"Presidential Courage", by Michael Beschloss

Michael Beschloss is one of the top presdential historians active today, along with Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin. His 2007 book "Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989" is a fascinating and detailed account of how nine different presidents handled difficult and often unpopular decisions during their presidencies.

In discussing Washington's problems with Jay's Treaty, Beschloss destroys the myth that Washington's eight years were a time of idyllic national unity, and that Washington could have had a third term had he wanted it. Washington's first term had already been marked by considerable dissension, wtih frequent bickering between his Cabinet members Hamilton and Jefferson, who became the leaders of the two emerging parties, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, later called the Republicans. Washington urged them to get along, but Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State in disgust after the first term and went home to Monticello.

But it was in 1794, duirng his second term, when things really blew up. In an attmept to avoid another war with Great Britain, which had been intefering with US shipping as well as arming Indians and spurring them to atack settlers in present-day Ohio and Michigan, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to Britain in May of 1794 to negotiate a treaty to settle the issues. Although Hay had negotiated a treaty by November, due to communication delays it didn't reach Washington until the following Spring.

Washington disliked the treaty but he sent it to the Senate anyway, taking seriously the Senate's "advise and consent" duties under the constitution. The Senate barely approved it in a party-line vote, the Federalists approving and the anti-Federalists disapproving. The outcry againt the treaty was furious. A Philadelphia throng burned a copy of the treaty along with an effigy of John Jay, and there was even talk of impeaching Washington.

Ultimately Washington decided to sign the treaty, but a House vote was necessary to obtain the funds needed to implement it. After a bruisng debate, the House voted 49-49. The tiebreaking vote then went in favor of the treaty.

All the controversy and mean-spirited party politics so discouraged Washington that he decided not to seek a third term. Beschloss writes that "The struggle over Jay's Treaty had destroyed Washington's dream that America might forever be governed by national consensus--no parties, no factions, just patriots. By the fall of 1796, the country was bitterly divided between Federalists, derided by their foes as 'the British party', and Republicans, lampooned as 'the French party'. Washington's final Cabinet included not a single Republican. He scarcely spoke to his old Founding brother Thomas Jefferson."

Beschloss offers this thoughtful conclusion of the Jay's Treaty battle: "The precedent Washignton set with his leadership on Jay's Treaty was that a president should not merely preside. He must use his unique standing--even if it made him unpopular or cost an election--to convince Congress and the American people to accept unpopular notions that may be in their long-term interest."

Jay's Treaty ultimately did work well, and contributed to the peaceful settlement of the Northwest Territory. By the time that John Adams took office in 1797, the issue was imminent war with France. Adams fought this battle throughout his term, and to his credit he was able to avert war with France.

The irony is that word of the peace treaty settling what came to be called the "quasi-war" came a month too late to save his presidency, as the voting in the 2000 election had already taken place, resulting in Jefferson winning comfortably over Adams. Beschloss concludes that "Adams deserves lasting credit for his political sacrifice...Adams's personal tragedy was that he did not need to forgo a second term to make peace with France. Had he handled his Cabinet, Congress, his rivals and the public with more finesse, he could have saved his career...Just as he had once described Jefferson, Adams was more talented as political philosopher than working politician. His inability to fathom complex men like 'Washington and Hamilton would have been comic were the result not so painful."

I have serious problems with Beschloss's third crisis, the matter of Andrew Jackson and his opposition to the Second Bank of the United States. This was a bold action that to me is more foolhardiness and stubbornness than it is courageous. It does not belong in this book. Jackson ultimately succeeded in killing the bank, but at what cost?

Indeed, Beschloss himself seems to agree with me when he writes in conclusion: "By destroying Biddle's Bank without some more accountable replacement, Jackson peddled the dubious notion that America did not need a central bank to preserve a sound currency. Through eighty years of boom and bust, until Congress established the Federal Reserve in 1913, millions of Americans suffered."

I also have problems with the fourth crisis, the matter of Lincoln's re-election for a second term in 1864. The war was going badly and all signs were that Lincoln would be defeated. Lincoln himself was certain that he was going to lose the election. Then, on September 1st, Sherman took Atlanta and everything changed. Lincoln ended by winning easily.

