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Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks at a campaign event for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in March, 2022. Photo by Getty Images

By Robert ZaretskyJune 19, 2022

Seventy-five years ago, Albert Camus novelLa Pestewas published in France. Readers of the English translation,The Plague, have thrilled to its tale of a motley crew of characters who, when the bubonic plague bursts into their world, join forces to resist it. The thrill thickens upon the realization that Camus based the novel on a different kind of plague the occupation of France by the so-called peste brune, or brown plague of Nazism, and the men and women who risked their lives to oppose it.

Why did they do so? By way of reply, the narrator warns the reader that he does not want to exaggerate the actions of such volunteers by citing their courage or heroism. Doing what they had to do, they are to be congratulated no more than a teacher on teaching that two and two make four. Of course, there will always be times when affirming that two and two equals four can be dangerous, even deadly. Yet this does not change knowing whether two and two do make four.

One of the novels characters, Joseph Grand, does the math more quickly than his fellow resisters. Invited to join the sanitation team battling the plague an invitation that means almost certain death Grand agrees without a moments hesitation. The absence of hesitation is crucial. Though Grand lacks the words to express himself he famously spends his life trying to get past the first line of a novel he wishes to write the clarity of his vision leads to the clarity of his action. It is as if the two actions, seeing and acting, occur simultaneously. Acting does not so much follow seeing as it instead accompanies it.

The story Camus tells about courage and heroism throws a sobering light on the story the select congressional committee is now telling about the Jan. 6insurrection.

In the committees third session, held last Thursday, the narrative focused on the actions of then-vice president Mike Pence. With photos never before seen and testimony never before heard, we learned that then-President Donald Trump called Pence on the morning of Jan. 6. He pressured him to use his ceremonial role in counting the electoral votes to, in effect, overturn the presidential election results of November 2020.

When Pence refused to agree, Trump lashed out, calling him a wimp. Hours later, in the speech he gave to thousands of angry supporters gathered near the White House, Trump declared his hope that Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. Shortly after, many of those same supporters had, at Trumps urging, marched on the Capitol Building, where the vote count was taking place.

Though Trump did not, as he vowed in his speech, accompany the protestors, he was with them in spirit. At precisely 2:24, he tweeted that Pence didnt have the courage to do what was necessary. As videos reveal, the tweet, read aloud by protestors who were already surging toward the Capitol, further inflamed them.

While hundreds breached the police barriers and surged into the building, others chanted Hang Mike Pence and displayed a noose. Pence, along with his family and staff, was bundled off by Secret Service agents to an underground loading dock. Refusing to leave with his motorcade, he waited several hours, surrounded by bodyguards and staff members. When the rioters were finally dispersed, Pence picked up where he had left off and, by what was then the preceding day, completed the electoral tally and declared the victory of Joseph Biden.

The rest is history. But what are we to do with this history? Now that the committee is fleshing out the narrative of events of Jan. 6, what are the meanings, and perhaps even the morals, we can draw from it?

For many observers, one meaning is that our republic was saved by a single mans courage and heroism. InThe Atlanticmagazine, the conservative journalist Jonathan V. Last urged Congress to name a building in Pences honor and for Pence to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. While he was not the hero you or I might have wanted, Last told his liberal readers, Pence was the hero America needed.

Pence was not just any hero, but a Harrison Ford-like hero, according to CNNs legal and political affairs commentator Jeffrey Toobin. After the Thursday hearing, Toobin praised Pence for his act of real courage, blurting that the committees account of his refusal to leave with the motorcade was more like a Harrison Ford movie than a congressional hearing.

Not surprisingly, the members of the Jan. 6select committee echoed this interpretation. The chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, praised Pence for his refusal to swallow the bizarre scheme cooked up by John Eastman and embraced by Donald Trump to undermine the electoral vote count. Were fortunate for Mr. Pences courage on Jan. 6. Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.

It is clear our republic was (and remains) in danger, just as it is clear our republic was fortunate that Pence refused to play along with Trump. If he had, the consequences would surely have been catastrophic. Less clear, though, is whether we can call Pences act courageous.

While moral philosophers have long differed on the details, most agree that courage occurs when one confronts, contains or conquers fear. Curiously, this means a Stoic, if she truly believes it is unreasonable to fear things outside her control, is not, strictly speaking, courageous. No less curious, this also means that a bad guy, in pursuit of an evil end, can be as courageous as a good guy seeking the very opposite. This explains why Voltaire, who knew a thing or two about courage, insisted it is not even a virtue, but instead a quality shared by the base and great.

