Jules Feiffer and I were born 94 years ago in the Bronx, two months apart. We both grew up to be terrible at sports, and we both started to draw characters from the comics when we were 8 or 9 years old. We both became cartoonists, and last year, both of us ended up in different emergency rooms with heart failure, in the same week.

After four or five days, we were both discharged from the hospital with pretty much the same array of pills, as well as orders to stay away from salt. But Jules’s doctor gave him an additional admonishment: Jules had to move far away from his home on Shelter Island. The humidity was bad for his lungs. Joan Holden, Jules’s wife, wasted no time in doing research to find out which area had the best air quality. It turned out that the air around Cooperstown, New York, was about as good as you could get, so Joan and Jules bought a house in a nearby town.

I live in Manhattan but was determined to pay Jules a visit—we have been friends for half a century, and I was the best man when Jules married Joan. And, in a way, I owe the career I’ve had as a caricaturist to Jules. His work as a cartoonist, a novelist, a playwright, and a creator of children’s books over the past 70 years inspired me to attempt things I never would have without his example.

In 1956, when his strip in The Village Voice began appearing, I was an art director at CBS Television designing ads for I Love Lucy, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and other shows that I found unwatchable. Suddenly, there was Jules’s strip every week, describing the way we lived—our hang-ups, our desires, our fears, our politics. He was doing what I dreamed of doing: using comic art as commentary. Before my 27th birthday, I quit CBS and started freelancing.

[Read: The cartoon that captures the damaged American male]

It’s difficult for a generation younger than mine to realize how important Jules’s drawings were to so many of us in America in the 1950s and ’60s. There were some great cartoonists, but not so much when it came to the kind of sophisticated social and political commentary we now take for granted. The era of Doonesbury and The Simpsons, which Jules helped make possible, had yet to come. Jules created and occupied a space of his own: part editorial cartoon, part comic strip, part session on the couch. His style—his line, his language—was deceptively simple, and unlike anything else at the time. Across several panels, one character would give voice to a monologue, two characters would hold a conversation, or a woman would dance amid her swirling thoughts—rarely more than that. In the 1950s, newspaper cartoons didn’t really focus on relationships, therapy, conformity, self-doubt, or the latest fads in lifestyle and literature. In the early ’60s, even liberal newspapers were nervous about the civil-rights movement and virtually unanimous in their support of the Vietnam War. Because Jules was a lone voice of protest for so long, he was revered by many readers.

After Jules and Joan moved into their new home, Joan emailed me photographs, and I promised I would visit. But I didn’t see how I could. The drive there would take more than four hours, and I had promised my daughter (after badly denting her car) that I would never get behind the wheel again. Jules’s driving days were over too: He had macular degeneration. To the rescue came my friend Katherine Hourigan, a vice president of Knopf Doubleday and a good friend of Jules’s. Kathy offered to drive me to Joan and Jules’s place in upstate New York.

The events that led to my friendship with Jules began in 1974, when Clay Felker, a co-founder and the editor of New York magazine, bought The Village Voice, the countercultural weekly that had started publication in 1955. Back then, freelancers who wrote for the Voice liked to call it a “writer’s newspaper” because, as they described it, their stories went into print pretty much unedited. On the other hand, those lucky contributors, including cartoonists, made little or no money. The Voice’s unofficial policy seemed to be “We don’t edit you, and we don’t pay you.” When, in 1956, the editors agreed to run Jules’s comic strip—at first called Sick, Sick, Sick—he was ecstatically happy to accept $0 a week just to get published. After Felker took over the Voice, its low-paid staff joined a union, and Jules’s salary jumped to $25 a week.

Another result of the Voice changing hands was that Felker gave me—a contributor to New York magazine since its very beginning—a weekly spot in the Voice. Jules and I would now be appearing just a page apart every week. This put us in the position of being dueling cartoonists, but Jules’s parry-slash-and lunge had made him famous long before I joined the paper. His celebrated comic strip—now called simply Feiffer—was being syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, as well as overseas in The Observer. The film director Stanley Kubrick was so taken by Jules’s strip that he wrote to him praising his “eminently speakable and funny” dialogue. He suggested that they collaborate on a screenplay.

[Read: The alien majesty of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon]

Instead, Jules used his gift for dialogue to write a novel, Harry, the Rat With Women, and followed that with a play, Little Murders. The latter was turned into a movie in 1971, the same year that another film, Carnal Knowledge, for which Jules wrote the screenplay, opened in theaters. Despite his dizzying array of creative undertakings—his critical history The Great Comic Book Heroes; his illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth; and the Oscar-winning animated film Munro, about a little boy who is drafted into the Army—Jules never missed a deadline in the 41 years that his cartoon strip appeared in the Voice.

An illustration by Jules Feiffer from The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

In the 1970s, when we met at parties or spoke on the same panel, we were always friendly, but we did not become close friends until Jules met my wife, Nancy. It was easy for a boy from the Bronx to be attracted to Nancy: Her voice was warm and soft, and her speech was clearly enunciated. She radiated what Quakers call “inner light,” and—best of all—she had been a fan of Jules’s since her college days. Jules figured that if Nancy had married me, I must be more interesting than he’d thought.

One summer, Kathy Hourigan invited Nancy and me to the cottage she rented on Martha’s Vineyard, and Jules, who had a large, turn-of-the-century saltbox house, invited us all to dinner. When Nancy told Jules how much she admired his home, he explained that he had bought it with the $650,000 he’d picked up for writing the Carnal Knowledge screenplay, adding that he had initially written it for the stage but “rewrote it for the screen because Mike Nichols said he would rather direct it as a movie.” Jules made it sound so easy to write a screenplay that I promised myself that as soon as I got back to Manhattan, I would learn how to type.

Having the Feiffer strip and my own cartoon a page apart in the Voice worked out well. Even when we both tackled the same subject in the same issue, our approach was very different. Most of the time, I felt I held my own against Jules’s sequential drawings, but not when it came to the war in Vietnam. On that subject, Jules couldn’t be touched. The attempt by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to force Christian dictators down the throats of Buddhist Vietnamese in the name of anti-communism produced many brilliant cartoons from many pens, but none with more rage, wit, and concision than Jules’s.

Unfortunately, my happy stay at the Voice was short-lived. In 1977, Rupert Murdoch bought a controlling interest in New York and the Voice, and Felker was gone. I resigned, along with many other contributors. Feiffer saw no reason to leave the Voice, and Murdoch never interfered with his strip. In 1986, Jules finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. After 30 years of brilliant graphic commentary, it was long overdue. “Every 30 years,” Jules said at the time, “the Pulitzer committee gives me a prize, whether I deserve it or not.”

[Read: Trump’s future isn’t up to Fox News]

Jules and I were thrown together again in 1992, when Tina Brown took over the editorship of The New Yorker. Tina saw nothing wrong with going after celebrated writers and cartoonists who had made their reputation outside the magazine’s hallowed halls; she wanted Jules Feiffer, and gave him two pages to do a strip for her first issue. I contributed the cover for that issue.

The Monday it hit the newsstands, Jules and I were bowled over when the magazine was delivered to us by messenger. I have no idea how many other contributors received a copy by hand, but such gestures on Tina’s part were the first indication I had that concern for the bottom line was very low on her list of priorities. Although I had broken into the The New Yorker a year earlier, I phoned Jules, and we congratulated each other on making it into the magazine that had snubbed us when we were young.

Jules continued to have triumphs in the years ahead, but he also had troubles. His screenplay for Popeye didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped, and some of his later plays received lukewarm reviews. He also had to cope with a long, acrimonious divorce. And then there was the brutal fact that his eyesight was failing.

After four hours of driving from one boring highway to another, we were told by the car’s GPS that we had arrived at Joan and Jules’s home. Kathy and I found ourselves in front of a very long one-story house that Joan later described as neoclassical or Gustavian. No one answered our knock, so we just walked in. We soon discovered Joan in the kitchen; she welcomed us with hugs and rushed to find Jules in the other wing, and we followed. When he saw us—or the blurred image of us—he let out his familiar high-decibel shout of joy, and we all returned to the kitchen. The house has enormous picture windows with a spectacular view of a lake and the voluptuous mountains beyond it. I wondered how much of the view Jules could actually enjoy, though he had spoken enthusiastically about seeing his home’s surroundings for the first time.

After lunch, Jules and I spent time together in his studio. “This is the biggest studio I ever had,” Jules roared at the top of his lungs as we entered. I guess he wanted his friends in Manhattan to hear—they’d all told him not to move out of the city. I’m not sure Jules could afford to live in Manhattan anymore; the divorce had drained his savings. The one time he’d tried to make a little extra money by drawing a strip for an advertisement, he’d received a letter calling him “a sellout,” and that was enough to make Jules swear off ever doing another ad. The great New Yorker cartoonists Peter Arno, Charles Saxon, and Charles Addams had all drawn for advertising agencies, and nobody had ever called them sellouts. But the followers of Jules expected their hero to be above drawing for a whiskey ad.

As I sat with Jules, I saw a lot of taped-up boxes from the move that he still hadn’t opened. But one of my drawings from my book The Saturday Kid had been unpacked and was hanging on his wall; I’d given it to Jules years ago as a peace offering. That book had come close to ruining our friendship.

This was decades ago, but here’s what happened. I had called Jules and asked if he would consider writing a book, which I would illustrate, about a poor boy in the 1930s who goes to the movies every Saturday morning and daydreams himself into those movies. Jules jumped at the idea and promised I’d have copy in a week or two. After six months went by, I decided I could write the book myself. That’s when his copy arrived. It was mostly about a boy with a terrible mother. It was Jules’s mother, not mine. I told him I couldn’t do his book. He felt betrayed and went off to write his own book for children, The Man in the Ceiling, which was brilliant and became a best seller, as did most of his other children’s books. He forgave me.

Jules brought over a few drawings that he had done recently. I found out later that the essayist Roger Rosenblatt was using them in his new book, Cataract Blues. Looking at the thin lines crossing this way and that, it was hard for me to figure out what exactly Jules meant to convey, but his work, done in blue ink, had a quality that reminded me of some Paul Klee drawings. One of them seemed to me to be of three bridges, perhaps ones that cross the East River. I told Jules they were lovely, and they were. But they didn’t look anything like those assured, energetic drawings that I so admired.

An illustration by Jules Feiffer from Cataract Blues, by Roger Rosenblatt

Before Kathy and I got in the car to drive back to New York, Joan and Jules walked out with us and pointed to their barn. It was temperature-controlled—a previous owner had used it to store paintings and wine. It is intended to become a repository for many of Jules’s original drawings, currently in storage in New York City. The archive encompasses seven decades of our national life, or at least a version captured with India ink on Bristol board. Maybe the Smithsonian will come calling.

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Most Americans who have heard of the John Birch Society associate it with the political fringe—and rightly so. Founded in 1958 by a small band of anti–New Deal businessmen, the society rejected virtually the entire post–World War II, U.S.-led international order. Birchers urged the United States to get out of the United Nations, denounced the foreign-policy establishment as a communist cabal, and called on political leaders to confront what they saw as the gravest threat to the country: a homegrown plot to take away Americans’ liberties. Many Birchers promoted baseless conspiracy theories—fluoridation in the water supply represented, as one Bircher document charged, “a massive wedge for socialized medicine.”

But at the height of their influence, in the mid-1960s, the Birchers were hardly a marginalized force in American society. Across hundreds of chapters in almost every state, Birch activists—mostly white, upwardly mobile, Christian, suburban men and women—won seats on local school boards, traded ideas in their neighborhood bookstores, and volunteered for like-minded political candidates. Birchers helped secure the 1964 GOP presidential nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The founder, Robert Welch, twice appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. Herblock featured the society in his cartoons. Bob Dylan composed a song called “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” The movement was creeping into the mainstream.

Yet those who are familiar with the John Birch Society also know that its time in the spotlight ended decades ago. The organization bequeathed a set of ideas to a host of successors who kept Bircher ideas alive through the decades: Phyllis Schlafly, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Michelle Bachmann, Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others. But little more than a decade after its founding, the society began to shrivel. Its membership declined, and its finances suffered. To many Americans, it soon came to resemble a historical artifact.

[Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism]

How did it happen? And what does it mean for today’s far-right forces?

The decline of the John Birch Society is partly a story about political leaders, grassroots activists, and liberal institutions intervening to defend American democracy. But it is also a story of an implosion from within. As the group attracted ever more conspiratorial members, some prone to bigotry and even violence, the society was consumed by internal strife. Some members resigned. Others protested that Birchers weren’t anti-Semitic enough. The leadership sometimes tried to police and expel more troublesome individuals, but that process proved fractious and chaotic. By the mid-’60s, “John Birch”—the name came from an evangelist turned warrior who had been killed by Chinese Communist forces—became a common epithet.

