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Joe Biden is both old and boring. The American voter has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.

But first: Last year, Jake Tapper wrote about C. J. Rice, a Philadelphia teenager who was sentenced to decades in prison for a crime he insisted he didn’t commit. Today, Rice’s conviction was overturned. He now awaits a decision from the Philadelphia district attorney’s office on whether to retry the case or release him from custody. Read the full story here.

Plus, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history The case that could destroy the government Life really is better without the internet. The Power of Magical Thinking

I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves.

The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the voters simply stopped caring very much about the nuts and bolts of governing. Rather than policy, they care about politics as a spectator event—much like sports or reality television—and they want it to be exciting. They want to root for heroes and heels; they want to feel high charges of emotion, especially anger; they want their votes to express a sense of personal identification with candidate

Biden can’t fulfill any of those desires. That’s to his credit, but it’s killing him politically.

As strange as this is to realize, our political environment is the result not of bad times but of affluence. Most voters are accustomed to relatively high living standards—even in poorer areas—because the world around them is filled with technology and services that mostly just work, no matter who’s in the Oval Office. The days of knowing which politicians paved the roads are mostly in the past, and today voters mostly draw connections from their daily lives to their elected leaders only if something aggravates them: If gas prices are high, then it’s the president’s fault.

For voters to blame political leaders for almost everything is not uncommon, but as I explained in a recent book, this tendency has become extreme not just in the U.S. but in many democracies, where bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence. Donald Trump is the obvious American case, but think of Boris Johnson in the U.K., the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, and Javier Milei in Argentina. (And what is it about right-wing populists and their signature hairdos? I have to believe there’s a connection. But I digress.)

Biden’s critics might scoff at such an explanation, and counter that the president has sludgy approval ratings for good reason. James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page made this case in April, hanging inflation—then hovering near 5 percent—around Biden’s neck and noting that the president should have kept his campaign’s implicit promise to govern as a boring old guy but instead had been a radical in office. (Freeman also thinks that Biden should debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., so he might not be arguing this issue entirely in the name of good government.)

A Democrat, no matter how centrist, is never likely to find love in the arms of the Journal’s editors, but some Democrats themselves seem submerged in a kind of moral fogginess about what their own party represents. Last week, The New York Times published a discussion with a dozen Democratic voters about Biden and the future of their party. The Times asked these participants to explain what it means to be a Democrat:

Many hesitated or said the lines between the two parties had grown “blurry.” The participants said they held core values: tolerance, respect, an unshakable belief in the freedom to choose. They shared deep concerns about the divisions in this country. And they believed that Democrats were generally focused on the right problems—gun violence, student debt, climate change and homelessness. But they had little confidence that the Democrats could fix those problems.

Right off the bat: I cannot imagine anything less “blurry” than the difference between Democrats and Republicans. But on top of that, I admit to raising an eyebrow at the line that these voters, who ranged in age from 27 to 72, felt “betrayed” on student loans “more than any other issue.”

This was only one focus group. But a few weeks ago, the Times also spoke with Democratic voters who were more enthusiastic about Vice President Kamala Harris than about Biden, and the answers were equally incoherent. One respondent, a lifelong Democrat, said in the poll that “she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called ‘too old and a bit out of touch’ and ‘a bit of a doofus.’” By the end of the interview, she said she’d probably vote for Biden again, but “I’m just not happy about it.”

Voters rarely have ideologically consistent views, but they generally used to care about policy. In the post-policy era, they care about personalities. Abortion seems to be the one issue that has risen above the “post-policy” problem, but it is the exception that proves the rule: The Republican assault on abortion rights is now so extensive and relentless that voters can’t help paying attention to it. But even on that issue, Biden faces voters such as the one the Times interviewed who said that “she strongly supports abortion rights—and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him.” Once, we might have expected such contradictions among low-information voters, but when even partisans are confused, candidates face the problem that most voters are low-information voters—a natural advantage for Trump (whose voters rely on their emotional attachment to him) but an obstacle for Biden.

“He’s old” isn’t enough to explain all of Biden’s bad vibes. The president is only four years older than Trump, and he keeps a travel schedule that would grind me, nearly 20 years his junior, into the ground. Sure, he seems old. He speaks like an old man with a gravelly voice, instead of thundering and booming like Trump. And no doubt, the White House comms shop—with the notable exception of National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby—could be better at keeping Biden in the news for his policy achievements.

But voters’ obsession with bad news even when the news is good is a global problem, and one that predates Biden. Americans, in particular, are susceptible to what the political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the “Green Lantern” theory of the presidency. The Green Lantern, for you non-nerds, is a comic-book hero with a ring that can manifest almost anything he imagines, as long as he concentrates hard enough. Trump cleverly promises such powers: He claims that something shall be done by his will, and his fans and base voters never care whether it actually gets done or not.

Biden, however, lives with this magical-thinking expectation from his own voters. If Biden only wanted to, he could forgive student loans. If he willed it, he could stop the Israel-Hamas war. If he so ordered, he could reverse all prices back to 2019 levels.

As America heads into the 2024 election, Biden has an enviable, and consequential, first-term record of policy achievements. The calls for him to step down make no sense other than as a frustrated surrender to the politics of celebrity. In that political contest—for the role of Entertainer in Chief—Trump has a distinct edge. Possibly only Trump’s mutation into an openly fascist candidate might change the dynamics of the race as voters focus more on the threat he represents—and decide, once again, that boring is better.

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to extend their humanitarian pause for two more days, according to Qatari officials, as exchanges of hostages and prisoners continue.

The suspect in the shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent in Burlington, Vermont, over the weekend pleaded not guilty.  

Documents published by the Centre for Climate Reporting reveal that the United Arab Emirates, which will host the COP28 climate talks beginning this week, planned to discuss oil and gas deals with foreign governments at the summit.

Evening Read Aaron Graubart / Trunk Archive

Anything Can Become Gluten-Free Pasta
By Matteo Wong

To my grandmother, who has lived her entire life in Italy, gluten-free pasta is “una follia”—nonsense, madness. A twirl of spaghetti or forkful of rigatoni should provide a familiar textural delight: a noodle that is both elastic and firm, holding a distinct, springy shape that your teeth can sink into with some, but not too much, resistance. That is all because of the gluten in wheat.

Upon taste-testing some popular brands of pasta made from ingredients such as rice, corn, and chickpea flour, I understood my grandmother’s doubts. The various noodles retained a firm, if not al dente, shape at the lower end of their packaging’s recommended cook time. But approaching the upper end of the range, the noodles became soft and eventually collapsed; penne ripped in two by the time it was on my fork. Even when the noodles didn’t turn limp, they were almost sticky against my teeth. And the pastas had faint aftertastes: of overcooked rice, of tortilla chips, of chalky chickpeas …

Yet gluten-free pasta is a billion-dollar industry, so mainstream that you can find multiple kinds in basically every supermarket.

