In the copious literature of the US capital, there is a sub-genre we might call “the saint in the swamp”. It focuses on the travails of an honest man sent to wade through the muck and slime of America’s political Babylon. The exemplar is, of course, the 1939 classic film Mr Smith Goes to Washington, with Jimmy Stewart as the lone man of integrity on the Potomac. But the archetype recurs at intervals in the culture, with the West Wing’s Jed Bartlet a more recent incarnation. And now we can add a new, non-fiction addition: the memoir of James Comey, the FBI director fired a year ago by Donald Trump.
Perennially cast as a boy scout – and in Washington that’s usually an insult – Comey establishes his goody-goody credentials early and often. We learn that, when he was in his 20s, people would clap eyes on the 6ft8in lawyer and instantly offer smalltalk about his presumed past as a player of college basketball. As it happens Comey hadn’t played, but in his youth he would let people think he had. “This was a seemingly small and inconsequential lie told by a stupid kid, but it was a lie nonetheless. And it ate at me. So after law school I wrote to the friends I’d lied to and told them the truth,” he writes. Later he gives the director of national intelligence a necktie. Or rather, “I regifted to him a tie my brother-in-law had given me … Because we considered ourselves people of integrity, I disclosed it was a regift.”
There’s plenty in that vein, including a declaration that Comey made a habit of using the staff canteen at FBI headquarters and that “I never cut the line … even when I was in a hurry.” Acting pre-emptively to ensure the reader is not left “mildly nauseous” – to quote Comey’s description of how he would feel if he had tipped the election to Trump – by all this virtue, the introduction warns us that the author has long struggled with flaws in his character that include being “stubborn, prideful, overconfident, and driven by ego”. The word “sanctimonious” appears in the book’s first paragraph.
All this moral goodness can make Comey an occasionally cloying companion. Nor is the book helped by its apparent dual function as a leadership manual aimed at those who tend to turn left when they board aircraft. There’s lots of management tips for the inspiration-hungry CEO, advice about getting the best from your team and an unfortunate tendency to describe anyone in even a vaguely senior organisational role as a “leader”.
Fortunately, though, Comey has quite a story to tell – and that’s even before we get to the Clinton and Trump chapters that have made this book an instant bestseller. His life has been full of drama. As a teenager, he and his kid brother were held at gunpoint in their home by an intruder who turned out to be a wanted serial rapist. He and his wife lost a baby to a preventable infection nine days after the child was born. In his early career as a prosecutor, Comey took on and defeated the Gambino crime family.
Yet the temptation is strong to read all this through the lens of what we know will follow. Indeed, the author pushes us in that direction. When he recalls some unhappy childhood memories and offers his thoughts on the psychology of the bully, we know who he has in mind. And he is not afraid to make the connection explicit. Cornered into a dinner a deux with Trump at the White House, and asked to profess his personal loyalty, he is reminded of “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony – with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man’”.
For liberal Trump-haters, reading A Higher Loyalty will be a conflicted experience. Comey was both hero and villain in 2016, on the one hand closing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of unsecured email and, on the other, revealing he’d reopened it again less than a fortnight before election day. He both saved her candidacy and buried it.
Accordingly, the Hillary chapters will be hard going for those who hoped she would become America’s first woman president. Yet Comey makes a good defence of his actions, showing how he was repeatedly confronted with a series of lose-lose choices. On the late October disclosure that the email probe was active again, he writes that he faced two doors: one marked Speak, the other Conceal. Had he failed to reveal that investigators were looking anew at Clinton’s emails, and had she been elected, Americans could justifiably argue that they had not voted in full possession of the facts. The FBI’s silence would have rendered Clinton an illegitimate president. (You can imagine what the Fox-Republican complex would have done with such a revelation.)
Even those who follow Comey’s logic – and most readers will, I suspect, conclude that his motives were pure – are likely to struggle nonetheless with the other crucial decision he took in 2016. If disclosure was right for Hillary, why was it not right for Trump? Why did the FBI not announce that it was also looking at Trump’s possible collusion with Russia? Here Comey’s reasoning is much less persuasive. He explains that the Trump/Russia investigation was at a much earlier stage, that they did not want to tip off possible suspects and so on. But given the stakes, and the consequences, it’s not really good enough.
The truth is, and Comey admits as much, he and others, including Barack Obama, were swayed by their assumption that Clinton was cruising to victory. That led Obama to keep back what he knew about Russian meddling in the election: why undermine Americans’ faith in their democracy when those Russian efforts were apparently making so little difference? And that same assumption shaped Comey’s decisions: he allowed himself to be more worried by questions of future public faith in a Clinton victory than by the risk that his actions might derail that outcome.
The Trump win and what followed provides the material for the book’s most riveting chapters. Comey has a keen eye and his observations of Trump and his enablers are sharp. He shows us attorney general Jeff Sessions, for example, under pressure, eyes down, darting from left to right. But it’s Trump we’ve paid to see.
Comey cannot disguise his loathing for the man, and the portrait he paints could not be uglier. He has Trump speaking in monologue, leaving no space for anyone else to say a word, a silence the new president takes as assent and complicity. Trump is ignorant – he blanks at Comey’s use of the word “calligrapher” – incurious and casually dishonest. And his ego is unbound. When Comey attended Oval Office meetings with Obama or George W Bush, the president would take a seat with the rest of the group: primus inter pares. But Trump remains seated behind his big desk, as if on a throne attended by courtiers. Comey puts that down to insecurity. A more confident man would not need to demonstrate his status so crudely.
Comey records such details throughout, noting who has emotional intelligence and who lacks it. He describes “the Washington listen”: not so much listening as waiting for your turn to speak. And he offers some fascinating observations on presidential humour. Bush could crack a joke, but it was usually at someone else’s expense. Obama laughed easily and never once used humour as a putdown. Trump, meanwhile, never laughs, not even once: to do so would require acknowledging the existence, and successful conversational play, of another person.
If the book has a hero besides Comey, it is Obama. A one-time registered Republican, Comey is bowled over by the Democrat who made him head of the FBI. In Obama he sees the wisdom and human sensitivity he aspires to himself. He recalls how, at a reception to mark Comey’s appointment, Obama posed for a photograph with Comey, his wife, the couple’s two daughters and their then boyfriends. At one point, Obama gestured to the boyfriends and said, “Hey, why don’t we take another without the guys. You know, just in case.” It was done playfully, but it was also wise. With all that must weigh on a president’s mind, he nevertheless had room to imagine the awkwardness such a photo could cause several decades later.
In Comey’s telling, Obama was something of a saint in the swamp. Obama valued what Comey himself cherished and regarded as near-sacred: the independence of US institutions and, more important still, the obligation to tell the truth.
There was a time when we might have teased such a man, mocking him as an earnest altar boy. But we don’t have that luxury now. In today’s world, truth has become a precious commodity and those ready to risk their careers to defend it are few and far between. Comey may be self-righteous, but in 2018 and given the alternatives, that has come to look like a rather tolerable vice.
• A Higher Loyalty by James Comey is published by Macmillan (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