The factors that prevented the society from metastasizing are relevant to a country now struggling to contain election denialism, white supremacy, and political violence. Former President Donald Trump’s millions of supporters might be more powerful than the Birchers’ estimated 60,000 to 100,000 members ever were. But the MAGA movement, too, has begun to see how extremism—in the form of white supremacists, militia members, conspiracy theorists—can lead to marginalization. As numerous commentators have noted over the past decade, the guardrails of American democracy are not as strong as they once were. Yet America’s institutions have still helped constrain the reach and power of MAGA Republicans.

The far right’s victory in the 21st century is hardly assured. And the story of the decline of the John Birch Society offers possible strategies for containment.

By the 1960s, the John Birch Society had become, to its legion of critics, an authoritarian movement seeking to topple the nation’s fledgling multiracial democracy. Welch had once charged that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent. Birch members called to impeach Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren (a radical step at the time), smeared Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist, promoted “America First”–style isolationism, and dabbled in anti-Semitism and racism. Liberals fretted that the society would use secretive, violent means to disrupt free and fair elections and help tip the United States into a civil war. Many in the GOP were worried too. Patricia Hitt, a prominent California Republican and an ally of President Richard Nixon, called Birchers “haters beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Around this time, a coalition of public agencies and liberal organizations arose to tarnish the Birch movement, acting both independently and in concert. These included presidents and former presidents, other federal and state actors, members of Congress, civil-rights NGOs, and the news media.

Attorneys general, activists, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Defense Department, and the FBI all at various times worked to discredit the movement, in some cases investigating Birchers or publishing mocking and even scathing reports about them. Military leaders reprimanded Birch-preaching officers (the society’s supporters criticized the practice as “muzzling”), while some mayors and police chiefs threatened to punish police officers for being members. Human-rights and civil-rights groups—including the NAACP, the union-backed Group Research, and Americans for Democratic Action—put out press releases, speeches, and reports branding Birchers as conspiratorial, malicious, and hostile to racial equality and to democracy.

No institution took more aggressive (and, arguably, effective) steps to discredit the society than the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s foremost organization devoted to combatting anti-Semitism. Like many liberals, the ADL’s leaders feared that a Bircher-led movement fueled by anti-government zeal and easy access to firearms could explode into violence against racial and religious minorities, and they felt a moral obligation to stamp the movement out. Starting around 1959 and continuing through at least the early ’70s, the ADL mounted an extensive counterintelligence operation to infiltrate the John Birch Society and dig up damaging information about it.

Operatives gathered Birch chapter-membership lists, studied individual Birchers’ personal and professional associations, and ferreted out their credit reports, employment records, financial transactions, license-plate numbers, and even a codicil to one Birch donor’s will. These efforts resulted in thousands of pages of materials giving the ADL insights into the personalities of Birch leaders and the activities of chapters and members. (The ADL’s efforts to counter the Birchers are documented in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, and are chronicled in my new book.)

The information the ADL collected amounted to one of the country’s most comprehensive assessments of the Birch Society, painting a detailed picture of Birchers as agents of hate and serving as source material for countless ADL books, press releases, and pamphlets. The ADL also fed choice bits of information to the press, which helped shape public opinion of the society as an enemy of fact, reason, and democracy.

The relatively consolidated media landscape of the era also helped elites relegate Birchers to the margins. In the ’60s, virtually every major news outlet in the country scrutinized the group. In The Nation, the journalist Hans Engh spoke for many reporters when he wrote that the Birch Society “represents a basic, continuing phenomenon in American society: that regressive force which, under one guise or another, seems to pop up whenever the country as a whole seems destined to move into a more progressive era.” Although the condemnation in the mass media engendered some sympathy among those on the right who thought the Birchers were martyrs, it also warned conservative leaders such as Goldwater, Nixon, and the National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. to put at least some distance between themselves and the most extreme members of their coalition.

After Goldwater was trounced in the 1964 presidential election, a handful of Republican leaders got the message, denouncing the society as a threat to the GOP’s prospects and a movement out of step with the values of the party establishment. At a time of urban uprisings, anti-war protests, and student-led movements, some Republican Party officials sought to expel Birchers from their ranks while depicting Democrats as the ones who refused to extirpate extremists from theirs.

[From the October 2022 issue: The long unraveling of the Republican Party]

In September 1965, Republicans’ two most powerful elected leaders, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, held a joint press conference devoted to repudiating the John Birch Society. Birchers, Dirksen emphasized, were “NOT a part of the Republican Party” and resembled the “Know-Nothings” of the 19th century. “We do not believe in extremism,” he added. The society’s views of Eisenhower and former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as agents of communism were “at complete variance with a whole tradition of the Republican Party,” in Dirksen’s words. And the GOP’s legislative record—its backing for the United Nations and U.S. international treaties, its partial acceptance of civil rights, its pro-public-health stands—was “in substantial conflict with the views of the John Birch Society,” Ford, the future vice president and president, said.

Over time, the society evinced a pattern that is familiar to many extremist groups: Its conspiracy theories drew more and more radicals into its ranks, and it became less cohesive, with Birchers fighting over how far to go. Even as some members of the society welcomed the hatred of their enemies, others worried that their affiliation made it impossible for them to live their lives freely and pursue their careers. Reports circulated that some Birchers were being hounded at work, losing business or friends. Some members resigned as a result.

By the mid-’60s, Welch accused some Birchers of putting their personal agendas above the society’s by feuding with fellow chapter members or ignoring his directives, and he issued an ultimatum: follow him or resign. In August 1966, The New York Times reported that “acrimonious disputes” had forced Welch to travel the United States to try to resolve problems one chapter at a time. For a group with a dues-paying membership model, the squabbles exacerbated existing financial woes; the society had to refund money to lifetime members who had been expelled for various violations, recoup equipment from chapters that had gone defunct, and figure out how to handle members who had lost their own money on Birch-affiliated bookstores.

Adding to the dissension, many Birchers who joined in the society’s later years were more radical than the group’s earlier members. The Birch leadership at times used militant rhetoric—Welch once said the fight against communism required courage “greater than that called for in meeting an armed enemy … on a physical battlefield.” Yet he also believed that the group would be tainted by members who threatened physical harm to their enemies or who had criminal records or associations with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. That set up a clash with members who urged the society to be more bigoted. In September 1968, a Bircher named Robert Jones resigned because he found the Birchers too soft on American Jews. “Whoever holds the propaganda power holds the real power,” he explained, “and the tragic thing about the Jews is that although they are very important in the field of propaganda here, most of them do not relate to being Americans first.”

As the society lost members and money, it also lost clout. It occasionally resurfaced in the late 1970s and ’80s—three players for the San Diego Padres were exposed as members in 1984—and still exists today in a much-diminished form. But the organization has never come close to matching the intensity and impact it achieved in the ’60s. Most observers seemingly agreed with a Los Angeles Times reporter who, in 1974, predicted that the society’s “ideology may be so narrowly based and require so much precise faith” that “gaining mass popular support” would be nearly impossible. Years of institutional pushback weakened the group, and the organization burned itself out.

Could the MAGA movement eventually ebb in the way that the Birchers did?

Today’s far right has numerous differences from the John Birch Society. MAGA is the dominant force in the Republican Party, with a leader who occupied the nation’s highest office, and Birchers never achieved that level of political power. (Only a few Birchers were elected to Congress, and the GOP often governed in ways that rejected the fringe’s most insistent demands.) Trump’s movement has capitalized on larger developments that Birchers didn’t enjoy: a more fractured media landscape, a full-blown culture war, and the ideological sorting-out of the two parties, among many other changes in American life. Today’s defenders of American democracy face a much steeper challenge.

[Peter Wehner: The Trump abandonment has begun]

Yet the decline of the Birch Society has some echoes in our current moment.

Although American democracy might be battered today, events of the past few years have demonstrated how the nation’s institutions still can curb fringe actors, as they did the Birchers. Police heroically fended off pro-Trump insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6. Since that day, the Justice Department, the FBI, local and state prosecutors, and the federal judiciary have investigated, arrested, tried, or jailed hundreds of pro-Trump rioters and secured seditious conspiracy convictions against leaders of the pro-Trump Oath Keepers militia. The House’s bipartisan January 6 committee documented Trump’s central role in efforts to overturn a free and fair election. And Trump himself and his top lieutenants might eventually face criminal charges.

The mass media obviously have lost much of their cultural authority since the Birchers’ heyday, but not all of it. Journalists have chronicled Trump’s lies, conspiracy theories, and racist statements in detail, making it harder for him to expand his popularity. Even some of Trump’s own voters have tired of his penchant for chaos and now consider him unelectable.

MAGA’s growing radicalism is breeding dissent within a movement that was never particularly harmonious to begin with. After years of Trump’s batty screeds and violent rhetoric, his movement unsurprisingly has lured more extremist acolytes, such as the anti-Semitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and the white-supremacist leader Nick Fuentes, with whom Trump dined in November. (Birchers, Fuentes has remarked, were “a prelude” to his Groyper movement.) MAGA’s ever more fringy orientation and conspiratorial mindset has damaged it electorally, as voters handed election deniers a series of defeats in otherwise winnable races in 2022.

Even if the MAGA movement continues to follow a similar trajectory to that of the John Birch Society, the far right’s racist, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial elements won’t disappear from our politics. They will eventually find new homes, as they did after the John Birch Society became a shadow of its old self. But the tale of the society’s decline at least offers one model of how radical groups can be constrained, from the outside and the inside, even in a highly fractured and polarized America. Similar constraints could cause MAGA to wither, at least for a time. It is not too late to push the radical right back toward the fringes.

This article was adapted from the forthcoming book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.

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Mission Control: … now being retracted from the Saturn V vehicle. T minus 15, 14, 13, 12 …

Vann R. Newkirk II: Odds are, you don’t know much about the Apollo 6 mission.

Mission Control: … three, two, one. We have commenced; we have liftoff. (Crowd cheering.)

Newkirk: If you’ve ever seen that one famous video from outside a rocket detaching from the first stage, just beyond the Earth, then you probably have seen Apollo 6. It’s got a bit of a mixed record, as far as space stuff goes. It was just the second test flight of the Saturn V rocket, one of the most critical components of the entire moon-landing program. On its launch date in 1968, the idea was still new, still uncertain, still dangerous.

Mission Control: Now at 10 nautical miles of altitude, heading out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, uh, we’re on our way.

Newkirk: It had just been six years since President Kennedy announced that we would go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. It turned out that building something like a giant bomb that would send men a quarter-million miles away through the vacuum of space was pretty hard.

The launch wasn’t as big an event as previous launches. It was uncrewed, so there was none of the majesty of astronauts walking and smiling. No names to remember. There was no nail-biting drama of wondering if the boys might not make it home. Earlier that week, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. His announcement took away some of the attention from the launch. Still, this was the experiment that would tell us if the thing was possible at all. In a country where so much was falling apart socially and politically, this was the rare moment that might bring people together.

Mission Control: Our first stage will be falling away shortly now. That’s a day’s work done. Again the greatest weight-lifting effort ever … Our inner stage has separated—this crucial timeline event, right on schedule.

Newkirk: In the broad strokes, the Apollo 6 mission worked. The Saturn V rocket did not explode. The command module made it up to space and came back. But there was some damage to the rocket. The mission’s planned route was no longer possible.

Apollo 6 is often described as a failure, but it did end up being important. The ability to safely manage the problems in the launch gave NASA confidence in the Saturn V.

It meant that when Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon a year later, it did so with the Saturn V rocket.

In the right light, the Apollo 6 launch might be remembered as a validation of the effort to go to space, maybe the greatest scientific endeavor humanity has ever attempted.

It was a spring evening, the week before Passover—10 days before Easter. A time of renewal. A time of change.

But Apollo 6 is not really remembered at all, because there was a bigger story on April 4.

Police scanner: 416. A shooting has occurred … You are to remain in the car until it is verified that the …

Ken Reed (journalist): Yes, this is Ken Reed, of Westinghouse Broadcasting in Washington. And we received word about, uh, the shooting of, uh, Dr. Martin Luther King. And, uh …

Public relations officer: We have no other information about his condition or where he is.

Reed: Uh, you don’t know, uh, when, when, uh, when or how or his condition, uh—you’re just about as ignorant as the rest of us are in all of this, huh?

Public relations officer: I’m sorry. I’ll have to hang up.

Reed: All right.

Police scanner: 24-16. We’ve finally put up on this … It has been confirmed that the Reverend King has been shot. 416. 416. Form a ring around the hotel, around the hotel. Ambulances are responding.

Newkirk: Just after 7 p.m. eastern time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A bullet from a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster rifle traveled through his face and spine. His closest friends tried to care for him and reassure him as help came, as police fanned out into the city, looking for the gunman.

Reporter: Dr. Jackson said he had just asked Dr. King if he was ready for dinner when a bullet struck Dr. King in the face. The impact lifting him off his feet, he slumped to the floor without a word.

