Two oceans can be said to defend the United States. There are also the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, outposts of security and pivot points on the U.S. Navy’s map of the world. The American territory not bounded by water is bordered by countries with no reason and no will to invade: Mexico, Canada, and the United States still have the remarkable option of friendship, should they choose to accept it. Were the will to invade ever to materialize in Mexico or Canada, it would have to contend with a military that commands immense power on land, on sea, and in the air. For those still undeterred, countless nuclear weapons stand ready. The security is not total — total security is an illusion; but it is a fact so formidable that it can be (and almost always is) taken for granted.
Washington, DC, lies within this endless zone of security. Daily the city that defends a nation and a hemisphere defends itself. It does so seamlessly, as the task of the millions who wear uniforms, work in cubicles, decipher intelligence, and debate strategy so that the nation’s capital might be forever unharmed. The War of 1812 scarred Washington and the Pentagon was hit in 2001, two vivid exceptions to the rule that the American capital is impregnable. Only bad weather can go where no great power would dare to go; only it can barge in and break things down. Apart from the remains of a few Civil War forts, Washington, DC has no ruins. It is unlikely ever to have ruins.
The unlikelihood of erasure, of ending, of extreme loss is psychological. Since it reflects certain realities – the reality, say, of two world wars that never directly threatened the American capital – this unlikelihood is unspoken. It is assumed, implicit, built-in, less an unlikelihood than an axiom of national security (and daily life). The White House was rebuilt after it was burnt down in 1812. The Pentagon was quickly repaired after it was damaged in 2001. And yet – a ruin is conceivable in this world-historical fortress, a ruin in a massive building on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks from the statue of General Sherman (who laid waste to Atlanta in the Civil War) and a few blocks from the White House. I am sure that such a ruin is conceivable in Washington, for I saw it with my own eyes.
I began a new job at the Wilson Center for International Scholars on January 13, 2025. The executive order mandating a reduction of the Wilson Center to its “statutory minimum” was issued on the evening of March 21, and on April 3 almost all Wilson Center employees were fired. They were terminated in the morning, meaning that people would be on “administrative leave” by 5 PM on that day, out of the office and off their work email. A quiet pandemonium followed the announcement of this news. There were office plants still to be saved, though people had started moving out before they knew the worst, and papers had to be packed up, and ancien regime emails still to be sent before the revolution could fully instantiate itself. The center’s six floors had always been a hive of activity. They were never more turbulent than on that day in April. At the same time, all the noise and activity were quickly evolving into silence and stasis.
The Wilson Center had proudly identified itself as a center for scholars, and scholars must have a library. Of the center’s six floors one was its library, some thirty thousand books and dozens of journal collections. Like trophy displays in a high school hallway, glass cases held books by fellows who had written them at the center. There was a hard copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a window into the disingenuous solidity of Soviet knowledge, and a marvelous collection of first-edition travel books — A Lithuanian Village, for example, by Leon Kobrin, published in 1920. (Kobrin was born in Vitebsk in 1873, wrote first in Russian and then fell in love with Yiddish in Philadelphia after emigrating there.) The library’s two librarians were fired with everyone else on April 3. Like everyone else they would no longer have access to work email. Like everyone else they had to vacate the building only a few hours after being let go. We all had a rushed exit.
So what would happen to the books?
After April 3, one could still enter the building with permission. The abandoned center’s library was the first American ruin I have seen, or it was the first modern American ruin. It recalled Pompeii in its imagery of life interrupted, though not in its scale: no volcano had dumped lava on the Ronald Reagan Building, where the center was housed; there were no charred bodies. Instead there were trollies with random unreturned library books, study carrels with books and no fellows, and the thirty thousand books that had been there before (tended, catalogued, cared for) and were now orphaned. A library is a library because of librarians — not just because of books. The books, lacking readers, lacking librarians, had lost their function. If a book lies in the woods with no one to read it, is it still a book? These unwanted books were the ruin of a library; they could have been piles of ancient stone.
