Today is Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday on 17 June 2021 when President Joe Biden signed into law Juneteenth National Independence Day, making it the 12th federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, the date Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered General Order No. 3 announcing the end of legalized slavery in Texas.

Although the war was over with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House two months earlier, Lee’s surrender was ignored in  Texas where many plantation owners refused to acknowledge it and vowed never to “release” their enslaved workers from bondage.

A week before Granger’s arrival, a brigade of the 25th Army Corps, comprised of more than 1,000 African-descendant soldiers, arrived in Galveston and captured the city. They chased the rebel government and the remaining Confederate soldiers into Mexico. The Black soldiers of the 25th Army Corps also spread the word about freedom to the enslaved Texas population.

When General Granger arrived with General Order No. 3, plantation owners were forced to read it to their enslaved men, women and children. Thus was born Juneteenth, which was first celebrated exactly one year after the final freeing of the last slaves in America. Fittingly, in 1980, Texas became the first state to promulgate Juneteenth as a state holiday. Eventually another forty-six followed, ultimately leading to Biden’s 2021 federal holiday promulgation.

I was reminded of this history this morning when I remembered that Donald Trump had, in an instance of impeccable timing, scheduled one of his wild and crazy rallies back in 2020 on Juneteenth. According to the Associated Press, Trump was unaware of Juneteenth, let alone the significance of it to the Black community, when he announced his rally’s date. Consequently, he did not anticipate the blowback he would get. But get it he did. Even from his own supporters.  In a rare instance of backing down, he moved the rally to the next day, the 20th, at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Having insulted the Black community with the date, Trump added further insult with the place — Tulsa.

For in African American history, Tulsa has a special place. On another day in June, the 1st June day of 1921, Tulsa was the site of the worst race massacre in American history.

The day before, police had arrested a young black man by the name of Dick Rowland for allegedly attacking a white woman in a Tulsa elevator. Soon after Rowland’s arrest, rumors began to spread about a group of whites planning a lynching party. To protect Rowland, African American World War 1 veterans surrounded the jail holding him. There was a standoff with a mob of whites. Somebody fired a shot, and a firefight ensued. The much larger white mob pushed the black vets all the way to Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black section.

Greenwood was the wealthiest Black neighborhood in the country. Oil had made it rich. Racism was about to destroy it. Over the course of the day, 6,000 homes and businesses and 36 square city blocks were turned to ash. Pilots of two airplanes dropped turpentine bombs on buildings, instantly igniting them. Three hundred African Americans were slaughtered, most thrown into mass graves. Not a soul was ever prosecuted for anything. Then Tulsa, population 100,000, swept it all under the rug. Two generations later nobody knew a thing about it. It was never taught in schools, no books were written, no oral history passed down. It was as if it never happened.

Tulsa’s current mayor, G. T. Bynum, wants to take the rug up to see what’s hiding under it. He’s committed to investigating what happened and determining accountability. He thinks he’s found a couple of the mass graves and is having them excavated. The goal is to at least identify as many victims as possible through DNA analysis.

Bynum also formed the City of Tulsa 1921 Graves Investigation Office, convened experts to help locate, identify and connect people today with those who were lost more than 100 years ago, and established the 1921 Graves Press Room to report on the effort.

In 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, President Biden, in an emotional speech in that city, said  he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long suppressed — moments of racial violence.

“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”

As far as I have been able to document, Donald Trump has yet to say one word in public about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. And what has he said about Juneteenth? Four years ago he denigrated it, saying, ‘nobody had ever heard of it’ before, despite it being celebrated by African Americans for 158 years. This year he has said nothing, although Janiyah Thomas, the Trump campaign’s director of Black media, did issue a statement commemorating the day, saying, “Today, we reflect on how far we [have] come as a nation and remember that light will always triumph over darkness. With President Trump’s leadership, our party will continue to advance the American dream for all people.”

If you believe that, I have some prime, Grade A land in Florida I would like to sell you — just as soon as the tide goes out.

From 2017 through 2020, I chaired the Board of what became a $2 billion Massachusetts non-profit health care company (I retired at the end of 2020). I had been a founding Director in 2003. All the company’s revenue came from Medicare and Medicaid.

The Directors were not paid. We did it for the love of the work, which was helping poor, sick people become more healthy, thereby lowering their health care costs. The company did well by doing good.

At one of our meetings, I think it was the one where our CFO reported annual revenue of perhaps $1.6 billion, I suggested to the group that it might be time to begin paying Directors a modest stipend.

There was instant silence. Then our General Counsel said, “Tom, the optics. We can’t take that risk.”

