Editor’s note: Aside from a stellar list of writing credits ranging from Captain Phillips to The Hunger Games, Shattered Glass, Flightplan and others, Billy Ray co-created the highly popular Deadline Strike Talk podcast and writes occasionally for us. He also adapted the James Comey memoir A Higher Loyalty and directed both episodes of the CBS and Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule, which starred Jeff Daniels as Comey and Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump. The mini focused on the FBI director’s contentious run and eventual dismissal by first-term president Trump, and we could think of no one better to discuss the merits of the man and his recent indictment by Trump’s Department of Justice for allegedly making false statements.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy was touring a NASA facility, when he met a custodian pushing a broom. Kennedy asked the man “What do you do here?”
The custodian said, “I’m putting a man on the moon.”
That’s a story James Comey told often when he was Director of the FBI. It’s how he led.
Comey — an imperfect man, to be sure — has served our country as a prosecutor, then as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan, then as Deputy Attorney General, then as FBI Director. At each of those stops, he was both Kennedy and the custodian – a public servant to his core, dedicated to the mission of the institution for which he worked.
We used to give out gold watches to people who’d spent their lives that nobly. We named Post Offices after them, or Little League fields.
Today we indict them.
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I am not going to discuss the merits of the charges against him. You know, as I know, there is no case here. The White House knows that too. The prosecutor to whom it was assigned said so, and was promptly fired. At some point, those charges will be dismissed, or Comey will be exonerated – having spent a million dollars to defend himself – and the world will move on to another distraction.
No, the damage here won’t be suffered by Comey. It will be suffered by us.
Because America, whether we want to admit it or not, is made possible by that custodian pushing the broom. America is your neighbors volunteering to run local elections or joining the PTA or helping out with a Main Street parade or a county fair or a town-wide fish fry. Those people do all that because they, like the custodian, believe in the mission of public service.
Jeff Daniels, left, and Brendan Gleeson in ‘The Comey Rule’
Showtime
Not fear. Not political animus. Not hatred of one party or another. No, what they believe in is this country. Liberty and Justice for all. The idea that our greatness comes from our goodness. That’s why 16 million Americans served in World War II, and why 417,000 of them gave their lives to win it. It’s why we all held hands after 9/11, why people give blood and bag groceries for their neighbors after a natural disaster or donate time to their church or serve as a crossing guard. It’s why the librarian stays late to read to a kid, and why we root for anyone wearing red, white, and blue during the Olympics.
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It’s why the Freedom Riders went South to fight for Civil Rights in the 1960s, knowing they might never return. And why the right side won at Gettysburg and on D-Day, thus saving the world. It’s why teachers sometimes dip into their own salary to pay for their class’ supplies, why FBI agents – before their mission was rewritten – once risked everything to chase terrorists. These public servants, these patriots, these angels of democracy – whom this White House has cruelly and inaccurately called “The Deep State” – are America. In indicting James Comey, we threaten every single one of them.
He did his job. That job required him to defy a sitting president. It took courage and integrity. And for that he is now being punished.
Which makes us all less safe. And less free. A White House this reckless may very well come after you tomorrow.
Think that’s an overstatement? Consider this: While reading this brief column, have you had the thought, “Billy should be careful with what he says here. He could get in trouble”?
That is how upside-down things have gotten. No one should risk “trouble” for exercising their right to free speech. Freedom of Speech is far more American than a hundred-thousand-dollar-per-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago or trips to Epstein Island or bullying a network into cancelling Steven Colbert or bragging about having extorted $16 million from a movie studio.
Or militarily occupying Portland.
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We have seen the Department of Defense become the Department of War. Are we now going to remake the Department of Justice into the Department of Vengeance? I hope not. Political retribution is weakness masquerading as strength. And extremism, in all forms, is a lie.
When the mission is about America, you get Neil Armstrong. Absent that inspiration – that belief that you are part of something greater than yourself – we become drones, functionaries. We work in fear. We do the minimum and punch the clock and get the hell out. Remember the faces of the National Guardsmen that were sent to occupy Washington D.C. and wound up collecting garbage? They knew their patriotism was being misused – by their own government.
Faith in the mission makes people work harder, push harder and do better. Once, that faith inspired our nation to stand up to Russia and to feed and lead the world. Not anymore. A new kind of American smallness has killed all that – smallness like the phony charges against Comey.
As I said, Comey isn’t perfect. And you may hate the fact that his actions as FBI Director were a factor in the outcome of the 2016 election. I certainly do. But even his mistakes were committed in his desire to protect the integrity of the institution he’d been appointed to lead. It was that same desire that led him to challenge the president who is now persecuting him. Comey was, and is, doing what that NASA custodian was doing – serving his country with passion and pride. Pursuing the mission.
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There may yet be employees in the White House who believe in the Constitution – perhaps the custodians there still do, I don’t know. What’s clear is that the power of that institution is now in the hands of hacks who clock in every single morning determined solely to purge this country of any citizen who ever dared to challenge or dislike this president. They may very well silence and imprison thousands of those voices, maybe millions.
But they’ll never put a man on the moon.
If that worries you enough to raise your voice, the America you were born in may still be saved.
