the name of Jeremy Moss, who was a longtime state legislator in Michigan. He won the Democratic nomination to replace Haley Stevens in the 11th Congressional District, overwhelmingly Democratic district. He's very likely to be the next congressman from the 11th Congressional District to serve in Washington.

39:36And he put up, you know, a picture of him. He's Jewish and he is supportive, generally speaking, of Israel. And next to the picture it had is his AIPAC rating, which is this group that puts out like any time a Jewish person contributes basically to a candidate that's, you know, AIPAC money. And next to it, it had a picture of him in Israel, surrounded by a number of Israeli flags. It did not say what he was doing there. He was actually there to protest against the Netanyahu government. That wasn't covered in there. But I thought to myself, why is Hassan Piker, who has millions and millions of followers, many of us believe that he is very anti-Semitic, in addition to being racist and sexist and many other things, if you listen to some of the things that he says during his streaming or podcast.

40:26And I'm wondering, who's going to stand up for Jeremy when these really hateful words are being said and you're highlighting this Jewish elected who's going to Congress? Who are the members of Congress, of our congressional delegation in Michigan, who will say, that's not right? Who of our U.S. senators, who in our state legislature will do it. Is it only going to be the Jewish electeds? Will it be the same people over and over again, which is me and, you know, two state reps and, you know, like just members of the Michigan Democratic Party Jewish caucus? Is it only going to be a handful of us?

41:04Will we have any allies that are non-Jews who will stand up and say, this is wrong? And so for a lot of us, You know, we feel really isolated. Like, do we have a home in the Democratic Party anymore? And I actually put up a query on it was my my political, but my personal Facebook page. So all the people who who can see it are people who I've friended on there. They're not just like bots or just people from other states or whatever. These are all people that I know in some way, shape or another. And I said, is there still room in the Democratic Party for, you know, for people who believe that Israel has a right to exist and that we should have a two-state solution with sovereignty and dignity and self-determination for both the Palestinians and Israeli Jews?

41:53and it was a real mixed result. It was like half and half of a lot of people saying, no, like our tent of our party is not big enough for you people anymore. And that was deeply concerning for me. You mentioned earlier on that you, and this I'm sure is true for everyone who's ever run for office, have said things that on second thought were not the right thing to say or showed imperfect understanding or lack of sympathy. And like this is part of the human experience, right? If you're a candidate who has built all of his or her previous career in a farm area, and then you run for a statewide office, and you say something that shows lack of awareness of the problems of city dwellers, or vice versa, you're a city candidate, and you haven't been attentive enough to the needs of farmers or rural people, and they come to you and say, look, you've been rural, you've been urban through the first part of your career, and now you're running statewide, and you need to understand us, it's credible that that person's like, gee, I never thought about it that way.

42:48I never had to think about city or country where I was before. Or you're right. I'm learning from you. Thank you so much. I can be a bigger and better representative of more people as I run for statewide office. But if you've based your entire career on I hate the farmers or I hate the city people, and that's your message, and everything that you don't like is a product of a conspiracy by farmers or city people, and then you run for statewide office, and we're a few weeks from a close election, you suddenly realize, I need 100 ,000 more votes for the farmers. And then every liberal op-ed writer in America saying, here's what you must say to deceive the farmers into thinking you are their friend in these last few weeks before the election.

43:23I think the farmers are entitled to be, or the city people, are entitled to be a little skeptical and to say, you know, that's just a form of words. Your whole career was based on one view. I think that's you. I think that's you. The thing you've said all your career, I think that's you. And I don't think that's ignorance. I think that's you. And if I find it disrespectful of me, that's not because you don't understand me. It's because you've taken a view hostile to me. I understand exactly what you're saying. And, you know, I want to believe that Abdul will educate himself a little bit more on some of these issues that I think he demonstrates a clear lack of understanding in regard to and does not appreciate some of the nuances in the history of Israel or, you know, the background of the Jewish people, you know, going back, you know, 3 ,000 years.

