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Vietnam was escalating. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been slain only a year before. And at Niles West High School outside Chicago, a senior who was president of the student council took on an issue of pressing concern to the teenagers of this suburban slice of the North Shore: the right to wear shorts to the un­­airconditioned school during final exams.

It was an era of student strikes and sit-ins, but the student council president, Merrick Garland, chose a different course. He tried to defuse the brewing conflict, turning to hard evidence to make the case. “Who would have thunk to seek out help from a psychologist?” recalled Donald Silvert, a fellow 1969-1970 student council officer.

But that’s what Garland did, enlisting a psychologist to write a letter to the principal, assuring him that there was no research showing that wearing shorts rendered high schoolers any less studious.

The strategy succeeded.

At 17, his handling of the dress-code controversy — working for change from within the system, taking the views of others into account — displayed qualities that have been visible throughout the life of the 63-year-old appellate judge whom President Obama has nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court.

The vacancy on the court, created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, has become a focal point of the nation’s bitterly divided politics, with Senate Republicans refusing to consider anyone Obama had chosen. An examination of Garland’s coming of age and his professional life, based on interviews with more than three dozen relatives, friends, mentors and colleagues, reveals a style and intellectual disposition that offer opponents to his nomination few rough edges to exploit.

Garland is a disciplined rule follower — methodical and meticulous in his adherence to process. He would never dream of accelerating at a yellow light, according to one of his closest friends since fifth grade, Earl Steinberg, and invariably seeks out multiple doctors’ opinions when he or anyone in his family has a medical problem. “It’s check, double-check, triple-check,” Steinberg said.

And yet this understated, systematic style — that of technical mastery, not poetry — is blended with a prodigious work ethic and keen social intelligence to potent effect.

Ever since his youth, Garland has drawn the support of people in a position to further his ambitions. In the high school election for student council president, a classmate stopped collecting petitions to run against him, sensing that the faculty adviser was grooming Garland to win. When Garland worked two college summers back home for the Democratic congressional campaigns of Abner Mikva, writing his press releases and cue cards for his stump speeches, the candidate’s wife made no secret that she hoped Garland would marry one of their daughters. As a third-year law student, Garland was eager to edit a Harvard Law Review article by Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. — and impressed the justice enough to secure a clerkship with him.

Asked to recall instances in which Garland has suffered disappointments — or temporarily veered off course — people close to him hesitate, stumped. The first instance anyone cites came in 1995, when President Bill Clinton tapped him for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit but the nomination was blocked in the Senate for two years. The experience was hard on him, friends said. (Clinton eventually renominated him.) Later, Garland was a finalist for the first two Supreme Court openings of Obama’s tenure but wasn’t chosen and thought his time had passed.

“If there is someone who has his highest dreams fulfilled unexpectedly, it has to be Merrick Garland,” said Mikva, now 90, a friend and mentor, who went on to become chief judge of the D.C. Circuit. It was Mikva’s departure in the mid-1990s to be Clinton’s White House counsel that created the court vacancy that Garland filled.

“I think Merrick must have thought about being on the Supreme Court as long as he’s been old enough to think about it,” Mikva said. Still, “one of the things about Merrick is, he has passions, but he does not use them to get aroused.”

Merrick Brian Garland grew up in a less-fancy part of Lincolnwood, the first child of a couple who had met at a Jewish dance. Cyril and Shirley Garland had both gone to the University of Chicago — he to study business administration, she for social work. The family lived in a brick bi-level, with a bedroom for the only son and another that his two younger sisters shared.

Jill Roter, about 18 months younger than her brother, remembers their father working 12 or 14 hours a day, running a tiny advertising business from an office on their home’s lower level. He designed fliers promoting store sales, took them to a local print shop and then “had little address machines. . . . Merrick and I would sit and help,” Roter recalled. Their father was “not making a lot of money, and working all those hours,” she said.

Childhood friends remember Garland’s father, who died in 2000, as gentle, non­judgmental and affectionate. Friends describe his mother as “brilliant.” She was on the local school board — a post that required her to run in non­partisan elections.

Garland was an achiever early: enrolled in an experimental class for advanced students in fifth grade, president of the Lincoln Hall Junior High student body in eighth grade. By high school at Niles West, he played the challenging lead role in “J.B.,” a play, written in free verse by the poet Archibald MacLeish, based on the biblical story of Job.

 As the student council’s vice president his junior year, he helped organize a mock election; it was the fall of 1968, three months after riots at the Democratic National Convention in downtown Chicago, so the principal was wary, recalled Barry Rosen, another council officer. “Merrick was very cognizant of all this, to make sure this was organized, to make sure all views would be represented,” said Rosen, now a lawyer in Chicago.