Newkirk: They rushed King to St. Joseph’s Hospital. But there wasn’t much to be done. Just an hour after the shooting, he died. He was 39 years old.

***

Newkirk II: From The Atlantic, I’m Vann Newkirk. This is Holy Week.

Part 1: “Rupture.”

***

Newkirk: The news of his assassination moved lightning fast to radio and TV stations across the country. For the next minutes, hours, and days, there was no other story. This was all that mattered.

Newscaster: NBC interrupts its regular program scheduled to bring you the following special report.

Douglas Edwards: This is Douglas Edwards, CBS News, in New York with a special report on Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

Reporter: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, this evening …

Reporter: Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee …

Newkirk: Everywhere in America, daily life stopped. Dinners turned cold. Families watched the news with dread. People spilled out from homes, from stores, from restaurants, into the streets. Politicians scrambled to say something, to comfort people who were facing despair. They understood that this would send America into crisis.

Edmund Muskie: The criminal act that took his life brings shame to our country. An apostle of nonviolence has been the victim of violence.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I pray that his family can find comfort in the memory of all he tried to do for the land he loved so well.

Newkirk: For Black folks who were around in 1968, the moment is seared into memory. It’s the dark thought that comes with all the MLK boulevards, with the calendars and posters and records or speeches, or any time they hear Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” song.

It’s been over 50 years since then, but for many people, it feels like yesterday. Barbara Fleming and Taquiena Boston were both kids in northeast D.C. when it happened. They remember it well.

Barbara Fleming: That was major, major news. It was. They stopped everything on TV. Didn’t have but four channels, but it came on all the channels.

Taquiena Boston: How did it happen? Who did it? What do they know? You know, we were glued to the television.

Newkirk: Topper Carew was a young architect in D.C., trying his best to make Black neighborhoods beautiful. He remembers.

Topper Carew: It was just excruciating, you know, because not only are you feeling it physically, you’re feeling it psychologically because it has just thwarted your spiritual investment, your life investment.

Newkirk: Roland Smith was in a jail cell in Maryland. He remembers.

Roland Smith: I heard crying and, um, panic and everything. And this guy shook me. He says, “Roland, Roland—they killed Martin Luther King.”

Newkirk: Robert Birt and John Burl Smith were hundreds of miles apart. But on that night, it was like they were in the same room.

Robert Birt: I remember Walter Cronkite coming on television, interrupting the program to announce that Dr. King had just been shot and killed.

John Burl Smith: Walter Cronkite is the first face I see. And he’s telling us that Dr. King had just been shot.

Birt: I remember my mother breaking down and crying on the sofa. I can remember, you know, waves of sorrow, anger welling up in my chest at that time.

Burl Smith: Numbness is about the best description I could get it because there weren’t any words.

***

Newkirk: Almost universally, when I talk to Black people who remember the assassination of Martin Luther King, they’re still wrestling with grief. And there’s a pattern in how that grief manifested. First came the shock, the numbness. Then came despair: What are we going to do? But then … came fire.

Roland Smith: At that moment, a rage kind of jerked its way through my body that I had never felt before.

Topper Carew: You could feel the energy, man. The energy was just terrible, man.

Newkirk: In many ways, the story of the civil-rights movement is a story about disasters and violence. Assassinations, bombings, riots, lynchings, and brutality all take center stage. But I’ve found that King’s death is overlooked. It doesn’t get the same space that it has in so many people’s memories. In real time, that event changed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Just after the killing, journalists in Memphis asked King’s associates to make meaning of what just happened. And to Jesse Jackson, King’s murder was nothing short of cataclysm.

Reporter: Do you think that this will have any dramatic effect on the relations between the white and Black in this community?

Jesse Jackson: Well, obviously it will. There were those who never believed in nonviolence because they never understood the depth of that method of solving problems in the world. Dr. King was by far the most articulate spokesman on earth in that regards. To some extent, Dr. King has been a buffer the last two years between the Black community and the white community. The white people do not know it, but the white people’s best friend is dead.

***

Newkirk: To me, King’s assassination has always stood at the crossroads of chance and destiny. There are few events in history that seem both so predetermined and so … random. In order to even be on the balcony where he was shot, King had to make a detour in his last campaign through Memphis. He had to choose to stay in the tiny, Black-owned Lorraine Motel, in a room with a balcony. Room 306. That room number had to be reported on the news for the assassin to hear.

From Bessie Brewer’s flophouse across the street, the assassin had to watch and wait. If King did come out, for long enough, the assassin had to run to another room to pull the trigger on his rifle. He had one shot. If the killer had tripped or been out of breath, if King had taken a longer nap, if the breeze had blown differently … The mind wanders.

But it all feels so inevitable too. For weeks, King had been delivering a sermon eulogizing himself. Just the night before his death, during his “Mountaintop” speech, he foreshadowed his own mortality. His eyes had “seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Over the years, he had been jailed, stabbed, beaten, surveilled. Rumor has it the autopsy showed that his heart resembled that of a much older man. That years of unimaginable toil and stress were already working to kill him, even if a bullet hadn’t. It’s simply hard to imagine any past, any America, where Martin Luther King lives.

The inevitability of it all makes it hard to look straight at what actually happened when King was killed, and why it all matters.

Robert F. Kennedy: In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

John True (journalist): United Press International, Memphis. Police and fire department are scrambling in answer to …

Art McAloon (journalist): Widespread violence and looting broke out in two areas of New York City tonight in the wake of the slaying of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

Judd Duval (journalist): Six thousand Guardsmen had been alerted during the afternoon as the vandalism and looting reached alarming proportions.

Jim McQuarie (journalist): This morning, the first violent acts were reported as small gangs of youths roamed the still riot-scarred sections of Detroit, throwing bricks, bottles and rocks through windows.

Tony Seargent (journalist): At least 4,000 National Guard and federal troops are in this uneasy town tonight and more stand ready.

Topper Carew: I immediately hit the street, man.

Taquiena Boston: And I didn’t know what was gonna happen.

Newkirk: After King was assassinated, Black neighborhoods erupted for days. Memphis, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore—in all, over 100 places went up. They were called riots or rebellions, sometimes now uprisings. Whatever you call them, and for whatever political reasons, the week was one of the most consequential in American history.

Reporter: Hundreds of Negroes were lining the streets, apparently in reaction to the news of Dr. King.

Vanessa Dixon: People that lived in the neighborhood were coming outside, throwing a rock, throwing a bottle.

Boston: It was scary.

Dixon: Mothers and fathers started coming out … older men, older women.

Boston: I couldn’t get in touch with my parents. I couldn’t get in touch with my aunts.

Reporter: I noticed some windows breaking and I looked and the Negroes had started looting stores in the area, mainly pawn shops and clothing stores.

Dixon: We was all just like, This is a release.

Boston: It felt like the world was in chaos.

Reporter: They then spotted me, and a very big, burly Negro said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m not doing anything. I’m just leaving.” And they said, “Well, you better run.”

Dixon: A white man killed a prominent person in our life.

Newkirk: That prominent person had taken on an almost prophetic role. It’s easy to see why his death became a sort of religious event. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher. His philosophy of nonviolence taught that his own suffering could be redemptive. More and more people viewed him as a sort of messiah. He even died during the Easter season. Across the country, the temptation to make King a martyr for white America’s sins was irresistible. But in America’s ghettos, that sin had not been washed away.

Barbara Fleming: As a child, you knew, you took the loss, but it didn’t hit you in the pit of your heart, as it does today when I sit back and think about all that he went through for us.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I hope that all Americans tonight will search their hearts as they ponder this most tragic incident.

Topper Carew: By nightfall there was a soldier on every corner.

Reporter: At least 100 fires have been ignited. Several are burning out of control at this hour.

Carew: … in your neighborhood. Yeah. In your neighborhood where you’re trying to make beauty, you’re trying to make art.

People on the streets: Hey, how you doing? This is James Louis, alright!

Carew: This is like aliens have just landed in the neighborhood, you know.

Memphis city statement: It’s believed by the Memphis Police Department that an emergency situation does exist, and at this time we are asking that all people of Memphis and Shelby County observe, and as we put into effect, a curfew. We request that all persons, unless it's absolutely an emergency to be on the street, to go to their homes and stay there until tomorrow, when things hopefully will be in a better situation.

Newkirk: That week, flags flew at half mast. Crowds recited and played back King’s speeches. They chanted his name. Choirs came together to sing songs honoring him, trying to keep people together.

Millions of Americans mourned. But they didn’t just mourn the man. They mourned a future that suddenly seemed impossible.

Roland Smith: I was a hospital employee, so I wound up having to report to work. It was, you know, kind of chaotic in the hospital.

I remember going to the top floor of the Washington hospital then, and looking out in one direction, seeing the smoke billowing from the buildings that had been set on fire. I see the military vehicles because D.C. was under martial law, and in the other direction I could see the Capitol dome with the flag flying. And I just kind of remember saying to myself, This is supposed to be the capital of the free world. You know, just thinking, What did our country come to? You know, I was just kind of feeling that sense of loss and anxiety.

Newkirk: The story we are often given transforms King’s death from a tragedy into a sort of redemption. The final chapter of a victorious movement for justice. But that story is wrong.

Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

King is shot on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. He is pronounced dead within an hour.

Robert F. Kennedy announces King’s death

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Kennedy gives a speech announcing King’s assassination from his campaign trail in Indianapolis.

Americans learn of King’s death

That same evening, radio bulletins announcing the death of Martin Luther King Jr. reach listeners across the country.

Reporter: The Poor People’s Campaign is more than six weeks old now. And the poor that Dr. Martin Luther King wanted to bring to Washington have come. The Blacks, the whites, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans, and Indians. More than 3,000 of them have come from across the country. And as Dr. King had dreamed, they built a shantytown to expose the nation’s shame. They call it Resurrection City.

(Group singing: “… This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …”)

Vann R. Newkirk II: The thing people seem to remember best about Resurrection City is the rain.

(Group singing: “… Lord, which side are you on? Well, you can tell that God above …”)

Newkirk: A month after King was killed, Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King followed through with their promise to continue his plan. Thousands of people came to D.C. People took buses and even mule carts up from Mississippi and Alabama. From Memphis, the Invaders, the last group to meet with King, sent their own delegation. John Burl Smith didn’t make it, but one of his deputies, a man called Sweet Willie Wine, went instead.

Sweet Willie Wine: I brought a militant group here. We have become nonviolent to a certain extent. But don’t mean just because he's dead that it’s going to stop progress. It won’t stop me from thinking as I think. Because each time these people die—these leaders that is going to help, the poor people die—you know it makes me that much more mad, and makes me go out to recruit more people for my purposes.

Newkirk: The people started building shacks and tents on the National Mall on Mother’s Day, and they were ready for the heat of May and June in D.C. But then one day, it just started raining, and it didn’t stop.

Matthew Nimetz: There was mud and storms and the little kids there. And it was a real mess.

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz was one of the staffers the White House named as a liaison to Resurrection City. He was the young guy in the White House. He’d done everything from trying to squash reports for President Johnson to organizing the meeting with civil-rights leaders the day after King was killed. So then he got this job.

Nimetz: We knew that these people were arriving, and we got reports they were coming, and there were these mules, and where would the mules go? I had to deal with the mules and try to find a farm for them, you know.

Newkirk: When King was alive, President Johnson had opposed his plan to stage the Poor People’s Campaign. The White House still didn’t love the idea after his death. They had just worked magic to pass the Fair Housing Act, against serious opposition. But the people in Resurrection City were challenging the president, demanding more—always more.

Resurrection City Speaker: We’re here because there’s a lot of problems that has to be dealt with in this country. We’re here because little children are standing around in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia poverty-stricken, without food to eat. We’re here because most of the Black people in those states do not have adequate housing.They do not have education. That’s why we’re here. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The purpose of Resurrection City was in the name. If Black folks couldn’t bring back King, the man, then they could maybe bring back his spirit. They wanted to reiterate his call to transform America. They wanted to influence the presidential election and find a leader who could continue Johnson’s civil-rights legacy. When people took their mule carts up from the South in May, they hoped that this would be a new beginning.

Ralph David Abernathy: We are the people who come up out of great trials and tribulations. The death of Martin Luther King could not stop us. I am here to tell you today that certainly nothing that the Congress of the United States of America, and the policemen and the National Guard, or any other force can do here in Washington will stop us, because we have made up in our mind that we’re going to let nobody turn us around.

Newkirk: But that hope proved fleeting.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): A new white backlash is plainly visible in the country. The lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal is headed, “Ghetto Violence Brings Hardening of Attitudes Toward Negro Gains.”

Charles Kuralt (journalist): CBS News commissioned a poll, which attempted to measure racial attitudes in the United States statistically.

Newkirk: Shortly after the signing of the Fair Housing Act, journalists and pollsters tried to assess just how much the riots had moved white attitudes about civil rights and racial equality. CBS reported on a poll conducted during the Poor People’s Campaign.