I'm not sure what the basis is for claiming this was an act of "courage". Lincoln was simply being realistic, an admirable quality certainly but different from courage.

Perhaps the courage to the author lies in Lincoln's being unwilling to negotiate a peace with the Confederacy as a way of saving his presidency. To me a peace would have been preferable, and I emphatically disagree with Lincoln's war on the Confederacy, and his continuation of it for four long years. Decisiveness is not necessarily "courage", and it is not a good thing of any kind if undertaken for wrong ends.

Beschloss adroitly pivots to his fifth crisis, that of Teddy Roosevelt, by noting that TR's Secretary of State, John Hay, is the same John Hay who served as Lincoln's secretary during his presidency. The "courage" attributed to Roosevelt was his purusit of his trust-busting activities even when they threatened to derail his nomination for a full term in 1904. Ultimately his antagonist, Mark Hanna, died and Roosevelt cruised to the nomination, with the convention balancing the ticket by nominating a McKinley conservative for the VP slot.

And next we come to FDR and the 1940 election. Again, I am hard-pressed to udnestand what the suppsoed "courage" was here. He did run and win, showing remarkable politial skill and using his considerable charm to good advantage. But is this courage?

Beschloss conludes: "One danger in Roosevelt's approach was his deception and secrecy. By vowing in 1940 that Americans would fight in no 'foreign war' and that he had no 'secret understanding' with Churchill, he made himself vulnerable to the Tyler Kents and Joe Kennedys who had powerful evidence to the contrary. Any president with dangerous secrets is hostage to those who know them. Kent and Kennedy both came close to tattling everything they knew. Had they done so, FDR might have been voted out of office."

The next crisis was the Harry Truman decision on whether to recognize the new state of Israel. Truman was as anti-Semitic as the country as a whole, but he studied the issue with an open mind and eventually came around to the idea that recognizing Israel was the right thing to do. And it proved to be crucial to the survival of the new state. It would have been easy to sit back and wait to see what would happen after the partition, so Truman deserves much credit here for his courageous leadership.

The next crisis was the civil rights crisis that JFK faced. JFK gradually came around to supporting the civil rights movement, even though it imperiled his re-election chances in 1964. Indeed, he told a group of civil rights leaders that "I may lose the next election beecause of this. I don't care."

One interesting thing I learned from this section was that JFK had a taping system for White House conversations. Indeed, Nixon's was far from the first such system. I see now that FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK and LBJ all taped their White House conversations.

And last we have Ronald Reagan, whose courage was in seeking detente and arms reduction with the Soviet Union.

I still take issue with the author's emphasis on "courage". I submit that "Presidential Leadership" would be a better title, leadership being a broader term that could encompass all nine of the crises described in this remarkable book.

Findlay Bridge for 6/5/26

Five full tables for this event, which is an ideal number because the room is really too small to accommodate a larger group, plus at five full nobody has to ever sit out, and each hand gets played five times which makes for 4 possible points for each hand.

Ron and I had a bad day, finishing at 42%, 9th out of 10 and only a half-point out of last place.

Here are the hand-by-hand results.

Board 1. A memorable hand. Ron opened 1NT, and I had 17 points with a solid 6-card heart suit, including all the honors! I simply jumped right to 6NT, in lieu of trying Berber and risking getting confused on the way to slam. We made 7, and on the way home I was thinking there might have been a way to bid the grand slam. But when the results came in, I saw that noone else had bid the grand slam, and so we tied for top board. Three of the other pairs bid 6H instead of 6NT, two making 7 and the other only 6.

Board 2. We played 4S and made 6. The other boards all bid the game but not a slam. Two made 7, and two made only 5, so we were right in the middle.

Board 3. They played 4H, making 5. Same result at three of the other boards. One pair, Ronald & Tim, bid and made a small slam.

We scored 8 points on boards 1-3 against Ed & Linda, for a +2 result against a team we usually do well against.

Board 4. They played and made 1NT. We got top board, as two other pairs made 2, and the other two pairs got outbid and set the overly ambitious bidders.

Board 5. We played and made 4H. Same result at three other boards, while the fourth failed to even bid the game.

Board 6. They played 3NT, makng 6. Same on one other board, while another made only 4, and two others bid slam and went down, so we tied for bottom board.