Close to graduation, Garland suggested to Rosen and Steinberg that, as student leaders, they take to the senior prom three South American exchange students who might otherwise not be invited. “We triple-dated. I drove,” Rosen said.

Garland and Steinberg both got into Harvard, and they decided to room together in a four-person suite on Harvard Yard. Garland was planning to become a doctor, and he arrived in Cambridge with a large scholarship from G.D. Searle, a pharmaceutical company. It was inside their suite, second semester of their freshman year, that Garland began worrying aloud that he might not have chosen the right path.

As Garland saw it, medicine was a way to help people individually, Steinberg recalls. “What eventually drew him more to the social ­sciences,” Steinberg said, “was the prospect of having an . . . impact on many people, as opposed to one by one.”

Garland, ever the rule follower, knew that he needed to notify the sponsor of the scholarship about his shift in plans, and he feared losing the aid. Searle allowed him to keep it.

By his first winter in college, he was again working within the system. He was elected the sole freshman representative to Harvard’s Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life. The campus was being roiled by disputes over coeducation, following Radcliffe’s recent merger with Harvard College.

Jamie Gorelick, who would later become Garland’s boss at the Justice Department, was a junior on the committee and first remembers him from a fevered debate over whether to change a system that had given tickets to Harvard’s football games only to male students, with women able to go only as men’s dates. Some administrators contended that the proposed change would harm the university’s future fundraising. Gorelick was outspoken that the system was unfair, and Garland, the freshman, agreed with her.

That spring, Garland was accepted into the small social-studies major, a “place to be if you wanted to be on the inside with some” of Harvard’s social science luminaries, said classmate David Johnson. It was rigorous and non-ideological. Every sophomore, Johnson said, “had to read the collective works of some of the great philosophers — Durkheim, Freud, Marx, Max Weber — and sort of synthesize their worldview from different perspectives.”

For his honors thesis as a senior, Garland chose to write about industrial mergers in Britain in the 1960s. His thesis adviser, a young professor in the government department named Peter Gourevitch, said the topic fit within debate circulating at the time about the role of government in the economy. The 235-page thesis is akin to the judicial opinions Garland would produce decades later, evaluating competing interpretations of the forces­ that led to automobile and computer industry mergers, and then laying out which interpretation he found to carry the greatest weight.
When he finished, Gourevitch, now an emeritus professor at the University of California at San Diego, did something he never did for any other Harvard student: He took Garland to lunch — at the No Name Restaurant, a fish place on Boston’s waterfront — to celebrate his achievement.

Susan Estrich remembers meeting Garland at a picnic for the 20 second-year law students whose grades had won them a spot on the Harvard Law Review. “We all sort of eyed each other,” said Estrich, a University of Southern California law professor who also has worked in Democratic politics. “We were all smart, but some people were . . . more cosmopolitan. He had a sense of being a winner.”

The next spring, Estrich beat Garland in a five-way competition to become the law review’s president. He became one of the law review’s four article editors, splitting up the hundreds of articles that arrived for consideration, recalls Kate Stith, now a Yale law professor. The article Brennan submitted was on rights granted by state constitutions that, in some cases, exceed those under the U.S. Constitution. Garland was eager to edit it, Stith and others recalled. The article ran in the law review’s January 1977 issue. By the time Garland graduated that spring, Brennan, who typically chose one Harvard law student as a Supreme Court clerk each year, had selected him.

Garland not only clerked for the liberal lion Brennan but also for another luminary: Judge Henry J. Friendly, a conservative on the New York-based Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. The judge drafted opinions by working at his large desk with his secretary taking stenography and his two clerks in front of him, expected to chime in if they had an idea.

After his clerkships, Garland became a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. When Ronald Reagan was elected president, Garland was three years out of school and had not yet practiced law. He joined the D.C. firm Arnold & Porter, focusing on anti­trust work. He helped to defend electrical contractors on trial in Montana for alleged bid-rigging; they were acquitted.

Four years after becoming a partner, Garland left in 1989 for a stint in the office of U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens. According to a friend at the time, Garland was allowed to bypass new prosecutors’ petty-crime rotation and jump into larger drug and corruption ­cases.

Three years later, he went back to his old law firm — temporarily.

Garland’s return to the Justice Department, as principal associate deputy attorney general, opened one of the defining chapters of his life, leading the investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Watching on television as rescuers removed bodies from the wreckage of the federal building in the hours after the explosion, Garland asked Attorney General Janet Reno to dispatch him to take charge of the inquiry into a crime scene covering several city blocks.
A half-dozen people who watched him work there recall that he consoled victims and families, and pushed a large law enforcement community to begin a disciplined inquiry that amassed evidence meticulously while ensuring that the bombing suspects were arraigned, questioned and prosecuted according to a strict interpretation of the criminal code.