Read the full article.

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Read. In Harvey Sachs’s new book, the music historian tries to understand the lingering resistance to Arnold Schoenberg’s classical works.

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P.S.

Last week, I wrote about the 40th anniversary of The Day After, the 1983 made-for-TV nuclear-war movie that scared the bejeebers out of millions of people, including President Ronald Reagan. I am not going to suggest more atomic-bomb pop culture this week, but I do want to note that if the farmer’s wife in the film, played by Bibi Besch, seems familiar, it’s because you also saw her a year earlier in a film that celebrated its 40th anniversary last year: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

If you’re not an aficionado of movie trivia, you might not realize that Star Trek II was also directed by Nicholas Meyer, who labored under immense strain to get The Day After to the screen in one piece. (He discussed his fights with the ABC network in this fascinating podcast interview.)

Anyway, let me put in a word for every Star Trek stan in the world: Star Trek II saved the franchise, and it’s wonderful, even if you don’t like Trek stuff. William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán reprise their roles from a 1967 episode of the original TV series, and these majestic hambones engage in a scenery-chewing competition for the ages. The movie has a great plot that boils down to a submarine chase in space, and the dialogue—“He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him!”—has provided me and my friends with repeatable lines and memes for four decades.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The department store is partnering with Covid-19 testing firm Randox Health to offer new services.

The actor says he could relate to a book about a pilot who experiences electrical failure in mid air.

In 2017, I spoke with a music historian to understand the trend of flute rap: a boom in rappers rhyming about codeine, cars, and trauma over the soft sound of breath moving through a tube. Ardal Powell, the author of The Flute, told me that nothing surprised him when it came to this instrument. It is possibly the oldest musical device in the world. Neanderthals and 15th-century Swiss mercenaries and 1970s heavy-metal bands found use for it. Why not rappers?

The “key thing in the history of the flute, going back thousands of years,” Powell said, is that “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.” No reed or mouthpiece separates the player’s breath from the sound it makes. This observation suggested that the flute, all along, was a bit hip-hop. And at its best, rap can seem like an act of inner channeling, of making the body and mind one. The flute is difficult to master but, fundamentally, intuitive to operate—intuitive like tapping out a rhythm, or like speaking.

André 3000’s intuition long ago earned him a claim to being one of the greatest rappers alive. Starting in the early 1990s as half of the Atlanta group Outkast, he specialized in wise and funny verses connecting street life with the stars. He was in conversation with his peers in southern rap—known for lackadaisical charm and sonic-boom bass lines—but also with Prince, Shakespeare, and Carl Sagan. Eventually, however, his vision dimmed. Outkast’s last album was released in 2006, and since then, André has put out almost no solo music. The reason for his silence, he has said, was lack of inspiration. Life in middle age wasn’t sparking new bars.

Now he’s back with a new album, and he’s speaking in a new voice, or rather rendering his voice in a new guise with the flute. Over the past half decade or so, André collected reedless woodwinds from around the world; playing the flute, he has said, is a better way of passing time than scrolling through a smartphone. He loved that the instrument made him, a master of one art form, into a “baby” at another, he told GQ. Returned to newbie status, his creativity flared once again. These days, he’d feel uncomfortable if someone were to ask him to freestyle rap. But he’d happily improvise on the flute.

New Blue Sun, his first album in 17 years, features no rapping and lots of flute. It also has drums, keys, guitars, and other instruments, played by well-respected improvisatory musicians led by the percussionist Carlos Niño, whom André befriended at a crunchy Los Angeles grocery store. For hip-hop fans who’ve long awaited his return, disappointment is inevitable; the opening track title even apologizes: “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” (His aesthetic compass told him to write song names that long, and mine is telling me to abbreviate them for the rest of this article.) Charitably, the project seemed at first to signal retirement boredom, a retreat from ambition. Signs pointed to it sounding like kitsch jazz or spa music, like comedy or wallpaper.

But it turns out the album is stranger than that. I first listened to New Blue Sun while doing chores, and it really got on my nerves. The flute playing sounds rudimentary and halting, the sound of someone practicing aimlessly rather than committing to an idea. The rest of the band drowns André out with smoggy synthesizer chords and percussion that rustles with the irregularity of an animal climbing in a bush. (“Plants” are listed in the instrumental credits.) I am not much of a jazz listener, but I know enough of John and Alice Coltrane—two stated influences—to know that the pulsing ferocity of those cosmic greats isn’t present. Nor does the album achieve Brian Eno-ian usefulness, melding into my life.

But later, as I lay awake in a dark room, the music clicked. A pleasant coldness settled into my body three tracks in, on “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther … ,” whose minimal drum thump calls to mind an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, foreboding and lonely. Midway through the song, André locks into a melody that wheels up and up, and I felt carried with it. The next track, “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter … ,” seems to open up onto a cloudscape, with tufts of keyboard that billow and shiver. A sunray of a synthesizer erupts about eight minutes in, cohering the song’s mood, adding warmth. It’s like the moment a pot of ingredients, stirred and simmered at great length, finally thickens into a sauce.

Dissecting instrumental music requires either using technical terminology—which most people, André included, do not think in—or writing in the fairly silly way I did in the previous paragraph: mixing metaphors in an attempt to render subjective sensations concretely. It is very easy, when communicating in this mode, to rhapsodize past the point of meaning anything at all. One must be sure to draw contrasts, saying what something is like but also what it is not. (As a rapper, André always knew this; he’d take time in a verse to delineate the difference between slumber party and spend the night.)

So: Listening to New Blue Sun is not like listening to rap, watching a movie, or staring at a painting. It’s more like looking out of a wide window on a changing and interesting scene. The individual sounds remind me of bubbles—crowding, dilating, and suddenly dissipating. The overall songs move cyclically (breathe in, breathe out) but not repetitively (each breath is different from the last). Most important: The album’s best passages—the prismatic goo of “Ghandi, Dalai Lama …”; the subtle, drifting “Dreams Once Buried …”—are beautiful in original ways. They create shapes you’ll find nowhere else.

People will no doubt play this album to help them empty their brain for sleep or to congeal a vibe during dinner parties. But I’m not sure these are the best uses of it. Maybe if André were removed, New Blue Sun would fit more stereotypical notions of ambient or new-age music. But his flute, blowing humbly yet insistently within the canyon of reverberation created by the more veteran instrumentalists, sounds too alive—and flawed—to tune out. He’s not the virtuosic soloist or the hypnotizing pied piper; he’s more like someone talking to himself on a hike. I personally cannot write or even think when music with lyrics is playing in my ears, and the flute of New Blue Sun nearly achieves the same distracting effect. You hear intelligence at work; you hear language without words.

