A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership

“All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”-Battlestar Galactica
I chose to read A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being “Deep Throat,” And the Struggle for Honor in Washington before James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership because the Nixon and Presidon’t Administration have similar themes of undermining government institutions. It seemed instinctual to compare Mark Felt and James Comey’s situation. Felt was the de facto Director of the Federal Bureau Investigation after J. Edgar Hoover, died and Comey was the seventh official Director. Felt and Comey are two very different men.
While Felt would have respected Comey as a human being, I don’t think that he would approve of his work as Director. Felt clearly disapproved of his boss L. Patrick Gray for not being an FBI agent before being promoted to the highest rank, which made him incapable of steering the FBI effectively during turbulent times. He frowned upon Gray’s time away from the office giving speeches and for not having the same grasp as Hoover of daily operations. He was not a work horse, was more concerned with the President’s approval than focusing in house and too reactive to the Executive Branch as opposed to determining the FBI’s own course. More importantly, Felt’s manner is dramatically different from Comey. Felt was more concerned with effectively stopping corruption even if he had to be morally ambiguous to do so than the mere appearance of avoiding evil.
I am a firm adherent to the broken clock rule-even a broken clock is right twice a day. Presidon’t is reported as saying that Comey is a “showboat,” which is kind of true (and definitely a case of the kettle calling the pot black), but Comey is not interested in fame per se. After reading A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, it is apparent that Comey’s professional experience made him default to public actions as a way to insure internal integrity when he correctly recognized the harbinger of wrong doing in the Executive Branch long before Presidon’t arrived on the scene. It always worked when he was the United States Deputy Attorney General so naturally he would not suddenly stop just because he was working in a different position, especially because the FBI falls under the United States Department of Justice. Comey primarily acts like an attorney, not an investigator-his concern is getting a trier of fact, whether it is a judge, jury or the American people, to believe his story and convict the target of his investigation. Felt was also an attorney, but because he spent the majority of his career in the field and was required to be secretive until he was certain that he could snag a suspect, including spies, he was more effective at balancing his professional responsibilities albeit he seemed superficially complicit in his boss’ corruption.
Fortunately for readers, these differences in professional approaches to their jobs makes Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership a far better book than Felt’s A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being “Deep Throat,” And the Struggle for Honor in Washington. Comey knows how to tell a story and give enough personal details to keep a reader engaged from beginning to end. He makes legal issues easy for any layperson to understand, which is a rare skill when you reach a certain level of legal practice. I must confess that because I have seen him being questioned on television so often, it is hard to separate what I read from what I heard and saw, but the book covers far more ground than the current administration so if you feel as if you don’t need to read the book because you feel oversaturated with Comey content, you are wrong, and it is still worth your time.
There were a couple of points that surprised me while I was reading A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership. I didn’t realize that Rudy Giuliani was Comey’s boss at one point. So in some ways, even though they are now on opposite sides of the table, regardless of whether or not it was incidental or deliberate, Comey’s formative years as an attorney were influenced by Giuliani’s mentorship during Giuliani’s most effective point in his career as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York during the 1980s. Comey and Giuliani’s manner could not be more different, but the effect is undeniable. Comey’s cultivation of a public persona and unrelenting focus is in part a result of his time with Giuliani. It does make Giuliani’s hypothetical comments about Comey more reprehensible because ideally officers of the court should not make casual remarks about someone’s death, but for the subject of those comments to be about a colleague suggests a level of either depravity or mental deterioration that I am currently incapable of, and I have not enjoyed the company of all my former colleagues.
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership is deliberate in its discussion of race in America in an effort for Comey to distance himself from Hoover’s public legacy of persecution. Comey never explicitly states whether or not his impression of past FBI actions, specifically Hoover’s files on public figures, is based on information acquired in his professional capacity or common knowledge casually circulating in the ether. Felt devotes a grand portion of his book to debunking what he viewed as common misperceptions of Hoover’s actions against black activists in the 1950s through 1960s civil rights movement, specifically Martin Luther King Jr., but Felt was also known to be skilled at telling the truth in a way that hid the real details if he loved and wanted to protect someone. Then you have someone like Comey who just comes along and swipes his arm across Felt’s table and says that Hoover was bad. I would love if someone did a detailed follow up question on what informed Comey’s disapproval of Hoover’s actions. I am very disappointed that Comey never reflects on Felt’s experiences.
At the end of the day, despite Comey’s explicitly kinder, gentler approach to race, the results are still the same as Felt’s. Felt and Comey believed that their FBI had no bad intentions with respect to racial disparities in law enforcement, and if we knew what they knew, we would applaud their actions. Yet Comey looks back on the past and not only sees room for improvement, but actively disapproves of the FBI’s past actions and seeks to distance himself from it. I suspect that in five decades or less, another high level FBI official will look back and say the same about Comey’s FBI.
I don’t think that it is a coincidence that the highest level of law enforcement is historically always undermined by the party that loudly characterizes itself as a champion for law enforcement while simultaneously openly demonizing others whereas law enforcement is always more on guard when the other is in power, but actually suffer less losses during that period. That is how systematic oppression works. It does not just hurt the other, but it will undermine institutions based on truth when truth will not give way to prejudice and those that serve that institution will always be shocked and clutch their pearls. They never see it coming until it is too late just like they can’t see the flaws inside their own institution.
Side note: I borrowed this book from the library. I’m not paying him for helping us get in this mess. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Comey asked what he could have done differently. Um, make the announcement about the investigation on Clinton and Russian involvement with Presidon’t’s campaign at the same time or don’t make any announcement. Comey seems to incorrectly believe that people didn’t know about the latter until after the election, but I knew long before that so you did this. Live with it.