His lesser-known role in another case perhaps best illustrates the adherence to process that has characterized him since he was a teenager: the troubled investigation of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. An internal Justice Department report examined complaints surrounding the FBI’s interview of security guard Richard Jewell, whose name was leaked as a potential suspect. And it found that Garland, who was not in charge of the case, repeatedly urged that Jewell be given his Miranda rights and complained to his bosses­ after learning that FBI agents had used a ruse, telling Jewell erroneously that the interview was being taped for training purposes.

Since Garland arrived on the D.C. Circuit in 1997, the qualities he first evinced as a youngster and the lessons he absorbed along the way have been much in evidence.

As he learned as a clerk for Friendly, Garland involves his own clerks in a meticulous polishing of an opinion. His custom is to ask the clerk assigned to the case to be beside him at his standing desk while he reviews the opinion, word by word. Once they finish, the judge then summons a second clerk — one with no role in drafting the opinion — to stand alongside him for a final reading. “It could take hours,” recalled Karen Dunn, a clerk a decade ago who is a lawyer in the District.

And, as he did decades ago with his wary high school principal, Garland has a facility for forging consensus among the 11-member D.C. Circuit.

Garland employs a mastery of the law and a strategy of defining contentious issues in ways that limit the scope of debate, according to interviews with four clerks and two fellow judges, including Judge Laurence Silberman, a noted conservative appointed by Reagan.

Garland’s ability to achieve consensus was apparent in a case last year, Wagner v. Federal Election Commission, a challenge to a federal ban on campaign donations from government contractors. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Alan B. Morrison, contended that the law violated the constitutional rights of individual contractors.

The opinion Garland wrote, however, upheld the contractors ban. It emphasized the narrow nature of the plaintiff’s claim and the statute’s limited reach. His opinion used the word “narrow” 11 times. Morrison, who expected his argument to be attractive to judges on both the left and the right, was stunned.

Garland’s opinion was signed by every other active judge on the appellate court.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Amy Goldstein, Tom Hamburger - The Washington Post

More than 25,000 people have signed a petition to allow firearms inside the Republican National Convention being held in Cleveland in July.

Firearms are currently not permitted inside the Quicken Loans Arena, known as "the Q," where the gathering will take place.

The petition, posted Monday on Change.org, sought only 5,000 signatures but has since quintupled, topping 25,000 Saturday afternoon. It was posted by an author identified only as "N.A." from Cleveland, but the user profile appears to have been deleted from the website.

It was not clear whether the person posting the petition was backing the proposal or attempting to put the party, which strongly backs gun rights, in an awkward position.

Among the petition's five goals, it calls upon Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, to mount a "concerted effort to use his executive authority to override the "gun-free zone" loophole being exploited by the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio."

The name of the group purportedly behind the effort — Americans for Responsible Open Carry — does not appear anywhere else online and accepts online message only from networked supporters, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

The Ohio Republican Party said it was not aware of the petition, the Journal reported, nor was the host committee overseeing the convention, although it noted that the Secret Service, in conjunction with Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and state and federal authorities, is handling security for the event.

“They are coordinating and will be continuously refining security plans leading up to the national convention,” said Alee Lockman, a spokesperson for the Republican National Convention, the Journal says.

In 2012, firearms were banned by the Secret Service at the Republican convention in Tampa.

The Journal says the National Rifle Association declined to comment on the petition.

The petition states:

This is a direct affront to the Second Amendment and puts all attendees at risk. As the National Rifle Association has made clear, "gun-free zones" such as the Quicken Loans Arena are "the worst and most dangerous of all lies." The NRA, our leading defender of gun rights, has also correctly pointed out that "gun free zones... tell every insane killer in America... (the) safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk."

The petition also claims that forcing attendees to leave firearms at home puts everyone in attendance at risk. It also notes the convention could be a potential target for an attack.

Without the right to protect themselves, those at the Quicken Loans Arena will be sitting ducks, utterly helpless against evil-doers, criminals or others who wish to threaten the American way of life.(USA TODAY)

 

Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or “substantially reimburse” the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.

“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump said during a 100-minute interview on foreign policy, spread over two phone calls on Friday, “I don’t think it would be around.”
He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the American nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China. If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.

And he said he would be willing to withdraw United States forces from both Japan and South Korea if they did not substantially increase their contributions to the costs of housing and feeding those troops. “Not happily, but the answer is yes,” he said.

Mr. Trump also said he would seek to renegotiate many fundamental treaties with American allies, possibly including a 56-year-old security pact with Japan, which he described as one-sided.