This is, strange as it is to say, music to listen to. André recently told NPR that playing the flute isn’t a “set-out meditation,” and emphasized, “I have to force myself to pay attention to what I’m doing.” For the listener of New Blue Sun, the same imperative holds. Spotify and its kind have flooded the music ecosystem with cheap background noise. This album is a reminder of the rewards that can come with taking time to tune in rather than tune out.

In that same NPR interview, André said that his flute melodies flowed out of thoughts that he feels unwilling or unable to put into words. Music, he said, is “sub-talk,” encoding ideas that different people will translate in different ways. Some fans will try to solve these songs like a puzzle (hoping to find the release date for an actual rap album, one imagines). But to approach this album as though it contains a hidden message isn’t quite right. The point of New Blue Sun, as with so much great music, is the inarticulable narrative created by the changing relationship between sounds. A tale lies, too, in the album’s status as an act of lively creation for someone who felt burnt out by words. In his way, André is still pursuing the art of storytelling.

John McGinn and his Scotland team-mates are "living the dream" as they try to keep their minds off playing at a second consecutive European Championship next summer.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

John F. Kennedy took George Plimpton by surprise after a dinner party one evening when he pulled his friend aside for a word in the Oval Office. The president had Reconstruction on his mind—really, though, he wanted to discuss Plimpton’s grandmother.

Plimpton was lanky and lordly, famous for his patrician accent and his forays into professional sports. The Paris Review founder did everything and knew everyone. He might edit literary criticism one day and try his hand at football or boxing the next. Plimpton had known Jackie Kennedy for years, and he had been friends with Robert F. Kennedy since their Harvard days.

He also had another, and very different, Kennedy connection. Plimpton’s great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a New Englander, had been a Civil War general and Mississippi governor during Reconstruction. He was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage. Kennedy had soiled Ames’s reputation in his best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. The book ushered the junior senator from Massachusetts onto the national stage, effectively launching his bid for the presidency.

Kennedy’s book presented a pantheon of past U.S. senators as models of courageous compromise and political pragmatism. One such man, Kennedy claimed, was Ames’s racist Democratic rival, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. A slaveholder, drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and Confederate colonel, Lamar later became the first ex-Confederate appointed to the Supreme Court after the Civil War.

Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians—disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman.

[From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on]

Ames’s daughter Blanche—Plimpton’s grandmother—was incensed. She sent meticulously researched letters to Kennedy, demanding that he correct his book. Some of the letters had footnotes. Some had appendixes. Blanche would not let up, chasing Kennedy from the Senate to the presidency.

In Plimpton’s telling, as Kennedy took his guests on an informal tour of the White House that evening, he motioned to Plimpton for a word. “George,” he said, as Plimpton would recall, “I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.” Kennedy begged him to persuade Blanche Ames to stop writing, complaining that her correspondence “was cutting into the work of government.”

Plimpton promised to try, but he knew it would be no use. “My grandmother was a Massachusetts woman,” he later explained, and when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche “did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”

Blanche Ames was born in Massachusetts in 1878, the year after Reconstruction ended in a political deal that awarded Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, the disputed presidential election in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Blanche had the Civil War in her blood. Benjamin F. Butler, a Union general, was her maternal grandfather; he had commanded Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and had designated fugitive slaves as “contraband of war,” using a legal loophole that allowed refugees to seek protection behind Union lines. He later became governor of Massachusetts. Adelbert Ames, her father, won the Medal of Honor at First Bull Run and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. After serving as the military governor of Mississippi, Ames became the state’s senator and then its civilian governor. He was a champion of racial rights, embracing a personal “Mission with a large M ” to support Black citizens.

Blanche, too, was a principled fighter, willing to risk her social privilege for the causes that she championed. Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s-suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.

Blanche Ames Ames acquired her distinctive, double-barreled name upon marrying the prominent Harvard botanist Oakes Ames, who came from an unrelated dynastic strand of Ameses. A talented painter, Blanche illustrated some of Oakes’s books about orchids. The Ames mansion at Borderland, their 1,200-acre estate outside Boston, was built entirely of stone to ensure that the library—the filming location for the 2019 movie Knives Out—would be fireproof. Adelbert Ames’s and Benjamin Butler’s Civil War–era swords can still be seen in the foyer. George Plimpton once used one to cut a cake at an anniversary party.

Profiles in Courage roused Blanche from her Borderland retirement. Eight decades had elapsed since the end of Reconstruction. The modern civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, with its promise of a second Reconstruction. Kennedy was not only taking the wrong side, but he was doing so by maligning Blanche’s father:

No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor … [admitted] that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets … Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government.

Lamar, meanwhile, was cast as a “statesman” for whom “no partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth”—a selfless patriot who had helped reconcile the nation.

The truth of the matter was very different. Reconstruction-era Mississippi under Ames’s leadership arguably held more political promise for newly enfranchised Black people than any other southern state. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union. But the new state constitution worked to overturn the Black Codes—laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans—and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the country’s first Black senators. Ames himself shared his gubernatorial ticket with three Black candidates.

Democrats swept the 1874 national midterm elections in what the historian Eric Foner has called a “repudiation of Reconstruction.” Mississippi Democrats saw an opportunity: By seizing control of the legislature in upcoming state elections, they could pass measures that would essentially end Black suffrage. The year 1875 became a struggle between Ames, the elected governor, and Lamar, who was then in Congress. Ames’s administration had the support of Black voters. Lamar, meanwhile, embraced the so-called Mississippi Plan, which aimed to disrupt a legitimate election, by force if necessary. Lamar insisted that the Democrats had to win control of the state legislature to ensure the “supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” On Election Day, paramilitary terrorists called White Liners obstructed polling places, destroyed ballot boxes, and threatened to kill Black citizens who voted, as the journalist Nicholas Lemann has written in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Counties that were once overwhelmingly Republican saw the Republican vote drop to single digits. “A revolution has taken place,” Ames wrote to his wife, prophesying a bleak future for Mississippi. “A race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to … an era of second slavery.”

[From the December 2023 issue: Eric Foner on Confederate general James Longstreet]

Democrats, elected by terrorism and led by Lamar, now threatened Ames with impeachment. They accused him of financial impropriety—including the high taxes that Profiles decried—despite his administration’s relative frugality. To avoid impeachment, Ames resigned and fled the state. A U.S. Senate committee investigated the Mississippi elections and produced a 2,000-page document known as the “Boutwell Report.” It concluded that Ames was blameless and that his resignation had been forced “by measures unauthorized by law.” No matter: Ames’s reputation lay in tatters.

The following year, during the presidential deadlock, Lamar helped broker the Compromise of 1877, which gave Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the return of “home rule”—rule by white-supremacist Democrats—to the South, effectively destroying national Reconstruction.

Profiles in Courage evades easy categorization. It is a historical work, written by a political team, heavily assisted by historians, and published for political gain. The book features eight senators, strategically distributed across time, space, and party. Five of the profiles focus on questions of slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, and none of the featured senators took a progressive approach to Black rights. Three, including Lamar, were slaveholders. Questions about authorship arose early: Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was rumored to be the true author. (He did, in fact, write most of the book.) Archival drafts reveal that the Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids helped overhaul the Mississippi chapter. The book’s historical vision, though, came from Kennedy.

