Review: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James B. Comey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a bad book, not for many of the reasons I’ve heard in the many news reports surrounding it, but because it’s above all a bland book. As a writer – and Comey has become a writer in the process of putting this book together – Comey’s go-to move seems to be the platitude. I’ve noted a few, almost at random:

“Evil has an ordinary face.”

“I can’t explain God’s role in human history.”

“Intelligence is the ability to collect and report what the documents and witnesses say; judgment is the ability to say what those facts mean and what effect they will have on other audiences.”

So, looking at this as a book rather than a publishing moment, it’s hard to admire. Comey seems dazed, as if he hasn’t really processed the whirlwind of controversy that brought him down and as if he is still worried – along with many of us – that our intellectually limited and emotionally unstable President threatens our democratic institutions. I have a writing rule I take from my father: some of our most troubling experiences have to ripen before we can write about them. I wish Comey had had the chance to follow that here. He hasn’t moved far enough away from his experience to have learned much from it. What we get here is a digested diary rather than something that rises to the level of memoir.

But, of course, this book is primarily an event, not a work of literature. As such, it lets us get a sense of the mind of someone who, almost Zelig-like, has been in the press photo for some of the most controversial political decisions of the last twenty years. From the time he prosecuted Martha Stewart for insider trading, through his role in prosecuting Scooter Libby, his showdown with Dick Cheney loyalists about waterboarding (while Attorney General John Ashcroft lay delirious in a nearby hospital bed), his handling of the Clinton email scandal, and his sort-of standing up to Trump, he’s had a front-page presence at least every few years.

What’s striking in all that – as Comey himself admits – is that he is not an extraordinary man. He is, I am certain, above average intelligent and above average diligent, but he’s where he was in part because of his ability to survive in a cutthroat world. And his survival strategy is pretty clear: he has a capacity for being inoffensive, for giving the impression that he is acquiescing but simultaneously demonstrating that he followed his own conscience. He admits he learned much of that strategy as a child bullied at school and, in a harrowing instance, as an adolescent held at gunpoint during a home invasion.

I don’t mean to say that Comey comes across as spineless. If anything, it’s the opposite. He seems stiff in some of the ways photographs capture him. He’s a surprisingly tall man who doesn’t seem practiced in stooping.

Rather, what I do mean is that Comey has succeeded because he is an exemplar of a certain kind of decency. He believes in the power of institutions; he says repeatedly that he saw himself as a servant of the Justice Department or the FBI, that he refused to allow himself any partisan political leaning.

In ordinary times, I’d admire that decency. We need capable people to fill those institutions so that the rest of us can fight about the policies that will govern them. These are not ordinary times, though, as Comey himself admits.

As a result, the most uncomfortable parts of this book – as many reviewers have noted – come when Comey seems to stoop to some Trump-like moves, when he talks of the man’s orange skin, ignorance of the word “calligrapher,” or mob-boss aspect. But Comey doesn’t stoop well, and he doesn’t have a feel for the language of deep criticism.

The bottom line, then, is that Comey is as ill-suited to shed fresh light on the Trump experience as he was to survive it. He is a creature of institutions while Trump has set himself against institutions. He is scrupled and calm, showing his passion through a life-long commitment to the rule of law. Meanwhile, Trump instinctively pushes against structures, against anything that might constrain him or cause him to confront his self-contradictions and outright fictions.

James Comey had it in him to be an exemplary director of the FBI, to be someone who gave his full mind to pursuing justice in an impartial way and to diversifying the Bureau’s workforce so that it could do that work even better in coming generations. He is, however, just one of the many timbers left in the hurricane wake of a man who is intent on preserving his own power by undermining everything Comey represented. As this book arrives, the storm is still raging, and his analysis – even the language he has for stating that analysis – is bland by comparison.


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