IT ALL HAPPENED so fast.

The pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus hit Southern California and the rest of the country with a rate of acceleration that, for a time, left colleges like Pomona announcing new and sweeping steps seemingly every day. Advisories quickly became urgent warnings and unprecedented changes. Within the period of a few days in March, the College went from limiting travel to closing events to the public to canceling them entirely to sending most of its students and employees home to work and study remotely for the duration. As this magazine went to press, many decisions about the future remained to be made. But in the meantime, here’s a look back at the pandemic semester of Spring 2020.

The Pomona-Pitzer baseball team defeats Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in one of the last public events held on campus before the cancelation of all spring semester events.

A Pandemic Timeline

Jan. 24, 2020

Pomona sends out the first of several health and travel advisories to the campus community about the expanding global epidemic caused by the novel coronavirus shortly after the first case is reported in the United States.

Feb. 11, 2020

The disease caused by the novel coronavirus is named COVID-19.

March 3, 2020

The Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) reaches out to faculty about contingency plans in case the College needs to switch to remote instruction. The College seeks to curtail air travel by limiting sponsorship or reimbursement to trips that are deemed essential.

March 9, 2020

ITS holds the first of many workshops for faculty on distance learning technologies. One of the last public events to take place on campus is a baseball game between Pomona-Pitzer and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps at Pomona. Pomona-Pitzer wins 9-3.

March 10, 2020

All events are closed to the public, and most are canceled. All internal gatherings are limited to no more than 100 participants.

Pomona students pick up boxes and other packing supplies at Bridges Auditorium as they prepare to leave campus.

March 11, 2020

Pomona informs its students that they must leave campus by March 18 and should not expect to return before the end of the semester. Spring break is extended to two weeks, after which the College plans to resume its class schedule through remote instruction. All spring events are canceled.

March 12, 2020

Pomona announces that all student workers will continue to be paid whether or not they are able to continue their employment by remote means. Students who cannot leave campus are asked to submit a petition to stay.

March 13, 2020

Students begin to leave campus.

March 14, 2020

The College announces a prorated refund of room and board for all students leaving campus, as well as covering all approved travel costs and other forms of emergency financial assistance for departing students.

March 15­, 2020

The CDC issues an advisory calling for no gatherings of 50 or more people.

March 16, 2020

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issues an executive order urging people aged 65 and older or suffering from certain health conditions to shelter at home.

A Dining Service employee serves a student with a salad in a “Grab-and-Go” container.

March 17, 2020

Pomona closes all academic buildings and expands its work-from-home policy. The College’s Dining Service switches to a “Grab-and-Go” system in which the students remaining on campus receive their meals in take-out containers and­ return with them to their rooms­.

March 18, 2020

A special, two-week spring break begins. Most students have left campus by this date. Slightly more than 80 students who are unable to leave for various reasons end up staying on campus.

March 20, 2020

In response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s sweeping new stay-at-home order, Pomona asks all staff members who can work from home to do so. Pomona makes Zoom accounts available to all students, faculty and staff and holds first training in using the online conferencing platform.

March 24, 2020

All students remaining on campus move into the Oldenborg Center residence, where they can all have singles and space for social distancing.

March 30, 2020

Classes resume with remote instruction. The College announces that, respecting the wishes of the Class of 2020, the year’s Commencement ceremony will be postponed until a future date to be determined.

April 13, 2020

The College estimates the extra cost, to date, of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic at between $6 million and $7 million, including refunds of room and board and financial support for departing students.

April 20, 2020

The faculty votes to grade all Pomona students for spring 2020 semester classes on a P (Pass), NRP (No Record Pandemic) or I (Incomplete) basis.

April 22, 2020

The College launches a new program for the summer of 2020 to provide multi-week fellowships for students to work on virtual research projects, either independently or in partnership with faculty. The program is called RAISE (Remote Alternative Independent Summer Experience).

May 7, 2020

The College announces a variety of contingency plans for the start of fall semester but notes that final decisions may not be made until early July.

May 16, 2020

The pandemic-disrupted spring semester of 2020 comes to a close.

May 21, 2020

With families across the nation and around the globe facing a major economic downturn, the College freezes 2020–21 tuition at 2019–20 levels.

June 1, 2020

Pomona suspends all study abroad programs for the fall semester of 2020.

Writing this book was an emotional process. Immersing myself in extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness at a time of extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness was no easy thing. At various points, I had to walk away and get some distance. At other points, unfolding events sent me scurrying to my keyboard to hash things out. Of course, there are worlds of difference between the pre–Civil War Congress and the Congress of today. But the similarities have much to tell us about the many ways in which the People’s Branch can help or hurt the nation.