In Mr. Trump’s worldview, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining. He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of a negotiation, even when he was imprecise about the strategic goals he sought. He again faulted the Obama administration’s handling of the negotiations with Iran last year — “It would have been so much better if they had walked away a few times,” he said — but offered only one new idea about how he would change its content: Ban Iran’s trade with North Korea.

Mr. Trump struck similar themes when he discussed the future of NATO, which he called “unfair, economically, to us,” and said he was open to an alternative organization focused on counterterrorism. He argued that the best way to halt China’s placement of military airfields and antiaircraft batteries on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea was to threaten its access to American markets.

“We have tremendous economic power over China,” he argued. “And that’s the power of trade.” He made no mention of Beijing’s capability for economic retaliation.

Mr. Trump’s views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: He is not in the internationalist camp of the elder President George Bush, nor does he favor George W. Bush’s call to make it the mission of the United States to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might best be summed up as “America First.”

“Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” He said he was willing to reconsider traditional American alliances if partners were not willing to pay, in cash or troop commitments, for the presence of American forces around the world. “We will not be ripped off anymore,” he said.

In the past week, the bombings in Brussels and an accelerated war against the Islamic State have shifted the focus of the campaign trail conversation back to questions of how the candidates would defend the United States and what kind of diplomacy they would pursue around the world.

Mr. Trump explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences around the globe. Much the same way he treats political rivals and interviewers, he personalized how he would engage foreign nations, suggesting his approach would depend partly on “how friendly they’ve been toward us,” not just on national interests or alliances.

At no point did he express any belief that American forces deployed on military bases around the world were by themselves valuable to the United States, though Republican and Democratic administrations have for decades argued that they are essential to deterring military adventurism, protecting commerce and gathering intelligence.

Like Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Trump emphasized the importance of “unpredictability” for an American president, arguing that the country’s traditions of democracy and openness had made its actions too easy for adversaries and allies alike to foresee.

“I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” he said about how far he was willing to take the confrontation over the islands in the South China Sea, which are remote and uninhabited but extend China’s control over a major maritime thoroughfare. But, he added, “I would use trade, absolutely, as a bargaining chip.”

Asked when he thought American power had been at its peak, Mr. Trump reached back 116 years to the turn of the 20th century, the era of another unconventional Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up leaving the party. His favorite figures in American history, he said, include two generals, Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton — though he insisted that, unlike MacArthur, he would not advocate the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort. (He suggested that MacArthur had pressed during the Korean War to use atomic weapons against China as a means “to negotiate,” adding, “He played the nuclear card, but he didn’t use it.”)

Mr. Trump denied that he had had trouble recruiting senior members of the foreign policy establishment to advise his campaign. “Many of them are tied up with contracts working for various networks,” he said, like Fox or CNN.

He disclosed the names of three advisers in addition to five he announced earlier in the week: retired Maj. Gen. Gary L. Harrell, Maj. Gen. Bert K. Mizusawa and retired Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic. Asked about the briefings he receives and books he has read about foreign policy, he said his main source of information was newspapers, “including yours.”

Until recently, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements have largely come through slogans: “Take the oil,” “Build a wall” and ban Muslim immigrants, at least temporarily. But as he has pulled closer to capturing the nomination, he has been called on to elaborate.

Pressed about his call to “take the oil” controlled by the Islamic State in the Middle East, Mr. Trump acknowledged that this would require deploying ground troops, something he does not favor. “We should’ve taken it, and we would’ve had it,” he said, referring to the years in which the United States occupied Iraq. “Now we have to destroy the oil.”

Mr. Trump did not rule out spying on American allies, including foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose cellphone was apparently a target of the National Security Agency. President Obama said that the United States would no longer target her phone but made no such commitments about the rest of Germany, or Europe.

“I’m not sure that I would want to be talking about that,” Mr. Trump said. “You understand what I mean by that.”

Mr. Trump was not impressed with Ms. Merkel’s handling of the migrant crisis, however: “Germany is being destroyed by Merkel’s naïveté, or worse,” he said. He suggested that Germany and the Gulf nations should pay for the “safe zones” he wants to set up in Syria for refugees, and for protecting them once built.

Throughout the two conversations, Mr. Trump painted a bleak picture of the United States as a diminished force in the world, an opinion he has held since the late 1980s, when he placed ads in The New York Times and other newspapers calling for Japan and Saudi Arabia to spend more money on their own defense.

Mr. Trump’s new threat to cut off oil purchases from the Saudis was part of a broader complaint about the United States’ Arab allies, which many in the Obama administration share: that they frequently look to the United States to police the Middle East, without putting their own troops at risk. “We defend everybody,” Mr. Trump said. “When in doubt, come to the United States. We’ll defend you. In some cases free of charge.”

