The Washington Post National Weekly - May 28, 2017

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY THE COMMUNICATORS JFK, Trump and the power of new media.

PAGE 12

Politics Trump budget causes rift 4

Technology Google sees what you buy 17

5 Myths Watergate 23

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Why the FBI is eyeing Kushner BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

F

BI investigators have a simple reason for believing Jared Kushner can help them determine whether President Trump’s campaign helped Russia influence the presidential election: Kushner met with senior Russians during the campaign.

And while it’s not weird for presidential campaigns to meet with foreign officials, under this context, it was.

Right around the time Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser held a meeting with the Russian ambassador to the United States last spring, the CIA director started to notice something weird: The Russians were talking about aggressively trying to influence the U.S. presidential election against Hillary Clinton.

John Brennan, who was CIA director at the time, then started to notice that the Russians were reaching out to Trump campaign officials. His “radar” went off. Here’s what he told Congress in a hearing about Russian meddling this past week. I’ve italicized some key points: “Having been involved in many counterintelligence cases in the past, I know what the Russians try to do. They try to suborn individ­ uals, and they try to get individuals, including U.S. persons, to try to act on their behalf, either wittingly or unwittingly. And I was worried by a number of contacts that the Russians had with U.S. persons. And so therefore, by the time I left office on January 20, I had unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the campaign or not to work on their behalf, again, either in a witting or unwitting fashion. And so, therefore, I felt as though the FBI investigation was certainly well-founded and needed to look into those issues.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

In other words: When the Russians want to spy or meddle in other nation’s affairs, their go-to move is to find people from that nation to cuddle up with — or to blackmail, if it gets to that. (“Suborn” sits right in the middle of those two. It means to bribe or secretly persuade someone to do something.)

When the director of the CIA realized that the Russians wanted to influence the U.S. election, he knew to keep an eye out for Russians reaching out to people tied to the election. And

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is now a focus of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

sure enough, Brennan said, Russian officials started holding meetings with members of the Trump campaign.

Michael Flynn. Kushner. Now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. They all met with Russian officials at some point, and CNN and the New York Times, respectively, have reported that Sessions and Kushner did not disclose their meetings with Russians on their securityclearance forms. Other members of Trump’s campaign already had deep ties to Russia, among them former campaign manager Paul Manafort and adviser Carter Page.

And it’s fair to say that U.S. investigators would have been very intrigued to see then-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 33

candidate Trump’s son-in-law, one of his closest advisers, receiving meetings with Russians.

Going back to April 2016, we know Kushner met at least twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and a Moscow banker.

That’s not to say meeting with the Russians equates to colluding with the Russians.

Brennan emphasized to the House Intelligence Committee: “These are contacts that might have been totally, totally innocent and benign as well as those that might have succumbed somehow to those Russian efforts.”

“Many times they know that individuals may be Russian officials,” he said later, speaking broadly about how Russians use people, “but they don’t know that there is an intelligence connection or an intelligence motive behind it.”

Brennan made clear that he had only suspected that Russians may have used or tried to use members of the Trump campaign to influence the election. But — and this is a really key “but” — his suspicions were enough to refer everything he knew to the FBI. The FBI, we know now, took Brennan's concerns seriously. The agency is waist-deep in a months-long, mostly covert investigation of Russia meddling and whether the Trump campaign helped. And its investigation has led it to the highest ranks of the White House.

Exactly what investigators want to know from Kushner (whose lawyer said he will cooperate) isn’t clear. But why their investigation has led them to Kushner is clearer.

Given what we know about how the Russians try to use people, it makes sense that Kushner, who had several meetings with highlevel Russians and is one of the president’s closest advisers, is part of this investigation. n

© The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY LIFESTYLE BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Just as John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960 by looking good on the new medium of television, Donald Trump won in 2016 in no small measure by his use of Twitter.

Illustration by JACK HUGHES for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Many in GOP balk at Trump’s budget Divide sets up fight in Congress as some discuss working across the aisle to prevent deep cuts

BY K ELSEY S NELL, D AMIAN P ALETTA AND M IKE D E B ONIS

P

resident Trump’s proposal to cut federal spending by more than $3.6 trillion over the next decade — including deep reductions for programs that help the poor — faced harsh criticism in Congress on this past week, where even many Republicans said the White House had gone too far.

While some fiscally conservative lawmakers, particularly in the House, found a lot to praise in Trump’s plan to balance the budget within 10 years, most Republicans flatly rejected the White House proposal. The divide sets up a clash between House conservatives and a growing number of Senate Republicans who would rather work with Democrats on a spending deal than entertain Trump’s deep cuts.

“This is kind of the game,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “We know that the president’s budget won’t pass as proposed.”

Instead, Cornyn said he believes conversations are already underway about how Republicans can negotiate with Democrats to avoid across-the-board spending cuts that are scheduled to go into effect in October. Those talks could include broad spending increases for domestic and military programs that break from Trump’s plan for deep cuts in education, housing, research and health care.

“I think that’s the only way,” Cornyn said of working with Democrats on spending. “It would be good to get that done so we can get the Appropriations Committee to get to work.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said such spending talks would be inevitable.

“We’ll have to negotiate the top line with Senate Democrats, we know that,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. “They will not be irrelevant in the process, and at some point, here in the near future, those discussions will begin.”

As Senate Republicans were discussing a bipartisan spending

agreement, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney stood across town pitching Trump’s proposal to dramatically alter the role of government in society, shrinking the federal workforce, scaling back anti-poverty programs and cutting spending on things like disease research and job training.

The $4.094 trillion proposal for fiscal 2018 includes $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years to anti-poverty programs including Medicaid, food assistance and health insurance for low-income children.

It would slightly increase spending on the military, immigration control and border security and provide an additional $200 billion for infrastructure projects over 10 years. It would also allocate $1.6 billion for the creation of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Budget experts questioned many of the economic assumptions that the White House put into its plan, saying it was preposterous to claim that massive tax cuts and spending reductions will lead to a surge in economic growth. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, for example, said that using normal economic projections, the White House’s proposal would not eliminate the deficit and would allow U.S. debt to continue growing into the next decade.

“Rather than making unrealistic assumptions, the president must make the hard tax and spending choices needed to truly bring the national debt under control,” it said.

The White House proposals represent a defiant blueprint for a government realignment that closely follows proposals made in recent years by some of the most conservative members of the House, a group that once included Mulvaney. Trump has alleged that safety net programs create a welfare state that pull people out of the workforce, and his budget would cull these programs back.

Mulvaney pointed specifically to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the modern version of food stamps.

The White House plans to propose

Big cuts to programs that help poor Trump’s 2018 budget proposal makes deep cuts across many anti-poverty programs, including food stamps and family welfare.

-29%

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -19%

Children’s Health Insurance Program Medicaid

-17% -13%

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

-12%

Unemployment Insurance -8%

Earned Income Tax Credit -3%

Supplemental Security Income

-2%

Social Security Disability Insurance

-0.6%

Medicare

Social Security Old-Age Insurance

+3%

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Earned Income Tax Credit

$478.7B Trump’s 10-year proposal $672.0B Without policy change -28.8% difference

$252.3B Trump’s 4-year proposal $275.2B Without policy change -8.3% difference

Projection without policy change

$100B

75

75

50

50

Trump’s proposal

25 0

$100B

2007

2018

2027

25 0

2007

2018 2021

Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)

Supplemental Security Income

$13.4B Trump’s 2018 proposal $16.7B 2017 spending -19.4% difference

$623.9B Trump’s 10-year proposal $644.7B Without policy change -3.2% difference

$40B

$100B

30

75

20

50

10

25

0

2007

0

2018

2007

2018

2027

Social Security Medicaid forcing states to pay a portion of the benefits in10-year the program, $4.5T Trump’s proposalwhich reached morepolicy than change 44 million ben$5.3T Without eficiaries in 2016.

-16.5% difference “We are not kicking anybody off $800B of any program who really needs it,”600 Mulvaney said. “We have plenty of money in this country to take 400 care of the people who need help. . . .200 We don’t have enough money 0

2007

2018

2027

toDisability take careInsurance of . . . everybody who doesn’t need help.” $1.8T Trump’s 10-year proposal Mulvaney, who change served in the $1.8T Without policy House from 2011 until earlier this -1.8% difference year, is a co-founder of the House $400B Freedom Caucus. Many of the pro300 in Trump’s first budget revisions flect long-standing priorities of the200 Republican Party’s far right in cutting 100 back federal spending to 0

2007

2018

2027

-19.4% difference

-3.2% difference

$40B

$100B

30

75

20

50

10

25

0

0

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

2007

2018

5

2007

2018

Medicaid

Social Security Disability Insurance

$4.5T Trump’s 10-year proposal $5.3T Without policy change -16.5% difference

$1.8T Trump’s 10-year proposal $1.8T Without policy change -1.8% difference

$800B

$400B

600

300

400

200

200

100

0

2007

2018

2027

0

2007

2018

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)

Medicare

$143.5B Trump’s 10-year proposal $165.2B Without policy change -13.1% difference

$8.6T Trump’s 10-year proposal $8.7T Without policy change -0.6% difference

$40B

$2T

30

1.5

20

1

10

0.5

0

2007

2018

2027

0

2027

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

2007

2018

2027

Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance

$408.3B Trump’s 10-year proposal $461.5B Without policy change -11.5% difference

$11.6T Trump’s 10-year proposal $11.3B Without policy change 2.8% difference $2T

300

1.5

200

1

100

0.5

0

2007

2018

2027

0

2007

2018

2027

Sources: Historical program expenditures for Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, EITC and Social Security from the Office of Management and Budget. Projected baseline for Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security from the Trump administration budget proposal. Historical and projected spending for other programs from the Congressional Budget Office. All proposed budgets from the Trump administration budget proposal.

DENISE LU AND KIM SOFFEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

get the nation’s long-term fiscal picture under control — largely by cutting entitlement programs that mainly benefit the poor.

Republicans are keenly interested in passing a budget this year because they hope to use that legislation to lay the groundwork for a GOP-friendly rewrite of the tax code. Many GOP members hope to attach the tax reform to the budget process in order to take advantage of special Senate rules that would allow both the budget and tax rewrite to pass with 51 votes, rather than the 60 that are needed to pass most other legislation. That special treatment could be critical

WEEKLY

2027

Unemployment Insurance

$400B

KLMNO

POLITICS

to the success of the GOP tax effort in the Senate, where Republicans control a slim 52-to-48 majority.

White House officials knew their budget proposal would be jarring and launch a political fight, but they think it is a necessary debate given a wing of the Republican Party that wants the government to shrink.

But the cuts were met with intense criticism even among the majority of GOP members who hailed Trump’s desire to pare back spending, including many who worried about the size of some of the proposed cuts.

Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.),

chairman of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, said he was encouraged by early reports of new curbs on food stamps, family welfare and other spending. But he said he draws the line on cuts to Meals on Wheels, a charity that Mulvaney earlier this year suggested was ineffective.

“I’ve delivered meals to a lot of people that perhaps it’s their only hot meal of the day,” Meadows said.

“And so I’m sure there’s going to be some give and take, but to throw out the entire budget just because you disagree with some of the principles would be inappropriate.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he backs Trump’s proposal for a temporary burst of new defense spending, which White House officials say would allow them to add 56,400 service members in 2018.

