The Supreme Court has just given former President Donald Trump and future occupants of the White House the right to avoid criminal responsibility for actions that they can self-servingly claim are “official.” No other American president has ever had such sweeping authority to avoid responsibility for his actions. Americans can expect Trump to claim that anything he has done or will do is sanctioned by this Supreme Court decision, overriding the decisions and values of American courts and juries all over the country.
Sadly, this reminds me of a very different time: the early 1960s, when I arrived in Washington. My friend and former college instructor Fred Holborn had worked in John F. Kennedy’s Senate office and had even offered me a job with the senator that I was too dumb to take.
I recently had been hired as a Foreign Service Officer, which paid me a real salary for the first time in my life, and I was no risk-taker. Besides, I was rooting for Sen. Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, to be the 1960 Democratic presidential nominee.
In 1961, Fred got a fabulous job in the Kennedy White House after JFK had beaten Humphrey at the Democratic convention and Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. The job was to read dozens of local newspapers every day and collect other reading materials for Kennedy, who was a voracious speed-reader. Late on Saturday night, April 28, 1962, Fred told me he’d received a message from the president.
Kennedy was having dinner at the White House the fol.