But his rationale for abandoning the region was that “the reason we’re in the Middle East is for oil, and all of a sudden we’re finding out that there’s less reason to be there now.” He made no mention of the risks of withdrawal — that it would encourage Iran to dominate the Gulf, that the presence of American troops is part of Israel’s defense, and that American air and naval bases in the region are key collection points for intelligence and bases for drones and Special Operations forces.

Mr. Trump seemed less comfortable on some topics than others. He called the United States “obsolete” in terms of cyberweaponry, although the nation’s capabilities are generally considered on the cutting edge.

In the morning interview, asked if he would seek a two-state or a one-state solution in a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said: “I’m not saying anything. What I’m going to do is, you know, I specifically don’t want to address the issue because I would love to see if a deal could be made.”

But in the evening, saying he had been rushed earlier, Mr. Trump reverted to a position he outlined on Monday before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. “Basically, I support a two-state solution on Israel,” he said. “But the Palestinian Authority has to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

In his discussion of nuclear weapons — which he said he had learned about from an uncle, John G. Trump, who served on the faculty of M.I.T. and died in 1985 — Mr. Trump seemed fixated on the large nuclear stockpiles amassed in the Cold War. While he referred briefly to North Korean and Pakistani arsenals, he said nothing about a danger that is a cause of great consternation among international leaders: small nuclear weapons that could be fashioned by terrorists.

In criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, Mr. Trump expressed particular outrage at how the roughly $150 billion released to Iran was being spent. “Did you notice they’re buying from everybody but the United States?” he said.

Told that sanctions under United States law still prevent most American companies from doing business with Iran, Mr. Trump said: “So, how stupid is that? We give them the money and we now say, ‘Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing,’ right?”

But Mr. Trump, who has been pushed to demonstrate a basic command of international affairs, insisted that voters should not doubt his foreign policy fluency.“I do know my subject,” he said.

By DAVID E. SANGER and MAGGIE HABERMAN- The New York Times

ATLANTA — One presidential candidate pledged to "Stand up for America." Two generations later, another promises to "Make America Great Again." Their common denominator: convincing certain Americans that their version of the United States is under threat.

Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he's following the playbook of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who achieved national stature on his promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," then made four failed bids for the White House from 1964 to 1976.

Instead, Trump invokes the anger of "the silent majority," a phrase he's resurrected from the era of Wallace and President Richard Nixon, who won in 1968 and 1972 in part by co-opting Wallace's racially charged populism.

Trump detractors hear more than a faint echo of Wallace in Trump's anti-establishment mix of economic protectionism and blunt nativism, and they note that the brash billionaire, like Wallace, has drawn similar results in the campaign: tense rallies that often involve violent clashes among protesters, police and the candidate's supporters.

"Trump is taking his campaign straight to the haters, and he's gotten the roots of that old Wallace crowd," says Joe Reed, a black Democratic Party broker in Alabama who came to know the four-term governor toward the end of his life, when he had abandoned his segregationist positions, long after a would-be assassin left him paralyzed.

The comparison offends Trump backers.

"George Wallace was a racist," said Debbie Dooley, a national tea party leader. "It's totally ridiculous for anybody to think the same about Donald Trump." She argues Trump's independence from "the money that controls Washington, D.C." outweigh his caustic rhetoric on immigration, Muslims and the protesters — many of them young and black — who interrupt his rallies.

"Donald Trump is not preaching hate," Dooley said. "He's standing up for the American workers and the American people."

Trump offers his outsized personality as an all-purpose antidote to a country that is "falling apart" and "never wins anymore."

The overwhelmingly white throngs at Trump rallies roar at his mention of a border wall and heartily approve his call to stop all non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. Supporters cheer his promises to protect gun rights and share his lament that Christianity is under attack. They applaud his threats of punitive tariffs on imports from countries "killing us on trade."

Wallace, meanwhile, fueled his strongest campaigns in 1968 and 1972 with a wide-ranging critique of a society in decline. He modified the overtly racist language he used in his Alabama campaigns, fashioning himself instead as a "states' rights" conservative. He complained of rising crime and a "sick Supreme Court" that outlawed compulsory school prayer and allowed pornography.

Wallace, political historian Dan T. Carter said, "had all these ways of getting across what he meant" without explicitly mentioning race or class. "He said 'inner-city thugs,' and everybody knew he was talking about young black men in the cities."

Tom Turnipseed, who managed Wallace's 1968 campaign and became a civil rights activist, assigned the same motivation to Trump and Wallace. "Fear," he told The Associated Press.

"You can scare folks with that line that the Mexicans are coming because everyday working people ... see Mexicans in the labor market and it hurts their wages — they think of it that way, at least," Turnipseed said. "Governor Wallace, you know, did the same with African-Americans."