This helps explain why, in the batting order of Team Virtue, courage holds an unusual place. It bats both lead-off, cleanup and every other slot. In fact, if courage is not in the line-up, no other virtue can make it to home plate, much less first base. This is because, without courage, we can neither enact nor act upon any other virtue. A coward can no more be virtuous than a corpse can swing a bat.

The French-Jewish philosopher Vladimir Janklvitch, who spent the Occupation fighting in the Resistance, captured this elusive quality to courage. It is not just one virtue among others, he wrote in hisTrait des vertus(A Treatise on the Virtues), but instead it is the condition that realizes the other virtues. Sincerity, justice, and modesty all begin in this inaugural act. The duty to be just, the imperative to be honest, the necessity to be loyal all need to be ignited by courage.

This explains, as well, Camus reluctance to praise as heroes those who resisted. They did what they had to do, just as we must have to conclude two and two equals four. Upon acknowledging better yet,seeing this objective truth, every else follows. Or, more accurately, unfolds at the same time. It is not so much Seeing is believing as Seeing is doing.

On Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards embodied this ethic. A Capitol policewoman, she joined the handful of fellow officers who, behind a bicycle rack, were trying to block a great wave of violent protestors. Pushed over by the mob, Edwards was knocked unconscious. When she recovered, she immediately rejoined her overwhelmed comrades, all of whom were then tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by the insurrectionists. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer, she told the committee, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.

But in this nightmare that became reality, Officer Edwardsdidfind herself in the middle of a battle and, without reflecting or reasoning, saw and acted at one and the same time. Like Joseph Grand, Edwards could not find the words to express herself. It was chaos, she told the committee. I I cant even describe what I saw. But both Chairman Thompson and Vice-Chairwoman Liz Cheney could and did describe what they saw in Edwards response to the chaos: an instance of heroic courage.

This is what Janklvitch meant, I think, when he states that courage is a decision, not a conviction; that it is an act, not an assessment of facts. Along with her fellow officers, Edwards acted to defend the republic. In the end, Pence did the same. But how different was his doing from the doing of Edwards?

Pence had spent the previous days and weeks trying to convince himself to, once again, swallow another Trump outrage. Why else would he ask his legal staff, scholars and even former vice president Dan Quayle, for their assessment of the facts? Their assessment in this case was no more necessary than in, say, the case of Trumps claim that there were fine people on both sides in the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. Or Trumps claim that one needed to grab women by the pussy. Or Trumps claim that the tearing away of children from their parents on our southern border was the fault of the Democrats.

In those earlier instances, Pence did not act, no doubt because he refused to see. As for his act on Jan. 6, it might well have resembled a Hollywood clich. But it was an act that had nothing in common with the uncommon heroism of a Joseph Grand or a Caroline Edwards.

A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward. His new book, Victories Never Last: Caregiving and Reading in a Time of Plague, was published in May 2022 by the University of Chicago Press.

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Should we really call Mike Pence courageous and what do we mean by courage anyway? - Forward

In what could be an SNL parody sketch if it had been played by anybody else, Donald Trump performed a standup routine, dubbed a "keynote address," at the Faith and Freedom Coalitionin Nashville today. And not a thing has changed with the boastful one-term president whose theme of the talk was, you guessed it, a rehashing of the Big Lie.

And as perfect timing would have it, he thumbed his nose at Mike Pence a day after the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6th Capitol riot praised the former VP for not succumbing to Trump's plot to overturn the election.

"Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance, frankly, to be historic," Trump said in his cultivated preacher voice. "But just like Bill Barr and these weak peopleMike did not have the courage to act."

"Mike was afraid of whatever he was afraid of Mike Pence had absolutely no choice but to be a human conveyor belt. Even if the votes were fraudulent, he said he had to send the votes couldn't do anything!"

"I said, 'What happens when you have more votes than you have voters?' DOESN'T MATTER!" he shouted. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't nothing matters!"

Unfortunately, he's right. It doesn't matter what kind of drivel comes out of the huckster's gob, his devoted fans will eat it up.

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Donald Trump harped on Mike Pence today for not overthrowing the election (video) - Boing Boing

The most damning piece of evidence presented at todays Select Committee hearing on the January 6 insurrection wasnt a sound bite from a star witness, nor was it another never-before-seen video of the assault on the Capitol. The revelation amounted to a single highlighted sentence in an email sent days after the attack by one of Donald Trumps lawyers, John Eastman, to another, Rudy Giuliani: Ive decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.