But he worries that Trump would finance those increases by cutting critical programs like the National Institutes of Health.

“My number one goal is to have a more balanced budget,” said Graham, who also endorsed the idea of entering into spending talks with Democrats. “NIH is a national treasure, and it would be hurt, too.”

Graham is part of a long-standing alliance between defense hawks who want increased military spending and Democrats who are willing to back military programs in exchange for more spending on domestic priorities. The two sides have forged several past agreements, including a two-year plan for increased spending that is set to

expire at the end of September.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that he is prepared to work with GOP leaders when the time is right.

“The idea that we’ll work on a bipartisan budget independent from the president’s is ripe in the air,” Schumer said.

But such a deal is sure to anger conservatives in the House, where many of the most hard-line members staunchly defended aspects of Trump’s proposal.

Although Meadows said Meals on Wheels cuts might be “a bridge too far,” he praised much of the rest of the Trump budget.

“It probably is the most conservative budget that we’ve had under Republican or Democrat administrations in decades,” he said.

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.), a Freedom Caucus member, rejected the argument that Trump’s budget represented a betrayal of some of his populist campaign promises, notably to protect Medicaid spending.

“If we don’t do something to protect the program for the people who really need it, then they’re not going to have access to that, so I think we can’t continue to ignore these big-ticket items,” he said. “If we’re ever going to get our budget to balance and pay down our debt, we’re going to have to make these tough choices and have these tough votes.” n © The Washington Post

Eric Ueland, right, the Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, distributes President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Trump team vetting relied on Internet ‘Anyone who came to us with a pulse . . . and seemed legit’ was welcome, aide says

BY T OM H AMBURGER AND R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN

A

s Donald Trump surged in the Republican primary polls in the early months of 2016, his outsider campaign faced growing pressure to show that the former reality-TV star and noted provocateur was forming a coherent and credible world view.

So when Carter Page, an international businessman with an office near Trump Tower, volunteered his services, former officials recall, Trump aides were quick to make him feel welcome.

He had come with a referral from the son-in-law of Richard Nixon, New York state Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox, who had conveyed Page’s interest to the campaign, Cox said.

A top Trump adviser, Sam Clovis, then employed what campaign aides now acknowledge was their go-to vetting process — a quick Google search — to check out the newcomer. He seemed to have the right qualifications, according to former campaign officials — head of an energy investment firm, business degree from New York University, doctorate from the University of London.

Page was in. He joined a new Trump campaign national security advisory group, and in late March 2016, the candidate pointed to Page, among others, as evidence of a foreign policy team with gravitas.

But what the Google search had not shown was that Page had been on the FBI’s radar since at least 2013, when Russian officials allegedly tried to use him to get information about the energy business.

By the summer of 2016, Page, who had been recently named as a Trump adviser, was under surveillance by FBI agents who suspected that he may have been acting as an agent of the Kremlin.

As part of its broader investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the FBI continues to examine how Page joined the campaign and what conversations he may have had

PAVEL GOLOVKIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Carter Page, who served as an adviser on Donald Trump’s campaign, has also been under FBI surveillance for his possible ties to Russia.

with Russian officials about the effort to interfere with the election — with or without the knowledge of Trump and his team — according to people familiar with the matter.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also zeroed in on Page, asking him for records of all his contacts with Russians during the campaign, all financial interactions he had with Russia and all communications he had with Trump campaign staff.

The circumstances that led to Page’s easy access to the Trump campaign represent one of the main questions facing investigators: Were Trump’s connections to multiple Russia-friendly advisers mere coincidence, or evidence of a coordinated attempt to collude with a foreign government? Or were they the result of incompetent vetting that left a neophyte candidate vulnerable to influence from people with nefarious agendas?

Regardless of the answer, the campaign’s previously unreported procedures for vetting Page and other advisers are greatly complicating matters for Trump’s presidency. Along with Page, a number of other Trump associates are under growing scrutiny by congressional investigators and the FBI as they examine potential ties between the campaign and Moscow, including former national secu-

rity adviser Michael Flynn, onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort, informal Trump adviser Roger Stone and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Multiple people familiar with campaign operations, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that Page and others were brought into the fold at a time of desperation for the Trump team. As Trump was starting to win primaries, he was under increasing pressure to show that he had a legitimate, presidentialcaliber national security team.

The problem he faced was that most mainstream national security experts wanted nothing to do with him.

“Everyone did their best, but there was not as much vetting as there could have been,” former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said.

Another longtime campaign official put it this way: “Anyone who came to us with a pulse, a résumé and seemed legit would be welcomed.”

“We were not exactly making due diligence the highest priority,” another campaign veteran added.

A White House spokeswoman referred questions to Trump’s campaign. Michael Glassner, who currently serves as manager of Trump’s campaign committee, de-

clined to comment.

Page and Trump aides have said that Page never met Trump, and Page left the campaign in August 2016. Page has denied working on behalf of the Russians and said questions about his Moscow ties are part of a political witch hunt designed by Democrats to discredit Trump.

On Thursday, after Cox described his role, Page confirmed that the New York GOP chairman had connected him to the Trump campaign.

Cox said in an interview that Page, an acquaintance from business and political circles, had reached out to him in early 2016 expressing interest in joining the Trump campaign. Cox said he routinely connected potential volunteers with GOP campaigns. He described Page as “very informed and up to date on things.”

Clovis, who assembled and vetted the list of national security advisers that included Page, declined to comment. Representatives for Flynn and Kushner declined to comment. A White House official said senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, also a key campaign staffer at the time, had no role in the formation of the foreign policy group.

A thorough vetting of Page might have revealed several red flags. Page had spent three years working in Moscow, for instance, and he held stock in the Russian company Gazprom, meaning that he could have a personal financial stake in the future of U.S.-imposed sanctions against Russia.

Page wrote in a September letter to then-FBI Director James B. Comey that he had sold his “de minimis equity investment” in the Russian company at a loss a month earlier.

Page had previously drawn the attention of the FBI after he had conversations in 2013 with a man posing as an executive with the New York branch of the Russian development bank Vnesheconombank. The man was later convicted of being a Russian spy, and FBI recordings included discussions among Russian operatives about their attempts to recruit

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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POLITICS ANALYSIS Page. Page has said that he cooperated with the FBI and that the only crime related to the incident is that U.S. government officials appear to have recently revealed his role to the media.

In June, Page stunned a group of foreign policy luminaries during a private meeting at Blair House with the visiting prime minister of India by going off-topic to declare that Vladimir Putin was a stronger and more reliable leader than President Obama, according to people who were in the room. Page also promised that U.S.-Russian relations would improve if Trump were elected. Page has denied this account, blaming it on his political enemies.

The next month, Page delivered a speech at a Russian university in which he was highly critical of U.S. policy. Page has said he met with no Russian government officials during the trip, except for briefly greeting a deputy prime minister who attended the event.

Over the summer, the FBI convinced a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of Russia, law enforcement and other U.S. officials told The Post last month.

Page’s name also appeared in a now-famous dossier, which quietly circulated among reporters and alleged links between Trump associates and the Kremlin. The document asserted that Page met with top Russian officials to plot how to elect Trump.

The document, which was compiled by a former British spy employed by Trump’s political adversaries, became public after the election and was dismissed by Trump and his allies as “fake news.” Page vigorously rejects the allegation about him and said the FBI should spend its time investigating how the document came together instead of his activities.

Page used a recent letter to the House Intelligence Committee to defend his contacts with the Russians. Page wrote that, throughout “my interactions with the Russians in 2016, I consistently made it crystal clear that all of my benign statements and harmless actions in Moscow as well as elsewhere overseas were solely made as a scholar and a business person speaking only on behalf of myself.

In other words, in no way connected to then-candidate Trump.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Republicans have inherited what Trump has wrought

BY K AREN T UMULTY AND R OBERT C OSTA

T

he darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party.

When GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly assaulted a reporter who had attempted to ask him a question Wednesday night in Montana, many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are “the enemy of the people.” Nonetheless, Gianforte won Thursday’s special election to fill a safe Republican seat.

“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”

Trump — and specifically, his character and his conduct — now thoroughly dominate the national political conversation.

Traditional policy arguments over whether entitlement programs should be overhauled, or taxes cut, are regularly upstaged by a new burst of pyrotechnics.

The dynamic is shaping the contours of this year’s smattering of special congressional elections and contests for governor, as well as the jockeying ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

“It’s an entirely different atmosphere,” said Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman. “The president isn’t ideological and ideology is no longer the anchor. So when reporters put microphones in candidates’ faces, they’re asking about the president, tweets, character, your moral outlook and not about a particular policy.”

Few Republicans expect party leaders to do anything to lessen the toxicity.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative

former talk-show host in Wisconsin and author of the forthcoming “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” said, “Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”

Those who still navigate by the old maps are having trouble staying on course.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte won his Montana race.

Karen Handel, a conventional Republican running in next month’s special House election in Georgia, has railed against Obamacare, and campaigned alongside House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who called her “tested and true.” But she has been scorched endlessly on television for her support of the president, who her Democratic opponent has claimed “embarrasses our country” and “acts recklessly.”

Other GOP candidates, emboldened by Trump’s success at shattering norms, have ventured further to test the limits of what the electorate can stomach.

Corey Stewart, a former state chairman for Trump’s presidential campaign, has embraced Confederate symbols as his gubernatorial bid has flailed in Virginia, horrifying party leaders ahead of the June 13 primary and forcing the GOP front-runner to respond.

His primary opponent, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie has seen his steady, well-funded campaign for governor all but drowned out recently by Stewart’s rage over the effort to remove Confederate

statues from public spaces, which Stewart has said is proof that “ISIS has won.” Their primary clashes have been more over style and political correctness than any particular issue.

Gillespie still has the edge.

“Corey has labeled himself as Trump’s Mini-Me, but the mojo ain’t there,” Shaun Kenney, the former executive director of Virginia’s Republican Party, said earlier this year. But it remains to be seen whether Stewart has damaged the GOP brand for the general election.

Other polished exemplars of the establishment have struggled to set themselves apart.

Handel, a fixture of state politics, has seen suburban voters in her district, which has been in Republican hands since 1979, grow so uneasy about Trump that her once unknown Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, has taken the lead in polls.

Ossoff has seized on Trump’s decision to fire James B. Comey as the FBI director investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump’s barrage of news-making and controversy drives the GOP even at its lowest levels, with his raucous populism and blustering behavior reshaping its identity. Candidates often are either adopting aspects of his persona or finding themselves having to fitfully explain why they back him despite them. Coupled with a national conservative media complex that sears the press as much as it does Democrats, they are navigating a highly charged and volatile environment.

In the Trump era, it is far from clear what is over the line — or even if a line exists any more.

“There is a total weirdness out there,” Sanford said. “People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Detaching the ER from the hospital C AROLYN Y . J OHNSON Houston BY

N

ot far from neighborhood streets lined with million-dollar homes here lies an open-air mall where people go to eat, shop and — when needed — get emergency medical treatment. People pull up to the front door, park next to a gleaming antique ambulance and enter a waiting room that feels more like a graceful hotel lobby than a holding area for sick people.

It isn’t a clinic or an urgent care — it’s an emergency room, without the hospital.