Historians in recent years have acknowledged that the real problem with Profiles is not authorship but substance. As a critic, Blanche Ames got there first. Her personal copy of the book, a first edition, overflows with annotations. She drew arrows and corkscrew question marks around the paragraph about her father, her anger visible on the page. When Kennedy insisted that Lamar had written Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession only after losing hope that “the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union,” Blanche thundered in the margins: “Lamar had sown the seed in 1861. He was sowing it again in 1874.”

In June 1956, Blanche sent a nine-page letter to Senator Kennedy, introducing herself as his friend Plimpton’s grandmother and urging “corrections of errata for your own sake as well as mine.” She recognized diplomatically that, “in a work as ambitious as ‘Profiles in Courage’ … there are bound to be some viewpoints to arouse controversy.” Nevertheless, she argued, ambition did not excuse historical inaccuracy.

Kennedy replied the next month. He was cordial, admitting that Reconstruction was “one of the most difficult sections” to write, not because of lack of material, but because of an abundance of “emotion-packed and strongly partisan” readings. It was a politician’s apology, suffused with qualifiers. He insisted that he had relied on “reputable authorities,” but granted that “it is possible, of course, that in so doing a particular individual or incident is slighted or inadequately or inaccurately described.” He added, “If such is the case in connection with my mention of your father … I am indeed sorry.” He assured Blanche that her message “succeeded in stimulating me to further research,” but warned that he did not expect Profiles to be reprinted, so there would be no correction.

Kennedy did, in fact, do further research. According to Plimpton, during that Oval Office conversation after the dinner party, Kennedy asked Plimpton what he knew about his great-grandfather, apparently eager to demonstrate his own knowledge. He reenacted how Ames would inspect his Civil War soldiers and shout “For God’s sake, draw up your bowels!,” causing White House personnel to burst in, worried by the uproar. The president had found this obscure detail in an equally obscure book, The Twentieth Maine, which was published a year after Profiles.

But between 1956 and 1963, Profiles was reprinted more than 30 times. Kennedy did not change his account of Adelbert Ames and L. Q. C. Lamar.

Kennedy’s intransigence only fueled Blanche’s campaign. She forwarded her letters to Harper & Brothers, giving the publisher “the first opportunity” to rectify where Profiles in Courage “falls short of the Code of Historians.” The publisher declined, claiming that too much time had elapsed for readers to be able to understand any corrections. Blanche combed through Kennedy’s acknowledgments and wrote to the professors who assisted with drafting or editing Profiles, hoping that the historians might put pressure on him.

They did not. There is no evidence that Davids, architect of the Lamar chapter, ever bothered to reply. Allan Nevins, at Columbia, backpedaled, claiming that the introduction he had written for Profiles “carried no endorsement of all details … I am sure the Senator will make correction where correction is proper.” Arthur Holcombe, at Harvard, patronizingly suggested that Blanche had “misunderstood Senator Kennedy’s meaning.” Some of these academic historians may simply not have taken Blanche seriously: She was old, she was a woman, and she lacked scholarly credentials.

Blanche contacted a second circle of scholars, seeking a historian “free from bias” who might serve as an impartial biographer of Adelbert Ames. She steeped herself in the historiography of Reconstruction, coming to understand how closely Profiles followed the neo-Confederate historians Wirt Armistead Cate and Edward Mayes. “Cate copies Mayes and Kennedy copies Cate,” she wrote to the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Now, unless corrected, modern and future historians may copy Kennedy! This method of writing history leads around in circles of quotations of half-truths. It is a false method.”

Morison suggested a few military scholars as potential Ames biographers, but mainly recommended “Negro historians” such as John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Alrutheus Ambush Taylor. “Adelbert Ames’ career as Governor was, I believe, more important than his military career,” Morison reasoned, “and he was the champion of the Negroes.” Blanche contacted a host of prominent academics, including C. Vann Woodward, whose books had criticized the Dunning School and challenged the myth that Reconstruction governments with Black elected officials were simply incompetent or ignorant. The Profiles team had paid no attention to this scholarship. Despite her efforts, no historian would commit to the project. So Blanche resolved to write a biography of Adelbert Ames herself.

Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.

Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

The stakes, Blanche believed, included not only her father’s reputation but the very meaning of Reconstruction. Her final chapter, “Integrity and History,” is a scathing condemnation of the traditional Reconstruction historiography Kennedy had parroted. Throughout the book, she linked Adelbert Ames’s promotion of racial rights in the 1870s with the modern civil-rights movement—the second Reconstruction:

In this fateful year of 1963, our Congress has a unique opportunity with its overwhelming Democratic majorities … Congress seems to hold the practical power to do away with the disgraceful suppression of Negro suffrage rights … A hundred years has been too long to wait for application of these long-standing laws of equity.

Blanche Ames’s book was published at the worst possible moment. In September 1963, she finished correcting page proofs for Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor. The book was lovingly bound in Sundour cloth and stamped in gold. It sold for $12.50, about $120 today—an old-fashioned, costly volume. Kennedy’s mass-produced paperback, meanwhile, sold for less than a dollar. On November 22, 1963, as Blanche’s book was going to press, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy in Dallas.

With the president’s tragic death, Profiles in Courage got a second life, landing back on the New York Times best-seller list. As Americans evaluated Kennedy’s legacy, his prizewinning book seemed a natural place to start. A televised adaptation of Profiles had been in production at NBC before Kennedy’s death. At that time, Blanche had urged Kennedy to use television as an opportunity to “bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.” After the assassination, the network pressed ahead, framing the series as “one of the finest living memorials to President Kennedy.” But Blanche may have gotten through to Kennedy’s team in the end, at least as far as the television series: When it premiered, a year after Kennedy’s death, the planned segment on Lamar had been quietly dropped. It was the only original profile not to be featured on television.

But there was still the book. Blanche wrote to Sorensen in early 1964, trying to strike a tone of mutual interest: “Must we not find a way of correcting these obvious misstatements inadvertently restated by President Kennedy? Otherwise they will be perpetuated with greater force than ever, and I do not believe that he would have wished this. Do you?” There is no record that Sorensen replied.

Blanche lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Born a year after the end of the first Reconstruction, she was able to witness the start of the second. But when she died at Borderland, in 1969, a belittling New York Times headline read: “MRS. OAKES AMES, BOTANIST’S WIDOW; Illustrator of Her Husband’s Works on Orchids Dies.” Despite Blanche’s best efforts, her book sold only a few thousand copies.