Many years ago, when I began researching this book, it was far less timely and far more puzzling. There seemed to be so much violence in the House and Senate chambers in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Shoving. Punching. Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen brawling in bunches while colleagues stood on chairs to get a good look. At least once, a gun was fired on the House floor. Why hadn’t this story been told?

That question is answered in the pages that follow, which reveal for the first time the full scope and scale of physical violence in Congress between 1830 and the Civil War. Yet even knowing that answer, I didn’t fully grasp how such congressional fireworks could remain undercover until last year. In a long and intimate Politico interview, former House Speaker John Boehner revealed that some time ago, during a contentious debate over earmarks (items tacked onto bills to benefit a member of Congress’s home state), Alaska Republican Don Young pushed him up against a wall in the House chamber and threatened him with a knife. According to Boehner, he stared Young down, tossed off a few cusswords, and the matter ended. According to Young, they later became friends; Boehner was best man at Young’s wedding. And according to the press reports that addressed the incident, it wasn’t the first time that Young pulled a knife in the halls of Congress. In 1988, he reportedly waved one at a supporter of a bill that would have restricted logging in Alaska. (He also angrily shook an oosik—the penis bone of a walrus—at an Interior Department official who wanted to restrict walrus hunting in 1994, but that’s an entirely different matter.) Two of these confrontations made the papers when they happened, but only recently has the Boehner showdown come to light. Remarkably, even in an age of round-the-clock multimedia press coverage, what happens in Congress sometimes stays in Congress.

From a modern vantage point, it’s tempting to laugh—or gasp—at such outbursts and move on, and sometimes that’s merited. (The oosik incident is definitely worth a chuckle.) As alarming as Young’s knifeplay seems, it says less about a dangerous trend than it does about a somewhat flamboyant congressman.

And yet congressional combat has meant much more than that— especially in the fraught final years before the Civil War. In those times, as this book will show, armed groups of Northern and Southern congressmen engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the House w ­ floor. Angry about rights violated and needs denied, and worried about the degradation of their section of the Union, they defended their interests with threats, fists, and weapons.

When that fighting became endemic and congressmen strapped on knives and guns before heading to the Capitol every morning—when they didn’t trust the institution of Congress or even their colleagues to protect their persons—it meant something. It meant extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate. It meant the scorning of parliamentary rules and political norms to the point of abandonment. It meant that structures of government and the bonds of Union were eroding in real time. In short, it meant the collapse of our national civic structure to the point of crisis. The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.

The fighting wasn’t new in the late 1850s; it had been happening for decades. Like the Civil War, the roots of congressional combat ran deep. So did its sectional tone and tempo; Southern congressmen had long been bullying their way to power with threats, insults, and violence in the House and Senate chambers, deploying the power of public humiliation to get their way, antislavery advocates suffering worst of all. This isn’t to say that Congress was in a constant state of chaos; it was a working institution that got things done. But the fighting was common enough to seem routine, and it mattered. By affecting what Congress did, it shaped the nation.

It also shaped public opinion of Congress. Americans generally like their representatives far more than they like the institution of Congress. They like them all the more if they are aggressive, defending the rights and interests of the folks back home with gusto; there’s a reason why Don Young’s constituents have reelected him twenty-three times. The same held true in antebellum America; Americans wanted their congressmen to fight for their rights, sometimes with more than words.

This was direct representation of a powerful kind, however damaging it proved to be. The escalation of such fighting in the late 1850s was a clear indication that the American people no longer trusted the institution of Congress to address their rights and needs. The impact of this growing distrust was severe. Unable to turn to the government for resolution, Americans North and South turned on one another. The same held true for congressmen; despite the tempering influence of cross-sectional friendships, they, too, lost faith in their sectional other. In time, the growing fear and distrust tore the nation apart.

Toward the start of my research, I discovered poignant testimony to the power of congressional threats and violence. It took the form of a confidential memorandum with three signatures on the bottom: Benjamin Franklin Wade (R-OH), Zachariah Chandler (R-MI), and Simon Cameron (R-PA). And it told a striking story.

