‘The Last Honest Man’: Book on Idaho Senator Frank Church is a profile in courage | Opinion

There was a time when the U.S. Senate was known for its towering intellects and the courageous stands senators took without regard to their ability to get reelected. Those days are long gone, but remembering a time when the Senate was termed the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World offers hope that those halcyon days will return.

James Risen has written a book that takes us back to a time when intellect and integrity won out and an Idahoan by the name of Frank Church distinguished the work of the United States Senate.

“The Last Honest Man: the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and the Kennedys — and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy” covers what Risen calls a watershed moment in the history of U.S. intelligence.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter calls Church one of the greatest senators ever to serve the American people. His book reminds us of what it was like to have senators of Church’s stature as opposed to the middling talent too often seated in the body today.

In 1975, Sen. Frank Church chaired the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee. It would take 16 months, 126 committee meetings and 40 subcommittee meetings, 150 staff members and 800 witness interviews to uncover assassination plots by the CIA, surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and the FBI and links between the Kennedy family and the Mafia.

The committee would expose mishaps by the CIA and the Mafia in attempts to assassinate foreign leaders that remind readers of the late Jimmy Breslin’s title for his book on the Mafia: “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

To add to the drama of the day, some of those implicated in illegal activity and called to testify before the committee would meet untimely deaths that could hardly be written off as natural causes. Church’s dogged determination to hold U.S. intelligence operations accountable would result in legislation and executive orders that would restore accountability to U.S. intelligence operations and have a lasting impact to this day.

Anyone wondering whether Church had the stomach for the tough and courageous stands necessary for his leadership of the Church Committee just had to reflect on his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War.

He challenged President Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president of his own party, as LBJ sent even more troops to Vietnam. Many of Church’s fellow Democrats were hesitant to take on LBJ, who didn’t brook opposition to the war. But that didn’t stop Church from publicly opposing the war for what he believed was a fight between Vietnamese factions that could not justify the loss of so many lives.

Risen has written his book at a time when one of the two major political parties in America has been hijacked by a twice-impeached former president of the United States who has sullied the reputation of the U.S. abroad, encouraged coarse and uncivil conversations in the public square and debased the political culture from coast to coast. Republicans have marched in lockstep with Trump as he viciously attacks those with whom he disagrees and creates false narratives that he feeds to his vulnerable followers.

How refreshing to read of a U.S. senator who called the shots as he saw them, who reached across the aisle to create a bipartisan consensus to the 1975 investigations and then stuck by his promises not to pull any punches and go public with the facts, even those that embarrassed his own party.

Frank Church’s bipartisan roots ran deep. Oddly enough for a liberal Democrat born and raised in his state’s capital, Church grew up admiring Republican Sen. William Borah of Idaho who was an isolationist opposed to U.S. entry into World War II.

Church, himself, would serve as an intelligence officer in the Navy during the war. Later in life, when he would oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War that would claim the lives of 58,220 American soldiers, he would characterize America’s foreign entanglements like Vietnam as an example of an overextended national security state that engaged in conflicts abroad that he maintained were none of America’s business.

Church’s presidential aspirations complicated his role as the chair of a committee that was making its mark on Washington, and which required strong and courageous leadership undeterred by a presidential campaign. He grappled with doing both, but then postponed campaigning to focus on the investigation. No doubt, his standing in the field of 1976 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president campaign suffered by delaying campaign visits until he finished the business of the committee.

Sen. Church had to make some tough calls in chairing a committee that to this day is the gold standard for how integrity and courage should govern the business of congressional committees. John F. Kennedy may have authored “Profiles in Courage,” but he certainly couldn’t author anything on marital fidelity, as the Church Committee would learn in its investigations. Some aspects of Kennedy’s personal life would prove embarrassing to the legacy of the fallen president and politically damaging to the Democratic Party.

Republicans on the committee, to whom Church promised fair and objective investigations, were intent on assuring that the Kennedy discoveries were not swept under the rug by Democratic partisans on the committee. Ignoring how news of Kennedy affairs and Mafia relationships might affect his party, Church stuck to his word and never swayed from his commitment to a fair and bipartisan investigation.

You don’t have to read much of Risen’s book to ask in wonderment: What the hell happened to Idaho in the last four decades to wind up with two U.S. senators today who could only star in a book titled, “Profiles in Submission”? Submission, that is, to the followers of a twice-impeached president who dragged American politics into the gutter and taught those followers how to break laws and scoff at the norms of a democratic government that held this nation together for over 230 years.

Idaho’s Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo fall in line with most Republican officeholders today who put their fingers in the air to see which way the Trump winds are blowing, assuring their silence even as the nation’s classified documents are stashed in the bathrooms of Mar-a-Lago.

A library of books has been written on all that has gone off track with our politics today, even before Trump disgraced the office of the presidency.

But not enough has been written about those moments in recent history when profiles in courage arose from the thicket of partisanship and abuse of power. James Risen has done just that by chronicling the inside story of Frank Church’s successful effort to rein in agencies of national security that were out of control.

I think back to my younger days when I admired Frank Church from the distance of my Midwestern roots and realize how instrumental he was in defining the public service as a noble effort, the highest of callings that had young people squarely in its sights. I don’t have an ounce of regret for choosing my career path, and I hope this book will serve today’s youth in showing the way to a career in the public service that will be as rewarding and fulfilling as that of Frank Church.