Headlines Without History

 Stephen K Bannon, the former chief strategist of President Trump's White House - also a former Goldman Sachs Mergers and Acquisitions specialist, who graduated with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University, as well as an MBA from Harvard; co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute; former member of the principals committee of the National Security Council; and a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant - has been sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of $6500 for contempt of Congress

This is a dark time for America: because banana republics will "banana republic"

• The media is erasing and rewriting the long and august American heritage and personal commitment of "executive privilege" - a tradition that does not appear in the Constitution, but which has protected our nation in many ways, throughout its history
• In a way that makes me feel as if the world in which I was a young White House spouse had been turned upside-down, the media in 2022 are rewriting the act of respecting executive privilege - keeping confidential one's conversations with the President - as an example somehow of a lack of ethics.

The honor-code culture of supporting "executive privilege" at that time

• people from all walks of life protecting confidential conversations with the President was robust
• One respected Presidential executive privilege, if one was not a complete jerk and sellout
• one's commitment to respecting the unwritten honor code had nothing to do with the man who occupied the role of President.

In almost all cases, this breach of confidentiality makes the task of governing well, more difficult

• Some who break a President's confidentiality just want their fifteen minutes of fame
• They may simply want to go on the talk show beat, after they leave the White House.
• Others want to be on the lecture circuit with those insider anecdotes

I have never written about any of the conversations I had with Vice President Gore or his campaign consultants, or with Dick Morris, four years earlier, when he advised President Clinton. Why not?

• The conversations which I am not disclosing, and that I will never disclose, were simply good, admirable conversations about good policies and strategies, driven by good motives.
• I won't ever write about those conversations because, like many other decent people who have served as formal or informal advisors, I respect the Offices of the President and of the Vice President of the United States of America.

When we consider this current media recasting of executive privilege as fungible, or as necessarily malign, think of this:

• Executive privilege is necessary for the survival of our Republic, because being President or Vice President is inhumanly isolating, disorienting, and hard.
• The air around a "Principal" is like a physical vortex: the adulation, the attacks, the advance teams, the constant barrage of headlines, the glare, the lack of privacy, the exhausting fourteen-hour days, the dawn wake-up calls, the polls, the pushy donors, the ceaseless chess of Congressional relationships, the racing adrenaline of foreign and domestic crises, the wearying, nerve-wracking phalanx and choreography of security - picture this, day after day.
• People around 'the Principal' exploit or try to manipulate him or her, or soft-peddle emerging problems to "the Principal" continually.

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