A Special Look Back

Dear New Reader,

I wanted to write a special note to the over 5,000 of you who have signed up for my newsletter in recent days. First, thank you. I have been overwhelmed by the response to my essay on how America tipped this month into fascism.

I don’t normally do this, but given the incredible surge of readership (really: THANK YOU!) I wanted to share with you three posts from this month that predated your subscription that I think you’ll find interesting, useful, and relevant to this moment we’re living through.

Next week, you will receive some fresh posts and columns. But for now, a special look back:

1) Fleeing One Step Ahead of Fascism.

I often joke, darkly, that I write “history” books that get filed instead under “current events.” Over the last year, as I’ve worked on my new oral history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings, there was one section in the book that always felt particularly chilling: The memories of the mostly Jewish refugee physicists who fled Hitler’s Europe to come to the United States ahead of the advancing cloak of fascism. (The book, THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY, came out at the start of August and debuted at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller list! You can order a signed copy here — or get it wherever you like your books!).

The advances of physics through the 1930s were inseparable from the darkening clouds of far-right fascism on the European continent. The rise of Hitler and his National Socialist Party in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy destabilized much of Europe’s scientific progress, particularly as anti-Semitic politics and pogroms targeted many of the biggest names in physics. Even as they helped lead groundbreaking discoveries around the structure of the atom, many of Europe’s top scientists watched with remarkable clarity as German democracy turned itself over — often much too willingly and easily — to Hitler, and they scoffed at their colleagues and friends who assured them, “Don’t worry, Hitler won’t be so bad — he won’t actually do the things he says he will.”

Any of that sound familiar? This excerpt from my book tells their story in their own words — as you read, I suspect you, like me — will feel all too many parallels with how American society is proceeding today.

2) What We Lost When We Lost the Greatest Generation.

I’ve spent much of the last few years writing and thinking about World War II — this month has marked the 80th anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Japanese surrender, and next Tuesday will mark the anniversary of the Japanese surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri. To me, it's no coincidence that democracy is backsliding in the US exactly eighty years after the end of World War II. I’ve come to believe that in losing the World War II generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, or the memories of working in homefront factories building aircraft in Willow Run in Michigan, landing craft at Higgins Industries in New Orleans, or manufacturing uranium in Oak Ridge, Tenn., as part of the war’s inner-most secret, the Manhattan Project.

We are losing, too, the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. In this essay, I explored the legacy of that Greatest Generation in doing the hard work of not just fighting and winning World War II to preserve democracy, but also to secure an era of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the decades thereafter, and what their work meant for our time and lives.

3) A Watergate Every Day.

Since so many have signed up in recent days, many of you missed my second column of this week, trying to zero in on two of the major scandals we’ve seen slide by in the news of recent days. Already, here by Friday, both have been forgotten — particularly in the shadow of the five-alarm fire at the CDC that has unfolded in the last 48 hours.

One of the hardest things to do in the modern moment is keep up with the daily slog of scandals and corruption unfolding in this administration — sometimes in broad daylight in front of cameras in the Oval Office. On the one hand, it’s just too much for the media to cover, but there’s also a bigger problem: The media does a terrible job noticing them as the scandals go by. I think often of Steve Bannon’s infamous quote: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Almost every day there’s a scandal that just skates by that in any other moment of presidential history would launch endless follow-up stories, congressional investigations, and sink an administration.

As someone who wrote a book about Watergate, it’s striking to me so see so many parallels between Nixon and Trump — and yet, at the same time, it’s even more striking to see how regularly we see scandals, corruption, and criminality in the Trump orbit that’s worse than anything we saw from Nixon. This week, I tried to zero in on just two of those scandals to show how little attention the media gives truly awful, democracy-threatening episodes that are forgotten by the following day, if they’re ever noticed at all.

Thanks again for subscribing and reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story, and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state. Or follow me on BlueSky for more regular updates throughout the week.

Talk to you soon!

GMG

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