One night in 1858, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron—all antislavery—decided that they’d had enough of Southern insults and bullying. Outraged by the onslaught of abuse, they made a difficult decision. Swearing loyalty to one another, they vowed to challenge future offenders to duels and fight “to the coffin.” There seemed to be no other way to stem the flow of Southern insults than to fight back, Southern-style. This was no easy choice. They fully expected to be ostracized back home; in the North, dueling was condemned as a barbaric Southern custom. But that punishment seemed no worse than the humiliation they faced every day in Congress. So they made their plans known, and— according to their statement—they had an impact. “[W]hen it became known that some northern senators were ready to fight, for sufficient cause,” the tone of Southern insults softened, though the abuse went on. The story is dramatic, but what affected me most when I first read it was the way the three men told it; even years later, they could barely contain themselves. “Gross personal abuse” had an impact on these men, and it was mighty. Not only did it threaten “their very manhood” on a daily basis, but by silencing Northern congressmen, it deprived their constituents of their representative rights, an “unendurable outrage” that made them “frantic with rage and shame.” To Wade, Chandler, and Cameron, sustained Southern bullying wasn’t a mere matter of egos and parliamentary power plays. It struck at the heart of who they were as men and threatened the very essence of representative government.

They had to do something. And they did.

These men were doing their best to champion their cause and their constituents in trying times, and they said so in their statement. They had written it “for those who come after us to study, as an example of what it once cost to be in favor of liberty, and to express such sentiments in the highest places of official life in the United States.” They were pleading with posterity—with us—to understand how threatened they had felt, how frightened they had been, how much it had taken for them to fight back, and thus how valuable was their cause. In a handful of paragraphs, they bore witness to the presence and power of congressional violence.

When I first read their plea, it brought tears to my eyes. It was so immediate and yet so far away. It was also stunningly human, expressing anger and outrage and shame and fear and pride all in one. Not only did it bring the subject of this book to living, breathing life, but it showed how it felt to be part of it. By offering a glimpse of the emotional reality of their struggle, Wade, Chandler, and Cameron opened a window onto the lost world of congressional violence.

The lessons of their time ring true today: when trust in the People’s Branch shatters, part of the national “we” falls away. Nothing better testifies to the importance of Congress in preserving and defining the American nation than witnessing the impact of its systemic breakdown.­­

Joanne Freeman ’84 is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and of American Studies at Yale University.

“Author’s Note” from THE FIELD OF BLOOD: VIOLENCE IN CONGRESS AND THE ROAD TO CIVIL WAR by Joanne B. Freeman. Copyright © 2018 by Joanne B. Freeman.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

The world was already in an authoritarian moment even before COVID-19 overwhelmed our lives in the spring of 2020. After a surge of democratization following the end of the Cold War, in the late 2000s democratic gains began to reverse. Since 2006, more countries have declined in freedom than gained it. At the same time, democratic openings in diverse parts of the world have failed to produce democracy. Neither the Arab Spring of 2011 (with the notable exception of Tunisia) nor electoral challenges to autocracy in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe succeeded in reversing the slide toward authoritarianism. Only six of the world’s 15 most populous countries (India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan and Mexico) can now be classified as democracies. And yet even in these countries, the trend has been toward growing executive power and illiberal populism.

The novel coronavirus has already exacerbated these trends, for reasons both internal and external to the countries experiencing democratic decline.

I begin with the internal. Coronavirus has led people to fear for their lives. History teaches us that when people fear for their lives, they tend to be willing to trade freedom for security. Measures like border closures are immensely popular because it shows people that the state is doing something. In this w sense, a pandemic resembles war, which also tends to produce a “rally-around-the-flag” effect in which people are willing to stand behind their leaders, often in an uncritical way. We saw this with the Patriot Act after 9/11 in the United States, but even way back in the Middle Ages, European monarchs increased their power as a result of the plague that devastated the continent at the time.

Democracy may be sufficiently robust to withstand a temporary strengthening of executive power and a weakening of independent institutions to respond to a crisis in well-developed democracies. However, in new or fragile democracies, autocrats looking to maintain their power and patronage under the cover of coronavirus can deal a fatal blow to democratic institutions. They can harness a sense of fear or disruption to solidify their own power or that of their ruling clique or to expand it further. They can also use disinformation as a tactic—as a way of distracting, dividing and discrediting legitimate, factual sources of information while disparaging experts. In the end, disinformation, too, undermines democracy. This tactic, sadly, has also been deployed here in the United States more recently, but it has a long history in the autocratic toolbox.

The legitimacy of elections—the most basic ingredient of democracy—can also be undermined by leaders under the cover of the coronavirus threat. This can entail suggesting that alternate voting methods are inherently corrupted or delaying elections in the name of the pandemic.

Consider the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region I teach and write about at Pomona. MENA leaders are using COVID-19 as an opportunity to expand their political and security authorities. These changes are likely to be permanent and will lay the groundwork for stronger authoritarianism across the region. Egypt has cracked down on journalists, including detaining prominent Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah and summoning foreign correspondents to complain about their critical coverage of the country’s coronavirus response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a deal to form an “emergency government” that would allow him to remain in office after three failed attempts to form a ruling coalition. Jordan and Morocco have similarly used emergency powers to arrest journalists and citizens for “spreading rumors” about the virus.