In 2010, a few years before efforts to remove Confederate monuments gained traction across the country, a life-size statue of Lamar was erected outside his former home in Oxford, Mississippi. The L. Q. C. Lamar House Museum’s public-outreach efforts generally commemorate Lamar not as a white supremacist or an architect of the Mississippi Plan, but as the embodiment of Kennedy’s redemptive arc: “Southern secessionist to American statesman,” as the museum describes it. Ames is not mentioned at all; Profiles is highlighted throughout the museum.

In 1980, George Plimpton donated a copy of Blanche’s book to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. “President Kennedy would know,” he said, “that a Massachusetts woman will eventually have her way.” But Blanche Ames Ames has not had her way quite yet. At the library’s gift shop, visitors can buy a 50th-anniversary edition of Profiles in Courage, published in 2006, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy. The book has never been corrected.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “Kennedy and the Lost Cause.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann.

Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive. For years, Mann had opposed slavery; he hoped his students would as well. He charged those he taught at Antioch to dedicate themselves to eradicating injustice with sedulous care. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” Mann told the graduating class of 1859.

Mary D. Brice was one of Mann’s students at Antioch, and she was a true believer in Mann’s vision. In December 1858, alongside her husband, Brice traveled 900 miles to New Orleans, to teach.

Brice found a city that was like no other in the antebellum South. In New Orleans, a small class of free Black people lived and worked as citizens alongside white people; they owned businesses and, in some cases, plantations. And if they were wealthy enough to afford tuition, or light-skinned enough to pass for white, they could attend school.

Yet the free Black New Orleanians who were neither wealthy nor light enough had few options. In 1865, Benjamin Rush Plumly, a white abolitionist politician who’d joined the Union army at the outset of the war, and who would eventually lead the Board of Education for the Department of the Gulf, described the antebellum situation in the region bluntly: “For the poor, of the free colored people, there was no school.”

Brice, a deeply religious person, believed that God meant for her to create one. She opened “a school for colored children and adults” in September 1860, at the corner of Franklin and Perdido Streets, near present-day city hall. The effort was short-lived. In June 1861, two months after Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Civil War, Brice was forced to close the school.

But the war could not stop Mary Brice. By November of that year, she had moved to Magnolia Street and reopened her doors. Again she was shut down, this time more forcefully. Confederates began a terror campaign against the school, leaving signs outside her home: Death to nigger teachers, they declared. So Brice began teaching in secret, sneaking to her students’ homes under cover of darkness.

By the end of April 1862, Union troops had captured New Orleans. Brice was now able to conduct her work without the constant threat of violence. With funding from northern missionary associations, other private teachers began to travel to New Orleans. The poor Black people of the city—including the formerly enslaved—wanted an education.

The educators’ efforts were slow and piecemeal at first, but eventually, with federal assistance, they helped create the infrastructure for public education in Louisiana. There, and across the South, education reformers and abolitionists like Brice carried out Mann’s vision for schools that were free and universal. The existence of public education today in the South—for all children—is largely their doing.

In the early days of the republic, the Founders often wrote and spoke about the need for an educated population. Yet schooling was typically reserved for the elite. Wealthy families hired private tutors, and those in the middle class sent their children to subscription schools (parents paid only for the period of time their students attended), where they learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Higher education was rarer still: Even into the late 1860s, only about 1 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary schools. Before the Civil War, many children were limited to learning whatever their parents were able to teach them at home.

The idea of public common schools—that is, schools funded and organized directly by communities and free to most children—had been slow to take off, though Mann had been proselytizing for them since the 1830s. In time, his approach took root in the Northeast and crept into the rest of the country, but such schools were more typically found in cities than rural areas. White southerners, in particular, were skeptical of Mann’s ideas. The contours of a slave society were fundamentally incompatible with widespread free education—public goods of many kinds were eyed with suspicion as potential tools of insurrection.

New Orleans, however, had a rich history of parochial schools. In 1841, the state legislature hoped to extend this tradition when it first approved funds for a public-school system in New Orleans, one of the oldest in the South. The schools there thrived—but they were available only to white students.

Education in the rest of Louisiana and the South was still rudimentary, even as the rest of the country made strides. In the years preceding the Civil War, Justin Morrill, a shopkeeper turned congressman from Vermont, tried to create a nationwide system for training workers by introducing a bill to give states land they could sell to fund colleges. The bill was opposed by southern congressmen wary of federal intervention in their states, and was ultimately vetoed by President James Buchanan.

After the war began, however, Morrill saw an opportunity. Southern lawmakers had been expelled from Congress for treason, and the nation was in need of skilled military minds. He reintroduced the bill in December 1861; the Morrill Act was signed by President Abraham Lincoln the following July. States in the North quickly began building land-grant universities.

Under the law, all southern states were barred from the program while in rebellion against the Union. But because New Orleans fell so early, the war presented an opportunity for the city. Major General Nathaniel Banks, the Union commander of the Department of the Gulf, issued General Order No. 38, which established a “Board of Education for Freedmen.”

The smattering of schools that had been established for Black students by missionary associations and individual citizens, including Brice’s, were quickly subsumed by this newly created board. The student rolls grew from an average of 1,422 in April 1864 to 9,571 by the end of the year. The board had established a foundation for education through a “unity of purpose and concert of action,” Plumly, the chair of the board, wrote. “In nine months we have succeeded, against the grave obstacles incident to the beginning of so great an enterprise, in gathering under instruction half of the colored juvenile population in the State.”

In 1865, Plumly released a report on the state of education in New Orleans, trumpeting his board’s success in expanding schooling through the example of Brice, whose school “continued to thrive” under his board, where she was known as “an efficient and honored principal.” Plumly’s report quickly spread across the nation, and after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865, it served as a model for those who hoped to establish public education in the South. The reunification of the country would be an enormous task, and no one knew what would become of the millions of Black Americans who were now free citizens—not to mention the masses of white southerners who would need to be reintegrated into the nation. Perhaps, the thought went, education could help make citizens of both the white and Black poor.

On April 3, 1865, the Chicago Tribune, opining about the New Orleans project, noted that although many of the teachers struggled “with every manner of difficulty—insufficient accommodations—leaky sheds with ground floors,” they were heartened by the fact that the school system had grown at such a rapid pace. The editors thought that the project might serve as a model for children, both white and Black, across the entire South.

“This is … but the beginning of a work which must spread over the entire Southern States, until both freed blacks, and the almost equally ignorant and even more degraded and vicious ‘poor whites’ have been brought within its christianizing and civilizing influences,” the Tribune article read. The work of expanding the nation’s schools no longer had to be “slow or tedious,” it said, “but can be accomplished rapidly and encouragingly.”

Outside New Orleans, however, there was less infrastructure for this kind of rapid transformation. Southern states were in the early process of being readmitted into the union, which required the states to disavow secession, repudiate war debts, and write new constitutions, and they could not yet access funds from the Morrill Act. If there was any hope for the sort of mass education that the Tribune editors believed was necessary, it would require private associations to step into the void. Groups such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the American Baptist Home Missionary Society began establishing primary schools and colleges, as well as schools to train teachers.

Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who became the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was unsure that his agency had the authority or money to set up such institutions on its own. Yet he found the schools operated by military governments, such as Louisiana’s under Major General Banks, to be a good model. “More than 200,000 people, old and young, in the insurrectionary states, have learned to read in the last three years,” Howard wrote in a letter to the American Institute of Instruction. The letter was read aloud to the nearly 1,000 people who had gathered in New Haven, Connecticut, for a meeting of the group on August 9, 1865.

Howard worked to establish a network similar to Banks’s, on a larger scale. Among the institutions founded in this effort were the Fisk Free Colored School, now Fisk University, and the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s alma mater. Howard also personally helped create Howard University, named in his honor, and later served as its president.

[Read: Why America needs its HBCUs]

Because of its small budget, the bureau primarily operated in a supervisory role. Howard appointed superintendents to oversee the logistics of the schools, which included training and hiring teachers, ensuring that they had military protection to conduct their work safely, and providing schoolmasters with fuel and provisions.

Most of this work was conducted out of the public eye, with missionary organizations in leadership roles. Even so, the bureau’s efforts ran the risk of vexing white southerners, many of whom simply opposed the idea of educating Black people at all. White objections to the involvement of the Freedmen’s Bureau in southern affairs often mentioned reports of ineptitude, poor administration, or outright fraud in its operations. Certainly, the administration of these new public schools left much to be desired. As Plumly wrote in his report about local schools, 1864 was a year “of great financial delays and embarrassments in this Department.” Teachers would routinely go months without pay—and although Plumly noted that the educators rarely complained, conditions wore on their morale.

But, in the main, the white objection to the bureau was still, simply, its existence. “Even the most friendly studies of the Bureau have exaggerated its weaknesses and minimized its strengths,” the Reconstruction historians John and LaWanda Cox wrote in 1953. “At the vital core of the Bureau’s activities was the explosive and still unresolved problem of the nature of race relationships that should follow the forcible destruction of slavery.” And as prominent physical reminders of the bureau’s presence, schools became a target.

Mobs routinely burned buildings and churches where classes were held. In some cases, teachers and agents of the bureau were murdered. According to James D. Anderson, professor emeritus of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at least 126 public schools in Louisiana overseen by the bureau faced closure from the combination of white terrorism, financial woes, and incompetence.

Still, the bureau’s work improved the educational outlook for millions of people who’d previously had no access to formal schooling. According to records gathered by Kamilah Stinnett, a specialist with the Smithsonian’s Freedmen’s Bureau Project, many Black people felt empowered to shape their education themselves. On March 17, 1866, a school official in Louisiana wrote to the bureau that Black residents were requesting Black instructors because they “object to paying [white] persons who continually insult them.” In 1868, the board of a “colored” school in Henderson, North Carolina, asked the bureau for $300 “for assistance in finishing our school house.”

Soon the number of people in the South entitled to common education was expanded even further. In 1867, Louisiana held an election for its constitutional convention; ultimately, aided by votes from freedmen and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, 49 white delegates and 49 Black delegates were chosen. The constitution they produced guaranteed integrated public schools.

Across the South, state conventions established similar constitutional provisions, and states were subsequently readmitted to the union, which also allowed for the expansion of college access through federal programs such as the Morrill Act. By 1870, five years after the bureau was established, roughly 78 percent of children of all races between the ages of 5 and 14 were enrolled in public schools.

That would prove to be the high-water mark for most of the next century. When the bureau was dissolved by Congress in 1872, a large share of the federal government’s oversight of common schools disappeared. Over the next decades, the educational foundation built by the Freedmen’s Bureau endured a concerted assault from white supremacists. The so-called Redeemers, who sought to reclaim political power through coercion and violence, had objected to the Reconstruction constitutions from the beginning and fought to overthrow them. They also objected to integrated education. Faculty at the University of Mississippi revolted, arguing that they would rather resign and the university close its doors than educate a single Black student. State legislators in North Carolina went even further, stripping UNC of its funding and forcing it to close in 1871. When the university finally reopened in 1875, several avowed white supremacists sat on its new board of trustees, including one former leader of the state Ku Klux Klan.

That same year, members of Congress introduced legislation that would endow common schools via land grants, and expand Morrill’s funding for land-grant colleges. Southern lawmakers helped kill the legislation, fearing that introducing additional federal money also meant introducing federal oversight of their activities. Such oversight of the public schools in New Orleans, for example, would have revealed that, in 1877, the state legislature reduced school-tax rates by 80 percent, dramatically cutting back resources for education.

Meanwhile, violent campaigns raged across the South. School buildings were once again burned. Educators were threatened. The network of common schools established by the Freedmen’s Bureau remained, although diminished. Some struggled until they fell apart; others hobbled along, underfunded but resolved to continue the work of educating those who were being shut out of other institutions.

By 1890, Morrill had untethered his new bill to endow land-grant colleges from the common-school bill, and it passed—with a caveat. Colleges could not make a distinction of race in the admission of students; states could, however, operate separate colleges for Black students. They used a portion of the funds to endow schools born of necessity—Black colleges such as Tuskegee University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Langston University.

[Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges]

Six years later, after the mixed-race activist Homer Plessy sued for the right to ride Louisiana railway cars reserved for white people, the United States Supreme Court decided that state-mandated segregation laws did not violate the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson ushered in the era of formalized segregation in the South, but America’s higher-education infrastructure had already taken to the idea. Soon, its common schools formally did so as well.

When Mary Brice moved from Ohio, she hoped that she might be able to bring education to Black New Orleanians—and, in the spirit of Horace Mann, win a victory for humanity. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped expand Brice’s vision to the entire South through federal intervention, providing what became the political and administrative scaffolding for all public education. But as remarkable as that achievement was, it could not withstand the extraordinary efforts by Redeemers to claim the benefits of such an education for white Americans and deny them to Black Americans.

On February 8, 1898, a group of white Louisiana Democrats gathered in Tulane Hall, in New Orleans, for a constitutional convention. The primary agenda item: to settle the question of whether Black men in the state should be allowed to vote. There was little question of what the convention’s result would be.

The convention could not explicitly circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but Democrats got as close as they could. They established a poll tax and literacy tests, and required voters to own property. Ernest B. Kruttschnitt, the president of the convention, bluntly admitted the purpose of these laws. “What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not?” he said to applause. “Doesn’t it meet the case? Doesn’t it let the white man vote, and doesn’t it stop the negro from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?”

This Jim Crow constitution worked as intended. There were 127,923 Black voters on Louisiana’s rolls in 1888; by 1910, that number had dropped to 730. From 1896 to 1900 alone, there was a 96 percent decline in registered Black voters. When the convention ended, Kruttschnitt returned to his day job—leading the New Orleans school board.

