A President, a Plane, and the Intimidation of Eyes That Watch

The scene is simple and brutal. Reporters publish a story about security concerns involving a new, Qatari‑gifted Air Force One. Before publication, a senior FBI official asks them not to print, invoking national security but offering no clear explanation. After publication, the Department of Justice serves at least four New York Times journalists with subpoenas, some delivered by federal agents at their homes, ordering them before a grand jury. The department insists the targets are leakers of classified information, not the press. Lawyers and advocates call it intimidation and a break with longstanding practice. Everyone invokes “national security” or “press freedom.” No one speaks of the effectual truth.

Let us begin where rulers always begin: survival. A president who rides a foreign‑gifted, $400 million symbol of his authority cannot be indifferent to stories that say this flying palace is unsafe. Here security and reputation run together, as they usually do. In The Prince I wrote that men “judge more by the eye than by the hand,” in W. K. Marriott’s translation, and this aircraft is all eye. If the public believes that the commander in chief travels in a compromised plane, they judge him improvident with his own person and therefore with the state. The leak does not merely reveal a defect; it manufactures an image of negligence. Against images, princes rarely answer with pamphlets. They answer with fear.

So the Justice Department convenes with the FBI director at the White House, then moves. Not against the anonymous leakers alone, but through the visible necks of the reporters. Subpoenas to testify before a grand jury in Manhattan, carried by federal agents to private homes, are not simply legal acts. They are theater. The government claims: we value the press, but we must enforce the law on those entrusted with secrets. Advocates reply: this breaks with the practice of going to journalists only as a last resort. Each side speaks in the language of principle. The real contest is over whose fear will dominate: officials who fear embarrassment, or sources who now fear calling a reporter.

Here I recognize the old question that made my name: is it better for a ruler to be loved or feared? I answered that it is safer to be feared, if one must choose, but never to be hated. Dragging the press into the machinery of criminal investigation is a decision to be feared. Delivering subpoenas at their homes, with all the humiliation of neighbors watching, approaches hatred, because it touches honor. A ruler may punish in secret and be feared, or he may punish with spectacle and risk hatred. To make an example of a journalist on the doorstep is to wager that the people will see a lawbreaker, not a sentinel.

The administration’s defenders say national security requires this harshness, that one cannot simply “stop investigating” leaks that may endanger an aircraft carrying the head of state. On the narrow question of necessity, they are not wrong. No state tolerates free traffic in its most sensitive weaknesses. In wartime Rome, a man who revealed the city’s unguarded gates would not have been shielded by a poet’s shrug. The question is not whether you investigate; it is what arms you use. When you use the criminal process, and the federal police, as arms against those who report, you do not merely defend secrets; you redefine which loyalties are permitted in public life.

Here the republic enters. In the Discourses I praised free peoples because, over time, they judge better than princes. Their judgment depends on information. A press that can report on the safety of the ruler’s own plane is one of those modern “good arms” by which a republic corrects its leaders before misfortune becomes disaster. To terrify not only leakers but the reporters who speak with them is to blunt those arms. It is the middle course I most despise: half professed respect for “the important role that the press plays,” half treatment of journalists as extensions of the criminal class, so that suspicion is cast on all and trust erodes on every side.

If I were still only the author of The Prince, I might applaud the move as a sharp use of virtù against fortuna: a bold president, seeing the flood of leaks rising, builds his dykes with subpoenas and makes an example at the city gate. But exile and history teach a harder lesson. In a principality, one asks only whether the ruler survives; in a republic, one must ask whether the methods that secure today’s ruler degrade the orders on which tomorrow’s depend. Turning federal agents into heralds at reporters’ doors may deter some leaks now, yet it also nourishes a belief that power fears scrutiny more than danger. Over time, that belief is itself a danger no subpoena can contain.

The effectual truth is that this escalation is both understandable and costly, a clever defense of one plane that risks turbulence for the whole constitution.