https://themessenger.com/opinion/the-last-honest-man-invokes-a-bygone-era-with-lessons-for-today

From The Messenger 5/22/2023

As I sat at the Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics and Prose this week listening to Jim Risen and his son Tom describe their new biography of former Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), it took me to what seemed a bygone era.

Their book, “The Last Honest Man – The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and the Kennedys, and one Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy,” is a classic lesson in honesty, integrity and — most important — a working system of holding government and people accountable.

Joined by others who worked for Sen. Church and many who served in governments past, the evening brought back a time and place when office holders challenged past wrongs and tried to make them right, worked to solve the critical problems of the time in a collegial and bipartisan manner, and trusted in truth and the good motives of their adversaries and their friends, despite their political party and their differences.

Jim and Tom Risen described the life and times of a man reared in the mountain west, a man of extraordinary talent, hardened by war like so many others, who got into politics to make a difference. Frank Church was not without fault or ambition, but like others of that era, he was willing to take great political risks to do what he felt was right and important for his country. He and his colleagues came out of World War II changed, and his battle with serious cancer in his early 20s convinced him that life was a gift — and he would not waste it.

Throughout his 24 years in the Senate, Church took on the toughest of fights: civil rights, protecting the environment in a natural resource state, early opposition to the Vietnam War, investigating bribery and multinational corporations, fighting for arms control and passing the Panama Canal treaties. Jim and Tom Risen describe what he did and how he did it, at a time when government worked.

Church is best known for his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee, on which I served — a special committee that investigated decades of abuse, including assassination plots, coup attempts, spying on Americans, collusion with the Mafia and wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights and anti-war leaders. Church served in intelligence in WW II, and the Risens describe how this affected his perspective on what was right and proper and effective for America in the Cold War era.

That period — one during which many of us gathered at Politics and Prose served in government — was brought back to life by the discussion of this book. The differences are stark. Today, we watch as a debt-ceiling fiasco threatens the economic health of the world; we watch as demagogues take over congressional committees (and tell us theirs is a “new Church Committee”); we watch as the Capitol building, where we worked, is attacked by a mob following a president’s lies about an election.

This is not the America that Frank Church and so many of his colleagues fought for and led during critical times. This is not the democracy that gave us pride, not the system of cooperation and compromise that corrected wrongs and served to produce solutions.

It’s difficult now to acknowledge that what we are going through is not normal.

We do need to learn the lessons and absorb the history; we do need to look to the example of leaders such as Frank Church if we are going to save our country. We should all read the book and start now.

Peter Fenn is a long-time Democratic political strategist who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was a top aide to Sen. Frank Church and was the first director of Democrats for the 80s, founded by Pamela Harriman. He also co-founded the Center for Responsive Politics/Open Secrets. He serves on the board of the Frank Church Institute. Follow him on Twitter @peterhfenn.