Humiliated, Undermined, Weakened: Judges and Journalists Discuss If Efforts to Discredit Them Foreshadow Dark Days Ahead for American Democracy

The question put to the man seated onstage at the National Press Club was, “Why do you think the institutions of the judiciary and the press failed in Germany in the 1930s?” Unlike any of the hundreds of other people in the room, Frank Cohn could answer from personal experience. The retired U.S. Army colonel, who at 93 still looked fit to command, was at the club in Washington, D.C., as a guest speaker at a one-day national symposium for judges and journalists organized by the nonpartisan and nonprofit National Judicial College (NJC), based in Reno, Nevada.