So begins the NY Times piece on panic spreading on Capital Hill as the Russians make public yet another luminaries personal emails:
WASHINGTON — A panicked network anchor went home and deleted his entire personal Gmail account. A Democratic senator began rethinking the virtues of a flip phone. And a former national security official gave silent thanks that he is now living on the West Coast.
The digital queasiness has settled heavily on the nation’s capital and its secretive political combatants this week as yet another victim, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, fell prey to the embarrassment of seeing his personal musings distributed on the internet and highlighted in news reports.
“There but for the grace of God go all of us,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama who now works in San Francisco. He said thinking about his own email exchanges in Washington made him cringe, even now.
“Sometimes we’re snarky, sometimes we are rude,” Mr. Vietor said, recalling a few such moments during his time at the White House. “The volume of hacking is a moment we all have to do a little soul searching.”
The Powell hack, which may have been conducted by a group with ties to the Russian government, echoed the awkwardness of previous leaks of emails from Democratic National Committee officials and the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan. The messages exposed this week revealed that Mr. Powell considered Donald J. Trump a “national disgrace,” Hillary Clinton “greedy” and former Vice President Dick Cheney an “idiot.”
I’ve been struck in the book Founding Rivals with the indirect, veiled and fussy way the great men and women of the late 17th Century wrote about themselves. I suppose being crass would have gotten them into duals. Here’s how James Madison wrote to a friend explaining that his girl friend had dumped him, “a disappointment in some circumstances.”
In the books I read about LBJ by Robert Caro I was fascinated at how he eschewed the use of paper to communicate. He was on the phone all day and all night. Nothing could be traced. How fortunate for historians that once he became President all his phone conversations were recorded.
I long ago made up my mind that I would write all my emails as though they would be made public. When, seven years ago, I was in a seemingly life and death struggle with Johnston Controls my emails were subpoened. It took me a week to go through them but with my techy son’s help I gladly sent them over a thousand emails which were then considered public property ( I guess ) and quoted out of context in the Duluth Budgeteer to make me seem brutish. I derided the criticism I knew that lots of my allies in Let Duluth Vote were in fear about their emails to me being read by JCI’s attorneys. In this they were like all of today’s poobahs in Washington D.C.
Honestly, I am pleased to know that General Colin Powell described Donald Trump as a “disgrace.” I have always valued Powell’s opinion and this hack has only validated that opinion.
BTW I rediscovered this old promise I’d written in the blog seven years ago. I still hold by it:
I’ll reserve my hardest and most caustic comments for big shots, chronic liars and the like. I will accept criticism leveled at me from people whose genuine motivation is their children’s welfare with patience and my rebuttals will be tempered with fairness and objectivity.
