president

The Danger of Being Inured to the Status Quo

February 18, 2026 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

We have all had the experience of staying a few days in a hotel — say on holiday — which becomes home; quickly, it becomes familiar. Individuals adjust to change. People who come into money get used to being well-off, and people who lose everything get used to that.

So, too, with nations. They adjust with this attitude: That is just the way it is.

The danger to America is that we will adjust, take the aberrations of today as the norm, and that after this period of presidential excess, we will be inured to presidential excess.

We will expect future presidents to skirt the Constitution or ignore it, and to consolidate the dangerous concept of a unitary executive — where the president is all-powerful and Congress is a functionary, often subservient.

The danger is acceptance. When something is accepted, it becomes the new normal, ensconced and hard to remove. The status quo ante isn’t a guaranteed consequence of the next election.

Over 25 years, I went to Ireland once a year to attend an Irish summer school, akin to a Renaissance Weekend here or a mini-Davos. When I started traveling to Ireland, it was one of the poorest nations in Europe.

What was most disturbing wasn’t that Ireland, the mother-nation to so many Americans, was poor, but rather the terrible acceptance that poverty was inevitable, and that to be a poor nation was the destiny of Ireland.

Then came the Celtic Tiger period, 1995 to 2007. The computer industry set Ireland on the road to global success, and the Emerald Isle became the Golden Isle, basking in prosperity. Ireland gained swagger and became a self-confident place that could show the world. This adjustment came quickly.

At the end of World War II, Argentina had the fifth-largest economy in the world. It had a high per-capita income, and its currency was as stable as the U.S. dollar. Now, it ranks 24th in the world by nominal GDP, and 70th by per-capita income, although it is the second-largest economy in South America, after Brazil.

Worse, I have found on visits to Argentina that it has come to accept its status as a permanent economic basket case with inept political leadership.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been on an upward economic path. It also assumed a world leadership role that made it the envy of the world, the place to emulate.

And for an individual, it was the place to migrate to. Talent and skill poured in, and the United States led the world in medicine, other sciences and technology. Also, in movies and popular music.

A second upward path began in the early 1960s with the civil rights movement, which opened a segregated society to all and became a beacon for the world.

Recently, on the PBS television program “White House Chronicle,” Freeman Hrabowski, spoke with me and my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell, about his astonishing ascent from a child who was imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963 for marching for access to a better school to his being sworn in as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“In 30 years, I went from being denied access to a White university, the University of Alabama, to becoming president of a mostly White university,” he said.

Civil rights and human rights were a second trajectory that took the United States to a special place in global esteem. A place of decency, values and hope. We exported those values and promoted them universally, until last year when they were abandoned.

We had accepted that we were a generous nation, concerned with the condition of the world outside our borders and anxious to share our bounty and to help.

The very concept of who we were was tied up with the sense of America’s mission: a force for good at home and abroad; first to seek peace, to further self-determination and healing. America was beautiful in that mission.

Now, we are America the transactional. However, transactions by their nature aren’t generous; they aren’t uplifting. They don’t boost the spirit or inspire the future; they don’t soar. Instead, they say over and over again: “What is in it for me?”

That isn’t America, which is a great country, and a greater state of mind.

It Isn’t the Stress That Gets To Air Traffic Controllers

November 14, 2025 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

If you don’t know about the stress air traffic controllers are reportedly under, then maybe you are an air traffic controller.

The fact is that air traffic controllers love what they do — love it and wouldn’t do anything else.

The stress comes with long hours, Federal Aviation Administration bureaucracy and a general lack of recognition, not with moving airplanes safely about the sky.

Of course, I haven’t interviewed every controller, but I have talked to a lot of them over the years and have been in many control towers.

Controllers love the essentiality of it. They love aviation in all its forms.

They love the man-and-machine interface, which is at the heart of modern aviation. They love the sense of being part of a great system — the power, the language, the satisfaction.

They love the trust that every pilot puts in them. It is rewarding to be trusted in anything, but more so when the price of failure is known.

Nearly everything that is true of pilots is true of controllers. At its heart, the job is about flight, arguably the greatest achievement of mankind, the fulfillment of millennia of yearning.

There is a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill that was actually said by a pilot and insurance executive in the 1930s: “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”

That is true both of pilots and those at the consoles on the ground, who co-fly with them.

After President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers in 1981, some of the saddest people I knew were air traffic controllers.

They were denied the right to do the work they loved and suffered immeasurably for that. A few were able to get work overseas, but mostly it was a light that went out and stayed out.

I ran into one former controller, working as a baggage handler. He said he just wanted to be near the action even if he couldn’t go into the tower anymore and do his dream job.