Reporter: Fourteen percent of whites now believe that housing for Negro families in all-white communities is a good idea.

Reporter:  Just about half of whites in our survey said the Negro has not made more progress because he has not worked hard enough. Only 15 percent blame discrimination. Some had no opinion.

Newkirk: The most-pronounced shifts in white opinions had come, unsurprisingly, on the matter of riots.

Hal Walker (journalist): More than a third of whites say that when a riot occurs, it would be a good idea for police to shoot one or two rioters as examples to the rest.

Man 1: Shoot to kill. If they’re old enough to violate laws, shoot ’em. If it’s my own kid, I’d say shoot them. He deserves it. He should obey laws. There’s laws for us. There’s laws for Negroes. Let them start obeying them.

Man 2: There was a riot. They had signs all over—soul brother—made no difference. They robbed, raped, plundered, looted their own people.

Woman 1: They should be shot. That’s the only way we can stop them.

Newkirk: It was not an encouraging sign as a massive event like the Poor People’s Campaign was being held in Washington D.C., a city where riots had just recently erupted. What was worse, although Abernathy and the movement were recommitted to nonviolence, the majority of white folks opposed even peaceful protest.

Walker: We found when it comes to ways for the Negro to protest for what he wants, most whites are against Negro picketing or boycotting. In fact against anything other than holding a protest meeting.

Newkirk: Things were already just as bad on the political front.

Richard Nixon: When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness …

Newkirk: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had been trying to out “law and order” each other to win the Republican nomination for president.

Nixon: … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.

Ronald Reagan: The government’s function is to protect society from the lawbreaker and not the other way around.

Newkirk: George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was running as a third-party candidate and had been holding rallies as far north as Maryland and New York.

George Wallace: If you go out of this building tonight and somebody knocks you in the head, the person who knocks you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital. And on Monday morning, they will try the policeman. [Applause.]

Newkirk: In the Democratic primary, Black voters had latched on to the hope of electing Robert F. Kennedy. He had criticized the administration for not doing enough to implement the Kerner Commission’s recommendations. His wife, Ethel Kennedy, marched with Coretta Scott King during the Poor People’s Campaign. But then, just after winning the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Andy West (journalist): Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has. Not only Senator Kennedy—oh, my God—Senator Kennedy has been shot…

Newkirk: Kennedy’s funeral procession stopped by Resurrection City on the way to burying him at Arlington Cemetery. A little more than three weeks after the Poor People’s Campaign first broke ground on the National Mall, they vowed to keep going, even as trash piled up and sewage ran into the mud in the shanties they built. But it was all just blow after blow. And the rain kept coming down.

C. Gerald Fraser (journalist): There is little doubt that the campaign has lost its momentum. Instead, the organization has been bogged down with problems overrunning Resurrection City, a task that has proved larger than most staffers would have believed.

Newkirk: Two weeks after that, their permit to stage the demonstration expired. The authorities shut Resurrection City down.

Matthew Nimetz: People like me were sympathetic, but we were realists. We knew we couldn’t change the country immediately. And then, in fact, things were going the wrong way.

Newkirk: There were not a whole lot of happy endings for Resurrection City. People went home exhausted, both from weeks of life in the tents and from the emotional letdown of tragedy after tragedy.

Some of them went back to Chicago, to Pittsburgh, to Baltimore, to neighborhoods and districts where police were still on edge, waiting for the next wave of riots. They took trains and planes and buses down south, where old Jim Crow was still fighting his best to hold on. They went to Memphis, where the Invaders were still trying their best to hold on to revolution. They went back to homes in D.C., walking past ruins where whole blocks used to be.

Even in real time, it all felt like a conclusion, like the end of a chapter of American history. But for the people leaving Resurrection City, and for the communities they went back to, trauma and grief didn’t have such neat endings, if they ended at all.

***

Newkirk: Part 8: “Resurrection.”

***

Newkirk: Last fall, John Burl Smith drove us out to his sister’s home, near Memphis. He likes to talk with both of his hands while driving, so I was already happy to be there. I was even happier when he opened the door and introduced me to his 102-year-old mother, Willie Mae Smith-Gray.

John Burl Smith: Hey, sweetheart.

Willie Mae Smith-Gray: I was worried about you.

Burl Smith: I’m doing fine. You’re my hero. [Laughter.] So I tell everybody about you. This is Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vance?

Burl Smith: Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Burl Smith: Vann, Vann …

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Newkirk: Yes, ma’am.

Burl Smith: Like Tommy’s daughter. Vann. V-A-N

Smith-Gray: Okay.

Newkirk: Nice to meet you.

Burl Smith: And this is Ethan.

Smith-Gray: Nice to meet him.

Newkirk: It’s been almost 55 years since John and the Invaders had their last meeting with Martin Luther King in room 306. I’d been talking to John for months about that meeting, but I want to know more about those 55 years, about what he carries with him, even now.

Burl Smith: Oh, let me get that.

Newkirk: John and I pulled some chairs into a back bedroom and talked.

Newkirk: I’m curious. Does this change the mission for the Invaders in the time after the assassination? You had a vision of the future for yourselves. What do you do next?

Burl Smith: Well... there were several events that happened.

Newkirk: There certainly were several events. A week after King’s funeral, the Memphis sanitation workers had finally gotten recognition by the city as a union, and they went back to work. John and his comrades sent a delegation up to D.C. for the Poor People’s Campaign, but they still tried to keep Black Power alive in Memphis. They were working with anti-poverty programs, giving out school lunches and breakfasts. John saw himself as a protector for Black kids around the city. He didn’t live too far from Carver High School, where a lot of the young Invaders were enrolled.

Burl Smith: The kids were being thrown out of school for wearing afros and Afro-centric dress, demanding Black history in their classes and Black books in the library and things like that. And they were suspending kids for that.

Newkirk: One day, John says he and the Invaders were visiting Carver to recruit kids for a local Black-theater program. Then they heard a commotion coming from the general-purpose room.

Burl Smith: And this particular day, they pulled the fire alarm and emptied the school. But the principal called the police. And when the police came, they were chasing the kids with blackjacks and things like that. And one of the police there recognized me as an Invader, and they arrested me.

Newkirk: Did you have the Invader jacket on?

Burl Smith: No. They arrested me for disorderly conduct.

Newkirk: The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was watching the indictment closely. They were keeping tabs on the Invaders, sabotaging them, passing intel to sympathetic reporters. Seeing John get caught up on those charges was mission accomplished.

Newkirk: I looked at the COINTELPRO report from then and they said you incited a riot. They said there were multiple fire bombings that you’d been involved in and that you’d had multiple marijuana parties at your apartment.

Burl Smith: Now, that might be the only thing that’s true in all of that, because we did party out, you know, and it was known—but you know, it’s marijuana. [Laughing.]

Newkirk: Around the same time Resurrection City was fully up and running, John was facing indictment. What’s more, after Congress slipped a new anti-riot law into the Fair Housing Act, Tennessee passed its own similar law. They established a five-year minimum sentence for setting fires and made inciting riots a felony. In essence, John became a test case for America’s newest crackdown on Black unrest.

Burl Smith: And the legislature met in July. And in September, the grand jury here in Shelby County indicted me for participating in a riot and trespassing in a public school, which were not even laws when this happened.

Newkirk: The only eyewitness testimony of any physical wrongdoing was a single account of one of John’s comrades throwing a bottle at an officer. There were no serious injuries. The scene that everyone described at Carver seems like it barely fit the definition of a real “riot” at all. But to the jurors, under the new state riot law, John became an example.

Burl Smith: That was the extent of it. But I did five years for that.

Newkirk: While John Burl Smith was on trial, the world changed. Going into the Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon was the frontrunner. But two factions inside the party tried to find delegates and maybe even join together to stop him. At the convention, Maryland’s Governor, Spiro Agnew, sent his delegates to Nixon and helped him win. Agnew had been a political nobody until he turned against civil-rights leaders in Baltimore. Now he was giving Nixon’s nomination speech.

Spiro Agnew: When a nation is in crisis and history speaks firmly to that nation, it needs a man to match the times. You don’t create such a man. You don’t discover such a man. You recognize such a man, the one whom all America will recognize as a man whose time has come—the man for 1968, the honorable Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon: All right. Thank you very much.

Newkirk: Agnew had become a voice of a kind of white backlash. He could knit together suburban moderates and southern conservatives. So when it came time for Nixon to pick a running mate, Nixon picked the nobody.

Reporter: Conservative Republicans generally applauded the choice. Liberals were dismayed.

Newkirk: The ticket was a clear signal to Black voters. The Baltimore Afro-American, the biggest Black paper in Maryland, understood that Agnew’s appeal wasn’t in policy or achievements, but his rhetoric in the face of Black protest.

Reporter: Mr. Agnew’s chief claims to fame are that he became governor of Maryland as the lesser of two evils and has proven his ability to insult Black leaders.

Newkirk: For white Americans, the Nixon-Agnew ticket had a pitch that worked. In one of his most famous ads, there are images of cities burning, of police confronting rioters in the street. And there’s some music.

Nixon: Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you we shall have order in the United States.

Newkirk: By the end of 1968, the optimism of Resurrection City seemed like a relic of a forgotten age. Nixon won the election, of course. You know that. Spiro Agnew became the vice president and became Nixon’s attack dog.

Agnew: You cannot have justice. You cannot have change without order.

Newkirk: Under Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO continued, focusing more on disrupting Black revolutionary groups.

Reporter: State’s attorneys police arrived at Fred Hampton’s West Side apartment, half a block from Panther headquarters, at 4:45 this morning.

Newkirk: On December 4, 1969, a group of law-enforcement officers, with the FBI’s backing, assassinated the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Reporter: Hampton’s body was found in bed.

Newkirk: Hampton’s lawyer, Flint Taylor, understood this as a clear proclamation from the government.

Flint Taylor: ...to send the message to all those young folks, whether they be Black or white, who wanted to get involved in the struggle: We’ll kill you in your bed.

Newkirk: Under Nixon, the Fair Housing Act was supposed to go into full effect. He even supported the law on the campaign trail. But once in office, he opposed enforcement, especially in America’s mostly white suburbs. He said that he was against forced integration.

In D.C., the riots remade reality. The city became a model for everything happening in Nixon’s America. White folks fled for the suburbs where integration never really came.

The law and order that Nixon promised came with the first War on Drugs. All the while, the burned shells of buildings from ’68 were never rebuilt. Walking and driving past them in Cardozo, Theophus Brooks only felt regret.

Theophus Brooks: We used to joke: “Why don’t we go downtown or Connecticut Avenue? We aren’t going down there.” You weren’t going down there, right? But it was the thing where, as young people, we thinkin about the burning, the excitement, stealing stuff. That’s what’s on everyone’s mind—what can we get? I’m going home and I don’t have nothin. I’m mad.

Newkirk: Do you think we missed an opportunity to do something then, in ’68?

Brooks: Yeah, we could have really banded together. You know what? Let me tell you something. I’m glad you said that. As close as we were, especially in this city, we could have made a big difference.

Newkirk: But there were people who did come together to try and do something. Even though the organization of SNCC was falling apart, a lot of the old organizers were still in D.C. They still had influence, especially cultural influence. Black people were calling themselves Black for the first time, partly because of the Black Power slogan. Young people were wearing afros, adopting Black-revolutionary fashion. The way SNCC and other radical organizations talked about the struggle became mainstream. The SNCC folks in D.C. had an opportunity, and they knew a guy.

Tony Gittens: There was this organization called African American Resources, and it was Courtland and Charlie, Marvin and some other people, and they asked me if I would be on the board.

Newkirk: Tony Gittens graduated from Howard a month after the riots. Around the same time, a group of SNCC veterans started a bookstore, the Drum and Spear. Tony was friends with a lot of them. He’d worked for the school newspaper. He didn’t have a job. So they named him the operator of the Drum and Spear.

Gittens: They were looking for somebody to do it and they threw me the keys, and that was how I became the manager of the bookstore.

Newkirk: It was a hard turn for Tony, after going down south to register voters and leading campus protests and then witnessing the rebellion on 14th Street. But for him—for all of them—it also sounds like it was therapy. They were finally able to settle down and build something. They had a radio show. They started a school. They had a press. The bookstore was located near 14th and U, near Cardozo. It gave them a chance to make beauty in a place that had seen heartbreak.

But for some Washingtonians, that kind of beauty never returned. Vanessa Lawson’s family was still waiting to hear any news about her brother Vincent. Vincent went out the night after King was killed, looting Morton’s department store to get his mother some stockings, and had never come back.

Weeks passed. Then months. Then years. Still, Vanessa and her family heard nothing. Vanessa moved on from junior high and started taking the bus to high school.