But there is an external autocracy-strengthening dimension to the pandemic as well, and also one that bolsters trends that had emerged before COVID-19. In recent years, the democracy and human rights promoting role of the United States has diminished greatly. Part of this is a function of declining U.S. power, but it is also about the Trump administration’s relinquishing of America’s traditional democracy-promoting role. The administration has not only turned a blind eye to repression around the world, but in some cases the president himself has openly praised autocrats like Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi while disparaging allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This has created a permissive international environment for the spread of autocracy around the world. While in the past the threat of U.S. censure (though that was hardly consistent even before Trump) moderated the authoritarian excesses of regimes from Eastern Europe to Latin America. Now they feel they have the acquiescence of a White House only interested in a transactional foreign policy.

The coronavirus has distracted Washington, giving autocrats even more room to ramp up repression. On top of that, the Trump administration’s “America First” approach means that it has yielded the diplomatic prerogative to competitors such as China, Russia and Iran, who have cleverly exploited the void by offering assistance and spreading disinformation. China’s influence was growing even before COVID-19, but with growing economic hardship, countries are pursuing new forms of economic cooperation with Beijing. Ironically, despite its own coronavirus failures and despite being the source of the pandemic, China’s reputation is improving. China, of course, is not interested in democracy and human rights and, if anything, prefers to deal with other autocratic states. Meanwhile, the perceived shortcomings of the U.S. response to the pandemic coupled with domestic failures—think the brutal killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests—have lowered American credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights. “I can’t breathe,” the Chinese foreign ministry recently tweeted in response to U.S. criticism of its policies in Hong Kong.

Thus, the pandemic has strengthened the fortunes of the world’s “autocracy promoters”—countries such as China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and others. In part this is because the Trump administration (with the possible exception of the Chinese power grab in Hong Kong), which has already proven that democracy promotion plays a minor role in its foreign policy, is even less willing to stand up to them.

In sum, both internal and external counter-democratic trends—many of which were already evident before coronavirus spread across the globe—have only been strengthened by the pandemic. In the short and medium term, the effect on democracy around the world is thus grim.

What about the longer term? The answer will depend in part on how ordinary citizens react to the expansion of state power in both democracies and dictatorships. After all, when a vaccine is made available and the threat of the virus dissipates, governments will have less room for maneuver. Corruption and overreach will be exposed. Will people rebel, or will they be complacent?

We might see evidence of both, depending on the country. In Hong Kong, we have seen protests against Beijing already. In Iraq, Algeria, Iran and Lebanon—all places in which there were ongoing mass protests before COVID-19 and where services are poor and corruption is rampant—protests could quickly re-emerge. On the other hand, major protests could also contribute to a second wave of infections, providing a pretext for further government crackdowns.

Yet, in another scenario, protests might not erupt at all, given the fear of past violent government repression and the fact that anti-protest measures are likely to be more brutal than ever. And also because the measures deployed in response to the pandemic could give civil society, opposition groups and other vestiges of democracy a decisive death blow in countries where democratic institutions were already weak.

You want to serve your country. You aspire to run for office—and not just any office. You want to be president of the United States. If you succeed, you will control the most advanced technology ever conceived, much of it secret. You will be able to authorize missile strikes, negotiate treaties, and spy on people around the world. And with a vast payroll, you will now run the largest employer in the country—the federal government.

For a moment, say that you win. You might hope to use this power to achieve great things such as ending poverty, providing affordable health care, or eliminating violent crime. You will have the ability to influence legislation and shape decisions about how to use the enormous federal budget. Lives, jobs, and trillions of dollars hang in the balance—and you have the ability to tip it. As you wave to your inauguration crowd through a blizzard of confetti, nothing seems out of reach.

Be careful: History might judge your presidency harshly. You don’t want to be lumped in with Andrew Johnson, a president who opposed and undermined the core values of the country. Surveys of historians from 2002 and 2010 each ranked Johnson as one of the worst presidents in American history. He was impeached by the House of Representatives (but not removed from office by the Senate) for firing his secretary of war Edwin Stanton, an ally of many in Congress at the time. Far worse, he fiercely opposed the Fourteenth Amendment—the monumental civil rights achievement of Congress after the Civil War. The amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law and extended citizenship to African Americans and all people born or naturalized in the United States. That amendment was necessary in part because Johnson essentially refused to execute the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery—a violation of his sworn duty to carry out the law of the land.