When lawyer Richard Yount opened the facility, called Elite Care Emergency Center, in 2009, the idea was simple: Emergency rooms were crowded, with miserable waits and rushed doctors. He could fix that — and make a lot of money — by carving the department out of the hospital, putting it in a neighborhood where people without insurance were unlikely to show up and charging hospitallevel prices.

There was just one problem: People assumed it would be cheap, especially at first. “No matter how many times you tell people you’re an emergency room, they have a tendency to think: If you’re in that kind of an environment, you’re an urgent care,” said Yount, who now operates four free-standing ERs. Free-standing ERs, stand-alone facilities where people can receive acute care any time of day, have increased in Texas in recent years as a result of a 2009 law that permitted the establishment of emergency rooms independent of hospitals. They join a host of other on-demand facilities — including hospital ERs, hospital-owned satellite ERs, “microhospitals” and urgent-care facilities — where people can receive care, especially if they have robust health insurance.

Texas’s wild west of competition, with lit-up signs advertising “SHORT WAIT TIME FOR LACERATIONS” and highways punctuated by warring billboards, is a leading example of how an emerg-

MICHAEL STRAVATO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Free-standing facilities offer convenience but at a high price for patients and the health-care system ing wave of convenient medicalcare options for Americans can also create confusion and lead people to seek expensive treatment for conditions that might not merit it, pushing up costs across the health-care system.

Across 32 states, more than 400 free-standing ERs provide quick and easy access to care. But they also are prompting complaints from a growing number of people who feel burned by hospital-size bills, like $6,856 for a cut that didn’t require a stitch or $4,025 for an antibiotic for a sinus infection.

Emergency care requires costly imaging and laboratory equipment and facilities that are open 24 hours a day and staffed round the clock by a physician — and the costs reflect that. Prices for an average free-standing ER visit have grown and are now similar to hospital ERs, but patients with the same diagnosis rack up bills 10 times higher than at an urgent care, according to an analysis of one insurer’s Texas data by Rice

University economist Vivian Ho. She found use of the facilities in Texas more than tripled between 2012 and 2015.

The high cost raises the question of whether people are seeking out more expensive care only because it’s convenient, not because it’s necessary.

“If there had not been a close, convenient emergency department, would that person have gone to an emergency department, or sought care somewhere else?” said Jeremiah Schuur, an emergency medicine physician at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital who studies the industry.

Texas’s flowering of free-standing ERs leads a debate about whether convenience makes people healthier or needlessly drives costs up — a central dilemma in health-care innovation. Healthcare specialists want people to seek care that’s necessary. But with U.S. health-care spending surpassing $3 trillion this year, new attention is focused on how making health care a better con-

Richard Yount runs four free-standing emergency rooms.

The idea came to him when he saw other services decoupled from hospitals.

sumer product might simply increase its use. Research shows, for example, that walk-in retail health clinics and telephone medicine, which might seem to replace more expensive options, actually tend to slightly drive up health-care spending.

“The vast majority of people who get sick on a monthly basis don’t go get care, don’t even think about getting care — and among those who do think, ‘I should go get care,’ only two-thirds of them end up getting a visit of some type,” said Ateev Mehrotra, a physician and researcher at Harvard Medical School who did that research.

“There is an enormous market of people out there who . . . choose to get care when it’s convenient.”

Texas’s crowded landscape of ERs and clinics may seem like a consumer paradise, in which people are able to shop around. But it lays bare a simple truth: It’s hard to shop when no one knows what anything costs.

Bryan Piccola of Frisco, Tex., sliced his left pointer finger on July 4 when his knife slipped cutting tightly wound zip ties off a toy for his year-old daughter. He debated cleaning the wound up and sticking a bandage on it, but he went to a free-standing First Choice Emergency Room a few miles from his house. He asked beforehand how much it would cost, since he is a veteran and didn’t have separate insurance, and says he was assured it wouldn’t be too bad. He received five stitches and, later on, the bill: more than $5,000. The company discounted it to $2,888.

“You drive by them all the time.

There’s a bunch of these little popup clinics,” Piccola said. “If they would have told me [how much it would cost], I wouldn’t have gone — I’d have gone home and wrapped it up and waited for the scar.”

Adeptus Health, the company that owns First Choice Emergency Room, declared bankruptcy in April. It declined a request for an interview.

Richard Yount embarked on his career as an emergency room entrepreneur as Texas’s access to

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

9

NATION emergency care was hitting rock bottom, given a failing grade by the American College of Emergency Physicians. He had watched other hospital services, such as imaging centers, being spun into separate, lucrative businesses.

“You had not a lot of competitors and you had all the patients you’d ever want, and they paid a lot. Money just fell in your lap,” Yount said. “I watched this train go by for 30 different services, and I only caught onto the caboose.”

Yount’s insight was simple: In addition to the physician’s bill, hospitals were paid a “facility fee” to cover X-rays, CT scanners, laboratories, and round-the-clock staffing by physicians and nurses.

Free-standing emergency rooms shared many of these costs, since they strive to deliver the same care available in a hospital ER, and the facility fee made the business viable.

By situating in well-off neighborhoods, they could largely avoid patients who couldn’t pay. Without a hospital affiliation, they cannot bill Medicare or Medicaid for emergency care, and many carry warnings on the front door that they do not accept those lesslucrative plans. And as a start-up, the free-standing ERs weren’t encumbered with the high administrative costs of a hospital.

Complicated cases, such as surgeries or trauma, could be sent by ambulance to a hospital, but stand-alone emergency room operators argue they can see people faster, keep them out of the hospital altogether and save money.

Yount, 68, is a jumble of contradictions. He is an unapologetic capitalist who operates four freestanding emergency rooms in Texas and is in the process of finding a site in Las Vegas to build a “microhospital” — an ER with some inpatient beds.

Yount says the start-up costs are about $5 million. In the early days, the business could break even with just seven or eight patients a day. The break-even point today is up to eight or nine, and Yount expects the number to rise as pressure from insurers increase.

The model appeals to many physicians and nurses.

“The mind-set is totally different here,” said Aaron Schwartz, an emergency physician at Elite Care.

“In the hospital, it’s driven by surveys and scores, efficiency and throughput times and volume. . . .

We can spend as long as the patients want us to spend with them.”

Some patients appreciate the convenience. Miguel Balli, 24, of Houston had spent a miserable night, vomiting and ill, when he showed up at Elite Care one Monday morning. Within an hour, he was getting an IV drip and beginning to feel better.

“These setups are a lot more beneficial for the patient as far as time concern and quickness and availability,” Balli said. “If you’re not the most serious person at the ER, if you’re not the one bleeding out or having a heart attack, you’re probably going to get last on the totem pole.”

The problem is the flip side of the success: People who would have thought twice before navigating down to Houston’s crowded medical hub, the world’s largest medical center, have a surfeit of options right in the neighborhood.

In Sugar Land, an affluent suburban city south of Houston, there is St. Michael’s Emergency Center, right next to Emerus 24HR Emergency Hospital, a former freestanding ER that’s been converted into a small hospital. In the driveway, two identical signs look like mirror images, each directing people with an “EMERGENCY” in a different direction. A mile away, in both directions, are two hospitals.

The ease of access is a good thing if it is moving people to seek care for symptoms that would be dangerous to ignore.

Many free-standing emergency room operators say they do their utmost to stress to people that they are in an emergency room, with emergency room prices, and they refer patients with minor conditions to urgent-care facilities. The buildings have “emergency” signs on them and are required by state law to carry written warnings that they will charge a facility fee — although the amount is not disclosed.

That points to the biggest lesson emerging from Texas’s experiment.

“We need to do more to make prices extremely visible to patients,” said Schuur, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “But it also calls into question the ability of patients to be smart consumers, particularly in the time when they have what they perceive as an acute health-care need.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Suburbs are again the hot place to be BY

T ARA B AHRAMPOUR

I

n the tug of war between the suburbs and the city, the suburbs are once again on top, growing faster than cities for the first time since 2010, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

WARREN SKALSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Chicago lost more population than any other U.S. city in 2016.

8,638 Population loss in Chicago last year.

Despite that, it is still the third-largest city, with 2.7 million people.

The shift reflects a relatively steeper decline in the growth rate in cities, rather than an increase in suburban growth. In the past six years the rate in large U.S. cities slowed from 1.1 percent in 2010 to 0.82 percent; in the suburbs over the same period, growth declined from 0.95 percent to 0.89 percent.

In the big picture, it represents a return to normal. Since the middle of the 20th century, when people started buying cars and building homes outside of cities en masse, the suburbs had maintained their edge. It was only in 2010 that city growth began to outpace suburban growth.

The turnaround belies the much-hyped narrative that millennials have shunned the suburbs because they preferred city living, said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“Up until now we really didn’t know where this city growth was going; it almost came out of the blue, and it surprised a lot of people,” he said. Now that the economy is improving, he said, it could

turn out that young people were choosing city dwellings over larger suburban houses out of necessity rather than preference, he said.

Growth is declining in both the Snow Belt of the northeast and in Midwest metropolitan areas as well as the Sun Belt areas of the South and West. The number of big cities losing populations, just five in 2012, shot up to 14 last year.

Nationwide, the city losing the most people was Chicago, followed

by Baltimore, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and Cleveland. Among the 17 largest cities, 13 grew more slowly last year than the year before.

Ten of the 15 fastest-growing large cities were in the South, with four of the top five in Texas. The rest comprised four in the West and one in the Midwest. No Northeastern cities were among the nation’s fastest growing.

Around the country, New York remains the largest city by far, with 8.5 million people, more than twice the population of the next largest city, Los Angeles. Despite a population loss of 8,638, Chicago is still the third-largest city, with 2.7 million people.

The largest numeric increase of any city was Phoenix, which added 32,113, about 88 people a day on average, between 2015 and 2016.

That is consistent with recent trends showing population migration in the U.S. reverting back to traditional patterns, with the Northeast and Midwest losing people and the South and West gaining people.

As for millennials choosing suburban versus city life, a 2015 survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that 66 percent of people born after 1977 want to live in single-family homes outside of the urban center, including those currently living in cities. The new census estimates may reflect that.

“It’s not the end of city growth, but it does show that cities are maybe not going to be as dominant as people thought in terms of their growth,” Frey said. n © The Washington Post

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WORLD

Venezuela’s man-made hunger crisis

BY M ARIANA Z UÑIGA AND N ICK M IROFF

Yuma, Venezuela

W

ith cash running low and debts piling up, Venezuela’s socialist government has cut back sharply on food imports. And for farmers in most countries, that would present an opportunity.

But this is Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction.

At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.

Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.

Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.

“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”

Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable, and armed gangs have been squeezing him for extortion payments and stealing his eggs.

Venezuela’s latest public health indicators confirm that the country is facing a dietary calamity.

With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. The head of the ministry was fired by President Nicolás Maduro two days after she released those statistics.

Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the

MARIANA ZUNIGA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

People are starving, but farmers can’t feed them; they blame government policies and gangs Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition, and 48 percent “at risk” of going hungry.

In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds.

This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.

Venezuela’s disaster is manmade, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. While millions of Venezuelans can’t get enough to eat, officials have refused to allow international aid groups to deliver food, accustomed to viewing their oilrich country as the benefactor of poorer nations, not a charity case.

