The Right Note

Editor's Letter/December 2019

The first day that Annie Leibovitz photographed the Speaker of the House, shadowing her through a day of meetings on Capitol Hill, was the same day many hoped might herald the beginning of impeachment proceedings against the president. Elsewhere on the Hill, Robert Mueller was testifying before the House judiciary committee. By the end of that day, his testimony seemed like a final curtain; in reality, it was just a false start. And so, in this issue we present Annie's suite of pictures of Nancy Pelosi at work, illustrative of the Speaker's drive, focus, and uncanny ability to rise above the noise of a chaotic news cycle. "The times have found us," she tells V.F.'s Abigail Tracy, quoting Thomas Paine, and if they found us a few months later than we expected, with more bizarre bit players from Ukraine, well, Pelosi was ready and waiting.

The tyranny of low expectations hangs over the president during this inquiry. Questions like "What did the president know and when did he know it?" presume some actual knowledge on his part as to how governance works, and what he should and should not be saying while on the phone with foreign powers. But it's fair to ask a few similarly pointed questions about all the president's men. For example, how did Attorney General William Barr devolve from a principled conservative into one of Donald Trump's chief sycophants? Marie Brenner looks back to the tumultuous spring of 1968 to investigate the scandal of Barr's formative years—when his father, Donald Barr, was the controversial head of the Dalton School in Manhattan, and young Billy Barr was a staunch young Republican pushing back on the rising tide of liberalism. As Marie writes, the lessons William Barr learned while under the sway of a different "charismatic, domineering, and doctrinaire figure named Donald" are manifesting in today's headlines. Is it weird, incidentally, that the trio of men most visibly responsible for our current national paroxysm—Trump, Barr, and Rudy Giulianiall hail from New York City? Or is it poetic justice for the political party that, to quote Ted Cruz, loves to rail against "New York values"?

Well, I'm from New York too, and we would like to counter with the values broadcast by one of America's most delightful families: Chrissy Teigen, John Legend, and their two adorable children. We photographed them at home in Los Angeles, and spoke to Chrissy and John about fame, fortune, family, and activism—John as a powerful and persuasive advocate for prison reform (with a side hustle as one of the most accomplished musicians of our time); Chrissy as a funny, disarmingly honest voice pushing back against a president known for harassing women of color who dare to speak their minds. The Teigen-Legend household harmony provides an alternate note to the divisiveness and dissonance all around us, and it seems that whatever Trump throws at them, they can handle it. Here's hoping the same for Congress in the coming months.

RADHIKA JONES

Editor in Chief