Those who organized the murder of the Wilson Center did not hate the books. They had no desire to dump them out onto the plaza outside the building and to burn them. A Lithuanian Village offends no one who is offended by diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hatred was not the motivation. Nor was it ideological zeal, despite the analogies that were made to China’s Cultural Revolution and to its disdain for the educated and for the paraphernalia of history and refinement. The motivation of these vandals was indifference. The point was to make the Wilson Center disappear – no more, no less. However the decision was made and for whatever purpose, its implementation was so rapid that the agents of the executive order never even made it to the library. A library built up over decades, housing precious books, a splendid homage to learning on the edge of the National Mall, could now be regarded as empty space, not a scandal, not a jewel, not a concern.
Some turmoil brutally disrupts the status quo. The caretakers are banished, and under new leadership the bequests of generations are handled either with violence or with indifference. The effect of violence and indifference is similar. Perhaps indifference is more destructive than violence. It lasts longer, the outrage that it perpetrates is quieter and less dramatic, and it precludes the possibility of remorse.
March gave way to April. The Wilson Center became a tomb, its only employees the institution’s undertakers. But the books were saved, their rescue consonant with the history of ruins. Ruins arise in part because the barbarians slip through the gates and pitch their tents in the imperial palace, dooming it to dissolution, and in part because people in the conquered institutions stealthily watch over their treasures, spiriting them away to safety (when they can). Perhaps the most famous examples of the heroism of stewardship are Jacques Jaujard and Rose Valland, who saved the paintings at the Louvre both before and during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
But new things grow in ruins, and the stones of a living edifice can be pulled from the debris. Twilight and dawn can co-mingle, and the radical indifference of miniscule elites is sometimes met by anger and action on the part of ordinary people. Those who witness the ravages of indifference often respond with solicitude and kindness, as legions of people did to the Wilson Center’s demise. We must save the books: the people who heard about them seemed to feel this intuitively. One wonders what percentage of books in the Wilson Center library contained stories similar to the story of what befell these books in the spring of 2025. One must save the books because the books already know how to save us.
The Wilson Center’s books are not metaphors. They do not symbolize the nation’s decline, just as they did not symbolize the nation’s health when the Wilson Center was intact. The spring of 2025 was not the fall of Rome, a city that has fallen so many times that its fall has been incorporated into its enduring legacy, and Rome is very much still there, still full after its fall. Rome resists the metaphors that are heaped upon it. So does Washington, DC. The city’s statues – General Sherman near the White House, General Grant grandly contemplating the Union’s victory at one end of the National Mall, Abraham Lincoln’s wise and melancholy face reflecting on the nation’s tragedy at the other – did not rise up to save the Wilson Center’s library. They stayed silent, as symbols do. The symbolism of strife and security, or of strife and serenity, in monument-man Washington is relevant and eloquent. Yet it is only symbolism, floating free in the ether of interpretation.
The Wilson Center’s books were just books, heavy, aging, old-fashioned, in a city awash in books. There are the dozens of university libraries in Washington as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Art, regal Dumbarton Oaks, the National Archives, and the neighborhood public libraries, among them one designed by Mies van der Rohe and lovingly restored in 2020. The Library of Congress sits across the street from the Capitol, its Jefferson and Madison buildings honoring two book-besotted founders of the American Republic: and at the Library of Congress, April having given way to May, the firings have also just begun. If you want a friend in Washington — the saying goes — get a dog. But you might as well get a book: there are so many of them at hand. The opera house came late to the city; the bohemian neighborhoods never came; the skyscrapers were forbidden; the modern city never drew its inspiration from Washington; but in this city the books were always there, tucked behind the neoclassical facades and beckoning to students and scholars, even if the political classes are usually too busy to read. (Their research assistants are not.)
To save the books one must concede that they might have to be saved — and in Washington today they need to be saved not from foreign invaders but from the folly of Americans. The U.S. military is not set up to protect the libraries of Washington, DC. (“We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten,” Condoleezza Rice once said about foreign lands, though Dwight Eisenhower cared enough about the cultural monuments of Europe to demand that his soldiers fight around them, even if this slowed down the war. And there might well be times when we will need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten; there have been such times in the past.) The libraries of Washington, DC must be protected by the citizens of the city, book by book, collection by collection, and if they have to be saved they should be saved merely as the necessary objects that they are, not as metaphors. Better yet, the city’s books should belong to the city’s employed librarians, who are not primarily guardians or warriors or self-conscious defenders of civilization but the giver of gifts, the enablers of so much that is necessary. Without them, an abyss opens. With them, the abyss is kept at bay. We must save the books.