In his book "The Politics of Rage," Carter identifies Wallace and his play for working-class white votes as the model for the "Southern strategy" that Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use to win four landslide elections in 20 years.

Nixon wrote in his memoirs of having to navigate Wallace so he would not "draw a large number of conservative votes from me." Nixon protected his right flank by criticizing court-ordered busing of schoolchildren to accomplish integration, vowing to impose "law and order" and declaring the "War on Drugs," which an aide later described as a targeting of "hippies" and blacks.

Trump is the latest heir of all this, Carter said.

"When you hear Trump supporters say he 'tells like it is' or 'he's not politically correct,'" Carter said, "what they're really saying, many of them, is ... 'I love it, because it's what I believe, too.'"

Protesters, meanwhile, become evidence of the national decay that only the candidate's tough leadership can reverse.

When activists interrupted his rally at Madison Square Garden in 1968, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders "kowtow to these anarchists." He added, "We don't have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of 'em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that's all."

Trump has pined for "the old days" when such "animals" would be "carried out on a stretcher, folks." He orders security to "get 'em the hell outta here" and said of one protester, "I'd like to punch him in the face."

Reed acknowledged there are "working white folks who are mad" but says Trump, like Wallace, has them "turning their arrows at the wrong folks."

Trump denies he is playing to racism or xenophobia. His supporters "aren't angry people," he says, just frustrated "about the way the country is being run."

"What are we looking for, OK, all of us?" Trump asked after declaring that families, jobs, homes and health care face existential threats. "We're looking for security. We're looking for safety. We're looking for family, and taking care of our family, right?"

By BILL BARROW, Associated Press

In a mathematical squeeze to make up ground in the Democratic presidential race, Bernie Sanders is preparing to ratchet up his attacks on Hillary Clinton ahead of a New York showdown that could establish how easily the party can pull itself back together for the general election.

The Empire State’s April 19 primary looms as potentially determinative: A win by Clinton, who is favored, would further narrow Sanders’s path, while a loss in the state she represented as a senator would embarrass her and hand Sanders a rationale to continue campaigning until the final votes are cast in June.

Clinton had enjoyed a lead of roughly 300 in pledged delegates, but Sanders narrowed the gap Saturday with victories in at least two of three Western caucuses. In one of the most successful days of his campaign, the senator from Vermont easily won in Alaska and Washington state and was well positioned to carry Hawaii.

To capitalize on his fresh momentum, Sanders plans an aggressive push in New York, modeled after his come-from-behind victory a few weeks ago in Michigan. He intends to barnstorm the state as if he were running for governor. His advisers, spoiling for a brawl, have commissioned polls to show which contrasts with Clinton — from Wall Street to fracking — could do the most damage to her at home.

“We’ll be the underdog, but being the underdog in New York is not the worst situation in politics,” said Tad Devine, the chief strategist for Sanders. “We’re going to make a real run for it.”

The intensified and scrappy approach by Sanders comes as Clinton is eager to pivot to the general election. Clinton keenly understands the imperative to unite Democrats for the fall campaign and, thinking that the nomination is nearly locked up, wants to spend the spring building bridges to the Sanders wing.

A potentially ugly primary in New York threatens to derail those efforts. Clinton’s advisers are all but urging Sanders to lay off his attacks.

“We’re going to run to win delegates and run to win the primary,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in an interview Friday. “We intend to win this thing with a majority of pledged delegates. Senator Sanders is going to have to make up his mind about what he wants to do and what kind of campaign he wants to run.”

Podesta noted that Sanders took a more negative turn in the Midwestern states that voted on March 15 — Illinois, Ohio and Missouri — and lost all three. “It didn’t work,” he said.

Clinton, her aides and her allies in recent weeks have avoided sharply attacking Sanders, wary of saying or doing anything that would make it more difficult to engineer an eventual coming together.

In particular, the Clinton forces have been careful not to be seen as pushing Sanders to quit the race. A group of pro-Clinton senators recently considered writing an open letter to Sanders saying the time had come for him to end his campaign. But when two Clinton allies, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), caught wind of the idea, they persuaded their colleagues to nix it, according to two people familiar with the letter.

Assuming that Clinton stays on course to secure the nomination, her team sees wooing the Sanders coalition as a pressing mission, especially young people and independents, to ensure that they don’t sit out the November election altogether. Key would be whether and how soon Clinton wins Sanders’s endorsement — and how enthusiastic he is in giving it. Clinton’s vocal support for then-Sen. Barack Obama following their divisive 2008 primary helped unite Democrats.

Two popular Democrats currently on the sidelines — President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) — could help bring the two sides together. David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, pointed to a third unifying figure: Donald Trump. He noted that Warren last week fired off a flurry of tweets attacking Trump, which he read as an important signal.