“It’s not only the nationalization of land,” said Carlos Machado, an expert on Venezuelan agricul-

ture. “The government has made the decision to be the producer, processor and distributor, so the entire chain of food production suffers from an inefficient agricultural bureaucracy.”

With Venezuela’s industrial output crashing, farmers are forced to import feed, fertilizer and spare parts, but they can’t do so without hard currency. And the government has been hoarding the dollars it earns from oil exports to pay back high-interest loans from Wall Street and other foreign creditors.

Escobar said he needs 400 tons of high-protein imported animal feed every three months to keep his operation running, but he’s able to get only 100 tons. So, like many others, he’s turned to the black market. But he can only afford a cheaper, less nutritious feed, meaning that his hens are smaller than they used to be — and so are their eggs.

Venezuela has long relied on imports of certain foodstuffs, such as wheat, that can’t be grown on a large scale in the country’s tropical climate. But trade statistics show

An empty henhouse is seen this month at a farm in Aragua State in Venezuela.

Many farmers can’t afford to feed their animals.

that the land policies of the late Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, made Venezuela more dependent on imported food than ever.

When oil prices were high, that wasn’t a big problem. Now Venezuela’s blend of heavy crude is worth barely $40 a barrel and the country’s petroleum output is at a 23-year low.

The government hasn’t published farming data in years. But Machado, the agriculture expert, said annual food imports averaged about $75 per person until 2004, then soared after Chávez accelerated the nationalization of farms, eventually seizing more than 10 million acres. The government expropriated factories, too, and Venezuela’s domestic food production plummeted.

By 2012, annual per capita food imports had increased to $370.

Instead of spurring growth in domestic agriculture, the government has strangled it, farmers say.

Domestic production of rice, corn and coffee has declined by 60 percent or more in the past decade, according to Venezuela’s Confederation of Farmer Associations (Fedeagro), a trade group. Nearly all of the sugar mills nationalized by the government since 2005 are paralyzed or producing below capacity.

Escobar, the chicken and hog farmer, said the only way for farmers to remain in business today is to break the law and sell at market prices, hoping authorities look the other way.

“If I sold at regulated prices, I wouldn’t even be able to afford a single kilogram of chicken feed,” he said.

If it’s not a fear of the government that keeps Escobar awake at night, it’s criminal gangs. Since one of his delivery trucks was robbed in December, he has been forced to make “protection” payments to a mafia boss operating out of the local prison. Calling the police would only escalate the danger.

“I know how to deal with chickens and pigs,” Escobar said, “but not criminals.” n © The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Breaking norms requires new names R ACHEL P REMACK Seoul BY

H

wang Yun-ik would never think to call his coworkers or boss by their first names. Most Koreans wouldn’t.

For Hwang, that changed recently. Kakao, one of South Korea’s largest Internet companies, decided three years ago that all employees would go by English nicknames. Hwang works at Kakao as a director in business development.

The strange part wasn’t being called an English name. It was being called, well, a name.

The norm in South Korea is to call your colleagues or superiors not by their given names but by their positions. It’s the same for addressing your older friends or siblings, your teacher or any person on the street. So if your family name is Johnson and you were to be hired in a Korean company as a manager, your co-workers would call you “Johnson-boojang.” To get the attention of your older female friend, you would call for “eunni,” or “older sister.”

This is a language where verb conjugations are based not on I, they, we and so on, but on formality levels. “The younger person must use honorific to the older person,” Hwang said. “If not, that makes a lot of conflict.”

One popular Korean blog was more explicit on shirking honorifics in the workplace: “Dropping your pants and [urinating] in the person’s briefcase would be only a little ruder than calling him/her by his/her first name.”

But some companies are looking to eliminate some of this hierarchy. The best way to do that, it seems, is dictating that employees take English names. Using the actual name of your boss or coworkers feels impolite. But, hopefully, using an English nickname taps into a different cultural mindset.

That has ushered Koreans to take on typical English names such as Sophie or John. Or, in Hwang’s case, atypical ones: He chose “Unique.”

AHN YOUNG-JOON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some South Korean companies have workers pick American nicknames to loosen hierarchy Why Unique? He responded simply and with a smile, “I am unique.”

Unique has embraced English nicknames, though folks elsewhere feel uneasy about it. Hwang Hye-rim, who previously worked at a translation company, said she always attached position names to her co-workers’ English names.

“I was concerned that omitting job position names would be really offensive,” she said.

Hong Yun-ji likes the lack of hierarchy at the Seoul office of Sabic, a Saudi manufacturing company. But, in an office full of Esthers and Michelles, she stuck with Yun-ji.

“I prefer to use my Korean name because I am a Korean person,” Hong said between sips of an iced coffee at a stylish cafe in Seoul one recent Saturday. “Using an English name even though you are not American is a little bit strange.

Your name is from your own mother and father.”

Companies in English educa-

tion, tourism, trade or other globally focused industries typically have English nickname policies.

They want to accommodate foreign business partners who can’t decipher between Lee Ji-yeong and Lee Ji-yeon. “They’re thoughtful people,” Hong said. “It’s to be kind to foreign people.”

She added with a laugh, “It’s too thoughtful thinking sometimes.”

The larger reason is a desire for a horizontal workplace as more employees, particularly younger ones, are educated or work outside Korea. “Younger generations think something’s wrong with it, and we all feel the need to fix this culture,” Hwang Hye-rim said.

In the hierarchical structure, employees cannot follow or share their own ideas. Decision-making is usually stymied by going through many chains of hierarchy.

And projects are not necessarily led by expertise but by who has the highest title. “ ‘You should, you must follow my commands over your own

Kim Do-hee, an employee of a Kakao Friends shop, uses a smartphone beside its goods in Seoul last year. Kakao decided three years ago that all employees would go

by English nicknames.

thinking,’ ” Hong said. “It’s like they’re soldiers. They are not working together.”

While start-ups such as Kakao have rejected that quasi-military structure, it’s protected at chaebol — the massive, family-owned companies such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai that essentially run Korea. Samsung alone accounts for one-fifth of Korea’s gross domestic product.

Chaebol are infamously rigid, as are the many Korean companies made in their image. People receive raises and promotions on the same schedule, according to age; desks are arranged according to position; and hiring occurs no more than twice a year, often according to test scores. It’s comfortingly logical.

So when a company instills English nicknames along with a more horizontal culture, it is removing the backbone of an organization.

Many Koreans, who often work 12-hour days at a single company for most of their lives, feel that their life identity is taken, as well.

“At first, we felt emotionally deprived,” one employee at SK Telecom, which removed most job titles in 2006, told the New York Times in 2008.

Younger Koreans and foreign workers hoping for a quicker overhaul of the hierarchical office are likely to be disappointed. This country spends more time at work than nearly any other country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — on average every year, 323 hours more than Americans and 394 hours more than the Japanese.

There’s little reason to want to be called “Fred” or “Sally” rather than the “director” title you have dedicated your life to achieving.

Even Hong, who lived in Canada and dislikes many of Korea’s Confucian aspects, still accidentally calls her boss by the traditional title.

“Sometimes it comes out,” Hong said. “It’s a foreign company, but the people working there are totally Korean. They never discard their own essential personality.” n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

MASTERS OF THEIR MEDIUM

N

early a year before the 1960 presidential election, Sen. John F. Kennedy displayed a startling sense of prophesy about the influence of television in politics.

Writing in the Nov. 14, 1959, issue of TV Guide more than a month before he announced his candidacy, Kennedy seemed to foresee a crucial moment in the battle for the White House. As though visualizing Richard Nixon’s doomed visage — dark and sweaty — and his own youthful charm on national

STORY

BY STEVEN LEVINGSTON

television during the presidential debates, the senator declared: “Many new political reputations have been made on TV — and many old ones have been broken.”

Once in the White House, Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago this month, embraced the mantle of America’s first television president, using the small screen to enhance his image and to communicate with the nation. As he told his speechwriter Ted Sorensen after watching a replay of his smooth performance at a news conference, “We couldn’t survive without TV.”

Just as Kennedy navigated his way to the White House in 1960 by looking good on the new medium of television, Donald Trump captured the Oval Office in 2016 in no small measure by his savvy exploitation of the newer medium of Twitter. “I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter,” Trump told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in March. “I have my own form of media.”

While Kennedy and Trump mastered the megaphones of their eras, allowing them often to bypass the traditional media and speak continues on next page

KENNEDY ON TELEVISION, TRUMP ON TWITTER, AND THE POWER — AND LIMITS — OF NEW MEDIA

from previous page

directly to the electorate, neither television nor Twitter has freed politicians from the scrutiny of reporters. Print and broadcast journalism is no longer the mostly civil monolithic behemoth of Kennedy’s day. Today, politicians must reckon with a diffuse and more raucous media world to explain their policies, project their images and construct their legacies. How they interact with journalists goes a long way toward shaping their portraits in the first draft of history.

While he had his scraps with the press, Kennedy was known for embracing reporters, amusing and even befriending them, a communion that was instrumental in fostering his lasting, and in some eyes romanticized, legacy.

By his coolness, wit and willingness to hold regular news conferences, he beguiled many reporters. Although the Washington press corps is a combative fact-finding herd — as American democracy would have it — it comprises individuals susceptible to the charms of personality and presidential decency.

Trump’s tenure is still young and highly uncertain, but one thing is clear: His relationship with a large swath of the media is the most adversarial since the early 1970s, when President Richard Nixon insisted privately to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, “Never forget: The press is the enemy,” a sentiment Trump has echoed publicly on Twitter. Unlike Kennedy, Trump engages in direct battle with reporters. “He goes into his press encounters deployed for the war he says is ongoing, and he looks more like a warrior than a communicator,” says Frank Sesno, who spent 21 years at CNN — part of that time as White House correspondent.

Kennedy’s public geniality was on full display when he burst onto the national scene at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. He failed to win the vice presidential slot on the ticket of candidate Adlai Stevenson. But in losing, Kennedy wowed convention-goers and television viewers by making a good-natured podium appearance to call for unanimous support for his rival, Estes Kefauver. Four years later, when he took to the hustings in the presidential campaign, he captured the hearts of voters through the remarkable reach of television. Kennedy marveled at how the technology eased the task of informing the electorate. After World War I, for instance, President Woodrow Wilson — in the absence of mass communication — journeyed across the country for 22 days to rally support for the League of Nations, severely running down his health. Decades earlier, the impeachment of

BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Andrew Johnson in 1868 filled newspaper columns, but if you wanted to witness the proceedings in real time you had to finagle a much-coveted seat in the Senate galleries.

One of Kennedy’s most significant hurdles was his religion — no Catholic had ever occupied the Oval Office. To beat back suspicions, he took to television, buying airtime in Protestant West Virginia. “If his religion was what they held against him, Kennedy would discuss it,” Theodore White recounts in “The Making of the President 1960.”“There remains with me now a recollection of what I think is the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any political candidate make.”

Kennedy wasted no time after entering the White House in conducting regular news conferences live on television. In his first week in office, he faced reporters in the State

President John F. Kennedy at a 1961 news conference. He averaged about one every 16 days in office.

President Trump answers questions during a news conference at the White House.