44:12I hope he will do that. But what I will say about how I'm looking at this election in many ways is, you know, when you talk about the future of Israel, when you talk about the future of the Jewish diaspora, I don't know if any of it matters if we have no regulations of any kind on AI. and we end up in a situation where literally, I mean, you just saw over the weekend they had the robot competition in China. If you have literally armies of robots that are driven by AI that are able to, and I don't mean to sound too crazy here, but like enslave the human race, I don't think that's the craziest idea out there.

44:59And I've actually heard a lot of these AI, you know, CEOs talk about that. You know, they've talked about how AI could result in the end of humanity. Climate change. I mean, every day we are seeing the devastation that's brought upon us. I don't know how much longer the human race is going to be able to continue if we don't take serious measures to combat climate change. So there are things that I look at When I think, well, can I support Abdul and perhaps other candidates that are like-minded? I don't know. We're not going to have to worry about the future of the Israelis and the Palestinians because I don't know that any of us are going to continue to exist if we don't really get these significant global issues under control.

45:44I will tell you right now in Michigan, we're getting absolutely hammered by these Canadian tariffs. So you have, you know, you have people. By the anti-Canadian tariffs. The anti-Canadian tariffs. I'm speaking of Canada, let's say. I'm on the north shore of Lake Ontario right now. Okay. So the impact that this is happening to us, I can't possibly be overstated. I mean, you have people who are going to lose everything, everything, everything, right? They'll lose their businesses. They'll lose their homes. They'll lose their health insurance. So these are real issues that I know that Mike Rogers is going to be terrible on and will do anything that, you know, supports the president, no matter how ridiculous his foreign policy may be in a way that is so detrimental to us in Michigan.

46:31And I think that Abdul is going to stand up to that. So there are so many issues I could go on and on and on. Like, yes, my Judaism is so fundamental to who I am and what my beliefs are. But what do we do with these crises that are of such enormity that could it eclipse those other concerns because they are of such a weighty nature? That's going to have to be considerations for me. And I would say to my fellow Michigan Jews who are members of the Democratic Party or who typically vote for Democrats, like, these should also be considerations for you. We shouldn't just be thinking about Israel or even the safety of American Jews when we have all of these other issues that are also incredibly important.

47:15Well, you're raising a paradox that you will recognize as one of the most foundational questions in Jewish ethics. This quote from the Rabbi Hillel, where he says, if I'm only for myself, what am I? If I'm not for myself, who am I? And the subtlety of the quote is, obviously, if you're only for yourself, you're not even a person, because that's the what. But if you're not for yourself, then who are you? And this is a thing that in this cycle, a lot of Jews are having to balance, which is most Jews are probably on the side of most of the issues that are represented by the anti-Trump coalition. But important parts of that anti-Trump coalition are saying, but the price of the coalition and of your membership is you must take a second seat, not only for your beliefs about the state of Israel, but even for your physical safety.

48:00So I'm going to ask you to put yourself in, And you must have people, you are a very highly engaged person. You're passionately committed to your views. But you must have relatives or friends who are less engaged and who are committed to Jewish survival and to the Jewish connection to the state of Israel. How would you help them to think through the who am I, what am I question? How, when they're told this is the right thing to do, but you're going to have to take a second place in this right thing to do, how should they think about that? This is a daily conversation with my own family. If you're talking about my family without our many cousins and whatnot, I mean, probably never voted for a Republican in a U.S.

48:38Senate race ever, ever. And my parents are 85 and 89 years old. And we're having these conversations right now. But I would say a few things. First of all, again, we can't pretend that this is the only issue facing us. And sometimes we do have to come to the conclusion that we have to do what is best for all of humanity over those of us, obviously, who are Jewish and, again, who believe in the right for Israel to exist. But I want to make this one last point while I still have the opportunity to do so. I think it's a fundamental mistake for the Democratic Party to think that you can just push Jewish Democrats out and simply replace them with any other population.

49:24You know, we have been such an instrumental part of this party, whether you're talking about our activism, whether you're talking about our legal work, whether you're talking about the contributions and donations that have been made to the Democratic Party. And the fact that we have very progressive ideals that we've worked hard on and whether you're looking all the way back to whether it's, you know, women's suffrage, whether it's the fight for rights for African-Americans in this country, whether it's work that I did and many other Jews on LGBTQ rights issues. You know, we have been an essential part of the fabric of the Democratic Party for a very, very long time.

