Yogi Berra and George Santayana understood the world in which we live. Berra was famous for observing, “It's like déjà vu all over again.” Santayana understood what Berra said and simply added, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We don’t have to look far to find an illustration of the relationship between those two quotes.
Enter Bob Woodward. Woodward is the archetype of not only Berra and Santayana’s quotes but also wrote, along with Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men, which outlined the decline and fall of Nixon. Over four decades later, Woodward is back. Or as Berra said, “It's like déjà vu all over again.” In addition, we haven’t learned from the past as Santayana warned us.
At Christmas in 1976, my father gave me Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days with this greeting written in the title page.
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This link under Critical Issue, “It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again” is my attempt once again to understand more fully our fake president, Donald the Dumb. For example, Mark Felt was Deep Throat for Woodward. When either Woodward or Felt wanted to talk, they could signal the other person. Woodward moved a flower pot containing a red flag on his balcony where he lived, or Felt used The New York Times in which his drew the hands of a clock to indicate the time of the meeting. I would like to know who Deep Throat is in Trump’s White House that sent the anonymous letter to The New York Times on September 5.
Nonetheless, that is merely an interesting question about Deep Throat today. In the next few months, I will address what I consider the important aspects of Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House. Woodward picked the term, fear, based upon an interview that Robert Costa and he had with Trump in 2016. Trump said, “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
Trump wields real power when it comes to the republicans in Congress. Nearly all of the republicans in Congress should recall what Shakespeare wrote about fear: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The brave experience death only once. Of all the strange things I've ever heard, it seems most strange to me that men fear….”
FDR also commented upon fear during his first inaugural message to the nation. “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
This link is to NPR’s discussion with Robert Costa regarding Bob Woodward:
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/04/644617864/what-bob-woodward-uncovered-while-writing-his-book-on-the-trump-white-house
This link is The Washington Post’s copy of Bob Woodward’s taping of a phone with Trump.
This link is to Bob Woodward’s webpage. http://bobwoodward.com/
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