A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR

The Life of Lies. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. Loyalty oaths. An us-versus-them worldview. Lying about things, large and small, in service to some warped code of loyalty. These rules and standards were hallmarks of the Mafia, but throughout my career I’d be surprised how often I’d find them applied outside of it.

There was something of an unwritten code about working in the office of Rudy Giuliani, as I suppose there is in most organizations. In his case, the message was that Rudy was the star at the top and the successes of the office flowed in his direction. You violated this code at your peril.

I wish I could say I felt something different when I was in the presence of a mass murderer, handing me a cup of espresso in an empty convent. In the movies, some foreboding music might play in the background or the light might dim. But there was none of that. Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta.

These killers were people who had crossed an indelible line in human experience by intentionally taking another life. They all constructed their own narrative to explain and justify their killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. And to a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

I didn’t have to speak in this meeting unless called upon, so I let my eyes sweep over the faces that were familiar from TV—the president, Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI Director Bob Mueller, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. In that moment, something hit me: It’s just us. I always thought that in this place there would be somebody better, but it’s just this group of people—including me—trying to figure stuff out. I didn’t mean that as an insult to any of the participants, who were talented people. But we were just people, ordinary people in extraordinary roles in challenging times. I’m not sure what I had expected, but I met the top of the pyramid and it was just us, which was both comforting and a bit frightening. Suddenly Bob Dylan was in my head, singing, “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.”

“In every man’s life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him,” he told Ashcroft. “You passed your test tonight.”

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —MARK TWAIN

“I can’t believe someone with such a supple mind actually got elected president.”

I AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger.

Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation.

We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it.

I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity—it is a choice—and somewhere deep down they must know that.

This fire also offers an opportunity to rebalance power among the three branches of our government, closer to the model the founders intended. There is reason to believe this fire will leave the presidency weaker and Congress and the courts stronger, just as the forest fire of Watergate did.