“She was sending a message to Democrats that there are bigger things at stake here,” Axelrod said, adding: “There probably is going to be a very vivid choice in the general election and one that very much unifies Democrats.”

With that in mind, the Clinton team has been trying to foster trust with the Sanders base. Long lines at Arizona polling places last Tuesday led Sanders supporters to speculate online that the Clinton campaign was in cahoots with the Democratic National Committee in creating obstacles for them to vote.

Rather than responding with indignation, Clinton’s campaign counsel, Marc Elias, wrote a post on Reddit — in an online public square for Sanders fans — sharing in their outrage and explaining that the lines were the result of Republican-led voter restrictions in Maricopa County.

“What happened in Arizona is bad for BOTH Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, and supporters of both campaigns should come together to make sure this is addressed before November,” Elias wrote. “By the way, if you’re wondering, Secretary Clinton’s got a plan to address this, but I’m really not here to plug my boss!”

Clinton supporter Jay Jacobs likened the courtship of Sanders backers to making Thanksgiving dinner. “You can’t cook a turkey too fast by turning up the heat,” he said. “You’ve got to cook it at the right temperature for the right amount of time, and it’ll come out fine — but you’ve got to do a lot of basting along the way.”

Sanders, meanwhile, is hoping for another win in Wisconsin, which holds its primary on April 5. Sanders won two of Wisconsin’s neighboring states — Michigan to the east and Minnesota to the west — and the state’s overwhelmingly white electorate and the progressive, reformist roots of Democrats there should give him an advantage.

“If we’re going to have a serious shot at the nomination, we’re going to have to defeat her in Wisconsin,” Devine said.

Sanders then hopes to slingshot into New York, which will award a whopping 247 delegates — second only to California.

In New York, a diverse and pulsating center of Democratic power which has not hosted a truly competitive presidential primary since the 1980s, Democrats are buzzing with anticipation over the showdown.

“Everybody thinks it’ll be big,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based strategist and former Clinton adviser. “If the turnout by African Americans is large, Secretary Clinton will win well. If the turnout is not large, she will not win. Is the opportunity with her? Yes. But this is a test. . . . If it’s tight, it means the left is still aggravated against her.”

The Clinton team is readying for a competitive race and is not taking New York for granted.

“If [Sanders] sneaks up on her, then shame on the Clinton campaign,” Axelrod said. “The city is a bastion of progressivism, and there should be pockets of Sanders supporters. . . . But I have to believe that the relationships she’s forged there in the last 15 years mean something.”

Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn and plans to highlight his “New York values,” Devine said, and the campaign’s ads would have “a good feel for the state.” Sanders also is likely to go after Clinton over her ties to Wall Street, an issue he has raised for several months now, and Devine said the team is testing attacks on other issues, including fracking.

Sanders wants to ban fracking, the practice of pumping water containing chemicals deep underground at high pressures to release oil and natural gas. Clinton, who has ties to the fossil-fuel industry, says she does not support fracking where it is causing environmental damage — or in states like New York, where it is banned — though she has stopped short of opposing the practice outright.

“The basic frame of his whole campaign — the economy’s rigged, the campaign finance system is corrupt — will continue, but there are other issues, as well,” Devine said. “Fracking is something New York state has outlawed, and there’s a big difference between Hillary and Bernie.”

The Clinton team is preemptively crying foul.

“We fully expect him to continue waging a spirited campaign, but it’s disappointing he is preparing a fresh round of attacks to use against Hillary Clinton in her own back yard, rather than focusing on how to stand up against the dangerous rhetoric and ideas coming from the Republican candidates,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in an email.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), a Clinton backer, sounded a similar note in an email: “Bernie has every right to stay in the race and bring his campaign to New York and fight hard here. But New Yorkers do not want to see him go on the attack against Hillary when Democrats should be focused on the big threat we face from Donald Trump.”

The New York primary, by definition, should draw considerable media attention, but Sanders wants to raise the stakes even higher. His campaign is lobbying the DNC to organize a debate in New York the week before the primary. “We don’t mind being the away team in the Hillary home game in New York,” Devine said.

The Clinton campaign has objected to having a debate in the state, according to Devine. Fallon declined to comment on debate negotiations.

For now, at least, Clinton’s backers are confident that any damage caused by Sanders will not be lasting. “I think this primary is going to make our Democratic nominee even stronger heading into the general election, and I believe Democrats will come together in November,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) said in an email.

Asked about bridge building, Devine suggested that such outreach was a ways off.

“I’m not great at reading the tea leaves,” he said. But he added, “I know Podesta has my number, because he’s called it before — and it wasn’t to build bridges, in case you’re wondering.”

