He is serving a vision of America that no longer exists.
Robert S. Mueller III has spoken, but he had very little to say. As he said at a brief news conference on Wednesday morning, he will not go beyond what his report said. He will not criticize Attorney General Bill Barr, even though he wrote a letter to Mr. Barr in late March complaining that the attorney general’s summary of the Mueller report did not capture its “context, nature, and substance.”
And while he didn’t completely close the door on appearing before Congress, Mr. Mueller made it clear that it wouldn’t exactly be must-see TV, so what would be the point.
What we saw on display in Mr. Mueller’s nine-minute statement was his often discussed sense of rectitude and propriety. These are admirable attributes, normally. But we might well wonder whether those attributes are what is needed in the age of Donald Trump, or whether the preservation of our democratic institutions demands more.
Born in Manhattan to a former Navy officer and the granddaughter of a railroad executive, Mr. Mueller was the product of an era and a social class to whom the kind of flesh-ripping partisanship we have today was absolutely anathema.
He grew up mostly in Princeton, N.J. At a private school he attended in New Hampshire, a lacrosse (yes, lacrosse) teammate was John Kerry. It’s worth mentioning Mr. Kerry, because he was the same sort: well-born and imbued with the identical sense of class duty. Mr. Kerry, as is well known, enlisted in the Navy even before he graduated from Yale in 1966, and insisted he be sent to Vietnam.
Mr. Mueller graduated from Princeton that same year and soon enlisted in the Marines. Like Mr. Kerry, he saw combat in Vietnam. He won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. “One of the reasons I went into the Marine Corps was because we lost a very good friend, a Marine in Vietnam, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton,” he said in a 2016 interview. “There were a number of us who felt we should follow his example and at least go into the service. And it flows from there.”
Mr. Kerry is a Democrat, and Mr. Mueller a Republican. But in their social stratum, while Republicans surely outnumbered Democrats, it didn’t matter all that much. You could, in those days, be in either party and still have the same sense of duty and even, unimaginable as it seems today, believe many of the same things. Thus Mr. Mueller could be comfortable spending much of his career in the Department of Justice in one form or another, being named to posts by Democrats and Republicans alike.
And that is the Robert Mueller who did not want to be seen as being part of anything too “political.” As a creature of his generation, his class, the Marines and the Justice Department, being political surely goes against every instinct he has.
But there is another ideal that men like Mr. Mueller and Mr. Kerry were raised to uphold: the willingness to stand up to the dark impulses of the moment. There is a story, first reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, that illustrates the mind-set perfectly. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, in the face of all the hysteria, precious few lawyers were willing to defend suspected terrorists. At a Washington dinner party, guests began to turn on Tom Wilner, a corporate lawyer who was at the time defending a Guantánamo detainee.