On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln, who directly preceded Johnson, is seen as one of our greatest presidents. Among his many achievements, he kept the country together by winning the Civil War and shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Why was Lincoln able to be so great? He had a diligent fascination with the Constitution, the core principles that upheld the nation and the presidency, and the history of the Framers (the collective term we use for the storied people who crafted the Constitution, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). As the political theorist George Kateb writes, “Lincoln revered the principle of human equality and believed that he therefore should revere the US Constitution, the system of government created under it … making real the abstract principle of human equality.” For Lincoln, that meant standing up for the fundamental values of the oath and the Constitution while working within the constraints that limited his office. To end the evil of slavery nationwide, he didn’t rule by dictate; instead, he used the Constitution’s legal procedure to pass an amendment accomplishing his goal. Lincoln was a great president because he understood how the office of the presidency—used as the Framers had created it—could preserve, protect, and defend constitutional values.

As we shall see, the oath requires that the president uphold the Constitution—even parts with which he or she disagrees. If you fail to do so, you’ll end up with Johnson on the list of worst presidents. If you succeed, you can be remembered with Lincoln among the greats.

All presidents, from George Washington to Donald Trump, began their terms with dreams of accomplishing great things. But whether your presidency is monumental or disastrous will hinge largely on a simple thing: that you, a future president, understand how the responsibilities of the Constitution apply to your job.

***

What do you need to know to be president? Most of all, you need to know the U.S. Constitution. As president, your first task is to recite the oath of office. You’ll stand in front of your inauguration crowd, guided by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and recite the following words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

This oath is your public contract with the American people, and reciting it is your first constitutional responsibility. Before you recite it, you must know what it means and where it comes from. The oath is found in Article II of the Constitution, which established the presidency and defined its powers and limits. Ratified in 1788 and amended three years later in 1791 with a Bill of Rights, the Constitution contains a series of principles that limit the power of all federal officials, including the president, and defines the powers that those officials do have. The Constitution will serve as your blueprint for how to do the president’s job, helping you to anticipate the pitfalls that all presidents should avoid.

The oath itself is a reminder that your powers are conditionally granted and come with limits. The Constitution, in literally dictating your first instant in office, signals clearly that you are not free to act however you wish. Article II goes on to provide directions for what you must do and avoid. The oath is thus not merely a ritual—it is a recognition that you temporarily occupy an immensely powerful office, and that you must internalize the demands and responsibilities that come with it. Notice that you are promising to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution—not just to avoid violating it. In pledging to “faithfully execute” the office of the president, you promise to put aside your private interests to occupy a public and limited role on behalf of the American people. If you are not willing to work within these limits and take initiative to promote the document, the Oval Office isn’t for you.

It was George Washington’s second inaugural address—which at 135 words remains the shortest in history—that gave voice to the ideas underlying the oath and the office. Today, we tend to think of inaugurations as grand affairs, with modern presidents using them to draw widespread attention to their agendas. But Washington’s 1793 inauguration was much more subdued—fitting, since his address emphasized the limits of the presidential office. He held the inaugural ceremony in the relatively modest Senate Chamber of Congress Hall, located just steps from Independence Hall, where he had presided over the Constitutional Convention six years earlier. This choice of venue signified his respect for the legislative branch as a coequal to his own executive branch. In his speech, Washington challenged Americans to stop him should he fail to live up to his duties:

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President, the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.

In emphasizing the solemnity of the oath, Washington here was speaking to future presidents and the future Americans charged with holding them accountable. Washington is asking you, a future president, to respect the obligations and the limits of your new office. And to those of us who won’t be president, Washington is reminding us that we, too, must ensure that a president carries out the duties of the office.

Washington’s words here provide the impetus for our focus on what the Constitution demands of a president. This guide will detail what you need to know—how to take the oath seriously, and how to understand both the obligations and the limits that it places on you. It is not enough merely to avoid constitutional punishment, although that punishment—in the form of impeachment, censure, or losing an election—is still something you should worry about. You should go beyond this bare minimum requirement of the office, and defend the values that the Constitution enshrines. Unlike President Johnson, and like President Lincoln, you must recognize what the Constitution requires: read it, study it, and through your speech and actions, promote it.