Opposite page: Illustration by Jack Hughes for The Washington Post

Department auditorium and took questions for 37 minutes as some 65 million Americans tuned in. He roamed over a range of subjects, from negotiations on a ban on atomic weapons testing to his rejection of renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba. In such a forum the president risked stumbling, appearing illinformed, or mischaracterizing American policy and stirring worldwide repercussions. The new format came under scrutiny at the news conference as a reporter noted “there has been some apprehension about the instantaneous broadcast of presidential press conferences such as this one,” adding that “an inadvertent statement . . . could possibly cause some grave consequences.” Kennedy was unfazed, pointing out that any factual error could be quickly clarified. His primary focus was on the medium’s effectiveness in getting across his message unfiltered to the American public.

“This system,” he said, “has the advantage of providing more direct communication.”

His television performances were a kind of tightrope act without a net and required considerable homework. Kennedy was able to forge an image of courage, accessibility and preparedness.

Embracing his era’s new medium, Trump has made effective use of Twitter both during the primaries and after winning the White House. Far more than any other modern politician, he understands the political power of compact Twitter declarations. On the campaign trail, Trump reduced his rivals to cartoon figures by machine-gunning disparaging tweets about them. Who can forget Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb? And the criticisms stuck, allowing Trump to forge ahead of his Republican opponents and ultimately pull off an electoral college victory. Trump’s Twitter blasts demand little of him: When tweeting he is out of sight, not subject to the scrutiny of reporters or television cameras, and his messages are so brief as to be little more than headlines or announcements lacking elaboration. Still, the risks are high: Falsehoods, misstatements and even misspellings can contribute to a loss of trustworthiness. While early-day television suited the civility of John Kennedy, Twitter is a medium made for the blunt character of Donald Trump.

The march of history and the power of

modern technology — as well as a sharp swing in the political pendulum — make today almost unrecognizable from the 1960s. But the Kennedy approach to managing the media still stands as a kind of lesson book on amiable press relations for presidents. continues on next page

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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COVER STORY

from previous page

Kennedy had a gift for casual humor, which he called upon sometimes to evade an inquiry or ease a tense moment. Wit disguises being thin-skinned, and a good laugh with the media creates an illusion of inclusiveness: Together the president and the press corps are sharing a joke, a communal act that only draws the two sides closer. During the 1960s, crowd sizes at political events were as important — and debatable — as they are today. After one of his campaign rallies, the Kennedy team announced that some 35,000 people had come out to see the candidate, a figure far above what reporters on hand had estimated. When challenged, Kennedy chose humor as a way to minimize the discrepancy. Ben Bradlee, who was then Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief and later The Washington Post’s executive editor, recounted the story in his book “Conversations With Kennedy.” In his telling, Kennedy explained to reporters that crowdcounting fell to his press secretary Pierre Salinger, who was known by his nickname Plucky. “Plucky counts the nuns,” Kennedy told reporters, “and then multiplies by 100.”

And with that, reporters — amused and grateful for the attention — dropped their bone about the crowd count and turned to other issues.

By contrast, Trump attacked news outlets when they reported on photographs showing that the crowd on the Mall for his inauguration paled beside the swarms that had turned out for Barack Obama in 2009. Speaking at the CIA on his first full day in office, the new president said of the coverage: “It’s a lie,” adding, “We caught them. . . . We caught them in a beauty.” Trump’s statement about the media was demonstrably false, as the side-byside photographs of the two inaugurations showed. But at a time when the news profession is generally held in low esteem — a Washington Post-ABC poll in late April found that 52 percent of Americans believe journalists regularly produce false stories — Trump knows journalists are an easy target, particularly among his most fervent supporters. If Kennedy sought to win over the media to garner positive coverage, Trump has embraced an entirely different tactic in dealing with journalists. Accusing reporters of lying — even when his accusation is false — enhances Trump’s trustworthiness among his voters: In the same poll, 78 percent of Trump supporters said they believe news organizations regularly distribute false stories and 80 percent believe that false news reports are a bigger problem than Trump’s falsehoods; only 3 percent think Trump’s falsehoods are a bigger problem. In such an environment, the Kennedy rules for success with the media become irrelevant.

Trump has changed the game.

Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, believes that Trump’s aggressive response to the crowd photos set the tone for his administration. The photos were conclusive to anyone who saw them, but Trump demanded that his followers see an alternative

PAUL SCHUTZER/THE LIFE PREMIUM COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

truth. “It was a kind of power message to his supporters,” says Rosen, who writes the blog PressThink. “What he was saying was if you want to be on the team, you’re going to have to deny the evidence of your own senses.” While the strategy plays to the Trump base, it has an even deeper mission. “The purpose of his behavior is to detach his supporters from the rest of the information sphere and make Trump a more trusted source of news than the journalistic class.”

Although Kennedy concealed some aspects of

his life — among them, his womanizing and the extent of his poor health — he retains high popularity today in part because he was perceived as communicating honestly with the media and the American people. Historian Robert Dallek attributes his enduring appeal to “the public’s faith in Kennedy’s sincerity.”

Kennedy demonstrated a respect for the role of the media by holding regular news conferences, about 64 of them for an average of one every 16 days. The Q&As were “relished by the reporters and by the television audience,” in the words of his aide, historian Arthur Schlesinger. And America tuned in: On average some 18 million viewers watched each press meeting. An April 1962 Gallup poll found that 3 out of every 4 American adults had seen a Kennedy news conference, or heard one on the radio. Ninety-one percent of those polled said the president’s performance left them with a favorable impression. “Most important,” Dallek observed, “whether on

Cameras were trained on John F. Kennedy during his campaign. His approach to managing the media still stands as a kind of lesson book on amiable press relations for presidents.

television or in person, Kennedy came across to the public as believable.”

That’s not to say that relations between the White House and the media were never strained or that Kennedy always told reporters the truth. About two weeks before he launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, reporters dug up details of the clandestine mission. According to historian Michael O’Brien, the president fumed to an aide: “I can’t believe what I’m reading. Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers. It’s all laid out for him.”

But the president did not go public with his gripes. Kennedy respected the American tug of war between a president and the media over preservation of secrets and disclosure in the public interest. But he also used his skills of persuasion and the power of his office to cajole editors to downplay sensitive revelations.

When he felt it was necessary, Kennedy was not above shading the truth to meet his political needs. At a news conference just days before the Cuba invasion, the president told reporters: “I want to say that there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces.” That was technically true: The American military was not going to land on Cuban shores; the invasion force comprised CIA-trained Cuban exiles financed by the United States.

When the force was quickly routed and the Bay of Pigs invasion became an embarrassing debacle for the president, Kennedy did not attempt to shift blame. His military and

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COVER STORY

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

intelligence advisers had assured him of the strategy’s soundness, and Kennedy forever regretted heeding their opinions. CIA Director Allen Dulles lost his job in the aftermath. But publicly Kennedy took the failure fully upon himself. “There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he told reporters at his April 21, 1961, news conference, adding: “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

Trump steers clear of admitting any missteps and resists correcting false statements.

After claiming in four tweets without any proof that President Obama wiretapped him in Trump Tower, Trump maintained his assertion in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. As the story evolved, there were indications that Trump’s communications with some of his aides had been picked up by U.S. intelligence agencies through “incidental collection.” Despite his assertions, those revelations did not constitute any vindication of Trump’s claim against Obama. Similarly, in the face of facts to the contrary, the president has steadfastly clung to the fiction that massive voter fraud accounted for Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.

In 1945, at age 28, John Kennedy was himself a journalist, uncertain whether his destiny led to life as a writer or a politician. Hired by the Hearst newspaper the Chicago Herald-American, he was in San Francisco in April and May to cover the United Nations Conference, where 50 nations gathered to work out final

details of the new organization’s charter. Just a temporary stint, the job gave Kennedy an appreciation for the role and character of journalists, a perspective he carried with him throughout his days as a politician. He enjoyed the company of journalists, whom he found well-informed, even intellectual, and who kept him up-to-date on important issues.

“Kennedy himself genuinely liked reporters,” Bradlee recalled. “Some of his best friends . . . were in fact reporters.” The camaraderie between journalists and the president meant that reporters tended to cut Kennedy some slack, even protecting him by holding back potentially damaging rumors about his sexual escapades, illnesses and drug use. Bradlee faced criticism as a journalist for his close relationship with the president. But he insisted in his memoir, “A Good Life,” that he and the president respected “the complicated perimeters of our friendship and the conflict between friendship and journalism.”

As early as 1956, Kennedy had developed remarkable rapport with newsmen — and they were almost all men. During that year’s Democratic National Convention, as reported by Richard Reeves in his book “President Kennedy: Profile of Power,” Sen. Kennedy casually began to walk in his underwear from his bedroom into the sitting room of his hotel suite, where reporters and photographers were gathered. An associate called out in alarm: “You can’t go out there in your shorts.” To which Kennedy replied, “I know these fellows.

They’re not going to take advantage of me.”

President Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office with first lady Melania Trump. Early on, Trump liked the media for aiding his popularity, but during the campaign and into his term, he has belittled, badgered and evaded reporters.

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And, as Reeves concludes: “They rarely did.”

In the early days of his celebrity ascent, Trump appreciated the media for aiding his popularity. Obliging reporters, editors and TV producers assured the real estate mogul of vast coverage and many magazine covers. But as he ventured into politics, his friendship with inquiring reporters, whose attention he had craved, took on a different complexion. As president, Trump has become accountable to the nation and is subjected to the watchdog of the press. Yet he has held few news conferences, and when he has spoken publicly — other than on Twitter — he has generally appeared before more sympathetic reporters on Fox News. His war with journalists has escalated as he has repeatedly labeled legitimate newspapers and broadcasters as propagators of fake news, and tweeted, in the spirit of Nixon, the “FAKE NEWS media . . . is the enemy of the American people.”

During the campaign and into the White House, Trump has belittled, badgered and evaded reporters, calling them “scum,” “the lowest form of life” and “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.” His chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, voiced a particularly extreme sentiment when he declared that the media “is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country.” His remarks, which Trump endorsed, go beyond the hyperbole of labeling the press as enemies and suggest a failure to appreciate the fundamental American principle that presidential power is subjected to checks and balances, in particular, by a free press not beholden to politics or parties. Indeed, other top candidates seeking the most powerful political position in the world face rigorous scrutiny: Hillary Clinton was not immune to aggressive reporting on her handling of sensitive emails while secretary of state and other aspects of her career.

Sesno, now director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, believes Bannon’s charge is misguided.

“He’s wrong about the media being the opposition party, because an opposition party seeks to defeat the party in power in order to be in power,” Sesno says. “I know of no reporter who as part of his job is campaigning for office.”

President Kennedy understood the crucial

role of a vigorous free press in a democracy and liked to point out the absence of journalistic freedom in the Soviet Union. In an interview with Sander Vanocur of NBC News in December 1962, the president expressed his unhappiness about certain reporting — “it is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news” — but acknowledged that the news media were “invaluable . . . as a check really on what is going on in the administration.” He noted that under the Soviets’ totalitarian regime, Premier Nikita Khrushchev was able to operate in secret without any challenge.

“There isn’t any doubt,” Kennedy concluded, “that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.” n © The Washington Post

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WEEKLY

LIFESTYLE

Hey, adults, go out and play!

BY

J ENNIFER W ALLACE

S

occer icon David Beckham has said that he plays with Lego pieces to control stress. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres playfully pranks her television guests. While serving as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron was known to decompress at the end of a long day with the video game Angry Birds.