We scored 7 points on boards 4-6 vs. Bob & Karen, for a +1 result against a good, veteran team.

Board 7. This hand was passed out at our table, while there were bids at the other four tables, all of which went down! We were rewarded with 3 points for our restraint.

Board 8. We set their 4H by one, tyng for top board.

Board 9. We got into a horrible 3NT contract and went down by 3! Nobody else bid a game, and one hand was actually passed out!

Despite the bottom board on board 9, we still scored 6.5 points vs. Dave & Gene, for a +.5 against one of the weaker teams.

Board 10. They bid 2NT, making 3, giving us bottom board.

Board 11. We got set by one at 2D, tying for botton board.

Board 12. I opened a weak 2H and Ron inexplicably went to 2S. I ended up having to play 2NT, going down 3.

We scored a pathetic .5 points vs. Warren & James on boards 10-12.

Board 13. We set their 1D bid by one.

Board 14. We played 4S, making 7! Same result at two other tables, while one table made 6NT, and Bob & Karen bid 6S for top board.

Board 15. We sewt their 1H bid by two, tying for top board.

We scored 5.5 points vs. Mike & Arlene on boards 13-15, for a decent net -.5 against another good, veteran team, a co-winner of this event.

Board 16. We set 2D by one, for top board. The other pairs playing our same cards all got the bid, so we judged well to let our opponents play their 2D bid.

Board 17. We played 3NT and made 4, tying for top board.

Board 18. My partner Ron played 2H and made 5, the only player with our cards to make 5. Unfortunately for us, three of the other pairs bid the game, so we got only 1 point.

We scored an impressive 8.5 points vs. Ruth and Lester on boards 16-18.

Board 19. We went down 2 at 4S. Another bidding disaster, as nobody else went to game, and one hand was even passed out!

Board 20. A passed out hand, which turned pout well for us as we got 2.5 points.

Board 21. Our usually strong defense failed us as they bid 4H, making 5, the only pair to do so.

We scored 2.5 points vs. Jim & Kathy on boards 19-21, for a -3.5 result against the strongest regular pair.

Board 22. We went down 2 at 2S, for bottom board.

Board 23. They bid 4H, making 5. Same result at 3 other gboards, while the 4th also made 5 but didmn';t bid the game.

Bpard 24. We got top board as my partner played and made 3NT, while everyone else went set!

We scored 5.5 vs. Clarence & Teresa, a delightful pair who we usually do well against.

Board 25. They bid and made 6S. Three other pairs also made 6S but only bid game, so all credit to our opponents for their bidding success.

Board 26. We played 3D, making 6, but we lost out to three other pairs who bid and made a NT game.

Board 27. They played 2H, making 3, giving us a tie for bottom board.

We scored only 1.5 points vs. Ronald & Tim, the co-winners of the event.

How Did the Michael Peterson Case End?

Michael Peterson was convicted in 2003 for the murder of his wife, Kathleen Peterson, and started serving a sentence of life without parole. Even though the prosecution's acase was built entirely on conjecture, with no direct evidence, his appeal was denied.

Peterson might well have spent the rest of his life in prison, but for the case of Greg Taylor. Taylor was convicted of murder in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison, based on the testimony of a blood analyst who testifed that a spot of blood found in the defendant's vehicle belonged to the victim. A North Carolina innocence project invetigated the case, and in 2010 a three-judge panel exonerated the defendant, based on new testing which found that the blood was not even human blood! This evidence was apparently available before the trial but was supressed by the state.

The blood analyst who worked the Taylor case was the same one involved in the Peterson case, a bum named Duane Deaver. Investigation into all of Deaver's cases found that he had suppresed tests which didn't support the state's theory in 230 cases! His testimony in the Peterson case was re-examined and found to be false. The North Caarolina Attorney General who invetigated Deaver was Roy Cooper, the same Roy Cooper who has since served two terms as governor and is now running as a Democrat for the Senate.