Eastman, a conservative law professor, has long been a central figure in the January 6 saga: In memos and White House meetings, he first advanced and then sold Trump on the absurd legal theory that thenVice President Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally reject electors from contested states. Based on Eastmans arguments, Trump ceaselessly pressured Pence, in public and in private, to effectively overturn the will of voters and declare him the winnera campaign that put the vice presidents life in danger on January 6 as a mob chanting Hang Mike Pence! descended on the Capitol.

What the committee established conclusively in its third public hearing, so neatly encapsulated by Eastmans request for a pardon, was that Eastman knew that under the plan hed devised, Trump was urging Pence to violate the law. And not just Eastmaneveryone knew. The lawyers, aides, and assorted hangers-on who surrounded Trump in the crucial, ultimately tragic weeks between November 3 and January 6 all understood that what the defeated president was attempting was not merely contesting an election, but plotting to overturn its result.

Pences lawyer, Greg Jacob, testified that even as Eastman lobbied the vice president on Trumps behalf, he repeatedly acknowledged during private conversations that his scheme for Pence to declare Trump the winner would violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887. In videotaped depositions, Pence aides said the same was true of Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Trumps final chief of staff. Another White House attorney, Eric Herschmann, told the committee that when he pointed out to Eastman that such a move by Pence would spark widespread rioting in the streets, Eastman replied with words to the effect of Theres been violence in the history of our country in order to protect the democracy, or to protect the republic.

Quinta Jurecic: The January 6 committee is not messing around

The beginning of todays hearing was notable for how unreservedly a committee created by and loaded with Democrats held up as a hero the former Republican vice president whose devotion to Trump the party once mocked and whose hostility to LGBTQ rights its leaders continue to revile. We are fortunate for Mr. Pences courage on January 6, the committee chair, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. Thanks in part to Mike Pence, our democracy withstood Donald Trumps scheme and the violence of January 6. The praise seemed designed to create the illusion of bipartisanship, and to serve as an invitation for Pence himself to testify before the panel, an event that would capture public attention even more than the highly rated hearings already have. (Committee aides did not respond when I asked if they had asked him to appear.)

Yet the central significance remains the case against Trump and those who enabled his bid to remain in power. For all of Eastmans apparent responsibility for January 6, he came across more sympathetically than the former president did today. Jacob testified that at one point in early January, Eastman recommended against having Pence reject the electors only to reverse himself, on Trumps order, the very next day. Then, even after the horror of the Capitol siege, Herschmann said Eastman continued to press the Trump campaign to pursue its effort to overturn the results in key states, including Georgia. Herschmann said he erupted at Eastman and advised him to get a great effing criminal-defense lawyer. Youre going to need it. Eastman seemed to finally get the message. A few days later, Eastman emailed Giuliani with his requestwhich Trump never grantedfor a presidential pardon.

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The January 6 Committee Proves That Everyone Knew - The Atlantic

A photograph of former Vice President Mike Pence looking at a tweet by former President Donald Trump while he and his staff took shelter in an undisclosed location is displayed during a hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol at the Capitol in Washington, June 16, 2022. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON He started the day with a prayer.

Vice President Mike Pence, preparing to withstand the final stage of a relentless campaign by President Donald Trump to force him to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, began Jan. 6, 2021, surrounded by aides at his official residence at the Naval Observatory, asking God for guidance.

The group was expecting a difficult day. But what followed over the next 12 hours was more harrowing than they imagined.

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An angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray chanting hang Mike Pence came within 40 feet of the vice president. Pences Secret Service detail had to hustle him to safety and hold him for nearly five hours in the bowels of the Capitol. Trump called Pence a wimp and worse in a coarse and abusive call that morning from the Oval Office, Trumps daughter and former White House aides testified.

And a confidential witness who traveled to Washington with the Proud Boys, the most prominent of the far-right groups that helped lead the assault on the Capitol, later told investigators the group would have killed Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they got the chance.

Those were among the extraordinary new details that emerged during the third public hearing held Thursday by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.

Pences day dawned as it often did. The vice president, whose evangelical faith was a selling point for adding him to the presidential ticket in 2016 but often a source of skepticism for Trump, was joined by three people in prayer: his chief counsel, Greg Jacob; his chief of staff, Marc Short; and his director of legislative affairs, Chris Hodgson.

Pence and the team had been subjected to a barrage of demands from Trump that the vice president refuse to certify Joe Bidens Electoral College victory in a joint session of Congress an unconstitutional action never before taken in the 2 1/2 centuries since the nations founding.

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We just asked for guidance and wisdom, knowing the day was going to be a challenging one, Short said in videotaped testimony played by the committee.

While Pence was at the Naval Observatory, Trump was in the Oval Office with aides and family members trickling in and out, including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Ivanka Trump. He had already sent two Twitter posts further pressuring Pence, the first at 1 a.m. The second, at 8 a.m., concluded, Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!