With the Plessy decision propping him up, Kruttschnitt launched what Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, the authors of Crescent City Schools, called a “massive cutback in educational opportunities for black children.” Under his leadership, the district cut public schooling for Black students down to grades one through five, and the board announced, as DeVore and Logsdon put it, “that they were giving up all pretense of creating separate schools ‘identical with that of white schools.’ ” By 1920, there were about four times as many schools for white students as there were for Black students in New Orleans. The city’s idea of a universal, free public-education system, established in large part to serve Black students, now only feigned doing so.

It would take 40 more years, another federal intervention, and the protection of U.S. Marshals before Ruby Bridges and the McDonogh Three would reintegrate public schools in New Orleans—schools that likely never would have existed in the first place if not for the work of the federal government and the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For Black people who’d been emancipated, the full experience of citizenship that the Founders believed comes with education was short-lived. The country has been shaped in many ways by their subsequent exclusion. Even after court-mandated desegregation, educational opportunity has been highly stratified by race, and both educational attainment and quality in America as a whole have lagged relative to other wealthy countries. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, the most serious effort to date at realizing Brice’s dream nationally. The history of the South illustrates that efforts to splinter or deny education on the basis of race will inevitably diminish even those who lead those efforts. “Create a serf caste and debar them from education, and you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from education also,” Mann once argued. But the history also demonstrates the inverse: Making public education truly public and equal for all is the cornerstone of a nation.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Black Roots of American Education.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

John Davies has paid about £3,500 for lighting and sound system after the council could not.

Unlike other ads that focus on glitz and glamour, John Lewis follows a boy and his Venus flytrap.

On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.

The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world.

Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on Beijing and calling for Washington to impose sanctions against those who throttled Hong Kong’s freedoms.

[Read: The fracturing of Hong Kong’s democracy movement]

But in the summer of 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese officials put the final touches on a national-security law that effectively criminalized dissent and reengineered the very character of a once freewheeling city. Those found guilty under its provisions could be sentenced to prison for life.

This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s upcoming book, Among the Braves.

Now Hong Kong’s political groups and civil-society organizations were preparing to disband. Shops were pulling protest art off their walls. People were selling apartments and saying goodbyes. Many of Wong’s closest allies had booked tickets to foreign countries where they intended to seek asylum. But Wong didn’t have that option: His passport had been confiscated by the police.

If his renown was a vulnerability, Wong reasoned, it might also be his path out. The U.S. government maintained a few offices in the St. John’s Building, and Wong had set up a routine meeting with two American diplomats.

“I don’t want to leave,” Wong told them as the meeting ended. “I want to go to the U.S. consulate.”

His gambit drew on a famous precedent and a vexed history. The United States had cast its lot, at least verbally, with the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and the administration of then-President Donald Trump styled itself as tough on China. But how much was it willing to venture for the democratic opponents of the Chinese Communist regime?

Back in 1989, the United States seemed to have weighed this problem and come down on the side of principle.

Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist with an extracurricular interest in political philosophy and political systems. His belief in democracy was as public as it was forthright, making him a figure of global stature in the years preceding the Tiananmen Square protests. A sketch of his face, round and sanguine, graced the cover of the May 1988 issue of The Atlantic: In it, he wore a slight smile and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. Fang was China’s Andrei Sakharov, the journalist Orville Schell wrote, a “man of not only keen intelligence and conviction but fearlessness.”  

The day after the massacre—June 5, 1989—gunfire still rang out in the streets of Beijing as Fang, his wife, their son, and the academic Perry Link, who was a longtime friend, scrambled into the U.S. embassy compound. McKinney Russell, a diplomat and polyglot who was the head of the press and cultural section, and Ray Burghardt, the acting deputy chief of mission, met them inside.

Before he sat down with Fang, Burghardt had consulted his ambassador, James Lilley, a former CIA operative. Lilley was alarmed at the prospect of the Fangs seeking refuge there, fearing that they might get stuck in limbo. Burghardt walked away with the impression that he should talk the Fangs out of it. He told Fang that American protection could discredit him and the Chinese democracy movement: The Communist Party would dismiss Fang as a pawn of the United States, his presence at the embassy proof that the American “black hand” was behind the protests. The argument seemed persuasive. Fang and his family left, and the procedure-abiding diplomats reported the incident back to Washington.

[Read: Seeking sanctuary in the old empire]

Several hours later, Washington, on instruction from President George H. W. Bush, responded to the diplomats’ cable. Over a secure line, the administration delivered an unambiguous message: Go to the Fangs immediately. Tell them that if they wish to seek asylum, they would be “welcomed by the president of the United States.”

Russell and Burghardt raced to the Jianguo Hotel. They snuck into the back entrance, received the family—suitcases already packed—and climbed into an unmarked American van, which raced back to the U.S. embassy. There, the senior Fangs would live for the next year, until the United States negotiated their safe release to Britain. (Their son had gone back to his university studies in Beijing after a month, smuggled out of the embassy in another covert operation.)

Washington understood why the diplomats initially handled the Fangs in the way they did. On top of the political sensitivity, the request was technically out of line, as asylum can normally be granted only in-country, not at a consulate on foreign soil. But the administration’s ultimate concern, Burghardt told us, was that “regardless of what we said or how we recounted what had happened, the story would always be that we kicked them out and they got arrested.” And so the United States broke the rules to protect the Fangs. “It is a sort of fascinating example of the tension that always exists in American foreign policy, between the realist, strategic approach and the need to continue to uphold and to demonstrate our values,” Burghardt told us.

Fang and his family eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as a physics professor at the University of Arizona until he died in 2012 at age 76. That same year, in April, Washington made another life-altering exception. Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had championed disability and land rights, made a perilous escape from house arrest. He was given protection at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped negotiate his release to New York City, what she called “an example of American values in practice.”

American values clearly aligned with those of the movement in Hong Kong—such, certainly, was the message Wong and his fellow activists heard loud and clear from Washington in 2019 and 2020. American politicians across party lines praised Hong Kongers for standing up to China in defense of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and, most of all, democracy. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but Hong Kong remained a cause célèbre inside the Beltway, where stalwarts of both parties had deep connections to the city.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a decades-long supporter of human rights in China, lauded the protesters, as did Jim McGovern, one of the most liberal members of Congress. But any politician would have been hard-pressed, in 2019, to outdo Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of Trump’s closest legislative allies, in performative support. Cruz, the Texas Republican, traveled to Hong Kong in mid-October, wearing all black—in solidarity, he said. A few days later, Hawley, of Missouri, planted himself among teens in athletic gear and yellow helmets to tweet details of a nighttime standoff between protesters and police. Both men invoked Berlin and cast Hong Kong as the new center of a global struggle between democracy and communism.

No such sense of mission animated the president, however. Trump had billed his administration as one that took risks and was tough on China. But his position on Hong Kong was muddled, erratic, and guided primarily by his fixation on Chinese President Xi Jinping and his desire to secure a trade deal. The entire U.S.-Chinese relationship, for Trump, came down to dealmaking.