Peterson's original attorney agreed to work pro bono on the Motion for a new trial, but after that he told Peterson that he couldn't go through another trial. A new attorney, appointed this time as Peterson was now indigent, worked the case. The main thing she did during her representation was to file and argue a Motion to Dismiss the case based on due process violations. The main thrust of this argument was that the state lab had never done any testing on the fluids found on Kathleen Peterson's body. The state came up with its theory of MIchael Peterson's guilt early on, and simply refused to do any investigation into alternative theories, such as a third-party intruder being the perpetrator. Despite the compoelling arugment, this Motion was denied.

Peterson's new defense team was preparing for a retrial when a new DA raised the possibility of a plea deal. Peterson's original attorney got involved again at this point, and worked out an Alford plea, which is where the defendant pleads guilty without admitting guilt. Peterson was sentenced to time served for his plea to voluntary manslaughter, and that was the end of the case.

I have to mention the ugly, hate-filled participation of Katheen's sister Candace. Never have I seen a person so consumed with hate. She talked at every court appearance, as she was entitled to do under the "victim's rights" laws which are so prevalent today. She treated the prosecutors as her own personal attorneys, which of course is false, as the DA represents the entire public, not any individual.

"The Staircase", (2004-2018)

This documentary is a 13-episode miniseries of a famous North Carolina murder case, in which defendant Michael Peterson was accused of killing his wife Kathleen, after she died falling down the stairs of her home in 2001. The first eight episodes, released in 2004, were based on the trial which resulted in his conviction, while episodes 9 and 10 were released in 2013, after he was granted a new trial due to prosecutorial misconduct during the original trial. Episodes 11-13 were then released in 2018, when Peterson reluctantly decided to take an Alford plea to a lesser charge, resulting in a sentence of time served, in lieu of going through the ordeal of a retrial.

The case was so compelling that a dramatization of it was released in 2022 as an 8-episode mini-series starring Colin Firth as Michael Peterson. I will be referring to this dramatization as "the mini-series".

I first watched the 2022 mini-series, and I have since watched the earlier documentary. I have to commend the dramatization for presenting the characters so perfectly. After seeing the actual people in the documentary, it is obvious that great care was taken to capture the characters accurately in the mini-series. I can't help thinking of Robert DeNiro, who, during the filming of Goodfellas, would call the mob liaison guy 5-6 times a day to be sure he was getting his Jimmy Conway character just right. For example, he would ask questions like "How did Jimmy Conway hold his cigarettes?"

One might ask how such a miscarriage of justice could occur in the United States, which offers more protections to defendants than any other country in the world. The answer is really quite simple. The criminal justice system is a human institution, and as such is as imperfect as all human institutions are. There have been 202 exonerations of death row inmates in this country to date, an astonishing number given our many safeguards against such miscarriages of justice. We are the only country in the Western world that still uses the death penalty, to our eternal shame.

There is a philosophical rule called Occam's Razor, which holds that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. In line with this principle, I have a simple, clear-cut explanation for this miscarriage of justice. Michael Peterson was a successful novelist and was also a columnist for the Durham newspaper. In his columnist role, he regularly attacked the Durham city leaders for their racism, their corruption, and their general incompetence. In particular, he specifically criticized the DA, Jim Hardin, for going after bingo parlors instead of prosecuting violent crimes. This case was Hardin's revenge. (This tidbit about Hardin being criticized was mentioned in the documentary, but not in the mini-series.)

The revenge motive for a wrongful prosecution was also seen in the tragic Wisconsin case of Steven Avery. Avery was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault and attempted murder in 1985, and served 18 years in prison until being exonerated by DNA testing in 2003. He then filed a $36 million lawsuit against the sheriff and other county officials for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. In response, the sheriff's department framed him for murder on a new case, and Avery was convicted and is still serving time for that conviction. This whole sorry saga is the subject of the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, which I highly recommend. Nobody does documentaries better than Netflix!

While the parties were preparing for trial, it came to light that 18 years earlier, in 1985, there was a woman in Germany who died in a fall down a staircase. The defense team was obligated to investigate this situation in case the DA tried to introduce evidence of this at the trial. Consequently, the defense team made two trips to Germany to interview witnesses and examine records related to this death. The woman and her husband were neighbors and good friends with Peterson and his first wife, and after her death Peterson became the guardian of the woman's two daughters (her husband having predeceased her). There was no evidence of any affair or foul play between Peterson and the woman, but somehow the prosecution deemed her death to be relevant to the pending trial.

