A week or so ago, on his last day as Attorney General, Bill Barr sent all of us at the Department of Justice, The Email. You may have a version of The Email where you work. For us, it’s part of a well-worn ritual that Attorneys General – and virtually all subordinate DOJ lawyers too – partake in as they end their time with the Justice Department. Sometimes, the ritual includes walking out of the Main Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue to applause; sometimes not. But always, at least since the 1980s, there is The Email. “Over the past two years, the dedicated men and women of this Department – including its operational components – have risen to meet historic challenges and upheld our vital mission to enforce the rule of law.” The very same day of Barr’s departure, the Criminal Division’s Acting Assistant Attorney General sent his own version. “Before I leave, I wanted to convey that it has been a true honor to serve alongside each of you here in the Criminal Division.”
Except for the truly cynical or grizzled — and sure, there are more than a few of them in government work — we all have loved this kind of thing. Just getting an email from the Attorney General or Assistant Attorney General is treat enough for most. But it’s usually more than that. As a young prosecutor, I was selected with a few others to meet Attorney General Dick Thornburgh in a small conference room as he was nearing the end of his time as AG. When he talked of service to the country, we all got choked up. Decades later, in 2015, when Eric Holder was about to leave the Department, I was standing in the back of the Great Hall for his farewell ceremony. It wasn’t just that President Obama came to say thank you, in all his grace and elegance, and speak of Holder’s heroic work as Attorney General. Aretha Franklin came too. American Royalty. As she sang America, The Beautiful, I watched — we all watched — and were moved to cheers and to tears. Watch yourself.
For those of us raised on Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers – or on any religious tradition really – The Email and the AG farewell ceremony are just further proof of the existential role of ritual and myth. The messages and stories of heroism and service provide a lens — sometimes, an admittedly distorting lens — through which we find meaning from our everyday work. They help us to make sense of all the toil and trouble and tragedy. They give us reason to get up each morning and keep going; they feed our hungry soul and sometimes help keep away despair.
In Washington, the signs of the myths are around every corner. Years ago, I went to a meeting in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office in the Russell Building. The walls in the office were covered, end to end, top to bottom, with framed pictures of the Kennedys; in Hyannis, at the White House, playing touch football, serving the poor . . . It was really something. There they were, generations of one family making their hero’s journey and asking not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country.
And we all are just arrogant enough to believe in these myths for ourselves, too. Lawyers and bakers; farmers and truck drivers. My prosecutor and public defender friends. The judges we appear before. The couple running the food cart in front of the courthouse. For each of us, the story is a bit different. But we all want it, and we all think we can do it. The white knight. The Black Panther. The Father. The Son. Chip and Joanna Gaines. Whatever.
For decades, I would have soaked up Barr’s message. “I have been continually inspired by your professionalism and outstanding work. As I did almost 30 years ago, I leave this Office with deep respect for you, and I will always be grateful for your devoted service to the Nation we love.” And consistent with the American myth, despite Campbell’s reminder to us that myth making is universal, it sure seems like we Americans have taken the belief to a new level. American exceptionalism. All men are created equal. The American Dream. The Founders. Bootstraps. All of it. And remarkably, it’s those often denied the promise of these myths who believe in them most.
But no matter how blind we can be to the flaws in the myths and of the mythmakers, there are limits to our faith, limits to our delusions. As lawyers who swear an oath to Equal Justice Under Law, four years of brazen, unaccountable corruption by the President gets you near those limits. And then, in the days surrounding Barr’s Email, the President bestowed pardons on the plainly undeserving, as well as some deserving too. He indemnified those who showed allegiance, pardoning congressmen convicted of corruption, Border Patrol agents who shot an unarmed, undocumented man, four men who killed dozens of innocent Iraqis, his campaign manager and advisors who were convicted of graft and obstructing justice, and his daughter’s father-in-law, well just because.
I try to imagine how those directly affected by these presidential decisions must be feeling. Of the children and grandchildren of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, Duncan Hunter and Charles Kushner; they must be thrilled, and maybe, too, filled with some unease, or more likely, just more grievance. Of Bob Mueller and his team of prosecutors and agents – of all the agents and prosecutors who seek justice every day, in courts across a continent, for our country and its victims – what has come of their hero’s journey? Of the families of the undocumented man shot by the Border Patrol agents or of the many Iraqi dead; what can they tell themselves to put down the pain rekindled by the President? For law students and young people across the globe, who desperately want to believe in righteousness and a path that leads to it; what now?
The myths that comforted so many of us, that drove many to service, are now seriously damaged. The hero’s journey has ended, for now, not in triumph, but vanquished, or so it seems, by those who see only transactions in human relations. The rituals, The Email, the ceremonies, they feel empty, despite the partial repudiation of the man who made it so. We must, I suppose, turn our faith to the resilience of the young, who will live, and grow, and instinctively reject what their elders have done. For the new President, Vice-President and Attorney General, for the Chief Justice, for all of us, the job is less policy or law or vocation, and more to build a new mythology; to tell — and live — a new story that can inspire the young to believe in justice for all, despite our history; and to help the rest of us to heal, and to believe evermore.
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