Vanessa Dixon: And I tell you, it was more than once—twice for sure; could have been three or four times, but I acted on it twice—I would see somebody that looked like him and I’d get off the bus. I had to know for sure.

Newkirk: The private investigator the family hired to find Vincent had put the idea in her head that Vincent might be out there alive, with amnesia. She held onto that hope. The whole family did. It was even worse for them than if Vincent had died, and they’d known. Vanessa’s grandmother walked the block by Morton’s week after week after week, hoping she might run into Vincent. She died a couple years later. Vanessa’s mother was hurting, and she drank to dull the pain. Every once in a while, when the morgue had an unidentified body, they called Vanessa’s father to take a look.

Dixon: My mom would be on pins and needles and it was never him.

Newkirk: It was easy to fall into a kind of a stasis, a repetition—look for Vincent, hope, repeat—in the same buildings and on the same blocks. But then, in 1971, construction workers finally came to H Street to demolish part of the block that had burned. The workers had found a skeleton in the warehouse next to Morton’s. It had been years, and the body was beyond identification.

Dixon: But he had this medallion. My dad had bought us medallions. And both of our medallions said, “V.L.”

Newkirk: They said, “V.L.”

Dixon: My name is Vanessa Lawson. His was Vincent Lawson. And they both said said “V.L,” on them. He still had his.

***

Newkirk: When I visited Vanessa in her home outside D.C., she shared photos of her family, going back generations. One of her uncles was a Tuskegee Airman. She’s got pictures of the farm the family comes from in Virginia. She’s also got newspaper clippings of how Vincent’s story has been told in the news. In those stories, there’s not usually a lot about what happened to the family after they found Vincent’s body. Vanessa says they wanted to do things the right way: They wanted to do an autopsy, get a death certificate, take Vincent’s body and have a service.

Dixon: They had already had him cremated, so they cremated him and they didn’t even keep his ashes.

Newkirk: The city had already disposed of Vincent’s remains. They just threw him away.

Dixon: We didn’t have anything to work with. We didn’t have a memorial. We didn’t have his ashes. We never had anything. We didn’t have a gravesite because there was no burial. We didn’t have a church service. There was nothing.

Newkirk: And then people from the city came by Vanessa’s mom’s place on East Capitol.

Dixon: Mayor Washington and his little entourage came to our house in the black limo. And these guys got out, and his little short, chunky self. And they were carrying this basket, you know, with all these flowers and ribbons. And they had literally bought us a turkey dinner. And he said he wanted to apologize.

Newkirk: He came to apologize.

Dixon: He came to apologize to my mom, and she was yelling at him saying, “You lied!” You know, “You told everybody—you told the world that those buildings were checked out before they were covered up. And it was a lie.”

Newkirk: The family was already spiraling, but Vanessa says it was like a double spiral. Her grandmother had just recently passed. Her mother was in bad shape.

Dixon: My mom was drinking a lot. My mom was working about six days straight and off for like three days. And on the three days I was like, “Hello? Hello? Remember me?” kind of thing, you know. “I’m still here. You still got a kid here.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for years. Her father had his own family across town. Her brothers were in and out of her mother’s apartment, and her mother was in bad shape. Her drinking got worse and worse. Vanessa became her caretaker. She cooked and cleaned and took care of the place. Even in high school, she got a job downtown. Sometimes on weekends, Vanessa would stay with her father, to get away from stuff, just live like a normal teenager for a while. One weekend in the summer, she stayed with her dad until Monday and went to work from there.

Dixon: And I went to work July 23. I went to work and I went out at lunchtime, and when I came back with my little bookbag and stuff, I remember the white-lady supervisor—she came and she grabbed me.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s coworkers were crying and told her there was a family emergency. When her father came to pick her up, he’d been crying too. But he wouldn’t let her know what was going on. Vanessa made him pull the car over to tell her.

Dixon: And he says, “It’s your mother—she’s gone.” And he just started crying and you know. And he’s crying and crying, and I’m like, It’s my mother? What do you mean my mother? And he says, “She’s gone.” What you mean she’s gone? “She died.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother died. It was another blow to the family, to Vanessa. But she says she couldn’t even feel sad about it. She was going into her senior year. Her mom knew somebody who was supposed to make her a prom dress for free. Vanessa needed her mother. She was angry at her mother for leaving.

Dixon: I was mad, mad, mad, mad at my mom. How could you do this to me? I’m going into my senior year in high school. You know, You’re missing so much. You know, Now you’re dead. You know, You just wanted to go be with him.

And I remember picking out the casket. I remember picking out the dress. I remember, you know, telling them, you know, how she liked her hair. I remember going to the viewing. I remember biting my lips so hard that it bled.

I never cried. I wasn’t in a crying mode.

Newkirk: She didn’t cry at all. Not for Vincent. Not for her mother. She just tried to keep going. To keep working. But then she got sick too.

Dixon: I got a cold and I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t shake that common cold.

Newkirk: She started having breathing problems. Her dad made her take off work and check in at Providence Hospital. But the doctors didn’t believe that her main problem was physical.

Dixon: But I got diagnosed with emotional setback even though I was only 16, 17 years old. My body should have been able to fight it off before, way before it got to that point. But my resistance was so low.

Newkirk: She couldn’t shake it. And it got worse. Vanessa says her white-blood-cell levels dropped. They tried steroids. They gave her oxygen. They brought mental health professionals. But she just wasn’t responding. But then, she says, one night one of the nuns from the hospital came into her room to talk to her.

Dixon: And I remember one night in particular, I just lay there on the bed.

It was somewhere late during the night and this lady came in to check on me. And she had on white with some red stripes on it, and she talked to me. I can’t tell you verbatim, but—I can’t even tell you how long this went on—but she started stroking my hair. She stroked my earlobes. My mother used to do that—my earlobes—all the time.

She grabbed my hand and she told me, “Your mom is sorry and she’s with your brother, and they’re both wanting you to get better. She wants you to do good. And she’s really sorry, and everything is gonna be okay.”

When she left I started crying. I think I cried the next 24 hours or something, and that’s what I needed to do. And when they called my dad the next day, everybody came and said, “What happened?” He says. “Who talked to you?” I said, “The lady that was here last night.” And he wanted to know who it was so he could thank her, you know, whatever. But, she didn’t exist.

Newkirk: Providence.

Dixon: Okay.

Newkirk: Vanessa believes in Providence: the idea that things happen for a reason, that the things that happened to her happened to her for a reason. So does John Burl Smith. He ended up having to do two years in prison, at the Shelby County Penal Farm. But he says that his sentence saved him from the worse fates that came to lots of other Black radicals in the country.

***

John Burl Smith: They really hunted us out of existence. All the Black Power revolutionaries were either on the run, left the country, dead, or in jail.

Newkirk: While John was in prison, the Invaders disintegrated. With King dead, leadership went back to mostly antagonizing the SCLC and other groups in Memphis. One member of the Invaders was shot while attempting a robbery. Another was sent to prison for murder, and many others went to prison for other crimes. In other cities, Nixon waged war on the Panthers, and a lot of the people that John would’ve called comrades never made it home. But in prison, John found a counseling program that prepared inmates to go back out into the real world. He did so well that three years later they gave him a job as a counselor when he got out.

Burl Smith: And so when I got out in ’71, things have changed quite a bit, quite a bit. But because I got out with the job, I was able to pick my life up even better than it was before I went in. So as I said, in the grand scheme of things, I was saved and blessed. And so I’m on my third life now.

Newkirk: In his third life, John’s been studying history and how we tell the story of Black freedom in America. He’s particularly interested in how we tell the story of King, and what we got wrong about it.

Newkirk: What do you make of the fact that when King was killed, he was easily one of the most unpopular men in America? He didn’t poll, you know—in ’63 he was very popular, and every year since then, it lowered a little bit.

Burl Smith: Right.

Newkirk: In ’68, for favorability, he was like 60 to 70 percent unfavorable. He polled worse than the Vietnam War. [Laughs.] What do you make of the fact that after that assassination, some version of him is made to be an untouchable hero?

Burl Smith: Yeah.

Newkirk: How does that happen?

Burl Smith: Because he’s dead. He can’t do any more damage. When he was alive, he represented one of the greatest threats to white power in America.

***

Newkirk: Tony Gittens agrees with John. He believes that the fundamental questions about power in America were never really answered in the ’60s. The assassination in ’68 cut off a real debate, and the potential for revolution. Like John, Tony also believes that the image of King that is celebrated today is meant to keep people in place, instead of challenging things.

Tony Gittens: The American press ran to make him—[Laughs.] it was quite surprising—they made him the man who walked on water. Now, nobody was against Dr. King, but I remember that. And it was like King was the one; he was the man.

Newkirk: From Tony’s view, these sort of fundamental questions stopped being on the table for years after King’s death. He tried to keep them alive in his own work, doing what he could. That’s why he says he took notice in 2020, when people took to the streets again after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Gittens: And there were all these young people marching down 16th Street, you know. And I watched it and I said, “I got to go. I got to go.” I walked down to 16th Street from one circle to the next, and there were all these people there.

But it was the same kind of feeling I had the night of Dr. King’s assassination out on Columbia Road and 14th Street. The same thing. I had to be there. I just had to be there. I did not want to miss this. I couldn’t. You know?

***

Newkirk: As it turns out, the launch of the Apollo 6 did make the front page of the Washington Post on April 5, 1968. The article is pretty pessimistic. The launch was described as a setback in our race to go to the moon, as a waste of an expensive Saturn V rocket. We know now that it wasn’t really, that it actually showed how resilient the rocket was, and how problems could be controlled. But it’s interesting to think about a time when space was in front of us, when we didn’t know if its challenges were surmountable or if humans could ever reach the moon—when progress wasn’t guaranteed.

But that news item from the paper is swallowed up by other events. It’s a small column, sandwiched between news about President Johnson canceling his Hawaii trip, a photo of Martin Luther King, and an article about Spiro Agnew’s crackdown on Black protesters at Bowie State. April 5 wasn’t a day for space. It was a day for keeping our heads down and mourning.

Vanessa Lawson Dixon has clippings from the Post from that day in a scrapbook on her kitchen table. They’re part of the constellation of papers and pictures she keeps to remember Vincent.

Dixon: So this little boy right here is my nephew. This boy looks 90 percent like Vincent.

Newkirk and Ethan Brooks (together): Yes, he does.

Dixon: My kids ask me all the time. Like my granddaughter, she’ll walk past. They know he died. They know that he didn’t have to. They know my mother was hurt from it and my mother was really sad. They know all of this, all of these things that happened was as a result of Martin Luther King getting assassinated and the significance of that.

Newkirk: One of the things Vanessa keeps is an obituary for Vincent. The Lawson family never had a service for him when they found his body in 1971. No obituaries or memorials either. But in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the riots, Vanessa sent the Washington Post an obituary that she wrote for Vincent. It’s written as an apology from Vincent to his family for being hard-headed, for going out and getting in over his head. It’s got that picture of Vincent in it, with his spread collar and his baby face. It notes that he was only 14 years old. The date of his death is given as April 5.

Newkirk: Why did you pick that day?

Dixon: That’s the day that he went missing. That’s the day if he could have come home, he would have. That’s the last day that anybody saw him. That’s the day he should have come home.

Newkirk: She’ll never know the exact date Vincent died. None of us will. But it helps Vanessa to mark the date as April 5, because it connects him to King. People may not remember that a boy went out that night to score some stockings for his mother. They may not remember the mother who died just three years later. They might not remember Vanessa. But they will remember the nights that America grieved and the nights that America burned. So in a way, they’ll always remember Vincent.

The Poor People’s Campaign and Reverend Ralph Abernathy march

In May 1968, more than a month after King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement created in response to economic inequities, march in Washington, D.C.

Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated

Kennedy, a senator representing New York and the Democratic presidential candidate, is shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, after winning the California presidential primary.

Richard Nixon is elected president

Republican Richard Nixon is elected president of the United States on November 5, 1968. Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew is elected vice president.

Black Panther Fred Hampton is killed

On December 4, 1969, law-enforcement officers—with FBI support—kill the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

League One Falkirk become the first third-tier side to reach the Scottish Cup semi-finals since 2006 after coming from behind to beat Ayr United.

Photographs by Ryan Pfluger

Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly killed me.

I had joined him one morning as he rushed through his daily routine. Schwarzenegger gets up by six. He makes coffee, putters around, feeds Whiskey (his miniature horse) and Lulu (his miniature donkey), shovels their overnight manure into a barrel, drinks his coffee, checks his email, and maybe plays a quick game of chess online. At 7:40, he puts a bike on the back of a Suburban and heads from his Brentwood, California, mansion to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. From there he sets out on the three-mile bike ride to Gold’s Gym, where he has been lifting on and off since the late ’60s. The bike ride is his favorite part of the morning. It is also, I learned while following behind him on that foggy day in October, a terrifying expedition.

