Dear Mr. District Attorney,

As you know, you and I agree on some things. Cash bail does criminalize poverty. We have over-incarcerated. The death penalty is racially biased. But, as I’ve chronicled for a decade now — here, here and here, for example–you’ve grandstanded, Trump-like, rather than providing real solutions to real problems in real people’s lives.

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Worse, as we saw last week when a federal judge excoriated you and your office, suggesting that, in your zeal to obfuscate an allegedly botched exoneration, actual crimes may have been committed — it dawned on me. The problem isn’t just that, as I’ve long advanced, you’re blinded by rigid ideology. It’s that, just like the ogre in the White House you vilify, you are constitutionally unable to practice the lost art of public virtue. My summer reading has been all about said lost art — you know, lazy beach reading — the examples of which we’ll get to. Maybe they can help you.

First, a recap of some recent a-ha moments. Sure, your suggestion that, in five or 10 years, we blow up Trump’s ballroom and sell paper weights containing pieces of it sparked feigned outrage on the right. But the bigger question: What were you — an adult, duly-elected representative of We, The People — thinking? In those same comments, you called Trump an “ass,” a “fool” and “evil,” pandering to the already converted crowd. This is the opposite of public persuasion. In Trump’s first term, David Brooks wrote a column headlined “When the World Is Led by a Child,” referring to the president as an “infantilist” and pointing out that “immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.” Well, your causes, Mr. District Attorney, go nowhere if, to the everyday reader’s eye, your name could comfortably be substituted for Trump’s throughout Brooks’ piece. As your progressive brethren have proven time and again, you don’t win by reacting to Trump as Trump would.

The verdict is in on the question of your public character. You divide the world between us and them, and the latter is not to be merely disagreed with, but vilified.

Then came last week’s stunning courtroom testimony from your own people. There were tales of Nixonian threats by you, or on your behalf, toward those cooperating with the courts as to your office’s handling of that exoneration, sparking those stinging comments from the federal bench. Yes, the allegations of threats and bullying of your own team are troubling, but most disconcerting is your alleged reference to the Attorney General’s office as “full of Nazis.” That claim has the ring of truth, because you’ve said something similar before. Remember, you were once called on the carpet by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro for comments that referred to his office as full of former city prosecutors you deemed “war criminals” who had “fled” to Shapiro’s “Paraguay,” one of the countries that gave safe harbor to Nazis after World War II. It’s nice to finally see your bipartisan bona fides; you think both Republican and Democrat statewide prosecutors are Nazis.

Look, the investigation of your exonerations will go where it goes. But the verdict is in on the question of your public character. You divide the world between us and them, and the latter is not to be merely disagreed with, but vilified. You seem to have some weird fixation on mid-20th Century ideological battles, so let’s stay there. Hannah Arendt once said that the great success of Stalinism among intellectuals everywhere was that it had replaced all questions of validity or testability or objectivity with the question of motive. Our Comrade has questioned our policy; why would he do such a thing? And why now? And who put him up to it?

Such a true believer mindset has consistently characterized your time on the public stage. I’ve spoken to dozens of one-time Krasner loyalists who testify to your unwillingness to pursue the truth when it conflicts with your own predisposition. Many have been on the record, like Thomas Mandracchia, an ADA you hired eight years ago. “Both progressive and old school prosecutors alike are fed up and miserable in Krasner’s office,” he told me as he left your employ. “Rather than a rigorous training program for us new prosecutors, my class’s training was a cross between a graduate seminar and a religious retreat, filled with lectures followed by group reflection circles. Our bizarre training ended and, as we eventually entered the courtroom, my colleagues and I realized our training was insufficient at best and misleading at worst … [The training] misled some members of my class into believing they had authority to unilaterally withdraw felony charges in their first few weeks in the courtroom.”

Virtue might not be fashionable right about now, but that’s only because of cynics who traffic in its opposite.

Instead of solving problems, by, I don’t know, increasing reform-minded diversion programs, you’ve waged war on everyone but the criminals you were elected to protect us from: Trump, Josh Shapiro, a succession of mayors now. If every room you’re in contains someone of questionable moral rectitude, at some point you may want to wonder whether that someone is you. Come to think of it, the first signs of character deficit came way back on your 2017 election night, when your supporters loudly chanted, “Fuck the police!” You didn’t quiet them and remind them that most police keep their kids safe, that reform shouldn’t be mean and angry, that civility is a public virtue in and of itself. No, you defended their First Amendment rights — confusing possession of a right with whether it’s right to exercise it.

Or take your ongoing support of your one-time employee Movita Hall-Johnson. Yes, she tragically has lost two sons to gun violence, but the former state representative also funneled something like half a million dollars through an anti-gun violence charity to pay off a Porsche, fur coats and a Mexico vacation. She was sentenced to 11 1/2 to 23 months in jail back in January of 2020 before an early Covid-related release and you continue to praise her for her “courage.”

All of this is to ask: As a leader, do you have the right stuff, morally? You know, do you exhibit virtues like honesty, humility, and bravery?

In politics, that means placing principle above ideology and eschewing the moral straight jacket of team uniform. If you can say no to your friends and donors, if you can conduct yourself honorably, if you can center in your public self what unites us rather than that which divides us, you set yourself up to truly lead. You may remember Senator Robert Kennedy’s (not that RFK) stirring 1968 primary campaign for president before his assassination. He challenged his flock, as at Notre Dame University during the Indiana primary, when Kennedy was booed by his anti-war base for wanting to abolish college draft deferments. “You’re getting the unfair advantage while poor people are being drafted!” he bellowed. Once, when asked by a college student who was going to pay for the social programs he was proposing, he responded, “you are,” before connecting his response to an ethos his otherwise odious father had instilled in the Kennedy brood: To whom much is given, much is required.

