On Wielding Limited Power in Washington

The medical freedom movement has unrealistic notions of how government works.

My favorite novel of 2006 was Robert Harris’s Imperium, about the improbable rise to power of Marcus Tullius Cicero in the Roman Republic of the 1st century BC.

Cicero was a gifted lawyer and orator, but he was neither a patrician nor a noble. Had it not been for his fairly rich wife Terentia, he probably wouldn’t have gotten far in Roman politics.

The novel relates his first great triumph in public affairs—that is, his extremely daring prosecution of Gaius Verres, the corrupt Governor of Sicily, who ran the province like a mafia protection racket. Though not especially well-liked, Verres was a patrician with powerful connections in Rome.

There’s a very funny scene in the historical record of the trial. While addressing the jurors—some of whom he knows to be pals of Verres—Cicero said, “With you on this bench, gentlemen, with Marcus Acilius Glabrio as your president, I do not understand what Verres can hope to achieve.” No one in the room could resist the delightful irony and humor of this remark.

Harris does a fine job of depicting Cicero’s shrewdness in forming relationships with powerful guys in Rome who will help him to achieve his objectives, including guys he doesn’t particularly like. His greatest patron, Pompey the Great, is especially full of himself.

Cicero’s idealistic brother, Quintus, occasionally objects to Cicero’s political alliances, prompting Cicero to explain that politics is a game that one must play in order to do any good.

If you are not in the game—that is, if you are confined to writing commentaries on public affairs in your library—you may play a minor role in shaping public opinion, but you are unlikely to change policy.

Cicero understood this, and often remarked that there was nothing he enjoyed more in life than reading in his garden and writing in his library at his villa in Tuscany. However, as he told his brother, if he was going to achieve anything in public affairs, he had to be in Rome—“a city made of marble but built on a sewer” as he remarked.

I have long perceived Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be something like an American Cicero. The 71.5 year-old man has sufficient means to retire to some idyllic place and enjoy morning nature walks, reading, falconry, socializing with friends, and other hobbies.

The rigors and tedium of trying to run a gigantic federal bureaucracy in Washington—of dealing with dozens of ignorant and unpleasant people with bad manners and getting “grilled” by deranged Congressmen —offers the promise of neither wealth, nor pleasure, nor glory.

As was the case in the Roman Republic of Cicero’s day, the U.S. Republic today is run by an oligarchy of wealthy and powerful people. Kennedy was ensconced in this oligarchy until he started talking about vaccine harms twenty years ago, at which point he was ostracized.

Had it not been for the improbable second election of the idiosyncratic Donald Trump, Kennedy would not have stood a chance in hell of becoming HHS Secretary. And make no mistake—a large part of Trump’s motivation for choosing Kennedy was the latter’s huge and successful effort to build his own constituency of followers as an independent presidential candidate.

Like Cicero, Kennedy needs friends and supporters from all quarters. He cannot confine himself to the cohort of American society that is focused primarily on vaccine harms. It’s not necessary for him to like or even to trust his allies, as long as they are helping him to stay in the game.

The medical freedom movement should always bear in mind that the HHS Secretary does not possess absolute executive authority over U.S. public health policy. He must answer to both Congress and the President he serves.

As everyone knows, Washington is crawling with pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. According to a 2016 report in Blood medical journal:

From 1998 to 2013, pharmaceutical lobbying interests were 42% larger than the second highest-paying industry (health insurance). The $2.7 billion effort ... almost equaled the combined contributions of Big Oil ($1.3 billion) and the defense industry ($1.5 billion). An even greater financial commitment is made to advertising. The United States and New Zealand are the only 2 countries that allow prescription medications to be advertised on television. In 2012, nearly $3.5 billion was invested in the United States in pharmaceutical marketing. For every dollar spent on research, an average of >$2 (sometimes up to $19) is spent on marketing. Nine out of 10 large pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than on research and development.

If the HHS Secretary tried to keep everyone in Washington with Pharma industry connections at arm’s length, he might as well just stay at home and read Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On The Ends Of Good And Evil), which he wrote at his villa in Tuscany in the summer of 45 B.C.

Having studied political history for forty years, I am confident that Secretary Kennedy offers the best shot the American people have ever had—and likely ever will have—at cleaning up the corrupt sewer of U.S. federal health policy and financing.

It’s a huge, grimy, and mostly thankless enterprise. It seems to me we should all be grateful to the man for undertaking it.

I’ll close with an apt remark by Teddy Roosevelt.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. . .