My only major criticism of Reagan has always been that he didn’t rehire the strikers after he had won, proving that they were wrong in striking illegally and that they weren’t above the law.

Reagan was a compassionate man, but he showed the controllers no compassion. I think if he had understood the psychological pain he had inflicted, he would have relented.

Controllers have explained to me that if a controller finds the job stressful, then he or she shouldn’t be a controller.

About one-third of the candidates for controllers’ school, most of whom are trained at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City flunk out.

It takes longer to train a controller than a pilot — maybe not to work in the cockpit of a passenger jet, but certainly to fly an aircraft, including jets. It takes at least four years of schooling, simulator and then supervised controlling to qualify to be an FAA controller. Some controllers come from the military.

There is just one movie about air traffic control, released in 1999, “Pushing Tin.” It flopped at the box office but has a cult following among pilots and controllers. It is funny and accurate. Pushing tin is controllers’ jargon for what they do: push airplanes around the sky.

The fabled stress, in my mind, is the adrenaline factor. It is present in air traffic control, and it is present in the cockpit of everything that leaves the ground, from single-engine Cessnas to Boeing 777s — and in ATC facilities.

It interests me that pilots never mention stress. It is, however, always mentioned by people writing about or talking about air traffic control. I would venture that the most stress controllers deal with is the stress imposed on them by the FAA.

I will aver that in the government shutdown, the largest source of stress for controllers was how they were going to put food on the table and pay their bills, not the stress they feel at the console, pushing tin and keeping flying safe. Now they are stressed about back pay.

The Problem of Old Leaders — Churchill’s Sad Last Years in Office

May 23, 2025 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Old age is a thorny issue. I can attest to that. As someone told my wife about me, “He’s got age on him.” Indubitably.

The problem, as now in the venomously debated case of former president Joe Biden, is how to measure mental deterioration. When do you take away an individual’s right to serve? When do you restrict choice and freedom by the calendar and not by some other measure? Can you oblige the old to pass arbitrary competency tests for everything from driving to running a country?

Part of the answer in the Biden case, and many things, is a vigorous and fearless press. Contrary to the current allegations that Biden’s health decline was hidden by the press, nothing was hidden except by those close to him.

Anyone who watched Biden on television or heard him speak knew he was having problems. Months before the last election, I wrote a column about it. And so did others. Nothing was hidden from anyone except the full severity of the decline, which might have been buried by Biden’s family and his White House staff.

Supposing they had felt strongly that the 46th president should step aside, how would that have been managed if Biden had refused their entreaties? How do we know what his wife, Jill, said to him privately? Biden had reason to go on to protect his son, Hunter, who was the victim of considerable political animus.

Most of all, Biden probably wanted to finish what he saw as the business he had started: promoting people he felt had been unfairly left out. The symbols of that were Vice President Kamala Harris and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Before Biden ran for president, I chatted with him at a reception by a brain cancer support group in Washington. I had interviewed some of the doctors involved on television, and I went away thinking how likable Biden was and what a pity he was too old to run for president.

But he did run, and the Biden presidency was a success, measured by the economy, peace and optimism about the future. By the end, it might have been running on inertia. Only those close to Biden know how much staff work was done what Biden directed.

Biden wasn’t the only man with trouble at the end of a successful political career. So did a much greater man, a true figure of destiny: Winston Churchill.

As the late historian and philosopher Roger Scruton courageously pointed out, the second Churchill administration was a disaster. The man who stepped into the prime minister’s role in 1951 wasn’t the great statesman who stepped into the same office in 1940, aged 65.

Ten momentous years had taken its toll. This was an old, forgetful man whose constant drinking added to his failing powers.

As he had during the war, he would call the news desk at The Daily Express every night and inquire, “What’s the news?” During his second term as prime minister, it is reported that he was often confused and didn’t seem to know what day it was. But he was Winston Churchill, the man who had saved Britain. And no one, no journalist on The Daily Express, was going to whisper that Churchill was failing.

Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of The Daily Express and close friend and ally of Churchill, did tell the paper’s editor, Bob Edwards, “I’m dying from the legs down and Churchill is dying from the neck up.”

Many problems in Britain weren’t addressed by the prime minister and his government and were to haunt Britain until Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Foremost among these were a lack of any immigration restrictions for people from the former empire and trade union power allowed to grow unchecked.

The Churchill case is instructive. Had there been an age limit of 65 for prime ministers, as many companies have for their top executives, Churchill wouldn’t have been allowed to assume office when he was so needed in 1940.

Candor from loved ones may be the best defense against senility in leadership. After all, children do take the car keys from old and failing parents, or should.

If you love what you do, is it right for society to force retirement? Noel Coward, the prolific British playwright, actor and director, said, “Work is more fun than fun.” So, apparently, is high office.