Virtue might not be fashionable right about now, but that’s only because of cynics who traffic in its opposite. Which gets us to our reading list. Four books, designed to deliver a new, more classically Liberal Larry Krasner:

Right Thing, Right Now, by Ryan Holiday

Stoicism is having a moment, which is saying something for a 2,000-year-old philosophy. Perhaps most astonishingly, its greatest thinker was a holder of immense power — at a time when thinking and leading weren’t oxymoronic. “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury,” wrote Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. And: “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by.”

And what are those virtues, according to Aurelius? Wisdom, Courage, Justice, and Temperance. Best-selling author, podcaster and bookstore owner Holiday walks us through example after example of how Stoic virtues have fortified American civic life. My favorite? President Harry Truman, who, Holiday reports, underlined in his well-worn copy of Aurelius’ Meditations, “If it’s not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it … First do nothing thoughtlessly or without a purpose. Secondly, see that your acts are directed to a social end.”

We all know of the famous sign on Truman’s desk — “The Buck Stops Here”. But there was another one, quoting Mark Twain: “Always Do Right. This Will Gratify Some People and Astonish the Rest.” Astonish Truman did, suffering in public opinion polling when he banned discrimination in the federal government and desegregated the military. Truman had been raised in Missouri, Klan territory; but when he read of a horrible lynching in Georgia of a Black World War II veteran, it so offended his sense of basic decency that he dedicated himself to the cause of overcoming such inhumanity. In our very city, Southern Democrats — his allies — stormed out of Truman’s party’s convention over his commitment to civil rights. “You can always get along without the support of people like that,” he shrugged.

Truman was no saint, but time and again, Holiday gives us portraits of complicated, flawed leaders who nonetheless strove for moral clarity. The Stoic clarion call is to focus on what one can control and leave to God and the angels what one cannot. Good advice for an elected leader prone to playing political games in service of rigid ideas rather than flesh and blood people.

Churchill: Walking With Destiny, by Andrew Roberts

Crazily enough, some progressives and right-wing extremists are lately finding common ground on the bizarre revisionism that it was Churchill, and not Hitler, who was World War II’s aggressor. Roberts’ bio puts the lie to such heresy. Here is a political leader, warts and all; someone who, as JFK once observed, “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” But he was also someone who erred, learned, and carried on. He switched parties and alliances time and again, because his central obligation was to the preservation of liberal Western values. His loathing of Bond-like villains like Lenin, Trotsky and Hitler saved a continent, and maybe Liberty itself.

Read this book, Mr. District Attorney, to become a more principled leader. “Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party,” Churchill said. “I am not a man of the Left, and I am not a man of the Right. I am a man who looks for what is true.”

Reagan: His Life and Legend, by Max Boot

In my twenties, Ronald Reagan was to be reviled. He was reactionary, uncaring. Boot’s bio, however, paints a much more nuanced picture — dissecting policy flaws, while capturing inspiring examples of civic virtue.

According to Boot, Reagan consciously chose to “relinquish the dogmas of a lifetime” by abandoning his career-long “Evil Empire” rhetoric to negotiate historic arms-reduction treaties with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Boot praises such adaptability as Reagan’s greatest skill. Here we see the right-winger breaking bread with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill to pass legislation aimed at helping working class voters. (The “Reagan Democrats” he’d poached from O’Neill’s coalition.) Reagan was forthright in his beliefs, but rarely played the partisan purity game.

Boot contends that many elected to public office harbor not only deep insecurities but also burning resentment and even malice for those not in their camp — sound familiar? Reagan, however, was “armored in obliviousness,” a lovely phrase. It sounds like a weird virtue, but here’s wishing you more obliviousness to armor yourself in, Mr. District Attorney.

How To Stand Up To a Dictator, by Maria Ressa

This account by Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Ressa of the dissolution of democracy in the Philippines is a testament to the power of the free press as a bulwark against totalitarianism. She shows how quickly illiberalism can spread, and her pursuit of truth at all costs is a reminder of the most winning of strategies: Avoid the urge to mimic the dictator and instead double-down on Enlightenment values. “If you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth,” she writes. “If you don’t have truth, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have trust, you can’t have democracy.”

Ressa’s message should resonate for you today, Mr. District Attorney. You want to avoid making a prophet of Eric Hoffer, author of the seminal 1951 book, The True Believer. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” he wrote.

I hear, Mr. District Attorney, that you’ve started having conversations around town as you mull over a potential run for mayor. This advice is worth precisely what you’re paying for it, but here goes: Before you spend more time chatting up the consultant and political class, crack open these and other books. Look inward. Take in some wisdom.

Or don’t read anything at all. Maybe just head over to Youtube and watch this 1969 episode from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In many parts of the country, public swimming schools were still segregated. So Fred Rogers asked Officer Clemmons, a Black police officer played by François Clemmons, if he’d cool his feet with him in a wading pool. As Rogers bent to dry off Clemmons’ feet with a towel, he told his young viewers in that yinzer twang of his, “Sometimes a minute like this will really make a difference.”

His message was the same as the Stoics, the same as Churchill’s, the same as Reagan’s, the same as Ressa’s. They’d all say: Stop dividing. Let’s all be virtuous to one another.

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