The importance of play for children is well documented. Now researchers are turning their attention to its possible benefits for adults. What they’re finding is that play isn’t just about goofing off; it can also be an important means of reducing stress and contributing to overall well-being.

Play is easy to recognize in children and animals — like, say, an impromptu game of tag or chase — but what does it look like in adults? How we play is “as unique to an individual as a fingerprint” and could mean collecting stamps, tossing a football, reading a book or climbing Mount Everest,

says psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, Calif.

“What all play has in common,” Brown says, “is that it offers a sense of engagement and pleasure, takes the player out of a sense of time and place, and the experience of doing it is more important than the outcome.”

Although some people may appear more playful than others, researchers say that we are all wired by evolution to play.

It’s evolution Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, says, “Play primarily evolved to teach children all kinds of skills, and its extension into adulthood may have helped to build cooperation and sharing among huntergathers beyond the level that would naturally exist in a dominance-seeking species.” In other words, for our earliest ancestors, play wasn’t just about adding fun to their lives, it may have been a way of keeping the peace, which

Making time for fun is important for stress relief and well-being

was critical for survival.

There’s a reason that adult play exists in modern society, says Lynn Barnett, a professor of recreation, sports and tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One theory is that we play because it’s therapeutic — and there’s research to back that up, she says. “At work, play has been found to speed up learning, enhance productivity and increase job satisfaction; and at home, playing together, like going to a movie or a concert, can enhance bonding and communication.”

Playful adults have the ability to transform everyday situations, even stressful ones, into something entertaining, Barnett says.

She co-authored a study that found highly playful young adults — those who rated themselves high on personality characteristics such as being spontaneous or energetic, or open to “clowning around” — reported less stress and possessed better coping skills.

“Highly playful adults feel the same stressors as anyone else, but they appear to experience and react to them differently, allowing stressors to roll off more easily than those who are less playful,” she says.

Attracts the opposite sex Being a playful adult may also make us more attractive to the opposite sex, according to a study from Pennsylvania State University. Researchers there asked 250 students to rate 16 characteristics that they might look for in a longterm mate. “Sense of humor” came in first among the males and second among the females, “funloving” came in third for both, and being “playful” placed fourth for women and fifth for men.

Lead researcher Garry Chick speculates that the attraction to playfulness may be rooted in evolution and what we value in a mate.

“In men, playfulness signals nonaggressiveness, meaning they’d be less likely to harm a mate or an offspring,” he said, “and in women, it signals youth and fertility.”

Not all adults play alike, of course. In a study published in April in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, researchers examined the complexities of adult playfulness in an effort to tease out patterns of behavior.

The researchers identified four types of playful adults: those who outwardly enjoy fooling around

with friends, colleagues, relatives and acquaintances; those who are generally lighthearted and not preoccupied by the future consequences of their behavior; those who play with thoughts and ideas; and those who are whimsical, exhibiting interest in strange and unusual things and are amused by small, everyday observations.

Lead researcher René Proyer, a professor of psychology at the Martin Luther University HalleWittenberg in Germany, says that by showing how varied playfulness can be, he hopes that people will be encouraged to become more playfully engaged with others. “A less playful person can learn to be more playful, much like an introvert can learn to be a better speaker by observing the techniques extroverts use,” Proyer says.

“Play is a basic human need as essential to our well-being as sleep, so when we’re low on play, our minds and bodies notice,” Brown says. Over time, he says, play deprivation can reveal itself in certain patterns of behavior: We might get cranky, rigid, feel stuck in a rut or feel victimized by life. To benefit most from the rejuvenating benefits of play, he says, we need to incorporate it into our everyday lives, “not just wait for that twoweek vacation every year.”

Then and now To identify the kind of play that would be most meaningful to you, Brown suggests thinking back to the play you enjoyed as a child and trying to connect that to your life now. For example, a person who was very active as a child may be wise to engage in recreational sports as an adult.

Brittany Rouille, a 28-year-old travel blogger based in Hood River, Ore., says she made a point of incorporating more play into her life a few years ago after her then stressful and rigid lifestyle left her depressed. “It wasn’t until I reintroduced play into my life that I started to feel like myself again,” she says.

“Now I play every day, whether it’s roller blading, painting or playing my harmonica, even if it’s only for an hour, because I know how important it is for me to let go and not think about anything except for the fun thing I’m doing in that moment,” Rouille says. “I find play so crucial to my well-being that I have built my life around playing outside.” n © The Washington Post

ISABEL ESPANOL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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TECHNOLOGY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Google’s data mine grows deeper

BY E LIZABETH D WOSKIN AND C RAIG T IMBERG

San Francisco

G

oogle has begun using billions of credit-card transaction records to prove that its online ads are prompting people to make purchases — even when they happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores, the company said this past week.

The advance allows Google to determine how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, a goal that industry insiders have long described as “the holy grail” of online advertising.

But the announcement also renewed long-standing privacy complaints about how the company uses personal information.

To power its multibillion-dollar advertising juggernaut, Google already analyzes users’ Web browsing, search history and geographic locations, using data from popular Google-owned apps like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play store. All that information is tied to the real identities of users when they log into Google’s services.

The new credit-card data enables the tech giant to connect these digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before. But in doing so, Google is yet again treading in territory that consumers may consider too intimate and potentially sensitive.

Privacy advocates said few people understand that their purchases are being analyzed in this way and could feel uneasy, despite assurances from Google that it has taken steps to protect the personal information of its users.

Google also declined to detail how the new system works or what companies are analyzing records of credit and debit cards on Google’s behalf. Google, which saw $79 billion in revenue last year, said it would not handle the records directly but that its undisclosed partner companies had access to 70 percent of transactions for credit and debit cards in the United States.

“What’s really fascinating to me

ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

To prove its ads work, the company has begun connecting digital trails and offline purchases is that as the companies become increasingly intrusive in terms of their data collection, they also become more secretive,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He urged government regulators and Congress to demand answers about how Google and other technology companies are collecting and using data from their users.

Google said it took pains to protect to protect user privacy. “While we developed the concept for this product years ago, it required years of effort to develop a solution that could meet our stringent user privacy requirements,” Google said in a statement. “To accomplish this, we developed a new, custom encryption technology that ensures users’ data remains private, secure, and anonymous.”

Google for years has been mining location data from Google Maps in an effort to prove that knowledge of people’s physical locations could “close the loop” between physical and digital worlds.

Users can block this by adjusting

the settings on smartphones, but few do so, say privacy experts.

This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers.

Home Depot, Express, Nissan and Sephora have participated.

“Google — and also Facebook — believe that in order to get digital dollars from advertisers who are still primarily spending on TV, they need to prove that digital works,” said Amit Jain, chief executive of Bridg, a digital advertising start-up that matches online to offline behavior. “These companies have to invest in finding the identity of the consumer at the moment when that shopper is at the cash register.”

Tuesday’s announcement gives Google a clearer way to understand purchases than just location and allows them to understand purchase activity even when con-

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai speaks in California this month. Technology advances now allow the company to see how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, even when purchases happen in brick-andmortar stores.

sumers deactivate location tracking on their smartphones.

Google executives say they are using complex, patent-pending mathematical formulas to protect the privacy of consumers when they match a Google user with a shopper who makes a purchase in a brick-and-mortar store.

The mathematical formulas convert people’s names and other purchase information, including the time stamp, location and the amount of the purchase, into anonymous strings of numbers.

The formulas make it impossible for Google to know the identity of the real-world shoppers, and for the retailers to know the identities of Google’s users, said company executives, who called the process “double-blind” encryption.

The companies know only that a certain number of matches have been made. In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.

In the past, both Google and Facebook have obtained purchase data for a more limited set of consumers who participate in store loyalty programs. Those consumers are more heavily tracked by retailers, and often give consent to share their data with third parties as a condition of signing up.

This past week’s initiative enables Google to use transaction data from a much wider swath of consumers than ever before, but the lack of detail on how personal data was being handled caused concern for privacy advocates.

Paul Stephens, of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group based in San Diego, said only a few pieces of data can allow a marketer to identify an individual, and he expressed skepticism that Google’s system for guarding the identities of users will stand up to the efforts of hackers, who in the past have successfully stripped away privacy protections created by other companies after data breaches.

“What we have learned is that it’s extremely difficult to anonymize data,” he said. “If you care about your privacy, you definitely need to be concerned.” n © The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Chinese spirituality on its own terms N ONFICTION

C THE SOULS OF CHINA The Return of Religion After Mao

By Ian Johnson Pantheon. 455 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

R ICHARD M ADSEN

hinese society is not religious. At least that’s the conventional wisdom, which argues that there is no place for religion in a China consumed by materialist capitalism under the control of a dictatorial government. But in “The Souls of China,” journalist Ian Johnson brilliantly demonstrates that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Under the surface lies a world of vividly imagined hopes and dreams. Johnson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, ventures far off the beaten path and listens to ordinary Chinese who introduce him to their world of the spirit.

In today’s China, the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, which was replaced in 1929 with the modern Western Gregorian calendar, “still underpins how many Chinese dress, eat, worship, and pray.” In a nod to the calendar’s influence, Johnson organizes his book around its seasons. In many respects, the Chinese approach to spirituality does not follow the lines of the religious dogmas that inspire Western Christians. The Chinese immerse themselves in a different world of time and space where sacred mountain peaks represent the meeting of heaven and earth. The Chinese draw on rituals and poetic stories, some ancient, others recently invented, that in their own way constitute a rich religious life.

In the most vivid and moving chapters of the book, Johnson follows the Ni family, which leads one of the 80 pilgrim associations in Beijing. The family organizes the annual two-week pilgrimage to the city’s most important religious site, Miaofengshan, or the Mountain of the Wondrous Peak, to worship a goddess called Our Lady of the Azure Clouds. These associations are independent of the government, with an authority that derives from tradition and faith. The work is unpaid and

MOUNTAIN OF THE WONDROUS PEAK IN BEIJING. NG HAN GUAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

passed down from father to son.

Johnson spends the entire two weeks with the Ni family’s association, ascending the mountain with tens of thousands of pilgrims. The mountain is transfigured with statues and flowers and gold-colored sheets and banners; the air is redolent of incense; and time is filled with performances of singing and dancing, stilt-walking and martial arts. “Instead of appraising the statues,” Johnson writes, “I looked at the people, to see what was in their eyes.”

What was in their eyes was a kind of faith and hope, a belief that they were connected to their ancestors and a wish that they could bequeath that connection to their children. These aspirations are expressed in different ways by the religious practitioners throughout the book.

Li Bin from rural Shanxi province is a ninth-generation Daoist, a “yin-yang man,” who organizes funerals and tells fortunes, help-

ing the living both to understand their fate and to carry on the legacy of the dead.

Johnson also travels to Chengdu in Sichuan province, were he worships with Wang Yi, a former human rights lawyer and now pastor of a dynamic non-registered (and therefore officially illegal) “house church.” Some of Wang Yi’s friends regret that he is no longer a political activist, but Johnson reflects: “As a public intellectual in a repressive state like China, what could Wang Yi really achieve through activism? House arrest and a blocked Internet connection? . . . As a pastor and seminary teacher, Wang Yi could influence hundreds of people and help plant congregations across the country.”

