FOREWORD

BY MAUREEN DOWD

BEFORE MIKE PENCE CALLED HIS WIFE “MOTHER,” Ronald Reagan called his wife “Mommy.” Before Donald Trump wooed the “forgotten” Americans in the middle, Bill Clinton wooed the “forgotten” Americans in the middle. Before the bank panic of 2008, there was the bank panic of 1933. Before our tragically misbegotten war in Iraq, there was our tragically misbegotten war in Vietnam. Before large crowds thrilled to the sight of a young and handsome Barack Obama on the campaign trail, they thrilled to the sight of a young and handsome J.F.K. on the campaign trail. Before the soul-crushing assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was the soul-crushing assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Before Donald Trump twisted the truth and created dangerous illusions, there were many other powerful men who twisted the truth and created dangerous illusions.

History rhymes, as the saying goes. And often in perverse ways.

This collection of remarkable work from The New York Times’s archives tells the story of America—how we formed an identity and how we lost it. Our correspondents traveled the world, living through history and recording and interpreting it for our readers.

This book begins with a scalding scene: a riven country and President Lincoln taking his last breaths.

“The pistol ball entered the back of the president’s head and penetrated nearly through the head,” Edwin M. Stanton, President Lincoln’s secretary of war, wrote in a special dispatch to the paper headlined “Awful Event; Lincoln Shot by an Assassin.” As the Cabinet hovered around the president’s deathbed, Stanton wrote, “The wound is mortal. The president has been insensible ever since it was inflicted and is now dying.”

The sometimes-morose Lincoln had been “cheerful and hopeful” about “a speedy peace” at a cabinet meeting with Gen. Grant earlier that evening, Stanton revealed, “and spoke very kindly of Gen. Lee and others of the Confederacy.”

The book ends with another scalding scene: a riven country, as Donald Trump rails about fake news and fires F.B.I. Chief James Comey, sparking a special investigation into Russia’s attempt to besmirch our democracy.

The devolution from Lincoln to Trump is jarring enough, but the Statue of Liberty surely laments the sad fact that a century and a half after the Civil War, we are once more bitterly at odds over existential questions about who we are and who we want to be.

Flash back to election night, November 9, 1932, a time when our leaders had respect for a free press. “The people could not have arrived at this result if they had not been informed properly of my views by an independent press,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his victory statement, “and I value particularly the high service of The New York Times in its reporting of my speeches and its enlightened comment.”

Our election-night story explained that the country was voting a “national grouch” against three years of Depression, rejecting the argument by President Herbert Hoover’s side that “things could have been worse.”

When F.D.R. died at Warm Springs, The Times described the sadness that swept the nation’s capital, as crowds filled up Lafayette Square adjacent to the White House. “The men’s hats were off,” Arthur Krock wrote, “and the tears that were shed were not to be seen only on the cheeks of women.”

Krock wrote this about Eleanor Roosevelt: “A lesser human being would have been prostrated by the sudden and calamitous tidings, but Mrs. Roosevelt entered at once upon her responsibilities. . . . When Mr. Truman arrived and asked what he could do for her, Mrs. Roosevelt rejoined calmly, ‘Tell us what we can do. Is there any way we can help you?’”

In a story from 1946 with particular relevance for America in 2018, Winston Churchill appeared with President Truman at Westminster College and warned that Moscow would seek the indefinite expansion of its power and policies. The United States was at the “pinnacle of world power,” Churchill said, and must not fritter away its “clear and shining” opportunity, or it would “bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time.” He named war and tyranny as the twin evils threatening the world and said nothing could stop an “age of plenty” except “human folly or subhuman crime.”

Scrolling through the liquid history of journalism, you feel a shiver sometimes, knowing what is to come.

On November 7, 1960, Harrison E. Salisbury vividly described Senator John F. Kennedy’s final boisterous marathon campaign trip up and down the East Coast.

In Teaneck, N.J., “the crowd stampeded when the candidate appeared, overturning press tables and breaking down barriers. Shrieks of women filled the air.” When he got to the Naugatuck River Valley, “lights blazed in windows of homes along the way, and families rushed out and stood on their front steps as he passed. Not a few men were in pajamas, and there were women in nightdresses.”

And then Salisbury writes this sentence, which tugs at the heart to read it now: “Motor-ists parked along Route 110 blinked their lights and honked their horns at the motorcade. Mr. Kennedy rode in an open car, bareheaded as usual, despite the cold night air.”

