My Encounter with the “Dark Side”

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency has catapulted a number of figures with controversial opinions and affiliations into the national debate. None of these members of Trump’s political team is more controversial than Stephen Bannon. Bannon, a former naval officer and investment banker for Goldman Sachs, has, in recent years, been a prominent voice at the Breitbart news website. He has been accused of using his position as a platform to further the agenda of a group known as the Alt-Right, which aims at a restoration of white nationalism in the United States. There are striking similarities between this movement and the “Know Nothing” Party of the 1850s, with the important exception that the Know Nothings never won a general election.

Bannon left Breitbart late last summer to become an advisor to then-candidate Trump’s campaign. He has now been named as “chief strategist” for the incoming administration. Senator Harry Reid, among others, has prominently criticized this move, accusing Bannon of being “a champion of white supremacists.” It remains to be seen whether president-elect Trump will stick with his choice, or yield to the voices calling for Bannon’s removal from the inner circles of power. For his part, Bannon gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter on November 18 outlining his agenda and political philosophy. His emphasis in the interview was on a robust economic nationalism, not race: ”Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement… It's everything related to jobs.” He insisted that his role was as the administration’s purveyor of “Darkness” (his choice of words) the person who would use uncertainty and fear like Darth Vader (his example) to push the administration’s agenda, and keep its opponents off balance. I have watched Bannon’s rise with great interest. I had never heard of him until early last summer, and even then knew very little.  Yet I had the experience of having spoken with Bannon directly.

Last June, when my new book, “Rendezvous with Death” was released, my publicist put together a promotional campaign. I gave interviews, wrote articles, and spoke at various venues. One of the interviews was with the radio station operated by Breitbart news. The only thing I had ever heard about Breitbart was earlier in the spring when a female reporter for the website claimed she had been physically accosted by Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager at an event in Florida. My publicist said that it would be a great opportunity to reach millions of potential readers at what she characterized as a conservative counterpart of The Huffington Post. The interview itself was pretty ordinary. Bannon demonstrated some knowledge of history (which, in my experience, journalists are not often very informed about) and had claimed that he had read both my new book, and my first book on the War of 1812. He didn’t ask me any questions regarding contemporary politics or race relations, and I had no reason to anticipate that he would do so. Basically, I just talked about the book:  a story of a small group of Americans who joined the French Army in 1914 to fight the Kaiser’s invading army, and in so doing helped defend France and civilization itself, in their view. The summer rolled on, and I watched with alarm as Donald Trump was nominated by the Republican Party as its candidate for president. Then, in August, I read about Stephen Bannon joining Trump’s campaign, and his connections to the Alt-Right. This movement’s racist positions were disturbing. It seemed strange that the person I had spoken with could support these types of views. He seemed so ordinary. I recalled how he had claimed to have read my books, and this also struck a discordant note.

Both of the books that I have written include passages that are very critical of America’s historical record on race. They also both emphasize the heroic contributions of African Americans during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, in the ultimately-doomed defense of Washington against the British in 1814, in the fight against Germany in the trenches, and in the skies over France, in 1914-1918. One of the main figures in my new book is the light heavyweight boxer, Bob Scanlon, of Mobile, Alabama, who became a close friend of poet Alan Seeger. He had made his way to Paris at a time when being black in America meant always having to live with the threat of mob violence just beneath the surface of American society. France, and Paris specifically, had given so much to Scanlon. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion in August, 1914, to repay this debt. Furthermore, the title of the fifth chapter in “Rendezvous with Death” is written in Arabic because it immortalizes a famous battle in Artois in 1915, in which the Americans fought side-by-side with Muslim soldiers from North Africa in a ferocious assault on Vimy Ridge. The Arabic printed on the chapter heading translates as “No Fear, No Pity”: the unit’s motto.  I wondered how Bannon could be the rabid racist he was being depicted as in the national media if he had, in fact, read my books and genuinely enjoyed them as much as he seemed. These two things just did not go together.

Perhaps he didn’t ever read my books. It’s been the rare journalist that I’ve encountered as an author, who has actually read one of my books. His enthusiasm might simply have been a courtesy to my publisher. Regnery History is, for the most part, a mainstream popular history list (it currently has a New York Times bestseller in a book called “Sgt. Reckless,” a true story about America’s version of “War Horse”). However, its parent company, Regnery publishing, is a conservative press that publishes more polemical books. I first became aware of Regnery History when it published Ronald Utt’s War of 1812 book, “Ships of Oak, Guns of Iron.” For a book on what is a relatively obscure topic for most readers, it did quite well. I thought the edition that they had come out with was very handsome. As an author of what was, frankly, a competitor book, “Knights of the Sea,” I have to admit I was a little jealous. When my agent received an offer from Regnery History for “Rendezvous,” and was able to get them to come up a bit, I took it. Reflecting back on the interview now, I think the possibility certainly exists that Bannon incorrectly assumed that I was a conservative author because Regnery publishing is the parent company of Regnery History. In fact, my publisher submitted my book to the Conservative Book Club hoping to reach a wider audience. From a marketing perspective this made some sense, since my new book is one that could appeal to both liberal and conservative readers. It deals with the polarizing topic of U.S. intervention in World War I (particularly as it related to the Seeger brothers, Charles and Alan), but it does not deal with any contemporary issues that polarize our country. Though I see nothing wrong with having a conservative political philosophy, my own politics lean more toward the center-left. In fact, on education and labor they are decidedly far left. So it is fair to say that Mr. Bannon made an incorrect assumption. And yet, I wonder.

One of the things that is abundantly clear in the Hollywood Reporter interview is how well-versed in history Stephen Bannon is. He has more than just a passing interest in it. How someone who is accused of spreading such vile views could endorse books with black and Muslim heroes is a riddle to me. I never met Bannon face to face, we conducted the interview on the phone, but I would be lying if I now claimed he was some sort of ogre. He wasn’t. He was a gracious and enthusiastic host. We want our villains to be sinister all the time, but the reality is they can be knowledgeable, even charming. I must say, I found his final comments in the interview that he gave very interesting indeed. In trying to explain how he envisioned his role in a Trump administration, he said he would be like “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.” As NPR’s Kai Ryssdal remarked, it’s certainly worth noting that Cromwell, Henry VIII’s political “hatchet man” was executed once he’d exhausted his usefulness to the king.