Sublime

Congressman Vito Marcantonio

At the center of his analysis was the insistence that modern man, “like Macbeth,” had made an evil decision to trade allegiance to transcendent principles for present gain.

Eisenhower’s appointment of Earl Warren to be chief justice of the United States, like John Adams’s appointment of John Marshall, was one of the major events of his presidency.

Later he wrote, “McCarthyism took its toll on many individuals and on the nation. No one was safe from charges recklessly made from inside the walls of congressional immunity.… Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.”47

He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.

Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu,

John Dodson got the same message when he, too, became a government whistleblower in 2011. “You’re, in a sense, drowning where you can’t seem to find the surface,” Dodson tells me of the massive smear campaign he withstood. “It’s not just drowning; you’re trapped in this cube of water and you don’t know which way is up, which way to get out.” Dodson