Schwarzenegger can be selective in his observance of traffic signals. He zipped through intersections with cars screeching behind him. I braked hard and, being neither an action hero nor a stunt double, barely stayed upright. Drivers honked and yelled at the speeding cyclist in the lead until they realized who he was. “Heyyyy, Mister Arnold!” the double-taking driver of a landscaping van shouted out his window.

Schwarzenegger does not wear a helmet and seems to enjoy being recognized, startling commuters with drive-by cameos. He describes his ride as a kind of vigorous nostalgia trip, a time when the former Mr. Universe, Terminator, Barbarian, Governor of California, etc.—one of the strangest and most potent alloys of American celebrity ever forged—can reconnect with something in the neighborhood of a pedestrian existence. “It’s like a Norman Rockwell,” Schwarzenegger told me. “We talk to the bus driver. We do the garbage man, the construction worker. Everyone’s got their beautiful, beautiful jobs and professions.” These days, Schwarzenegger’s own beautiful profession is to essentially be an emeritus version of himself.

We made it intact to Gold’s Gym in Venice, the birthplace of bodybuilding in the ’60s and ’70s, and a cathedral to the sport ever since. Schwarzenegger will always be synonymous with the place, and with the spectacle of specimens at nearby Muscle Beach. The Venice Gold’s is a tourist attraction but also a serious gym—loud with the usual clanking and grunting, and redolent with the pickled scent of sweat.

“Say hi to Heide,” Schwarzenegger told me, pointing to 82-year-old Heide Sutter, who was working out in a skintight tracksuit. “She is a landmark,” he said. “She’s actually the girl who is sitting on my shoulder in the Pumping Iron book. She was topless in the shot.” Perhaps I recognized her? Not immediately, no. I didn’t even realize that Pumping Iron was a book. I knew it only as a movie, the 1977 documentary about the fanatical culture of bodybuilding. “Everybody wants to live forever,” went the opening refrain of the title song. Schwarzenegger, then 28, was the star of the film and a testament to the idea that humans could mold themselves into gods—bulging comic-book gods, but gods nonetheless.

“The most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the pump,” he says in the movie. “It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as in having sex with a woman and coming … So can you believe how much I am in heaven?”

Now the aging leviathan jumped into a series of light repetitions. He likes to emphasize a different body part each day of the week. He was focused today (a Thursday) on his back and chest muscles. He did light bench presses, pectoral work on an incline chest machine, and some lat pull-downs. I did a few reps myself on an adjacent machine, to blend in.

For the most part, the muscled minions at Gold’s left the king alone. “This is one of the few places where Arnold is treated normally,” said Daniel Ketchell, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, who hovered between us. A few tourists from Germany defied protocol and approached the bench, asking for selfies. “Don’t worry about it,” Schwarzenegger said, blowing them off. “We have a mutual friend,” tried another intruder, and Schwarzenegger scowled, muttering indecipherably, possibly in German.

As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwarzenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981, when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’ ” Wachter recalled. “He said, ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’ ”

Schwarzenegger is now 75. He observed his birthday on July 30 by trying not to notice it. The only memorable thing about the milestone was that he tested positive for COVID that morning. He felt lousy for a few days and recovered.

I wanted to talk with Schwarzenegger because I was curious about what aging felt like for someone with a name, body, and global platform so huge that they hardly seemed subject to time. What does it feel like to be perpetually compared with your long-ago peak? “They play Pumping Iron in a loop in some of the gyms,” Schwarzenegger told me, grinning at the idea of his souped-up old self still presiding over the pretenders. We all get soft and dilapidated, but it cuts much harder when you’ve been “celebrated for years for having the best-developed body,” as he put it. “You get chubby. You get overweight, you get older and older.” Just imagine, he added wistfully, “the change I saw.”

Left: Schwarzenegger at the Mr. Steiermark competition in Graz, Austria, 1963 or ’64. Right: Performing in “Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art” at the Whitney Museum in New York, 1976. (RGR Collection / Alamy; Elliott Erwitt / Magnum)

As I watched him complete his workout, Schwarzenegger was barely clearing 120 pounds on the bench press. After decades of abuse, the man’s shoulders are toast. His knees are shot, his back is sore, and he has undergone multiple heart procedures, including three separate valve-replacement surgeries, the last in 2020. Two of them devolved into 10-plus-hour ordeals that nearly killed him on the table. Still, let it be recorded that on a foggy October morning at Gold’s Gym in Venice, I was lifting heavier weights than Arnold Schwarzenegger was.

After our workout, Schwarzenegger stood a few feet away and looked me over, paying particular attention to my bare legs.

“You have very good calves,” he observed. “Very well defined.” And calves are important, he added: “They are one of the muscles that the old Greeks used to idolize.” Big deltoids are also coveted. In addition to abs and obliques. But he always takes note of a person’s calves. This was easily the highlight of my day, if not my five decades among Earth mortals.

A couple of years ago, Howard Stern asked Schwarzenegger on the air where he thought we all go after we die. “The truth is, we’re six feet under, and we’re going to rot there,” Schwarzenegger said. Some other authority gets to play the Terminator, and on a schedule of their choosing. Schwarzenegger wasn’t afraid of death, he added. “I’m just pissed off about it.”

Emotionally, Schwarzenegger has always been a padlocked gym. But he’s felt a change lately, a more reflective shift. People close to him have noted a degree of openness, a desire to confide, that wasn’t present back when he was young and invincible. Schwarzenegger told me that he recently attended the premiere of the new Avatar film (directed by his old friend James Cameron) and found himself crying in the dark. Someone will tell a story and he’ll choke up out of nowhere. He asks himself: “Why did this have an impact on me today when it would have had none in the 1970s?”

The day before our helter-skelter bike ride, I had caught Schwarzenegger leaning against a doorway of the Chinese Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard. He was waiting to give a brief speech in honor of Jamie Lee Curtis, who was about to get her hand- and footprints embedded in cement.

“I was trying to think of a big word,” Schwarzenegger told me. “You know, a forever thing, or something like that.” He kept landing on verewigt; German for “immortalized.” “It means ‘forever,’ ” he said. Ketchell encouraged the boss to not overthink it. “Just say ‘immortalized,’ ” Ketchell told him. This is Hollywood—speak in the native platitude.

Curtis walked into the theater and greeted Schwarzenegger. They performed ritual Hollywood shoulder rubs on each other. The two go way back: Schwarzenegger once did a Christmas special with her father, Tony Curtis. They have houses near each other in Sun Valley. In 1994, Schwarzenegger and Curtis co-starred in True Lies, the Cameron action comedy. That was the same year Schwarzenegger’s own massive hands and feet were set at the Chinese Theatre. He mentioned this more than once.

Schwarzenegger with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, 1994 (Colaimages / Alamy)

Schwarzenegger introduced me to Curtis, who told me how much she appreciated Arnold’s “showing up” for her. “Showing up” was a big part of the job these days. Then Curtis headed to the stage, while Schwarzenegger stayed behind in the doorway, squinting out into the glare. He looked fidgety, maybe bored. He asked me whether I had seen the spot where his hands and feet were imprinted.

Yes, I’d seen it. I’ll be back, Schwarzenegger had signed in the concrete—his signature line, first uttered in The Terminator, before his character circled back and murdered two dozen police officers. Schwarzenegger has been tossing out “I’ll be back”s ever since. The phrase carries “intimations of the eternal return,” an overheated critic once wrote in The Village Voice. But it lands a little differently now that the aging gargantuan is inching closer to the point of no return.

The reminders are everywhere, the worst one being that Schwarzenegger’s friends keep dying. Jim Lorimer, a sidekick and business partner of more than 50 years, and an early promoter of bodybuilding in America, died in November (Schwarzenegger spoke at his funeral). George Shultz, the Reagan-era secretary of state who became a close mentor, died in early 2021. The hardest loss was the Italian champion Franco Columbu, another Pumping Iron icon, known as the “Sardinian Strongman,” who died of an apparent heart attack in 2019. “I love you Franco,” Schwarzenegger wrote in an Instagram tribute. “You were my best friend.” Schwarzenegger listed a roster of other deaths, each depleting him more. “It’s wild, because these are not just friends,” he told me. “If people have a tremendous impact on your life, that means that a chunk of you is being ripped away.”

On the morning when we went to Gold’s, Schwarzenegger made a small detour afterward to show me the one-bedroom apartment he used to share with Columbu at 227 Strand Street, in Santa Monica. They lived there for about a year in the late ’60s, not long after each had landed in the States, while they were both making a living laying bricks. The dwelling, a blue-and-beige box with institutional windows, betrayed no trace of the behemoths who’d once resided there.

Schwarzenegger stared up at the soulless space. “He was the best,” he said of his friend.

For my ninth birthday, my parents got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated. One of the first issues I received featured photos from the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest, in New York. It was won, naturally, by the man SI called “enough of a legend for his first name to evoke a response wherever a barbell is picked up with purpose.”

Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia seven times, and Mr. Universe four. But he is dissatisfied by nature, and from a young age not easily contained. At 21, he set out for America. He felt alienated by the complacency of his boyhood friends: They aspired to a government job with a pension, maybe; church on Sunday; the usual. “I say to myself, Are we really just clowns? And just do the same fucking things as the guy before? … And I’m like, What the fuck? I better get out of here.” Standing on a stage in South Africa after winning Mr. Olympia yet again, Schwarzenegger felt the same old restlessness. “I looked around and said to myself, I’ve got to get out of this.”

Schwarzenegger at age 11 in art class in Thal, Austria, 1958 (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

He charged into showbiz and became similarly huge, making $35 million a film at his peak. “But then I outgrew that,” he said, mentioning Terminator 3, which brought in a burly $433 million at the box office in 2003. “And somehow I feel like I was standing on that stage again in South Africa.”

Next? Politics! He’d always been intrigued by the business; he married a Kennedy, and George H. W. Bush appointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (he claims to have presented 41 with a calf machine). And then, oh look, California was about to recall its pencil-necked governor, Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger jumped in and won his first attempt at elected office, also in 2003. He loved the job, telling me that of all the titles he has racked up, Governor is the one he cherishes the most.

Schwarzenegger was reelected by 17 points in 2006, though his popularity cratered by the time he left office, devoured by the usual bears of budgets, legislatures, and ornery voters. At that point he was not only term-limited by California law; he was also promotion-limited by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. He has often said he would definitely run for president if he could, except he was born in Austria.

Instead, upon leaving Sacramento, Schwarzenegger was greeted by scandal. He admitted to fathering a son in the 1990s with Mildred Patricia Baena, a family housekeeper for 20 years. Mildred and Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, had been in the house pregnant with his children at the same time.

After the story came out, Schwarzenegger retrenched for a while, tried to repair relations with his five kids, including his no-longer-secret teenage son, Joseph Baena. He and Shriver tried marriage counseling. It did not suit him, and it did not save the marriage. “I think I went two or three times,” Schwarzenegger told me. He dismissed the therapist as a “schmuck” who was “definitely on her side.” He admitted that he’d “fucked up” but did not believe the situation required any deeper exploration. “The fucking weenie gets hard and I fucking lose this brain and this happened,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes that so many successful people make, you know, so what am I going to say?”

What to do next? Susan Kennedy (no relation to Maria), Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff during the Sacramento years, told me that he missed his position as governor. “He had to learn a new role as a senior statesman”—one who was no longer in office. He took on a few film projects and did his various events and causes and summits. His friends saw that he was struggling. “To wake up without a purpose is a dangerous place to be,” Jamie Lee Curtis told me.

Meanwhile, another celebrity tycoon, Donald Trump, jumped into politics and landed in the White House on his first try, leaving Schwarzenegger with the dregs of The Celebrity Apprentice. Arnold’s Apprentice went about as well as Trump’s presidency.

“Hey, Donald, I have a great idea. Why don’t we switch jobs?” Schwarzenegger tweeted in response to the president’s taunting of the show’s ratings, before it was killed in 2017.

During the scary early months of the pandemic, Schwarzenegger began posting homemade PSA videos on social media as a lark. They showed him drowsing around his 14,000-square-foot mansion in Brentwood, smoking cigars and sitting in his hot tub. He led exercise tutorials and taught proper hand-washing techniques. “I wash my hands a minimum of 50 times a day,” he blustered into the camera from the kitchen sink. An ensemble of whimsical pets roamed in and out of the frame—Whiskey, Lulu, an assortment of tiny and massive (Twins style) Yorkies and malamutes.

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: Don’t be a schmuck. Put on a mask.]

Suddenly, Schwarzenegger was enjoying one of those random social-media moments—quarantined and yet everywhere at once. He was a goofball colossus called back into action. People loved the role: Arnold in winter. Conan the Septuagenarian. I watched the clips again and again. Wear a mask! Don’t party with your friends like a dumbass! Exercise! The videos were an escape from my remote-work quicksand. The protagonist looked unsettled but also purposeful. Or maybe I was projecting. I very well could have been projecting.