The religious space-time that Johnson explores is real, robust and resilient, and inevitably, it impinges on the everyday world of commerce and politics. The government once tried to stifle the

religious world, but under Xi Jinping, it is now trying to co-opt various forms of traditional religion in the hopes that they will crowd out a resurgent Christianity. But the efforts are clumsy and are not stopping the many religious practices from continuing on their own paths of development.

In Johnson’s telling, there is not one but many souls of modern China, all engaged in a sometimes cacophonous quest for meaning, community and justice.

“Perhaps,” he concludes, “because Chinese traditions were so savagely attacked over the past decades, and then replaced with such a naked form of capitalism, China might actually be at the forefront of this worldwide search for values.” n Madsen is a professor of sociology emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

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Spark of a new life found amid ashes

Artists pay price for our free music

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

A

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REVIEWED BY

K ATE M ANNING

nita Shreve’s books are reliably engrossing literary page-turners, never formulaic — unless trouble and desire mixed with the vicissitudes of fortune can be called a formula. In almost 20 novels, including “The Pilot’s Wife,” “Fortune’s Rocks” and “The Weight of Water,” Shreve consistently creates complex characters and plots, often drawn from the historical record or obscure headlines. She hands her characters a seemingly insurmountable problem or dire situation and tests them with oppressive social mores, menacing evil, buried secrets or catastrophic events — frequently, all of the above. Then she tells their stories in unobtrusively elegant prose.

“The Stars Are Fire,” her new novel, is set in Maine during the real-life disaster of 1947 when a severe drought caused a series of massive fires that burned out of control for 10 days. In Acadia National Park, 10,000 acres went up in flames, along with most of the mansions on Bar Harbor’s Millionaires’ Row. Fishermen and the Coast Guard rescued thousands from the shoreline. Firefighters and evacuees were trapped behind a burning wall that cut through Kennebunkport. Sixteen people were killed, thousands left homeless.

In this story, when the fire arrives, Grace Holland and her neighbors head to the water’s edge. Grace — 24 years old, a mother of two young children and pregnant with a third — holds her children in the frigid sea overnight as the flames send smoke and burning debris onto the beach. In the midst of crisis, she finds a strength she didn’t know she had, but her losses are devastating, and she faces a precarious future.

The scenes of the disaster, of the townspeople trying to save what they can, are tense and vivid. But Shreve is more interested in tragedy’s aftermath, when Grace is sorely challenged. Before the fire, “In many ways, she thinks, her

family is perfect. Two beautiful children . . . a husband who works hard at his job and doesn’t resist chores at home.” Grace is thankful for her seaside bungalow and her family’s health. She asks for little and does not complain. Still, she fears hers will be a restricted life, that she will probably never have a job or even learn to drive a car. She is bravely resigned to days spent watching the fog roll in as the babies continue to arrive.

Like many of Shreve’s protagonists, Grace is filled with inchoate longing. She has untapped potential and a desire for romance but doesn’t have the education or income to pursue her dreams. She tries to ignore “the niggling sense of something wrong.”

When the fires break out and destroy so much, they also leave room for new growth. Grace’s life suddenly holds out the promise of a fresh start. The question of whether she will prevail — or again be trapped into subservience — keeps the reader rooting for her. Shreve builds suspense with small details: a cloud of dust in the wind, a pervert lurking at the seashore, strange noises upstairs. Like every lone woman, Grace is in a constant state of alert, and Shreve is very good at keeping a low level of dread running through her pages.

Just when Grace appears to be gaining true independence, events conspire to spin her life in a dangerous direction, and she stands to lose the happiness and freedom she’s worked so hard to gain. Shreve knows a great deal about the human ability to resist despair, and this novel, like many of her others, shows how hard work and compassion are — sometimes — rewarded. It’s no spoiler to say that in “The Stars Are Fire,” stoicism, kindness and courage win the day over bitterness and cruelty. n Manning is the author of the novels “My Notorious Life” and “Whitegirl.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

T THE STARS ARE FIRE

By Anita Shreve Knopf. 256 pp. $25.95

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

By Jonathan Taplin Little, Brown. 308 pp. $29

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REVIEWED BY

E MILY P ARKER

he Internet revolution has a human cost. A case in point: Levon Helm was a member of the Band, a country-rock group that played with Bob Dylan. He once made a good income from royalties, but then the money dried up.

People still liked his music, but now they listened to it on the Internet. After Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer, he struggled to pay his medical bills.

When he died in 2012, his friends held a benefit concert so his wife wouldn’t lose their house.

Jonathan Taplin tells this story in his impassioned new book, “Move Fast and Break Things.”

Taplin is a former tour manager for Dylan and the Band as well as a film producer. He has had a front-row seat to the digital disruption of the music and film industries, and he is furious about it.

A few years ago, Taplin had a public debate with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, apparently a proud downloader of free music and movies. Ohanian said musicians like Helm should make money from touring, not old recordings. Taplin was appalled.

In an attempt to make amends, the Reddit founder wrote an open letter to Taplin, offering to “make right what the music industry did to members of The Band.” Ohanian suggested honoring Helm with a new album that would be funded on Kickstarter and launched on Reddit.

Taplin did not like this idea, to put it mildly. In an open letter of his own, he called Kickstarter a “virtual begging bowl.” Taplin concluded: “Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.” Ohanian did not respond.

This exchange, detailed in Taplin’s book, provides a good illustration of the author’s arguing style. His prose is bold, entertaining and occasionally over the top.

But his overall point is an impor-

tant one. Many hoped that the Internet would have a democratizing and decentralizing effect.

Instead, Taplin argues, power became concentrated in a small number of digital giants, such as Amazon (whose founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post), Facebook and Google.

This “winner take all” scenario also applies to artists. People may be consuming more content than ever, but most creators aren’t reaping the gains. Part of the problem is piracy, but the streaming music business isn’t helping much, either. Spotify, for example, doesn’t pay artists very much. In 2015, Taplin notes, “vinyl record sales generated more income for music creators than the billions of music streams on YouTube and its ad-supported competitors.”

Not everyone would agree with Taplin’s gloomy assessment. In a recent New York Times article, technology columnist Farhad Manjoo argued that the Internet is saving culture, not killing it.

Taplin offers various prescriptions to help artists survive in the Internet age. Right now, it’s too easy for people to post pirated clips on YouTube. Taplin recommends that the Library of Congress issue a precise definition of fair use, and YouTube clips that do not fit this definition should stay blocked. He suggests that artists run a video and audio streaming site as a nonprofit cooperative, giving artists a lion’s share of the revenue.

Taplin is at his strongest when he pulls back the curtain on vague and lofty terms such as “digital disruption” to reveal the effects on individual artists. Let’s hope this book makes people think twice about how their behavior shapes digital culture. n Parker, a Future Tense fellow at New America, is the author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Profanity is a curse on public discourse PHILIP KENNICOTT

The colorful one­liner Stephen Colbert fired off about Vladimir Putin’s little Putin and President Trump’s mouth wasn’t particularly funny, nor was it characteristic of Colbert’s usual comedic style. Perhaps the saddest thing about the joke was the implicitly homophobic subtext to it, which suggests that oral sex between men is degrading.

ISTOCKPHOTO

is the Pulitzer Prizewinning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post.

Colbert is better than this, and that he felt he needed to go there gives us a good sense of how ferociously competitive the antiTrump humor market is today.

But it also is part of a larger struggle: to break through the noise of a society that is hypercommunicative and feels itself in crisis. Well beyond the confines of late-night comedy, people are embracing a notion of language as performance and combat, and reaching for words that have more punch, more bite and often more overt vulgarity. This was obviously what Anderson Cooper was aiming for when he referenced defecation in a contentious exchange with a prominent Trump surrogate on CNN. Profanity, which is a perennial cause of controversy in popular culture, is now sweeping through the “resistance” communities that oppose Trump.

Of course, this moment feels extreme and unprecedented, but the embrace of profanity is a trap. It can only lead to exactly the sort of degradation — of language, discourse and thinking — that those who use it decry.

In the hours after the firing of FBI Chief James B. Comey, or the “Trump leaked to the Russians” story, or the “Comey left a memo” headlines, Facebook and Twitter feeds lighted up red with variations on “WTF?”Although the left is no stranger to vulgarity (it is a staple of street protest), these comments were coming not just from the temperamentally foulmouthed,

but also from your former calculus professor, your wellmannered great aunt in Boca Raton and that nice librarian whom you friended for his great book suggestions.

Sometimes they come emblazoned on red or magenta backgrounds, or in large typeface, or accompanied by GIFs from famous movies. But they feel odd as a community bonding exercise of the dignified left. The gesture is strangely selfdramatizing: People curse to demonstrate that they, too, have reached the cracking point.

There is an implicit sense of martyrdom: “Even I, who abhor this kind of thing, must now be foulmouthed.”

Leaders of the Democratic Party, eagerly chasing these semantic developments, have taken up the new argot, too.

Trump’s profanity-laced presidential campaign may explain Democratic National Committee Chairman Thomas Perez’s casual embrace of vulgarity. “They call it a skinny budget, I call it a s---ty budget,” he recently told a crowd in Portland, Maine.

Anxiety about profanity in public life is cyclical and often exacerbated during major political campaigns. Trump both used vulgar language and delighted in its use by his adoring crowds. “Trump that b---!” was the unofficial motto of a campaign that made misogyny its semiofficial ideology.

Although neither the right nor the left is innocent in the

embrace of profanity, they tend to use it differently. On the right, salty language establishes authenticity. On the left, the use of vulgarity seems more desperate, born of a need to keep up with the competition in a media environment that thrives on both pithiness and shock.

But it is also driven by nagging worries about “the new normal.” Trump has defined political discourse as a gunfight, so it makes no sense to show up with a knife. In that sense, the strategic embrace of profanity is related to a range of other norms that are collapsing in political and social life, including the gutting of the filibuster and the coarsening of chants at sporting events.

Norms don’t exist in isolation but are interconnected and bound by a sense that every room has its rules, from the smallest to the largest. Humans have an imperfect but visceral sense of when the social order has broken down, when the old rules are suspended and only a fool would play by them. These are the sensors that help us decide when we continue to wait in line, or rush the airline gate agent because everyone else is.

But they also help us distinguish between the need for protest and the need for revolution; between when it is appropriate to speak truth to power and when it is necessary to shout power out of the room.

The resistance, by indulging profanity, has taken the bait and fallen into a trap. The current

crisis, which has come from the right, in the form of a man who thrives on creating crisis, threatens to drag language with it into the abyss. The essence of Trump’s crude rhetoric is a sense of grievance, that someone is always about to get the better of him, or us. For Trump, the social norms are always just breaking, so the response is always to rush the line. The use of profanity doesn’t just register outrage at Trump, it also adds to the general level of crisis — and that’s the danger of it.

Trump the vulgarian brings with him, Janus-faced, Trump the authoritarian. It is a classic maneuver of political demagoguery: create crisis to justify crisis measures. And it operates on all levels, including on the level of language. If we indulge the invitation to speak in a degraded way, we enable degraded thinking. It is a kind of entrapment.

There aren’t many good arguments against cursing that don’t involve old and outdated ideas about class and elitism.