It’s crucial that you see the Constitution’s rules as legitimate constraints, not obstacles to get around. But the Constitution is more than just these rules: it stands for a wider morality of limited government and respect for people’s rights. You must find a way for your actions and words to honor and expound those values, while abiding by the limits that your office places upon you. You might be tempted to see the Supreme Court as the sole authority to tell you when you’ve strayed from constitutional values. Sometimes, it does play this role: courts have often limited the president by declaring his actions unconstitutional. But as you will see, the court’s role in American history has often been limited. The Supreme Court has sometimes protected civil liberties that presidents have put under threat, but at other times it has failed to do so. As president, you have an obligation to go beyond what courts require of you, taking it upon yourself to defend the principles and rules of the Constitution. In order to do that, you must first understand what those principles and rules are.

***

As a professor of constitutional law, my job is to introduce students to the core tenets of the Constitution. My students are often amazed by the scope and foresight of this document. It does more than create our entire system of government. It also provides tools that can limit those who try to abuse that system to violate the rights of the people.

The Constitution creates and defines the duties of the three branches of government: legislative, judicial, and executive—the last of which contains the office of the presidency. The Constitution strictly limits the president’s powers in Article II, but it also limits the president in other creative ways: by granting certain powers to the other two branches, letting states retain certain privileges, and enshrining the rights of the people. Each of the three branches interprets the Constitution and encourages the others to act in ways that are consistent with its requirements.

This includes you, no matter where you live or what you do. The Constitution is not magically self-enforcing, and there is no “Constitution police.” Not even the Supreme Court will always succeed in defending the Constitution’s values and enforcing the proper limits it places on you. Fortunately, you will not be alone in defending the Constitution. In the end, it is essential for all citizens to recognize that there is no guarantee that presidents or courts respect the Constitution. By demanding that elected representatives—whether senators or town council members—read, understand, and comply with the Constitution, the people can make sure that the requirements of the Constitution do not become, as Madison worried, mere “parchment barriers.” Ultimately, the president is checked not by the Constitution itself, but by the American people demanding that it be respected.

To uphold this duty, though, you need to understand the principles of the Constitution for yourself. Together, we’ll be taking a deep dive into our country’s founding document.

***

The Constitution isn’t the first thing most people think about when they vote for a presidential candidate. My own interest in politics certainly didn’t start with the Constitution.

When I was growing up in Queens, my father worked for a local politician. I sometimes tagged along for political events. And in Queens, the political event of the year was the Queens Day Celebration—a parade that transformed Flushing Meadows Park, a faded gem that had twice held the World’s Fair, into the center of the world—in my young eyes, at least. It was the sort of grand event that all the major figures from Queens would attend—and perhaps among them, a certain future president. It was there, at age nine, that I first saw my boyhood hero at the front of the parade: Edward Koch, the mayor of New York City.

At the time, Koch was larger than life. Some even mused that he might become the first Jewish president. Now I was walking directly behind him, right under Koch’s enormous arms, which he threw open every few seconds as he bellowed to the crowd, “How am I doin’?” The crowd of onlookers screamed their approval.

Just then, Koch whispered to a local politician next to him, “I’d love some ice cream. Vanilla.” The politician turned behind, pointed to a man next to me, and snapped, “Get the mayor some ice cream. Vanilla!” The aide turned and sprinted across the field next to the parade route, and returned about ten minutes later with a vanilla ice cream cone.

That was the day I decided I wanted to be mayor. To the mind of a nine-year-old boy, being mayor meant having the power to seemingly get anything—even ice cream—and get it on demand. w

What can a nine-year-old boy intuit about politics? A lot, actually. For many adults, it’s moments just like these that draw them to politics in the first place. For them, the presidency is shorthand for fame and power. They want to live in the White House. They want access to the staff. The helicopters. Air Force One.

When they wrote the Constitution, the Framers were well aware of the trappings of power. That is why the Constitution’s oath is meant to take a private citizen, whose focus lies with his or her own beliefs and desires—whether ice cream or the nuclear football—and transform that person into a public “officeholder,” whose job is to safeguard the Constitution and the country it governs. Presidents, of course, are required to recite the oath. But reciting it is not enough; they should read the oath carefully, internalizing its fundamental principles and the constraints it creates on the office. When you’ve just been elected by millions of people, you might feel as if you’re authorized to do as you wish—or whatever your supporters want you to do. But the constraints on your office are critically important. In fact, they are a defining feature of our system of government.

***

In this guide, we will examine the difficult balance between respecting the wishes of the people who elected you and respecting the limits the Constitution places on your power. These limits constrain presidents who cater to the worst prejudices of the people who elected them. But such safeguards, which operate by slowing down the pace of government, can also contribute to government gridlock.

President Harry Truman observed this conundrum firsthand. In 1952, as he was preparing to leave office, Truman turned to an aide and predicted what would happen to his successor, former general Dwight Eisenhower, who was accustomed to the military’s famous efficiency. “He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen,” Truman mused. “Poor Ike.”