Then Schwarzenegger watched the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021. He was horrified, and felt moved to make a different kind of video. Flanked by American and Californian flags, he talked about coming as “an immigrant to this country.” He compared January 6 to Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” in 1938, which, he said, had been perpetrated by “the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.” According to Schwarzenegger’s team, the video was viewed 80 million times. It was the biggest thing he’d done since he’d left office. “You never plan these things,” he told me.

Governor Schwarzenegger celebrating his victory on Election Night in Los Angeles, 2006 (David McNew / Getty)

As he ended the message, Schwarzenegger brandished his famous Conan sword. Because of course he did.

“The more you temper a sword, the stronger it becomes,” he said, suggesting that the same was true of American democracy. “I believe we will come out of this stronger, because we now understand what can be lost.” I remember thinking this was a hopeful take.

Schwarzenegger was born two years after World War II ended and grew up, as he put it, “in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy.” His father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, was a police chief in Graz, Austria, and fought for the Nazis. Schwarzenegger has spoken more freely of late about his father’s activities and his own attempts to reconcile with them. History need not repeat—that has been his essential theme. Hatred and prejudice are not inevitable features of humanity. “You don’t have to be stuck in that,” he told me. Humans “have the capacity to change.”

When Schwarzenegger first made it big in Hollywood, he approached the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Holocaust research and human-rights group, seeking to learn about his father’s complicity. Gustav’s record came back relatively clean. He “was definitely a member of the Nazi Party, but he worked in areas like the post office,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and CEO of the center, told me. Researchers there found “no evidence whatsoever about war crimes.” But it may be more complicated than that. According to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar at American Jewish University, records suggest that Gustav was “in the thick of the battle during the most difficult times,” when some of the “most horrific military and nonmilitary killings” occurred.

Schwarzenegger rarely spoke publicly about his father’s past until Trump became president and emboldened a new generation of white nationalists. “Arnold always told us the goal after he left office was to stay out of politics and focus on policy,” Ketchell told me. “But when the president is calling neo-Nazis good people, it’s hard to just focus on gerrymandering.”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: The America I love needs to do better]

After the violent march on Charlottesville, Virginia, by torch-bearing white nationalists in 2017, Schwarzenegger went hard at the neo-Nazis in a video. “Let me be just as blunt as possible,” Schwarzenegger said. “Your heroes are losers. You’re supporting a lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis.” The video drew nearly 60 million views.

Schwarzenegger can be a bit of a brute and a pig and could easily have been canceled half a dozen times over the years. Just days before the special election for governor in 2003, several women came forward to say that Schwarzenegger had groped them, and a few other accusations of sexual misconduct followed. He denied some and didn’t directly address others, but he issued a blanket apology for his behavior. “I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful,” he said at the time. “But I now recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry.”

The stay-at-home Arnold character from the pandemic videos changed how people viewed him, he believes. “The whole fitness thing was mostly guys, the movie thing was mostly guys, the Republican thing was mostly guys,” Schwarzenegger explained. “Then you had the fucking affair, and now of course the guys are on your side, and the girls are saying, ‘Fuck this, fuck this, I’m out of here, this guy was a creep all along … I hope Maria leaves him,’ and all that.” But the videos—those turned things around. “Now, all of a sudden, I have all these broads coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, you won me over with this video.’ ”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: I have a message for my Russian friends]

After Russia invaded Ukraine, in early 2022, Schwarzenegger made a video urging Vladimir Putin to call off the war and the Russian people to resist their government. He said those who were demonstrating on the streets of Moscow were his “heroes.” And he once again invoked his father, likening Gustav’s experience fighting with the Nazis in Leningrad to that of the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. His father “was all pumped up by the lies of his government” when he arrived in Leningrad, Schwarzenegger said. He departed a broken man, in body and mind.

After COVID restrictions were relaxed and the world reopened, Schwarzenegger receded again from the daily scenery. He had provided guidance and diversion during those rudderless months, and I had begun to miss him. I wanted to see how he was doing.

He was hard to get to, though. Beginning in May 2022, Schwarzenegger had cloistered himself in Toronto for several months filming a spy-adventure show for Netflix called FUBAR. While there, he was informed that he had won a prize for his work combatting prejudice. The first annual Award for Fighting Hatred was given by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF). Schwarzenegger is a sucker for such prizes and displays the biggies in his home and office alongside his gallery of bodybuilding trophies, sculptures of himself, busts of Lincoln, nine-foot replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and whatnot. He couldn’t receive his AJCF award in person because he was tied up with FUBAR, but vowed to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland as soon as he could.

Filming wrapped in early September, and Schwarzenegger went home to Los Angeles for a few days before heading off to Munich to meet some people at Oktoberfest. From there, the plan was to make a quick day trip to southern Poland before returning to Germany to shoot an ad for BMW.

He would be at Auschwitz a few days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Schwarzenegger’s people encouraged me to be there.

I arrived at the town of Oświęcim, the site of the camp, with a group of donor and publicist types who were connected with AJCF. We were met at the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by staff members, Arnold appendages, and a few strays, including a woman in a Good Vibes sweatshirt. No one seemed to know quite how to act. Distinct layers of surreal piled up before us.

Let’s stipulate that celebrity visits to concentration camps can be tricky. Schwarzenegger appeared mindful of this as he rolled up in a black Mercedes. He stepped gingerly into a thicket of greeters, and tried to strike a solemn pose. Originally, the thought was to do a standard arrival shot for photographers. But the keepers of the site are sensitive to gestures that might convey triumphal stagecraft or frivolity. “There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam,” management was moved to tweet after visitors kept posting selfies on the railway tracks leading into the camp. Every visit here is something of a balance beam, but especially for the son of a Nazi.

“Not a photo op,” a staff member reminded everyone as Schwarzenegger began his tour. Photographers clacked away regardless. Schwarzenegger wore a blue blazer and green khaki pants, and appeared to have had his hair tinted a blacker shade of orange for the occasion. He flashed a thumbs-up—always the thumbs-up.

“No autographs please!” a random Voice of God from within the entourage called out. “Please be respectful.”

Schwarzenegger was accompanied by his girlfriend, Heather Milligan; his nephew, Patrick Knapp Schwarzenegger; and Knapp Schwarzenegger’s Texan wife, Bliss. They toured the grounds like students. “What happened here?” Schwarzenegger asked his guide, Paweł Sawicki, pointing up at a watchtower. Sawicki delivered a recital of unimaginables: 1.3 million people were exterminated at the 500-acre camp, about 1.1 million of them Jews. Victims were pulled from cattle cars and triaged by SS doctors deciding who among them was fit to work, who would be used as guinea pigs for Nazi scientists, and who would be murdered immediately.

Nearly all of those “spared” upon arrival would eventually die of starvation, exhaustion, hypothermia, or random beatings. They were gonged awake at 4:30 a.m., then fed rations of moldy bread, gray soup, and dirty water. “The word I will use a lot today is dehumanization,” Sawicki said.

Schwarzenegger viewed the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, had been hanged. He asked questions about the complicit enterprises—whether the firm that made the crematoria ovens had known what they would be used for (it had). His retinue was led into Block 4A, to a room that contained eyeglasses, dishes, and prosthetics that had belonged to the victims. Another exhibit featured piles of their hair.

The last thing Schwarzenegger did before he left was step toward a black desk where a guest book awaited his inscription. Visitor registers can present a special hazard for celebrities. Some have committed egregious faux pas. Donald Trump at Yad Vashem, for instance: “It’s a great honor to be here with all my friends,” the then-president wrote breezily at the Israeli Holocaust memorial and museum in 2017. “So amazing and will never forget!” This was judged to lack gravity.

But it was not nearly as bad as Justin Bieber’s blunder at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Anne was a great girl,” the pop star wrote in 2013. “Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.” Hopefully Schwarzenegger would attempt nothing like this.

Schwarzenegger has worked hard to place himself on the right side of the genocide. Auschwitz officials were glad to have him visit, because he brought with him media attention and the gift of global awareness. “I have been fighting this cause … for years and years and years,” he said in a brief statement to the Polish press at the end of his tour. “I’ve been working with the Jewish Center of Los Angeles … I celebrated Simon Wiesenthal’s 80th birthday in Beverly Hills. We all have to come collectively together and say ‘Never again.’ ”

Photographers positioned themselves around the register as Schwarzenegger approached. Clearly, the safe play would be to simply sign his name. Please be respectful. Nothing cute, if only as a humanitarian pausing of The Brand. But no.

“I’ll be back,” Schwarzenegger scrawled.

After leaving the complex, Schwarzenegger visited a small synagogue in Oświęcim, an otherwise charming village if not for, you know, the history. There, he met an 83-year-old Jewish woman, Lydia Maksimovicz, who as a toddler had spent 13 months at the camp as a “patient” of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She told him about how Mengele had performed experiments on her: drained her blood, and injected her with solutions in an effort to change the color of her irises. Mengele apparently had taken a liking to young Lydia and privileged her life above the other children’s. Now, eight decades later, Arnold Schwarzenegger was engulfing her in a bear hug.

“People like Lydia show us how important it is to never stop telling these stories about what happened 80 years ago,” Schwarzenegger said in brief remarks. “This is a story that has to stay alive.” He vowed to “terminate” hate and prejudice once and for all. “I love being here!” he gushed. “I love fighting prejudice and hatred!” A woman connected with the AJCF tried to hand him a special box of cigars, but was intercepted by an aide. He reiterated that he would be back.

The Auschwitz visit left Schwarzenegger feeling depressed. He stopped off in Vienna afterward to receive a lifetime-achievement award from some Austrian sports outfit, and the friends who saw him there kept wondering if he was okay. He seemed dazed.

“We were sitting on the plane, and we both just shook our heads and were like, ‘Wow, can you imagine?’ ” Knapp Schwarzenegger, his nephew, told me. “It was a somber mood for sure.”

Knapp Schwarzenegger is an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills, and was the only child of Schwarzenegger’s only sibling, his older brother, Meinhard, who died in a drunk-driving accident when Patrick was 3. Schwarzenegger brought Patrick to America as a teenager and effectively adopted him; they remain exceptionally close.

Knapp Schwarzenegger said their family history added a fraught dimension to the experience of visiting Auschwitz. They’d been particularly struck by the tour guide’s stories of how the Nazis committed atrocities at the camp and then went home to their families. “That was the hard part,” Knapp Schwarzenegger said, thinking of Gustav, “the loving grandfather,” who died when Knapp Schwarzenegger was 4. “How can ordinary people like that do such a thing? … It hits much closer to home when you’ve had personal experience with that.”

Gustav was haunted by the war, his body racked with shrapnel and his conscience with God only knows what. He “would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother,” Schwarzenegger said in the January 6 video. Somehow, Schwarzenegger emerged intact. “My grandmother did the best she could,” Knapp Schwarzenegger told me, “but that affects you as a child. For Arnold, it made him stronger and more determined. And for my dad, it crushed him.”

Rabbi Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speculated that Schwarzenegger’s visit to Auschwitz could have been driven by shame, by a desire “to repent for the embarrassment of having such a father.” But Schwarzenegger does not concede to this narrative—to feeling guilty or embarrassed. His recurring message is more upbeat, if a bit deflecting. “We don’t have to go and follow,” Schwarzenegger told me. “My father was an alcoholic. I am not an alcoholic. My father was beating the kids and his wife, and I’m not doing that. We can break away from that and we can change.”

A few weeks after the trip to Auschwitz, I visited Schwarzenegger at his mansion in Brentwood, located in an extravagant hillside cul-de-sac of celebrity homes. Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen used to have a place down the road (in better days), as did Seal and Heidi Klum (also in better days). Maria used to live here too, in the mansion with Arnold (ditto).

I waited for Schwarzenegger on the patio where he smokes his cigars. He walked in and Whiskey and Lulu greeted him with a maniacal duet of braying. Two dogs wandered over to nuzzle him. An attendant brought him a cigar and a decaf espresso, and some treats for his dog-and-pony show. He took incoming FaceTime calls and kept raising his voice and shoving his face up into his iPad like my mother does.

Milligan, Schwarzenegger’s girlfriend, called to see how his day had gone. They have a comfortable, domestic vibe. She had been Schwarzenegger’s physical therapist, helping him through rehab for a torn rotator cuff about a decade ago. Ketchell, who had accompanied Schwarzenegger to the interview, wanted to make it clear that the pair had not become romantically involved until after Milligan stopped working with Schwarzenegger professionally.

A bust of Schwarzenegger in his office in Santa Monica (Ryan Pfluger for The Atlantic)

Schwarzenegger and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much in Poland, save for a brief kibitz outside one of the gas chambers. I wanted to debrief him. What had it been like to witness the death camp firsthand?