Language, we are told, is constantly evolving, so why stand in its way? But there is at least this argument, an old one, and perhaps one you heard from your grandparents: Swearing is a lazy way to talk. It is a substitute for thinking. The world may be entirely consumed by crisis, but language must stand apart. n

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Lessons learned from Manchester RICHARD WALTON is a director of Counter Terrorism Global, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and was the head of the Counter Terrorism Command at New Scotland Yard from 2011 to 2016. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

The Manchester terrorist attack Monday night was the deadliest since the 7/7 London Underground bombings in 2005 and one of the most shocking ever committed in Britain.

It has caused pain and anguish across the country as families and communities come to terms with the sheer horror of such a senseless act targeted against mostly young teenage girls enjoying a pop concert. If inspired or directed by the Islamic State, as claimed, it will serve to only strengthen the resolve of the people of Britain who want to see the radical group defeated. Manchester has experienced Irishrelated terrorist in the past, and its residents will demonstrate to the world how resilient it remains.

Now Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, and counterterrorism police units, whose capacity is already severely stretched from dealing with the Westminster terrorist attack just two months ago, are likely to come under pressure as they face questions about why another apparently “known” extremist was not prevented from killing so many.

One explanation is the unprecedented recent surge in threats against Britain from Islamic State-inspired attacks.

British authorities have actually been able to stop many such attempts; London’s Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard successfully disrupted three separate terrorist plots (mostly

involving knives) in the past month or so, two within a 24hour period. All of the would-be perpetrators, including four women, were subsequently charged with terrorist offenses.

They had all been living in Britain for years; they were not foreign fighters returning from the collapsing “caliphate” but known extremists inspired to act largely through access to radicalizing material on the Internet and social media contact with terrorists overseas.

The spike in terrorist plotting is likely to continue for months — even years — to come, despite military successes in Iraq and Syria. The harder it is for radicals to get from Britain to Islamic State-held land, the

likelier it is they’ll try to strike in the West. The end of the “physical” caliphate may be near, but the “virtual” caliphate online will endure. The lesson from the Westminster and Manchester attacks is surely that massfatality terrorism does not need to be complex or particularly sophisticated, such as the attacks carried out in Paris in December 2015. Lone individuals can easily be inspired to kill many people with knives, cars and homemade bombs; British officials rarely have to worry about disrupting plots with guns, thanks to our strict firearms laws. The only way of preventing such attacks is by knowing the mind-set and intent of the extremists and then disrupting their planning, either through good intelligence and covert monitoring or by family or communities reporting their concerns to police.

Serious questions will now be asked across Britain about its Muslim communities and whether Muslim leaders and role models are saying and doing enough to counter the poisonous narratives emanating from Islamist terrorist groups. Despite the existence of a mature and well-developed national terrorism prevention strategy in Britain, hundreds of largely British-born nationals have left

the country in the past four years to join the “caliphate,” and one has to ask what more needs to be done to prevent this particularly potent brand of Islamic extremism from flourishing.

The British government will be particularly concerned about a potential lack of community cohesion in the northwest of England after this attack, which is vulnerable to a backlash against Muslim minority communities.

While there is clearly no one solution to the ongoing threats across the world from Islamist terrorism, one has to hope that initiatives like the creation of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, launched in Saudi Arabia this past week, will make a difference. B It is an unintended consequence, but the advent of social media has placed a turbo charge on extremism, providing a vehicle for extremist narratives to be propagated across the world and joining like-minded proponents. There is much more to be done to combat these radicalizing influences. All countries now need comprehensive counterterrorism strategies that include mainstreaming steps to identify and deal with extremism in all its forms. n

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACREMENTO BEE

Trump’s titanic foreign policy shift NEWT GINGRICH is a Republican from Georgia and was speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He served as vice chair of the Trump transition team and is the author of the upcoming book “Understanding Trump.” He wrote this for The Washington Post.

The Washington Post’s former publisher, Philip Graham, famously described journalism as the business of writing the “first rough draft of history.” Last weekend, as President Trump gave a historic speech in Saudi Arabia before the leaders of more than 50 Muslim-majority nations, journalism’s first draft missed the history almost entirely.

While the media focused on the ephemeral questions — whether the president would use campaign rhetoric in a diplomatic setting or how the trip would affect the Obama legacy — they largely missed the real drama of the moment: a titanic shift in U.S. foreign policy occurring right before their eyes.

Trump stood before an unprecedented gathering of leaders to do something far more significant than utter a single phrase or undermine his predecessor’s record. He was there to rally the Muslim world, in his words, “to meet history’s great test” — defeating the forces of terrorism and extremism. He did so in a way that no American president ever had before. While extending a hand of friendship to Muslim nations, he also issued them a clear challenge: to take the lead in solving the crisis that has engulfed their region and spread across the planet.

“Drive out the terrorists and extremists,” he urged them, or consign your peoples to futures of misery and squalor.

To find a comparably dramatic moment in the history of U.S. foreign policy, we have to look back to 1982. That June, 35 years ago next month, President Ronald Reagan stood in the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster in London and called on the West to rally in defense of freedom and against communist aggression.

In that one speech, Reagan predicted the fall of communism and reinvigorated the Western alliance. “We see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit,” Reagan said. “What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms?

Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?”

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

Reagan declared his speech a turning point in history — and it was. Trump, too, declared that his challenge would be a turning point, one way or another. And he posed to that assembly in Riyadh an equally dramatic choice. It was, he said, “a choice between two futures” — the path of civilization, or the path of evil and death.

“America is prepared to stand with you” in the fight against terrorism, Trump pledged. “But the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.”

Never before has an American president tried so clearly to unite the civilized world, including the nations of the Middle East and Africa, against the forces of terrorism. Never before has an American president issued so direct a challenge to those nations to do more in the fight. And never before has an American president so plainly put the ultimate responsibility for eradicating terrorism on the nations of the region. In doing so, Trump’s speech implicitly repudiated the approaches of his two immediate predecessors and promised instead what he characterized as a “principled realism,” based on a

clear-eyed view of America’s interests, security and limits.

That this decisive shift in U.S. foreign policy occurred on a foreign trip within the first four months of the administration is all the more impressive. Reagan didn’t take his first international trip until well into his second year.

And unlike President Barack Obama’s early speech to the Muslim world in 2009, Trump backed up his words with action.

The United States and Saudi Arabia signed a $110 billion arms deal, the largest in U.S. history, which will bolster the kingdom’s ability to contribute to counterterrorism operations across the region. This will reduce the burden on the U.S. military and send a clear message that this administration takes the threat of Iran seriously. The agreements also included a new commitment to crack down on terrorism financing in the Persian Gulf states, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Saudi investment in the United States.

Journalists and Washington bureaucrats may see Trump’s call to action as a distracting sideshow from a status quo they can’t imagine changing. And yet, it already has. Foreign leaders and the American people alike can see in this trip the core of a new, reality-based foreign policy. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Watergate BY

R ICK P ERLSTEIN

Comparisons between the scandals plaguing the Trump administra­ tion and the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon abound. Yet more than 40 years on, myths and misconceptions about the Water­ gate break­in and its massive political ramifications remain.

MYTH NO. 1 There wasn’t a logical motive behind the Watergate burglary.

As politics scholar Elaine Kamarck at the Brookings Institution points out, “Nixon’s victory was never really in doubt, as the Democratic Party was in the middle of a rather spectacular civil war. So why go to the trouble of breaking into their headquarters when they were crumbling from within?”

But this view is premised on hindsight. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex took place June 17, 1972, when the question of whom Nixon would face in the general election was still very much up in the air.

The most important events precipitating the break-in were a pair of meetings in the office of Attorney General John Mitchell in January 1972, in which Nixon campaign aide G. Gordon Liddy presented an elaborate plan to harass and sabotage the Democratic Party, and a subsequent meeting shortly thereafter, in which Mitchell approved a scaled-down operation. During this period, the polls between Nixon and the various Democratic contenders were relatively close. Nixon especially feared the prospect of facing Alabama Gov. George Wallace; the assassination attempt that incapacitated Wallace occurred May 15, long after Liddy and Mitchell agreed to the break-in. Indeed, gathering intelligence on how the DNC planned to distribute the delegates Wallace had already won might have been one

motivation for the break-in.

MYTH NO. 2 Nixon could have quieted the scandal by firing employees.

Cutting loose the people directly responsible for individual crimes creates an incentive for them to implicate the higher-ups who managed the criminal enterprise — which was exactly what happened, accelerating news of the scandal. Nixon fired White House counsel John Dean in April 1973, and that June, Dean testified before the Senate Watergate committee about Nixon’s involvement in the coverup. Likewise, James McCord, a former CIA officer ostensibly hired to work as a security officer for the Republican National Committee, sent a letter to Judge John Sirica during the sentencing phase of his 1973 trial for the Watergate burglary, explaining that his perjury had been bought by the Nixon administration.

MYTH NO. 3 Watergate was politics as usual. Nixon just got caught.

In 1977, the conservative journalist Victor Lasky published “It Didn’t Start With Watergate,” a thick dossier on the sins of every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. He had plenty of material to work with.

But the proven activities of the Nixon White House far surpassed anything his predecessors were ever accused of. Nixon was adamant in his attempts to find wrongdoing from President John F. Kennedy’s administration, which was an object of personal hatred. Despite his extraordinary efforts, Nixon was so unsuccessful

DOUGLAS CHEVALIER/THE WASHINGTON POST

Richard Nixon won reelection by a landslide in 1972. But when the Watergate break-in was planned, the polls were relatively close.

in implicating Kennedy in Watergate-level wrongdoing that his aide Charles Colson ordered “cables” to be forged, using scissors and glue, to falsely suggest that Kennedy ordered the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

MYTH NO. 4 Ford’s pardon of Nixon helped heal the nation.

One month after Nixon resigned, President Gerald Ford pardoned him before he could go to trial for any crimes he might have committed while president.

However, the pardon exacerbated the public’s distrust of government by reinforcing Americans’ sense that the president was above the law. It also cast a damaging vote of no confidence by the executive in the co-equal judicial branch of government. After the pardon, Ford’s favorability ratings plummeted overnight, and he lost his 1976 bid for reelection. And, although Americans have become more favorable toward the pardon over time, it did nothing to stop the downward trend in Americans’ trust in government

accelerated by Watergate.

MYTH NO. 5 Deep Throat was pivotal to Nixon’s downfall.

By 2005, when Deep Throat was revealed to be Mark Felt — an FBI official, not a White House insider — people should have known his role was not that important. Because Felt had no access to the inner workings of the White House, he was not feeding Washington Post reporters new information but merely hints about what the bureau’s investigation had uncovered, and in many cases, what the journalists reporting the Watergate story already knew.

Indeed, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote the book “All the President’s Men,” they were surprised, per Bernstein, at the mystique that developed around Felt’s role. “Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources,” Bernstein said in 2005. n Perlstein is a historian and the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” and “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.”

SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2017

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Scholarship Awards Program & Hall of Fame Ceremony Keynote Speaker

past “Just one of our recipients!”

Lake Chelan native Joe Harris Jr. – Brooklyn Nets

WVC Hall of Fame Inductees

John Murio

Gene Baker, coach (far left)

Gene Baker and John Murio were both instrumental to the WVC Football program from 1980 - 1991 season, which was the last season for football at WVC.

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