NON-FICTION: GETTING BACK AT DONALD
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership by James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the investigation and security agency of the United States, is a tough book to begin reading because almost the first one-third of the book is an exercise in — as the writer himself says — “vanity.”
This is how the first paragraph of the author’s note begins: “Who am I to tell others what ethical leadership is? Anyone claiming to write a book about ethical leadership can come across as presumptuous, even sanctimonious. All the more so if that author happened to be someone who was quite memorably and publicly fired from his job.”
That is probably what the author promised to a wide readership about his book: the dramatic firing from his job by one of the most powerful persons in the world, US President Donald Trump, who never gets tired of injecting drama into his actions and utterances.
The former FBI director reserves his choicest hits for the US president — but they only come after one ploughs through a third of the book
In essence, this is a book of explanations — explanations given by a person about why he was fired and why he did not speak about the investigation that the FBI was conducting into Trump’s alleged Russian connections when he should have, and why he spoke about the reopening of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email investigations when he should not have. By keeping quiet on the Trump investigation and speaking about Clinton’s, Comey is being blamed by many for Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential elections and for messing up Clinton’s chances. The author strives to justify his decisions on the principle that the FBI keeps itself out of politics.
Comey had the experience of observing from close quarters how three US presidents worked –– Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He seems to admire Obama and is not fond of Bush, but he hates Trump. He also seems to be fond of Clinton, despite being a Republican voter.
A Higher Loyalty provides glimpses into the goings-on inside the US corridors of power and the author’s own perspective of what he saw happening at the highest decision-making level in the US administrative hierarchy. But the reader reaches these inner sanctums of US power corridors only after having patiently leafed through almost 80 boring pages in which the author attempts to recount his journey to the position of the US deputy attorney-general. On the way, he presents himself as a person strictly dedicated to Boy Scouts’ ethics.
From the word go, Comey tries to turn a piece of non-fiction into fiction, succeeding at places but failing frequently. With every event he recounts, he tries to make his book into a whodunnit thriller. A third-rate thriller. A page-turner of dubious quality. And he paints every character in his story with a broad brush in order to make each one of them come alive and appear as plausible as possible. Some of them he portrays positively, some negatively and others in-between the two extremes. But he reserves the choicest adjectives for President Trump. He claims he has never seen President Trump laugh, making this characteristic of the president something of a gross personality flaw.
His very first encounter with Trump is full of salacious drama. He goes to meet the president-elect at Trump Towers along with all the heads of security who had unanimously chosen Comey beforehand to meet Trump alone to discuss an important matter. So, after permission is granted and his colleagues leave the room, Comey begins to summarise “the allegation in the dossier that he [Trump] had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and that the Russians had filmed the episode. I didn’t mention one particular allegation in the dossier — that he was having the prostitutes urinate on each other on the very bed President Obama and First Lady had once slept in as a way of soiling the bed ... Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that allegations weren’t true.”
Trump denied, asking whether he seemed like a guy who needed the services of prostitutes. He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault.