The New Yorker:
Truth is good. Truth is great. Truth is so much better than loyalty that the former F.B.I. director James Comey wrote a book about it. Much of the coverage of Comey’s new memoir, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” has focussed on the insults its author has hurled at President Donald Trump, and on Comey’s narrative of how he handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but these two topics make up relatively small parts of the book. The true subject of “A Higher Loyalty” is the goodness of James Comey. The premise is that a man whose value is truth is superior to a man whose value is loyalty, and Comey’s understanding of “truth” is as basic as Trump’s understanding of “loyalty”: he believes that there is such a thing as “all the truth” that exists outside of history, context, and judgment.
Dishonest men who value loyalty bracket the book. Early in the story, Comey narrates his career in the New York U.S. Attorney’s Office that was working to break up La Cosa Nostra. He describes vicious killers who demanded and promised loyalty but were rotten to the core—not so much, one senses in Comey’s telling, because they killed, as because they lied to one another about the killings, Mafia rules, and drugs. Two hundred pages later, he describes the now-infamous February, 2017, White House dinner during which the recently inaugurated President of the United States asked the F.B.I. director for his loyalty. Comey rightly points out that Trump has the style and the substance of a Mafia boss.
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