50:08We are an essential part of the fabric of this party. And I would ask the leadership and members of this party to consider that before they do or say things that will force us to leave this party. I feel like we're already not wanted in the Republican Party. And I think that this is essentially a party of fascism. And we know about all the excuses that they make on the far right and how they embrace the Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens and all the people and Chucker Carlson's all of the enormous anti-Semites on the far right. Right. But, you know, and I'm not a member of the Republican Party. I can only speak to being a member of the Democratic Party.

50:52But I would tell members of our party that this is a worse place without Jews in it. Well, one of the things that people will say, and I think this is a message that Abdel C. and many of us, L.C. and many of us supporters say, is all you have to do to be accepted as a Jew is to jettison Israel. That's all we ask. And just disavow the fate of half the Jewish people who live in the state of Israel, maybe they'll be massacred, maybe they'll be enslaved, who knows what, maybe they'll be raped. That's not, you know, just separate yourself from that and you'll be left alone. And I think I listen to that and I hear, first, it's not for you to say what is important to me.

51:28When you tell me that Israel is not integral to being a Jew, I don't walk into your house and tell you what is integral to being who you are. So don't walk into my house and tell me what is integral to being me. But second, that's a pretty contemptible offer. You'll guarantee my physical safety if I submit. I mean, 3 ,000 years of Jewish martyrdom has been people who, it's a stubborn people as it says in the Bible itself. We don't submit to that. And now you're asking us with a threat, maybe sometimes with a smile and a threat, but a better threat, disavow yourself and you'll be safe. You say, you know what?

52:00The whole point of the state of Israel was that Jews didn't have to put their safety at the mercy of other people. They could defend themselves. And that's the Jewish project is to have a place in the world where Jews are safe because of themselves. And the American project, the American project was to say, everyone is safe. It doesn't matter who you are because we don't have majorities that tolerate minorities here. It's not with permission from other people. It's not conditional. Your safety is non-conditional. That's George Washington's famous letter to the Newport synagogue. Your safety is non-conditional.

52:31You're an American. You have a right to be the same as anybody else and to be left alone and respected the same as anybody else. And now suddenly there are all kinds of conditions, but only if you disavow who you are. Yeah. Let me just respond to that in a couple of different ways. I've said this over and over again, that, you know, when, um, when a black person says that phrase that you're using and the way you're talking about this issue to me is racist. I'd like you to stop doing it. We respect that when somebody, uh, you know, when we're talking to somebody in the LGBTQ community and say, I don't like the phrase that you're using or that term is offensive to me.

53:03And here's why. We respect that in the Democratic Party. We say, OK, I'm not going to use that phrase anymore. I didn't realize that it was offensive to you. I'm going to stop. But this has been an outlier for me. I have people saying, you are not going to tell us what you deem to be anti-Semitic. We'll decide what's anti-Semitic. That's not up for you, the Jewish population, to decide. And I find that to be very off-putting and offensive. And, you know, I think that's totally unacceptable. But the last thing I will say is this. If that's the deal that has to be made, and I've been really candid about this, I was Jewish before I was ever Michigan Attorney General.

53:44I'm going to be Jewish afterwards. I was Jewish before I was ever a member of the Democratic Party. And if I have to, I'll be Jewish afterwards, too. Attorney General Nessel, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Thanks for having me.

54:06A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

54:44It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

54:55Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Dana Nessel for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

55:30As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a new biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark. I had the opportunity to meet the notorious Roy Cohn once in my life when I was an undergraduate at Yale. He came to address a group of students. It was a small group because the name of Joe McCarthy's famous henchman had obscured a little bit with the passage of time. There were maybe six or eight of us there, and we all observed he was just as creepy in person as he was creepy in legend. And that's the story that is told by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark in their new book.

56:07Roy Cohn, of course, was the chief aide to Joe McCarthy during his investigations of the early 1950s. Those investigations led to a disaster for McCarthy, who was eventually censured by the Senate and who died of alcoholism as a comparatively young man in 1957. But Roy Cohn went on to a more lucrative future, even if he never lost his notoriety. As a shady lawyer in New York, he handled divorces. He represented many mafia figures. He was involved in all kinds of proceedings that would have got anybody else disbarred or even sent to prison. But Roy Cohn went from fame to fame, progress to progress.