The prosecution was so obsessed with this German death that they had her corpse disinterred from the Texas grave where it had been resting, and transported it across the country to North Carolina so that the local Medical Examiner could do an autopsy. This other death was in no way relevant to the current case, and evidence of it would be extremely prejudicial to the defense. And yet, the DA sought to introduce it into evidence at trial. And, even more incredibly, the trial judge, a hack named Orlando Hudson, Jr., allowed it into evidence! The medical examiner, who has since been discredited, testified that in her opinion the German death was a homicide by blunt force trauma to the head.

Another extremely prejudicial decision was that the jury was allowed to hear evidence of Peterson's bisexuality. Numerous emails were exchanged between him and various male escorts, and these were introduced to support the DA's theory that Kathleen had just found out about his bisexuality, which led to a fight between the two of them, resulting in her death.

Usually judges will err on the side of caution and will not allow this sort of prejudicial evidence in, out of a desire to assure the defendant a fair trial, and to avoid being reversed on appeal. The trial judge and the DA here were both guilty of gross misconduct in introducing such prejudicial evidence which had no real probative value. And yet, neither the DA nor the judge suffered any adverse repercussions. To the contrary, this case made them both famous; DA Hardin was appointed to a judgeship in 2005, and both he and Judge Hudson continued serving as judges until their recent retirements.

Ultimately the case came down to, or at least should have come down to, a battle of the blood spatter experts, Deborah Radisch for the prosecution, and Henry Lee for the defense. One was a local medical examiner, and the other a world-renowned forensic scientist, who had worked on many famous cases such as the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, the O. J. Simpson and Laci Peterson cases, the 9/11 forensic investigation, the Washington, DC, sniper shootings, and the reinvestigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Radisch testified that the blood spatters were "not consistent" with a fall down the stairs, while Lee testified that they were not consistent with blunt force trauma to the head.

If an AI bot had been deciding this case, it would have been an easy win for the defense. However, 12 fallible humans were deciding it instead, and they were subject to all of the small-town prejudices that are so prevalent in the South. (I realize that Durham, pop. 300,000, is not literally a "small town", but it has the same provincial outlook on life as all small towns have.) Every effort was made to turn the defendant into a villain. For example, in closing argument the assistant DA, a shrewish woman named Freda Black, stressed to the jury that Peterson was a "writer of fiction", and he therefore had a special ability to make up stories and present them believably.

To me this case is eerily similar to the famous case of Dr. Sam Shepard, whose wife Marilyn was found bludgeoned to death in her bed in the early morning hours of July 4, 1954, in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We were taking the Cleveland newspaper at the time, and I vividly remember the front-page editorial on July 30, 1954, with the garish headline "Why Isn't Sam Shepard in Jail" plastered across the top of the page in huge black letters. Even at the tender age of eight, I could sense that something wasn't quite right here. The Cleveland Police gave in to all the clamor and arrested Shepard that evening. He was convicted and spent a decade in prison before the justice system finally corrected its mistake.

In both the Shepard and the Peterson cases, the murder weapon was never found. The prosecution "expert" in the Shepard case testified that in his opinion the beating was caused by a "surgical instrument", Shepard being an osteopathic doctor. Much of the prejudice against Shepard was due to his being an osteopath, not a regular doctor. Similarly, Peterson was an outsider, not a Durham native, and the local prejudice against outsiders is strong in this provincial Southern town.

There is a popular myth among the populace that the rich person gets a better brand of justice than the poor person in our criminal justice system. In my experience this is not the case. In fact, the rich person often is treated more harshly. Prosecutors like to go after high-profile targets, for two reasons. One, it allows them to make an example of the high-profile person, to deter others from committing crimes. And two, it is a darn good way of gaining publicity for the prosecutor, thereby furthering his/her career. In most jurisdictions in the U.S., District Attorneys are elected by popular vote, so the publicity is important.

Michael Peterson had a top-notch defense, as the documentary makes clear. The original estimate from his attorney of the cost of defense was $500,000, later raised to $750,000-800,000, as more and more issues came up that had to be addressed. The defense team had a private investigator, a crusty old guy who reminded me of the Mike Ehrmantraut character from "Breaking Bad". Then there was a jury consultant, a witness coach, and other experts like Dr. Henry Lee, possibly the foremost forensic scientist in the world.

And yet, despite all of the hard work of this amazing team, Mike Peterson was convicted. Convicted despite the fact that his attorney surveyed autopsies of every single case of blunt force trauma to the head in North Carolina in the previous ten years, and they all showed either a skull fracture or a brain injury, neither of which was present in the Peterson case.

Mike Peterson's life was ruined, and he spent eight years of his life in prison. So much for this nonsense about the rich always getting preferential treatment!

The Michael Peterson Case

I am still watching the 2022 mini-series, "The Staircase", about this famous case, and I have not yet watched the earlier documentary. But I want to get the basic facts in mind before expounding further on this fascinating case.

Th heart and soul of this case is the amazing blended family that MIchael Peterson shared with his deceased wife, Kathleen. The miniseries doesn't always make the relationships clear. Todd and Clayton were Michael's sons with his first wife. Margaret and Martha were daughters of the Ratliffs, a couple who were friends with Michael and his first wife when they lived in Germany. After the Ratliffs both died, the Petersons took the girls in and raised them as their own. Caitlan was Kathleen's only bilogical child by her first husband. These kids were all 20-somethings at the time of Kathleen's death, and were all compellilng characters in their own rights.

Kathleen died in a staircase fall in Decmeber of 2001, and her husaband Michael was convicted of murdering her and started serving a life sentence two years later. That conviction was vacated in 2011 when a judge found that a key prosecution witness, forensic blood-spatter analyst Duane Deaver, had lied on the stand about the evidence and about his qualifications. In lieu of going to trial again, Michael opted to enter an Alford plea and was sentenced to time served.

"The Crash" (dir: Gareth Johnson, 2026)

This Netflix documentary is about a teenage girl who is accused of intentionally driving her car into a building, killing her two passengers. The DA on the case worked with the police to identify the causes of the crash, and then successfully prosecuted the girl. He methodically eliminated all other possible causes of the crash, leaving only murder as a possibility. He then charged her with two counts of murder and got a conviction at the trial.

The power of the film is in its depiction of just how badly our society has disintegrated. The girl and her parents, along with other friends and family, all cooperated with this documentary, obviously in the expectation that it would show a miscarriage of justice. Instead, it shows just how off the rails we as a society have become.

The film states that the defense opted for a bench trial rather than a jury trial, but no explanation is offered for this crucial decision. I would have liked to have seen some exploration for the reasons for this choice, since it severely increased the possibility of a conviction for the defendant.

What is striking is all of the footage that exists of life for this group of teenagers before the crash. They were heavily into social media, particularly TikTok and Snapchat, and many videos of their everyday life before the crash are readily available. It depicts a hedonistic, self-absorbed life, full of aimlessness with a total absence of any purpose in life.

The hero of this documentary is the hard-working DA, who could easily have shrugged this off as another tragic traffic accident. Instead, he persistently analyzed possible causes, first eliminating drugs and alcohol through testing, and then eliminating accidental error through analyzing data from the car (apparently cars these days have what is equivalent to an airplane's "black box", and it showed the girl made no attempt to slow down or brake). The hard-working, plodding, methodical nature of the DA's approach demonstrates what a good lawyer is all about. The flamboyance and superficial charm which too many clients tend to gravitate to might make a lawyer financially successful, but it does not make him or her a good lawyer.

On Foolish Wars

An article I read this morning in a recent issue of The Christian Science Monitor is ostensibly about Israel's war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, but it could just as easily apply to the US war in Iran, or to Russia's war in Ukraine.

A veteran of Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon says, "The lessons we learned then have not been implemented. We think that if we use force and more force, we will succeed, but in fact, force has not solved any problems anywhere. What is needed is...an agreement."

The founder of the movement Mothers at the Front, says that "at this point there is zero tolerance for the loss of Israeli soldiers' lives, especially as there is no faith in the government or Prime Minister Netanyahu, who in 2024 said Hezbollah had been set back decades".

A writer and filmmaker says, "I would be a lot happier with what we're doing if I trusted the government. This government is very good at starting wars. It's got no idea, or maybe no inclination, to finish."