At 11:20 a.m., Trump called Pence, who stepped away from his aides to take the call.

The group in the Oval Office could hear Trumps side of the call but paid little attention to what seemed to start as a routine conversation. But as Trump became increasingly heated that Pence was holding firm in his refusal to give in, the call became hard to ignore.

I remember hearing the word wimp, Nick Luna, an aide to Trump, said in videotaped testimony. Wimp is the word I remember.

Ivanka Trump, the presidents older daughter and a former top White House adviser, said in her videotaped testimony that it was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice president before.

Ivanka Trumps chief of staff, Julie Radford, appeared in videotaped testimony to say that Ivanka Trump told her shortly after the call that Donald Trump had an upsetting conversation with Pence. The president, Radford said, used the P word. (The New York Times reported previously that Trump had told Pence, You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy, according to two people briefed on the conversation.)

Over at the Naval Observatory, Pence returned to the room after taking the call looking steely, determined and grim, Jacob told the committee.

Trump in the meantime revised a speech that he delivered later that day to throngs of supporters on the Ellipse. An early draft of the speech, the committee said, included no mention of Pence. But after the call, the president included language that video footage showed riled up the mob.

I hope Mike is going to do the right thing, Trump said in his speech. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win.

All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people, Trump continued, referring to one of his demands that Pence send the election results back to the states, a delaying tactic that he hoped would ultimately keep him in office. If Pence failed to comply, Trump told the crowd, that will be a sad day for our country.

He added, So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. And I hope he doesnt listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that hes listening to, using the term for Republicans in name only.

Trump directed his supporters to march to the Capitol and make themselves heard.

By the time Pence arrived at the Capitol with his wife, Karen Pence, and their daughter Charlotte, an angry mob was already massing outside.

Inside, as the joint session began, Mike Pences aides released a memo to the public laying out the vice presidents view that he did not have the power over the certification that Trump and his lawyer, John Eastman, insisted he did.

Shortly after 2:10 p.m., the proceedings were interrupted by loud noises. The mob was swarming into the building. At 2:24 p.m. when Democrats on the committee said Trump was aware that the Capitol had been breached the president posted to Twitter that Mike Pence didnt have the courage to do what was necessary.

At that point, the Secret Service had moved Pence from the Senate chamber to his office across the hall. His advisers said the noise from the rioters had become audible, leading them to assume they had entered the building. Yet there was not yet a pervasive sense of alarm.

Once in his office, Pence sat with his family, including his brother, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Ind., and top aides as Short ducked downstairs to grab some food. Karen Pence drew the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in.

Short made his way back to the office. By then, Tim Giebels, the lead Secret Service agent for Mike Pence, had made a few attempts to nudge Pence and his family to move to a different location. But soon he was no longer making a suggestion. Pence, he said, had to get to safety.

The entourage began to make its way down a stairway toward an underground loading dock the point at which they came within 40 feet of the rioters. Pence and his aides did not know at the time just how close they were to the mob, some of whom were threatening to kill him.

I could hear the din of the rioters in the building, Jacob said Thursday at the hearing. I dont think I was aware they were as close as that.

From the loading dock, Pence handled calls to congressional leaders who had been evacuated from the Capitol complex and ordered the Pentagon to send in the National Guard. The Secret Service directed him to get into a car and evacuate, but he refused to leave the building.

The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol, Jacob said Thursday, noting that Pence did not want to give the rioters the satisfaction of disrupting the proceedings more than they had already done. He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day.

One person he never spoke with again that day was Trump, who did not call to check on Pences safety. Neither did the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Just after 8 p.m., the Senate chamber opened again, after the rioters had been cleared from the complex.

Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol, Pence said as the proceedings began again. He was greeted with applause when he said, Lets get back to work.

Back at the White House, egged on by some of his advisers, Trump told aides he wanted to bar Short from entering the West Wing from then on.

At 3:42 in the morning, it was all over. Bidens victory had been certified.

At 3:50 a.m., as Pence and Short went their separate ways, Short texted his boss a passage from the Bible.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith, the message read.

2022 The New York Times Company

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For Mike Pence, Jan. 6 Began Like Many Days. It Ended Like No Other.

Mike Pence was described as the hero of the hour, the man who stood his ground to Donald Trumps coup plot and saved America from a violent revolution.

Yet among the rows of committee members, witnesses, reporters, congressmen and women and young citizens at Thursdays January 6 hearing into the attack on the Capitol, the former vice-president was nowhere to be seen. Pence was 500 miles away in Ohio to promote American energy dominance.