56:43He never paid his taxes. He died despite all of his amazing career success. He died broke because he owed millions of dollars to the IRS, which they reclaimed from his estate, leaving very little behind. But he certainly lived life the way he wanted to live it. So Kai Barden's Susan Goldmark tell a withering story of his career, but they also illustrate how many people who thought they despised him and despised his politics were drawn into his orbit because of Roy Coyne's fathomless ability to find favors that people wanted and to deliver them. He lived by a code of loyalty, and he drew into his network of favor exchange many people who would become pillars of the New York liberal establishment of the 1960s and 1970s.

57:27Roy Cohn was a bad man, and he fully deserves the nickname of American Scoundrel that he's given to this book. But there is a blind spot in the book and a blind spot in the way that people think about him that I kept dealing with as I read this otherwise fascinating and important book. You know, one of the characteristics of post-McCarthy America is that never having felt so bad about the way people were accused falsely and dragged into conspiracies and had their names besmirched, some of them innocent, some of them merely naive fellow travelers, comparatively few of them actual traitors or spies.

58:04But there became a kind of blind spot about the moral decision to have been a communist in the 1930s and 1940s. And I noticed that throughout the biography of Roy Cohn. Kai Bird previously wrote a biography of the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer. In fact, it's his 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer that became the basis for the Christopher Nolan 2023 movie. Now, if you've seen Oppenheimer, one of the things you see is that Oppenheimer is the victim of a false persecution because of his left-wing sympathies in the 1930s, which are suggested in the movie to amount to no more than a sympathy for the Spanish Republic and a desire to give and a willingness to give, to make donations to Spanish Republican causes.

58:46Many, many people of liberal view shared that, shared that outlook. But in the years since 2005, more and more evidence has come to light that in fact Oppenheimer was probably a party member between 1939 and 1941. That's the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. So this is not premature anti-fascism. This is not a desire to support the only people who seem to be fighting against Hitler. He joined the party and stayed in it after Stalin signed his pact with Hitler and into 1941, at least according to the latest suggestive evidence collected post-2005. One of the most eminent historians of the Cold War period and the atomic research program, Barton Bernstein, wrote on the eve of the release of the Oppenheimer movie, New evidence also leads to a reassessment, and thus taking far more seriously, much negative evidence on Oppenheimer dating back to the 1940s, that many historians, including myself, often unwisely in about the 1970s to 2002 period, minimized or disregarded.

59:47It is no longer possible or reasonable to comfortably conclude, as had many liberal interpreters, including myself, that Oppenheimer in the 1954 hearing, that's his security hearing, was candidly forthcoming about his late 1930s and early 1940s politics. He was not. He lied, and he sought to deceive. Now, that story about Oppenheimer is relevant to reading this new book about Roy Cohn. Again, again, in this otherwise encyclopedic and analytic biography of Roy Cohn, you see a minimization of what happened in the 1930s and 40s with actual communists. In pages 32 and 33 of American Scoundrel, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark called Whitaker Chambers a serialist and fabulist and treated as an open question whether Alger Hiss was indeed guilty of espionage or perjury.

1:00:35And that's not an open question. We know that not only from the investigations that were conducted at the time, but from later releases of Soviet transcripts that identify Alger Hiss as a Soviet acid in the 1930s. That doesn't excuse Roy Cohn, who was a scoundrel and who lied and who abused his office. and was guilty of, again, things that would get anybody else disbarred or sent to prison. But it does mean that when we reckon with the past, we need to understand that even when we identify the villains correctly, we're often at risk of identifying the heroes wrongly. Those who are on the wrong side of Roy Cohn were not heroes, even if Roy Cohn was indeed the American scoundrel and great villain that Byrd and Goldmark so vividly portray.

1:01:18That's it for this week's David Fromm Show. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope if you like the show that you'll continue subscribing to The Atlantic. That's the best way to support the work of me and all of my colleagues. Please share this material on any social media platform you have access to that helps with the show's algorithm. See you next week on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

1:02:01This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

1:02:48every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.