[Read: The final blow to Hong Kong]

The Hong Kong democracy movement did not understand Washington in these terms. They saw a president who claimed to be tough on China, together with bipartisan concern for the fate of their city. Why wouldn’t the United States take a stand for one of the movement’s representatives?

Wong enlisted Jeffrey Ngo, a gregarious candidate for a Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University and a former member of Wong’s prodemocracy group, to help him execute a plan. Wong and Ngo had worked together since 2016 to win support for Hong Kong from American lawmakers, meeting with dozens of staffers and officials in the administration. Now they would appeal to those contacts for help.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a meeting over a secure phone line with his closest advisers on May 23, 2020. Details of China’s national-security law were still not public, but Pompeo was preparing to respond to its implementation by announcing that America no longer considered Hong Kong sufficiently autonomous to warrant separate treatment under U.S. law. He wanted policy suggestions on what should follow.

The advisers threw out a long list of punishments: enacting sanctions against top officials, scrapping training programs with the Hong Kong police, stopping the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Miles Yu, Pompeo’s China-policy adviser, suggested that Washington create a special immigration pathway for Hong Kong residents. Britain had done this. Canada and Australia were also working on such schemes. And admitting Hong Kongers wasn’t just charitable. The United States could offer special visas to Hong Kong residents with university degrees or with specialized skills; the country stood to benefit from fleeing Hong Kong talent.

The policy recommendations reached Trump, whose National Security Council had also prepared three lists of options in response to China’s strangling of Hong Kong. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and Ivan Kanapathy—the NSC’s director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and deputy senior director for Asian affairs—described theirs as a “Goldilocks” menu: One option included a list of “hot” measures (a maximalist approach); the second, “cold” ones; and the last, in-between.

The “hot” list comprised actions that had nothing to do with Hong Kong but that China hawks had long sought the opportunity to take, such as closing the Chinese consulate in Houston, where Washington claimed that spies were aiding in espionage and the theft of scientific research. Trump picked the “hot” menu. He even liked Yu’s immigration idea.

“President Trump said, ‘Why don’t we just open up? Why don’t we just let a huge portion of people from Hong Kong move to the U.S.?’ And I loved it,” Pottinger told us. “You know, my view was just, transplant the whole damn city and make a new Hong Kong in America. [Trump] was like, ‘They’re going to be industrious; they’ll be great. They’ll make great Americans.’”

[Read: What happened to Hong Kong?]

But Stephen Miller, Trump’s far-right political adviser, stopped the immigration scheme from going further. He was “very persuasive,” Yu told us.

The White House and the State Department moved forward on most of the other measures. As one senior official said: “So now we’re going to be thinking about Taiwan. We need to be thinking about the next steps and saying, Look, if you’re going to kill the golden goose, we’re not going to put the goose on fucking life support. We’re going to let you kill the goose. And then we’re also going to make sure that you regret it.”

Pompeo announced on May 27, 2020, that Hong Kong no longer had a high degree of autonomy. In the Rose Garden, Trump promised to eliminate “policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment.” Then the president went off script and vowed to cut America’s ties with the World Health Organization. The WHO announcement completely overshadowed the Hong Kong news.

Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed.

On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen.

For years, Ngo had worked behind the scenes for Wong, writing op-eds in his name and even editing his tweets. Now he wrote an email above Wong’s signature to the secretary of state. “I want nothing more than to continue to fight for democracy and freedoms in my home,” it read. “But there is legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention … I request U.S. protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of applying for asylum.”

The email landed in the inbox of Mary Kissel, Pompeo’s senior adviser, just after noon on July 1 in Washington. Kissel knew Wong and Ngo personally and had lived in Hong Kong as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She got the message where it needed to go.

Within the next 48 hours, Pompeo summoned his half dozen or so top officials to discuss Wong’s request. They immediately ruled out sheltering him at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. Plans were already under way to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, and when the announcement came, Beijing would likely retaliate. If Wong was hiding in the U.S. consulate, Beijing could close it down. Or Beijing could demand Wong’s release in exchange for American prisoners—it could snatch Americans off the streets in Hong Kong and hold them in arbitrary detention for this purpose.

The officials considered covertly extracting Wong from Hong Kong instead. But Hong Kong’s geography was unforgiving—the city shared a land border solely with mainland China, which meant that the only escape would be by boat across the Taiwan Strait or south toward the Philippines. Wong would risk encountering the Chinese Coast Guard in those waters, and American involvement could make for an international incident. Options dwindled. Soon the officials came to believe that none remained.

Pompeo and his advisers decided that the United States could neither let Wong into the consulate nor extract him from Hong Kong. “You’ve got national interest and personal interest, and in some ways you try to find a balance between the two,” one senior official involved in the process told us. “In the end, you know, on the seventh floor of the State Department, national interest won out.”

[Read: Hong Kong’s elite turned on democracy]

The decision was hardly unanimous in Washington. A National Security Council memo to the State Department opined that Wong should be protected, but deferred to State as the deciding authority with, as Pottinger later told us, a “fuller picture” of the facts. Pottinger’s deputy, Kanapathy, told us that fear of what Beijing would do in response was the “absolute wrong” reason to refuse to help Wong: “If you can’t do what I think a lot of people would say is the right thing [because] you’re afraid they’re going to do the wrong thing, then you’ve already lost.”

The State Department’s decision was, strangely, kept close. No one informed Wong or Ngo that the die was cast. In August, Ngo appealed to Pelosi and Senator Marco Rubio, both of whom had worked with Wong since he was a teen. They made calls to State on Wong’s behalf, pushing the request at the “highest levels,” according to one Hill staffer. At one point, a fellow Hong Kong activist named Nathan Law, who had slipped away to London just before the national-security law passed, met with Pompeo in private, raising Wong’s plight directly and emotionally. Nothing changed.

The issue “dragged,” one State Department official involved told us, “and it lingered, and then the inevitable happened.” Wong was arrested in September 2020 and then remanded in custody in late November. Last year, he pled guilty to charges of subversion under the national-security law.

The democracy movement in Hong Kong made little secret of the hope it placed in Washington. Some protesters flew American flags in the street, or made public appeals, whether to Trump’s gigantic ego or to Pelosi’s support for Chinese democracy activists dating back to Tiananmen. Many believed that America had the ability to alter Beijing’s course of action. They were wrong. What the United States could have offered was a haven, but it didn’t.

Washington made no special provision for Hong Kongers who wanted to emigrate to the United States. Cruz, notwithstanding his show of solidarity, killed a bill in December 2020 that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. In a self-aggrandizing memoir, Pompeo wrote that he wished he had done more to punish China over Hong Kong, but he made no reference to Joshua Wong.

The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.

This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s new book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, And Exile In The Battle For Hong Kong And The Future Of Global Democracy.