“We know people were killed there and exterminated and blah blah blah.” (He has an unfortunate tic, when speaking about grave topics, of trailing off his sentences and adding filler words like blah blah blah and all that stuff.) It’s one thing, he said, to be told about “all the gassing, the torture, all this misery, and all that kind of stuff. You can read about it, see documentaries about it, see movies—the Schindler’s List, all this stuff.” But actually seeing the eyeglasses, the hair—that added a dimension of reality. “I’m a visual person; it’s one of my things,” Schwarzenegger said. “When I was walking around, I was going back to that era.”

Did he have any regrets about signing “I’ll be back”? Some social-media congregants had criticized the message as “tacky” and “flippant,” among other things. Schwarzenegger said that he had been made aware of the blowback and had meant no offense. “I wanted to write ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ ” he said. Another signature line, this one from Terminator 2. (Yes, he was serious.) “I meant, you know, ‘Hasta la vista to hate and prejudice.’ ” But then he worried that Hasta la vista might come off as glib and dismissive—as in “Buh-bye, I will never come back here again.” So he opted for the more forward-looking “I’ll be back.”

His hosts had felt the need to tweet a defense: “The inscription was meant to be a promise to return for another more indepth visit.” In other words, Schwarzenegger was speaking literally, and did in fact plan to return. “That is what he said, so we expect Mr. Schwarzenegger will come back,” Paweł Sawicki, his tour guide, who doubles as Auschwitz’s chief press officer, told me.

I wondered if this had always been the plan, or if he had I’ll-be-backed himself into a corner and now had to schlep all the way to Poland again to prove his sincerity.

Definitely, it was the plan. In fact, he said, he was thinking about an annual road-trip-to-Auschwitz kind of thing. “I already told Danny DeVito and some of my acting friends that we’re going to take a trip next year,” he said. “Maybe Sly Stallone. I’m going to find a bunch of guys and we’re going to fly over there, and I want to be a tour guide.”

He contemplated the possibilities: “Imagine bringing businesspeople.” Maybe they could auction off some seats on the plane and give the proceeds to the museum. “We have to figure out something that is a little bit snappy and interesting,” he mused. Afterward, they could go to Munich for Oktoberfest, or something fun like that.

In early 2021, a few days after Schwarzenegger made his January 6 video, then-President-elect Joe Biden FaceTimed to thank him. They spoke for a few minutes, and at one point, Schwarzenegger offered his services to the incoming administration. “I told Biden that anytime he needs anything, he should let me know, absolutely,” he said. He’s heard nothing from the White House since. It’s complicated, he figures. Schwarzenegger, who is still a Republican, is not without baggage. The housekeeper-love-child-divorce episode remains a blotch. Celebrity politicians in general have seen better days: The likes of Trump and Dr. Oz have not exactly enhanced the franchise. In any event, Schwarzenegger gave no impression that he’s waiting by the phone.

But in the conversations I had with him, he betrayed a strong whiff of existential stir-craziness. “I felt like I was meant for something special,” Schwarzenegger told me that first morning after our workout, while we talked about his childhood in Austria. “I was a special human being, meant for something much bigger.”

At his bodybuilding peak, in Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger spoke with a kind of youthful yearning—or megalomania—of enduring through time: “I was always dreaming about very powerful people. Dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.”

If only he could have run for president. That remains his recurring lament. Entering the Mr. Universe of political campaigns would have been the logical last rung of his life’s quest for something bigger. Schwarzenegger said he thinks he could win. This is hard to imagine—a moderate Republican prevailing through the MAGA maelstrom of the GOP primaries? And he’s not about to become a Democrat, either. (“I don’t want to join a party that is destroying every single fucking city,” he told me. “They’re screwing up left and right.”) Still, if they tweaked the Constitution, he told me, he would love to run, even at 75, which he insists is “just a number” and not that old. It’s not like he’s 80 or something!

In the meantime, what if Biden asked him to be secretary of state? I admit, it was me who raised the possibility. But Schwarzenegger warmed instantly to the idea, listing several reasons he would want the job and be perfect for it. George Shultz was one of his idols, and pretty much lived forever too (he died at 100). Schwarzenegger is a big believer in celebrity as a global force, in the power of being so widely, unstoppably known. Who would be bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who could possibly compare?

“I mean, look at the guy we have now,” Schwarzenegger told me. Antony Blinken “is, like, a clearly smart guy, but, I mean, on the world stage, he’s a lightweight. He doesn’t carry any weight.” (Blinken, who is leading U.S. efforts to contain Russia and China, could not be reached for comment.)

Schwarzenegger told me he really does want to live forever. Not everyone would, at his age. But not everyone has had his life, either. “If you have the kind of life that I’ve had—that I have—it is so spectacular. I could not ever articulate how spectacular it was.” He was trying to project gratitude, but something else came through—a plaintiveness in that gap between the tenses.

I had a final visit with Schwarzenegger in late December, this time at his Santa Monica office suite. He wore a bright-red atrocity of a Christmas sweater and took a seat next to me at a conference table. Schwarzenegger has always been a creature of obsessive routine, dating to the strict training regimens of his bodybuilding days. But he emphasized to me that he is following no grand plan in this final stage. “The truth is that I am improvising,” he told me. He is trying to pass on what he knows, and just signed a deal to write a self-help book that will codify his advice for life. The working title: Be Useful.

The next morning, I was walking to a Starbucks near Santa Monica Pier, when who should dart by on his bike? “Hey, Arnold,” I called out.

He pulled over and accused me of being a “lazy sonofabitch” for not riding with him. He wore sunglasses emblazoned with I’ll be back, and his white beard glowed in the dawn sun.

We chatted on the street, and Schwarzenegger suggested that I talk to a friend of his named Florian for this story. Florian, who sometimes stays in Austrian monasteries, apparently, has some elaborate theory of Arnold. “He would have an interesting perspective,” Schwarzenegger said. “He’s 6 foot 10, has big hair, and he FaceTimed me last night while he was shaving at 11 p.m. Who the fuck shaves at 11 p.m.?”

Florian does. His full name is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a German and Austrian filmmaker who won an Oscar for his 2006 thriller, The Lives of Others. Later, I emailed him. He declined to share any grand theories. “These thoughts are very personal,” he explained. “At some point soon, I’ll turn them into a book myself. Hopefully to coincide with the release of a movie I direct with Arnold in the lead.” He made sure to mention that Schwarzenegger was his hero.

In the meantime, the hero was idling on his bike, telling me that he has more things in the works—retrospective things (a Netflix documentary about his life) and new adventures (Return to Auschwitz ! ). He was also planning a trip to Ukraine; in late January, an invitation would arrive from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, praising Schwarzenegger’s “honest stance and clear vision of good and evil.”

I imagined Schwarzenegger dropping into Kyiv, unarmed except for the Conan sword. He would drive out the Russians, end the war, and detour to Moscow to take down Putin. At least that’s how the Hollywood action version would end.

“There will be more,” Schwarzenegger promised that morning. I kept expecting him to ride off, but he seemed to want to linger.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Arnold’s Last Act.”

In a move that is disappointing to technocratic never-Trumpers and headline writers who love ’60s sitcoms, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced yesterday that he will not run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

“To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from” Donald Trump, Hogan wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times, a placement that showed his seriousness about reaching out to Republican primary voters. “There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. But the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.”

Don’t shed too many tears for Hogan, bravely sacrificing his presidential ambitions for the greater good of the Republican Party and the nation: He wasn’t going to be the nominee anyway. As Michael Ricci, Hogan’s former communications director, told Semafor, a Republican might be able to win without embracing Trump, but they can’t win by making rejection of Trump their central identity, which is where Hogan seems to have inadvertently ended up, despite a politically successful tenure in the very blue Old Line State.

But Hogan is making a smart point here. In 2016, Trump was able to win the Republican nod thanks in part to a fractured field. We remember the also-rans in that race mostly for making the 1988 Democratic field look impressive, but a less crowded stage might have allowed a couple of them to thrive.

The problem for Hogan and anyone else who dreamed of being the non-Trump candidate is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to be achieving that, not by offering a more traditional, levelheaded Republicanism, but by running to Trump’s right. Hogan appears to take a shot at DeSantis in his column, lamenting that “many in the Republican Party falsely believe that the best way to reach these voters is through more angry, performative politics and bigger government.”

Whether that is truly false remains to be seen, and not everyone buys into Hogan’s theory of the race. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, for example, flatly contended this weekend that Trump will not be the GOP nominee. And if that’s true, why not get into the race? As Republican governors of Democratic-leaning states go, Sununu seems to have beaten out Hogan to become, as Politico’s Michael Schaffer put it last week, the favorite candidate of the Washington Republican establishment.

Even as Hogan’s exit narrows the potential Republican field, the Democratic field grew this weekend, as Marianne Williamson officially entered the race, challenging Joe Biden. Williamson has a reputation as a woo-woo earth mother, but her 2024 campaign has already demonstrated sharp elbows that her 2020 bid didn’t have. First, there’s the venue she picked for her announcement—Washington’s Union Station, treading right on Amtrak Joe’s turf. Second, there’s the populist, rabble-rousing tone she’s using.

“I’m painted as a long-shot candidate by those whose power and position are tied to keeping the status quo,” Williamson told NBC News. “The problem is that the status quo is inadequate to the task of facing the challenges in front of us today. And the status quo will not disrupt itself. It’s time for the people to step in. I’m not challenging Joe Biden. I’m challenging the system."

The new Marianne Williamson is a potentially more interesting candidate than the old one. Unfortunately for her, however, the new Williamson is not any more viable.

This cheat sheet tracks who’s in, out, up, and down in the 2024 races. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Not officially, but in every other respect, yes. Every time he’s been asked, he says he expects to run, and when his longtime aide Ron Klain departed as chief of staff, Klain said he’d be there “when” Biden runs in 2024. An announcement could come soon, now that the State of the Union has passed.

Why does he want to run?
Biden has always wanted to be president and is proud of his work so far; he also seems to believe that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
If he runs, it’s probably his for the taking. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden does not, she’s expected to be the favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
It’s too soon to tell, but she’d start with an advantage if Biden sits this out.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden bows out.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden doesn’t, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
Say it with me: No, but if Biden doesn’t, she might.

Why does she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
If Biden, etc.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
On a visit to New Hampshire in March, he said he was considering it.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. If he does run, you can expect a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming.”)

Who wants him to run?
Who knows? Anti-vaxxers? His wife, the actress Cheryl Hines—with whom he has clashed over vaccines—is at least willing to tolerate it. “I’m thinking about it, and I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it,” he said.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Not officially, but clearly the answer is yes. DeSantis is getting a campaign and super PAC up and running, marshaling donors, and inserting himself into national politics. He reportedly might not announce until May or June.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early 2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
Members of the Republican establishment who want a pugilistic alternative to Trump, disaffected MAGA types, and maybe Jeb!

Can he win the nomination?
No one quite knows how a Trump-DeSantis battle will play out, but it seems very possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Perhaps as a MAGA-friendly alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say, as my colleague Tim Alberta has chronicled. Haley served under Trump, condemned him over January 6, said she wouldn’t run if he ran, and now is running anyway.

Who wants her to run?
That’s also hard to say, but if DeSantis stumbles in the spotlight, she could make a play for his supporters.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 37-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling resume (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J.D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like Covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
As The New Yorker found in a long profile in December, he has some avid fans. So far, little evidence suggests this amounts to a winning coalition.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not. At this stage, Ramaswamy gives off Steve Forbes/Herman Cain/Morry Taylor vibes—an interesting character from the business world, but not a contender. Then again, Trump once did too.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, a longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
It sure looks like it. He’s been making the rounds and having the conversations one has if one is going to run, and he says he will probably decide by April.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying he disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the election.

Who wants him to run?
Some old-school Republicans would welcome his candidacy, but it’s hard to imagine a groundswell.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
No. After giving a campaign “very serious consideration,” Hogan ruled himself out on March 5, saying he was worried that too large a field would help Trump win the nomination once more.

Why did he want to run?
Hogan argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

Who wanted him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Could he have won?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
“Maybe I run, maybe I don’t,” he said in early February. But he passed on a Senate run last year and just created a fundraising vehicle that typically presages a candidacy.

Why does he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and sees his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Maybe. Scott has visited Iowa and considered a campaign, and says he doesn’t plan to run for another Senate term.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him.

Can he win the nomination?
Who knows? The soft-spoken Scott is untested in this kind of campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
Most likely. He’s released a campaign-style memoir, though he had to blurb it himself, and has pointedly distanced himself from Trump on some issues.

Why does he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wants him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
He hasn’t said, but he’s been traveling to stump for Republicans and meet with donors, and he’s limited to a single term as governor.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Republicans who see him as able to run on Trumpy cultural issues while keeping some distance from Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as governor of Indiana and U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Pretty likely, though he hasn’t declared.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His time as Trump’s VP both makes him more plausible and probably rules him out, because he’s fallen afoul of his old boss.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers.

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.