She was right. Upon further discussion and thought, we all agreed that the last thing we needed was to see the name of  the wonderful organization we loved on the front page of the Boston Globe above the fold — in a bad light. Optics.

This stipend discussion came to mind as I thought about the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.

ProPublica, an investigative journalism enterprise, like a dog with a great big, juicy bone, has, over the last year, uncovered at least 38 instances over nearly three decades of Mr. Crow hosting luxury vacations and events for Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who has distinguished herself as a far-right, extremist backer of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” insurrectional movement.¹ Crow’s generosity includes trips aboard his Bombardier Global 5000 private jet and his 162-foot super-yacht, as well as stays at resorts most Americans could never afford. Consulting with travel experts, ProPublica estimated if the Thomas couple had to pay for all this themselves, it would cost into the millions. Justice Thomas’s Supreme Court salary is $285,400.

The problem the ProPublica journalists pointed out is that Justice Thomas never reported any of this on his yearly financial disclosure forms he and the other Justices are required to file.

And that is when the fecal matter hit the whirring instrument full on.

Thomas defended himself by saying he followed the Court’s rules in everything he reported. He sought guidance from the Court’s ethics officials. He did nothing wrong.

But last week things got worse when Justice Thomas revealed he had “inadvertently” neglected to report two other extravagant vacations with Mr. Crow.

The reactions to this continuing story have been what you’d expect. Thomas haters had more grist for their mills, and his allies cried foul. And, while I confess to deploring the Justice’s ideological bent, as well as his wife’s extremist leanings, and while to this day I continue to believe Anita Hill, I thought the story could not possibly be as binary as was being portrayed; there must be more there.

And the “there” I was looking for was all about Harlan Crow, the Dallas billionaire who was being made out to be a corrupting influence eating away at Supreme Court decisions. I began to read everything I could about him, and have now come to believe that, although the optics are terrible and two smart people made grave errors in judgement, Harlan Crow is anything but a corrupting influence. I write this because of who Harlan Crow is and has been for his seventy-plus years.

In a May, 2023, interview with The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood shortly after the ProPublica story broke, Crow kept insisting, “that he has little power over the American political scene.” Even with his fantastic wealth, he said he was incapable of preventing the rise of the politicians he most abhors, in particular Donald Trump and his sycophantic MAGA followers in Congress. Harlan Crow, although a decided conservative — old school, through and through — is a committed “Never Trumper,” who has proudly self-diagnosed himself with “Trump derangement syndrome.” He is also a backer of the “No Labels” movement, a quixotic, even foolhardy, attempt to find someone, anyone politically center-right, who could run against both Biden and Trump and who could garner support across party lines. He also supports legal access to abortion.

In an email to Wood, Crow wrote, “Trump is a man without any principles at all. Bernie Sanders has principles; I just think they’re wrong. Trump doesn’t have any.”

And Crow is a strong supporter of U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine. “The Ukrainians’ courage is unique in recent history,” he wrote to Wood. “I believe they’ve earned the right to their own independence.”

Harlan Crow naively believes that a rich man and a Supreme Court justice can just be friends — with, he admits, some benefits only the super wealthy can offer. He sees nothing wrong with that.

Still, he admits his friendship with Thomas is indeed “ironic.” Crow grew up amid a family full of silver spoons. Crow’s father, Trammell, who died in 2009, was at one point described in the press as the largest private landowner in the United States. Clarence Thomas did not see an indoor toilet until late in childhood. Crow believes Thomas’s rise from poverty highly admirable and considers him “a person of the highest character.”

The two most important words in Harlan Crow’s personal lexicon are character and integrity. He staunchly maintains, “I have never, nor would I ever, think about talking about matters that relate to the judiciary with Justice Clarence Thomas. It would be wrong. From my point of view, that is off limits. He and I don’t go there.”

In an interview with Rose Hasham of the Harvard Business School’s Club of Dallas, Rasham asked him a series of rapid-fire questions she had prepared. Here are some of them with Crow’s instant answers.

I come away from this affair thinking two things. First, Harlan Crow, who calls himself “a regular guy,” is a decent, patriotic man of good character who was just looking for a friend, albeit with all the delusional naivete a supremely wealthy person can hold. Second, there is fault here, great fault, and it rests with Clarence Thomas, who, as a Supreme Court Justice, should have realized long ago how this would eventually unfold. Perhaps their relationship, begun more than twenty years ago, began innocently, and perhaps it still is, but, as our General Counsel reminded me when I was about to stray from the path of light, “It’s the optics, Tom. The optics.”

