If you muted the television, closed the door to keep out the muffles from the street and listened carefully the other day, you may have heard the voice of John Quincy Adams.
John Quincy Adams, you ask? You may not have heard of him since 11th grade American history. He was the sixth president, and after that, a mere member of the House of Representatives who became an outspoken anti-slavery voice — but if you strained your ears, you may have heard JQA himself.
I think I heard him, speaking across two centuries, stentorian in speech though reviled by his onetime Massachusetts allies and admirers for backing the 1807 embargo measure against Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. He was speaking about the reaction of Bay State Federalists to his act of apostasy: his support of the centerpiece of the foreign policy of Thomas Jefferson, who had defeated his beloved father, hero, mentor and example, John Adams, for president in 1800.
“Most completely was I deserted by my friends,” he said. “I can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence that my father and my mother did not join in this general desecration.”
Abigail and John Adams stood by their son, much the way Lynne and Dick Cheney stood by their daughter 215 years later.
John Adams had been president of the United States and had to swallow his son’s defection from the orthodoxy of the party that sent him to the White House as the first occupant of the new executive mansion. Dick Cheney was vice president of the United States and had to swallow his daughter’s defection from the orthodoxy of the party that sent him to the House, to the Pentagon, to the White House (as chief of staff to Gerald Ford) and to the vice-presidential mansion.
In time, the elder Adams did what seemed inconceivable when he was at the center of the arena; he engaged in a warm rapprochement and indescribably important correspondence with his onetime partisan rival, a kind of break with the Federalism that in any case was in eclipse.
In the time after his departure from Washington in 2009, the elder Cheney did what seemed inconceivable when he was at the center of the modern political arena; he sped away from the GOP that had been so much a part of his life and engaged in a Wyoming-style range war with the next president of his party, knowing that the Republican Party of Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and, alas, Dick Cheney himself, was in swift eclipse.
In time, the younger Adams ran for president and entered the White House in 1825. In time, the younger Cheney may well run for president, hoping she might enter the White House precisely two centuries after John Quincy Adams. She certainly suggested that the night she conceded her House race to Harriet Hageman, a natural resources lawyer whose campaign was managed by the firm of Bill Stepien, a former Trump campaign official who was a star witness for the January 6th committee.
Of course, such historical flights of mind are as dangerous as they are engaging. On the other side of Ms. Cheney’s view of the Republican Party is another story plucked from history, that of a Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, who, denied a second term, roared back four years later to reclaim the White House and become the only chief executive to serve nonconsecutive terms. The Adams fable on the Never Trump side has the Cleveland fable on the Trump Forever side.
But for now, the Cheney story resonates, and not because she has a plausible chance of being president — she doesn’t, despite the most earnest wishes and fondest hopes of those who once criticized her views on fossil fuels (she’s all in), guns (her campaign boasted she owns one and that she was “a proud cosponsor of the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act”) and abortion rights (generally opposed), but who revere her stand against former President Donald Trump.
She’s at the center of the American conversation because she is at the center of a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.
Oh, no, you say? Not another struggle for the soul of the Republican Party?
Wasn’t there one in 1952, when conservatives symbolized by Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio (“Mister Republican”) wrangled with moderates symbolized by Dwight Eisenhower (who had never even voted, let alone been a member of the GOP)? And one in 1988, when religious conservatives symbolized by the Rev. Pat Robertson (running on the right wing and a prayer) sought to topple the Republican establishment symbolized by the elder Bush (who would soon forget he had bid his party to “read my lips” and vowed never to increase taxes)?
And the big one, in 1964, when conservatives symbolized by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona (whose campaign slogan was “In your heart you know he’s right”) battled with moderates symbolized by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York (whose supporters said of Mr. Goldwater that “in your guts you know he’s nuts”)?
The most important moment that year came just days before the election, when the B-list actor Ronald Reagan delivered television remarks now celebrated in legend as the “A Time for Choosing” speech. That night he said:
“This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
Close the door, strain your ears and you can almost hear Mr. Trump deliver those remarks without altering even one of those words.
But — politics being irony conducted by other means — consider the identity of the guest at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library June 29. There to deliver the “A Time for Choosing” speech was — and how delicious this is, she must have thought — Liz Cheney. Here’s what she said:
“At this moment, we are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before — and that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional Republic. And he is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who have made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man.”
Get set for Cheney versus Trump: The Sequel. It’s already begun.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