The next story is dated November 23, 1963. James Reston wrote: “America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young president, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best. The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.” Reston added that “the irony of the president’s death is that his short administration was devoted almost entirely to various attempts to curb this very streak of violence in the American character” and “to restrain[ing] those who wanted to be more violent in the Cold War overseas and those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war at home.”

Reston concluded that “the unexpected death of President Kennedy has forced Washington to meditate a little more on the wild element of chance in our national life.”

Sometimes the headlines alone make you shake your head. Consider the one on Robert B. Semple Jr.’s story about Richard Nixon’s win in 1968: “Goal Is Harmony—President-Elect Vows His Administration Will Be ‘Open.’” It is frustrating how often we are hostages to the vagaries of politicians’ gremlins.

There are descriptions of our racist history that are hard to read, like Roy Reed’s 1965 story headlined “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes.”

“Alabama state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County sheriff’s office tore through a column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips here today to enforce Gov. George C. Wallace’s order against a protest march from Selma to Montgomery.” Other painful stories include 1973’s “Firing Stepped Up at Wounded Knee” and a 1992 account of the riots in Los Angeles after four white police officers were acquitted of charges in the beating of a black motorist.

And there are times you will want to throw this book at the wall in fury. When, in 1970, the National Guard fires into a crowd of students at Kent State, killing four, and claims it was necessary because of a phantom sniper. Or when, in 1964, Congress approves a resolution requested by President Johnson to “strengthen his hand in dealing with Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.”

In 1967, five years before the Vietnam War officially ended, Lyndon B. Johnson sent 50,000 more men to fight in the doomed jungle. R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., embedded with our troops, wrote a searing story that exposed it as a lost cause: “1.2 million allied troops have been able to secure only a fraction of a country less than one and a half times the size of New York State.”

“It is galling work,” Apple wrote, describing a firefight that could have killed him, along with several soldiers. “Because the enemy can fade into redoubts or across borders where the Americans cannot follow him, the same unit must be smashed again and again.”

In inimitable Apple style, Johnny summed up the stalemate in Vietnam (and foreshadowed Afghanistan and Iraq) with some lines by Lewis Carroll:

If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

“Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

“That they could get it clear?”

“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,

And shed a bitter tear.

A story dated January 14, 2001, by Stephen Engelberg, is equally prescient about another horror for America: Osama bin Laden.

“His strategy is aptly captured by one of his many code names: The Contractor,” Engelberg wrote. “The group he founded 13 years ago, Al Qaeda, Arabic for ‘The Base,’ is led by masterful opportunists who tailor their roles to the moment, sometimes teaching the fine points of explosives, sometimes sending in their own operatives, sometimes simply supplying inspiration.”

While it’s clear to see that The Times loosened up its style over the years—and hired more women—there is wonderful writing and reporting throughout its history.

In a 1980 story headlined “From Film Star to Candidate,” Howell Raines profiled Ronald Reagan, noting that his family was so poor when he was growing up that Reagan’s older brother, Neil, was “sometimes dispatched to the butcher shop to ask for the free liver given out as cat food,” even though there was no cat.

“Mr. Reagan’s background as a movie actor has been both a blessing and a curse,” Raines wrote. “Political critics who characterize him as banal and shallow, a mouther of right-wing platitudes, delight in recalling that he costarred with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo. Even now, 24 years after his last film role, he stews about being typed as the nice guy who didn’t get the girl. ‘I always got the girl,’ he sometimes assures supporters.”

This book chronicles the rise of the good, the bad and the ugly: suffragettes, the civil rights movement, Joe McCarthy, the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, the movement to let women in combat, gays in the military, the Parkland kids, #MeToo. And it chronicles some falls, because, as we know, Washington breeds arrogance, insecurity, self-pity and self-destructive tendencies.

In a story dated August 10, 1974, James T. Wooten describes Richard Nixon’s farewell, “his face wet with tears” and his speech to his staff: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them—and then you destroy yourself.”

Which is exactly what happened to Nixon, who was eaten alive by his demons.

“Mr. Nixon’s day began in the mist and rain of a humid Washington morning, when Manolo Sanchez, his longtime valet, laid out the clothes he would wear during the final hours of his tenure as president,” Wooten wrote, adding: “While he spoke, Mr. Nixon’s eyes brimmed with tears that glistened in the glare of the television lights, and although he occasionally smiled, his remarks were tinted with the sadness his friends say now plagues him.

“There was also a moment of irony, while, in discussing vocational integrity, he said that among other craftsmen, the country needs ‘good plumbers.’”

Political reporting doesn’t get much better than that.