Both events could ultimately lead in the same direction: Pence 2024, a once unlikely presidential campaign illuminating the complexity of his relationship with his former boss, Trump.

Pence has dropped numerous clues already, from founding an organisation, Advancing American Freedom, to touring Republican primary battlegrounds. Nothing that the 63-year-old says on the early campaign trail, however, might be as crucial as the near three hours that played out in his absence on Thursday before a TV audience of millions.

But the panel came to praise Pence, not to bury him, or to hang him, for that matter like some of Trumps insurrectionists wanted. Even while he was taking part in a roundtable discussion in Cincinnati, the ex-vice-presidents ears might have been burning as the congressional committee investigating last years deadly assault on the US Capitol cast him as the savior of the republic.

They spoke of a man who put his loyalty to country ahead of his loyalty to Trump, a potential selling point to Republican voters who may want to move on from the former president. But the session could also prove a serious liability for Pence with the Trump base, hardening its view of him as a traitor.

The third public hearing was about Trumps attempts to pressure Pence to overturn his 2020 election defeat. It heard how the president was told repeatedly that Pence lacked the constitutional and legal authority to meet his demands.

Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, began the hearing by observing: Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong. We are fortunate for Mr Pences courage on January 6. Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put him very close to tremendous danger.

The vice-chairwoman, Liz Cheney, a Republican who in theory could run against Pence in 2024, added: Pence understood that his oath of office was more important than his loyalty to Donald Trump. He did his duty. President Trump unequivocally did not.

The committee heard how Trump latched on to a nonsensical plan from a conservative law professor, John Eastman, and launched a public and private pressure campaign on Pence days before he was to preside over the January 6 joint session of Congress to certify Joe Bidens election victory.

Witness Greg Jacob, who was the vice-presidents counsel, testified that Pence refused to yield to it. The former Indiana governor understood the founding fathers did not intend to empower any one person to affect an election result and never wavered from that view.

It was the death knell for the Trump and Pences marriage of political convenience. The president whined: I dont want to be your friend any more if you dont do this.

And as a giant screen in the cavernous caucus room showed, it lit the fuse for a mob on January 6 to make bellicose declarations such as Mike Pence has betrayed the United States of America! The sound of chanting Hang Mike Pence! was juxtaposed with the image of a mock gallows against the backdrop of the US Capitol dome.

Computer graphics demonstrated how Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber but was just 40 feet from the mob and in great peril. Jacob recalled: I can hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved. I dont think I was aware they were as close as that.

The committee noted that a confidential informant told the FBI that the far-right group the Proud Boys would have killed Pence if they got the chance. Jacob recalled how Pence declined to leave, insisting that the world must not see the vice-president fleeing the United States Capitol.

Yet Trump never called to check on his safety. Asked how Pence and his wife Karen reacted to that, Jacob replied simply: With frustration.

The implication was that Pence bravely alone stood between America and catastrophe. But the praise singing was jarring to critics who wondered why he was far away in Ohio and not here to speak for himself.

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, tweeted: Why wont Pence testify before the January 6 House Committee and tell all of us what really happened?

Pence did, after all, act as Trumps enabler for the previous four years. As vice-president he gave speech after speech lauding his boss and his policies, betraying no hint of dissent. In one strange example of sycophancy, he even seemed to imitate Trumps actions in placing a water bottle on the floor.

Asha Rangappa, a lawyer, CNN analyst and former FBI special agent, wrote on Twitter: Pence is not a hero. Pence is a coward. It just so happens that on Jan 6, his fear of displeasing Trump was (fortunately) outweighed by a fear of something else either being implicated in a failed coup and/or aiding and abetting criminal activity but hes still a coward.

Even now, while stating that Trump was wrong to seek to overturn the election, Pence also regularly trumpets the achievements of the Trump-Pence administration, pushes rightwing talking points and savages Biden and the woke left.

A presidential run would presumably try to square the circle by offering a resumption of the America first agenda but within recognised constitutional and democratic boundaries. Look, Im Donald Trump but without the violence, as Michael DAntonio, a Pence biographer, has put it.

But Thursdays hearing might just as easily be the breaking, not the making, of a Pence bid for the White House. His defiance of Trump has now been luminously displayed for a national audience and recorded for posterity. He will not be speaking at this weeks Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville after being booed last year; Trump is the star turn on Friday.

If the Republican party was still team normal, Pence would now be strongly placed to make the case that he was a loyal vice-president who showed his independence when it mattered. This weeks primary election results, however, suggest that the party remains team Maga and some still believe that Pence should hang.

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Pence the hero who foiled Trumps plot could it lead to a 2024 run ...