Truman’s words indicate a central irony of the American presidency: yes, the office is immensely powerful. Yet it is so often constrained and thwarted—by Congress, the courts, the press, the states, ordinary citizens, and even by its own executive bureaucracy. This limited role in the constitutional system is no doubt frustrating for presidents, but it serves the wider goal of the Framers: respecting individual rights and the rule of law—the notion that we are not governed by individuals’ whims but by standards common to all. The constraints are a feature, not a bug. They ensure that the oath is not a set of mere words, but that there are mechanisms for constraining a president.

The “Poor Ike” story is often told by scholars of the presidency. It was reported in Richard Neustadt’s influential book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. Neustadt’s book taught future presidents and their aides how to use the power of persuasion to lead the country. With its focus on power, the book was so popular in the 1960s that President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, made it required reading for all staffers in the White House. Later, as we’ll see, after Nixon was impeached for his role in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel and the subsequent cover-up of the event, one Nixon staffer told Neustadt that “you have to share the responsibility” for the illegal actions because of the ideas in his book.

Neustadt took this accusation seriously. He had learned to understand the Constitution when he was a student in civics class and assumed that his readers had done the same. But during Watergate, he realized that the decline of civics education meant that Nixon’s staffers had not developed an appreciation for the limits of the Constitution, instead focusing more on presidential power. Our guide makes clear what Neustadt’s book did not: that the Constitution is not a mere obstacle to get around, and trying to do so would be a disservice to the Framers’ ideas. To understand the Constitution, you need to see that the powers it grants are of a particular kind—loaded with tripwires, trapdoors, and springboards that protect the rights of the people and the rule of law. Presidents should celebrate, not bemoan, this complex design.

The best guide we have to the Constitution is the Federalist Papers. Written anonymously during the course of a single year between 1787 and 1788, the Federalist Papers were the project of three Framers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—and were an effort to persuade New York and other states to ratify the Constitution. Like many of their fellow Framers, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were concerned about the tyranny of Great Britain, against which they had just revolted. As a result, the Federalist Papers focused a great deal on how the governmental structure outlined in the Constitution would protect citizens from a flawed government—including a despotic president. They emphasized what it meant to be a legitimate leader.

James Madison, an author of the Federalist Papers and a primary writer of the Constitution, will serve as our guide throughout this book. Madison is a good guide in large part because he was the Framer who most consistently stressed the limits on the president, writing, “the ultimate authority … resides in the people alone.” He was also the most influential proponent of a Bill of Rights. And as president, Madison went beyond what he believed he was required to do by the courts, using his own veto power to strike down laws he viewed as violations against the Constitution. This guide may not always agree with Madison: for instance, in matters concerning hiring and firing, where he wrongly ascribed too much power to a president. But overall, it is Madison’s vision of a limited presidency that inspires the ideas of this book.

Madison’s vision of the presidency was just one of many debated at the time. Another Framer, Alexander Hamilton, stood for a markedly different vision. These days, Hamilton, a famous delegate to the Constitutional Convention from New York who later became secretary of the treasury, receives a good deal more popular attention than his fellow Framers. (Let’s just say there is no Madison: The Musical.) At times, Hamilton was Madison’s ally—recall that they wrote the Federalist Papers together. But they often clashed, especially on where presidential limits ought to lie.

Hamilton referred to the need for “energy in the executive,” by which he meant the president’s ability to make great things happen quickly. In a Hamiltonian view, the president is not a king—but does retain some kinglike powers. He argued that the president should have broad powers in war and foreign policy, even though the Constitution didn’t say so explicitly. Madison disagreed. These debates still resonate long after the Founding. For example, some legal precedent has suggested that the president is not required to uphold the equal protection of the laws in certain areas, such as immigration. Other thinkers have suggested the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” may not prevent the president from using or sanctioning torture. President Nixon even famously claimed the president couldn’t be indicted while in office. However, with Madison as our guide, we will push back against this strain of Hamiltonian constitutional thinking that emphasizes the powers of the president over the constraints on the office.

A president who takes the oath seriously needs to consider these Framers’ competing visions. But the Framers aren’t the only thing that needs to be considered: the president also needs to consider the text of the document, case law, and the meaning of later amendments such as the Fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause. The Framers’ ideas should be honored—particularly Madison’s vision of a limited presidency—but only as a guide, not as the final word on what the Constitution means.

Madison designed the Constitution to ensure that those of us who will not be president—“the people”—could protect the office from a president who failed to carry out the oath. He and the Framers gave us a Bill of Rights and institutions such as the judiciary, the Congress, and state governments to protect those rights if a president failed to do so.

