Donald Trump said weather kept him from wreath-laying duty at the American cemetery outside Paris on the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War. But the rain-shy Make-America-Great-Again president managed to keep his Armistice Day date in Paris with Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who runs Russia the way Stalin did when John Steinbeck and Robert Capa toured the Soviet Union 70 years ago. Previously undisclosed details of KGB spying on Steinbeck and Capa emerged from a recently declassified document summarized in a Radio Free Europe report that should stir anyone anxious about Russian history repeating itself in the love affair between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (For a dose of relief, see Stephen Cooper’s blog post on finding solace in Steinbeck published by The Hill in 2016.)
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Two great pieces, this and Stephen Cooper’s in 2016. The Steinbeck lines Cooper quotes from The Grapes of Wrath should be on every politician’s must-read list.
Amen, Steve. And just so everyone can appreciate what you are talking about, here is part of the passage Cooper cites:
“[F]ailure hangs over the State like a great sorrow . . . . And the smell of rot fills the country . . . . There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success . . . . In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”