____________________

¹ On March 24th, the Washington Post and CBS News revealed they had obtained copies of twenty-nine text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, the Trump White House chief of staff, in which she militated relentlessly for invalidating the results of the Presidential election, which she described as an “obvious fraud.”

James Madison and America’s other Founding Fathers were educated elites who were deeply schooled in the ancient Greek and Roman concept of virtue.

Today, virtue embodies  the idea of personal morality. For the Founders this was not the case. To them, virtue was a critical concept that meant serving the public good. They derived this from their study of the Romans and Greeks as sifted through the lens of the eighteenth century’s Scottish Enlightenment, with a healthy dose of Baron de Montesquieu folded in. At Harvard, William & Mary, and Princeton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Madison studied Tacitus, Cicero and even Xenophon for guidance as they developed into the leaders they became. Each of them understood that virtue was a desired end to everything they did publicly. It was the greatest good for the greatest number. It became their North Star.

The same held true for George Washington, who never had the education the others had, but through experience and the thoughtful analysis of his own character, became the leader Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, for all their education, could never be. It was Washington who, at the age of 14, copied out a small tract of rules to live by, signed his name to it, and called it Rules of Civility. Washington embodied virtue without having had it drilled into him at a college he never attended.

But the Founders recognized that the democratic republic they were creating was susceptible to corrupt ideas and people. That realization is the basis for their fervent belief that for government to function as they had envisioned, they must create a series of checks and balances.

In Federalist 51, James Madison, looking through a glass darkly into the future, emphasized how checks and balances were crucial to offset the self-interest of factions. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote. He concluded that thought with one of his wiser observations, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Which brings us to 2024, Donald Trump’s felony conviction in New York, his nonetheless adoring MAGA cult, Washington’s sycophantic Republican politicians, and the nation’s greatest factional split since the Civil War.

Yet, the Donald Trump the world sees today, the Donald Trump schooled by his profiteering New York City real estate mogul father, the Donald Trump who became the megalomaniacal, narcissistic serial liar, would never have happened were it not for Roy Cohn.

Cohn, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy’s brilliant hatchet man, was supposed to have been washed up in 1954, after he and the witch-hunting McCarthy imploded in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy drank himself to death in the following two years, and Cohn fled Washington a pariah, his brief career in government service in ruins.

But over the next three decades Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker after returning to his hometown of New York, and he would remain so right up until disbarment and AIDS finally leveled him in 1986.

How did that resurrection happen? It’s true that the right-wing resurgence of the 1980s gave him a late-in-life boost, and his influence with Ronald and Nancy Reagan gained him access to the experimental medication AZT, which was denied most everyone else. As Frank Rich suggested in 2017, Cohn “may have been the only AIDS patient the Reagan White House lifted a finger to help.” But the question of how he both survived and flourished as a Manhattan eminence in the quarter-century between McCarthy and Reagan is curious, indeed.

And Donald Trump was his prime, A#1 protégée.

Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, and theft. Donald Trump also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets — legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty.

What Cohn taught Trump (who didn’t need much teaching) was that raw personal power could be leveraged for his own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity. At Cohn’s urging, Trump sought and won favors from some of the older, more powerful New York Democrats and Republicans who were essential to rising in a “New York City developers world.” With Cohn’s imprimatur, Trump gained easy access to the ostensibly nonpartisan press Establishment as well. Decades later, these same eminences would enjoy Trump’s hospitality at Mar-a-Lago.

And Cohn it was who got Barbara Walters, the journalistic celebrity other journalists called Cohn’s “platonic fiancé,” to put together in 1979 a promotional profile of his shiny young protégé for ABC’s 60 Minutes rival 20/20. Titled “The Man Who Has Everything,” it was, in the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio’s description, “wealth pornography.” Among other superlatives, it floated the dubious claim (for the 1970s) that “the Trumps are treated like American royalty.”

The truly sad thing to contemplate is that back then none of New York’s elites ever intervened to block or seriously challenge Trump’s path to power. They had plenty of provocation and opportunities to do so. Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York’s upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. Sound familiar?

So, here we are today. After decades of otherwise decent people doing nothing to stop the Donald Trump runaway train, the nation faces the prospect of Roy Cohn’s mentee, his unguided political missile, blowing to smithereens James Madison’s concept of ambition counteracting ambition. For all his brilliance, Madison, whose entire life was guided by the “virtue” of serving the public good, never saw this coming.

The sad fact is that the cancer now consuming Washington and the nation was incubated not in that city’s notorious “swamp” but in the loftiest Zip Codes of New York City.