In modern-day politics, we often try to understand what “We the People” want through polls and policy preferences. But the Constitution means something different by “We the People.” These words don’t just refer to voters and their preferences of the moment. And they don’t mean that a populist president who claims that his personality reflects the desires of the people has a mandate to ignore the requirements of the law. Rather, “We the People” is an ideal of a “constitutional” people—citizens not only versed in the Constitution, but who demand that public officials, especially the president, comply with it.

Lincoln explained this constitutional ideal when he distinguished between people’s base instincts and their “better angels.” Later, eulogizing the war dead at Gettysburg, Lincoln explained that ours was a government “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” That phrase best explains the Constitution’s meaning and how it treats the ideal of a constitutional people. We are a government “of” the people, because ultimately all government officials work for and are accountable to “We the People”—an idea expressed in the Constitution’s first three words. We are a government “by” the people, in that we participate in elections and in lawmaking. Finally, we are a government “for” the people, because we recognize in our founding document that each of our fellow citizens is a rights holder. Without the right to free speech, we could not conceive of the ideas necessary to make democratic decisions. If we were denied religious freedom, we could not truly develop our own beliefs.

The Constitution protects this higher ideal of “the people” most obviously through the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution. But the structure of the original Constitution itself also protects the rights of the people. Madison gave the best early explanation of the Constitution’s ideal of “the people.” To him, the Constitution protected not just against kingly domination, but also against the “tyranny of the majority.” A president might become a tyrant by catering to the worst prejudices of the populace, but Madison argued that the people could never be stripped of their rights—even if a large majority of people favored such a move. Those rights allow the people to be the Constitution’s best protector. Sometimes, the people can exact punishment on an errant president indirectly, by working through the other branches: for example, by demanding vigilance from Congress. But the people can also take action directly, using rights like the First Amendment’s free speech protection to criticize a president.

As president, you will be constrained by these legal dynamics of the Constitution. But far more integral to your presidency is something else: the Constitution’s political morality. By this, I mean the values of freedom and equality that inform the document beyond its judicially enforceable requirements. We can tell whether presidents embrace the Constitution’s values not just by their executive orders or official appointments, but by how they speak to the American people. No court can tell you what to say. But you still must be guided by the Constitution in this crucial endeavor. As president, you should speak for all of us—and more, you should speak for what our country stands for, and aspires to be. …

Some people may tell you that you have to choose between the words and the principles of the Constitution when interpreting the document, or that you should just listen to the Supreme Court. None of these approaches is complete. Looking to the Constitution’s text, the history of Supreme Court rulings, and the broader values underlying the Constitution gives us the best method to resolve constitutional disputes and discover the document’s meaning. I refer to this approach as value-based reading.

So what are constitutional values? They are best understood as principles of constitutional self-government—principles that realize the ideal of an American populace with all citizens regarded as equal, always retaining their right to rule and influence public life. Although the text of the Constitution is the first place to look for signs of these values, they have also been argued over and worked out through Supreme Court cases throughout American history. We will look to these cases as an important guide to the Constitution, sometimes invoking the conclusions of the court’s justices and, where necessary, pointing to how the case law should evolve to better reflect the Constitution’s deeper values. And throughout, we will come back to the architect of the Constitution itself: James Madison. In the Federalist Papers, his public speeches, and other writings, Madison is essentially speaking to us across the ages.

We should listen.

Corey Brettschneider ’95 is professor of political science at Brown University.

Excerpted from The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents. Copyright © 2018 by Corey Brettschneider. Excerpted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times— Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.

But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity. Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large, diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere.

Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?

At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country.

Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy.

This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies w in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion.

But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.”

When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy.

It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the supreme court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After Chávez’s death a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy.

This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.

The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.

Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher.

Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary. But are they strong enough?

Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history. For the sake of clarity, we are defining a democracy as a system of government with regular, free and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association. Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the challenges facing our own. For example, based on the historical experiences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help identify would–be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to would–be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other democracies have kept extremists out of power. A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists ­into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would–be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms. Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican Party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination.

How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our Constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Donald Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump.

We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well—but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best—and survive longer—where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the twentieth century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn’t cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored. But if other countries’ experiences teach us that polarization can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Drawing lessons from other democracies in crisis, this book suggests strategies that citizens should, and should not, follow to defend our democracy.

Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs—and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert b­­reakdown. History doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.

Daniel Ziblatt ’95 and Steven Levitsky are colleagues at Harvard University, where Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Levitsky is professor of government.

Excerpted from How Democracies Die. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.