Podesta would not characterize his recent conversation with Devine.

“We’re in a contest,” the Clinton chairman said. “We both understand it.”

Anne Gearan and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

Philip Rucker- The Washington Post

NEW YORK — In television news, a telephone interview is typically frowned upon. Donald Trump's fondness for them is changing habits and causing consternation in newsrooms, while challenging political traditions.

Two organizations are circulating petitions to encourage Sunday morning political shows to hang up on Trump. Some prominent holdouts, like Fox's Chris Wallace, refuse to do on-air phoners. Others argue that a phone interview is better than no interview at all.

Except in news emergencies, producers usually avoid phoners because television is a visual medium — a face-to-face discussion between a newsmaker and questioner is preferable to a picture of an anchor listening to a disembodied voice.

It's easy to see why Trump likes them. There's no travel or TV makeup involved; if he wishes to, Trump can talk to Matt Lauer without changing out of his pajamas. They often put an interviewer at a disadvantage, since it's harder to interrupt or ask follow-up questions, and impossible to tell if a subject is being coached.

Face-to-face interviews let viewers see a candidate physically react to a tough question and think on his feet, said Chris Licht, executive producer of "CBS This Morning." Sometimes that's as important as what is being said.

Trump tends to take over phone interviews and can get his message out with little challenge, Wallace said.

"The Sunday show, in the broadcast landscape, I feel is a gold standard for probing interviews," said Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday." ''The idea that you would do a phone interview, not face-to-face or not by satellite, with a presidential candidate — I'd never seen it before, and I was quite frankly shocked that my competitors were doing it."

Since Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, Wallace has conducted three in-person interviews with him on "Fox News Sunday," and four via satellite.

Chuck Todd, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," has done phoners with Trump but now said he's decided to stick to in-person interviews on his Sunday show. He's no absolutist, though.

"It's a much better viewer experience when it's in person," Todd said. "Satellite and phoners are a little harder, there's no doubt about it. But at the end of the day, you'll take something over nothing."

Morning news shows do phoners most frequently. At the outset of the campaign, Trump was ratings catnip. The ratings impact of a Trump interview has since settled down, but it's still hard to turn him down. He's the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. He's news.

There appear to be no network policies; different shows on the same network have different philosophies. Licht has turned Trump down for phoners on CBS but concedes there may be exceptions for breaking news. "CBS This Morning," in fact, aired Trump commenting by phone following Tuesday's attack in Belgium.

Since the campaign began, Trump has appeared for 29 phone interviews on the five Sunday political panel shows, according to the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. Through last Sunday, ABC's "This Week" has done it 10 times, CBS' "Face the Nation" seven and six times each on "Meet the Press" and CNN's "State of the Union."

On Sunday, Trump phoned in an 11th time to "This Week," calling from Florida. The program repeatedly flashed a stock Trump photo while the candidate demanded an overhaul of NATO, blamed rival Ted Cruz for the bitter feud targeting each other's wife and complained about the Republican Party's delegate selection process.

None of the news shows have done phoners with Cruz, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, said Media Matters, which is urging that the practice be discontinued. Cruz and Clinton declined ABC's invitation to speak by phone or in person for the network's most recent Sunday program.

The activist group MomsRising said the disparity "sends the message that some candidates can play by different rules, without consequences, and that's just un-American." A study by mediaQuant and The New York Times estimated that Trump has received the equivalent of $1.9 billion in free advertising given the media attention paid to his campaign.

A Trump spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment.

What's unclear is whether other candidates were denied opportunities given to Trump.

CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker said Trump opponents frequently turn down interview requests. During an appearance on CNN last week, former GOP candidate Carly Fiorina complained about media attention paid to Trump, leading Anderson Cooper to shoot back: "Donald Trump returned phone calls and was willing to do interviews, which was something your campaign, frankly, was unwilling to do."

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier tweeted last week that she saw Trump being interviewed via phone on "Fox & Friends" a day after Cruz was told that he couldn't do a phone interview with the show.

Fox said that since then, "Fox & Friends" has offered to conduct a phone interview with Cruz five times and has been turned down each time. Cruz did appear in the studio Wednesday. Frazier did not return requests for comment.

NBC's Todd believes that complaints about phoners are a surrogate for people who want to blame the media for Trump's success.

"You're shooting the messenger while you're ignoring what he is tapping into," he said. "It becomes a little silly when you look at the bigger picture here. The media is getting criticized for interviewing Donald Trump. If we weren't questioning him, we'd be criticized for not questioning him."

For years, cautious candidates have tended to be stingy with press access. Trump is the complete opposite. In a fast-moving information age, he may be changing the expectations for how often a candidate submits to interviews.

Todd doesn't believe it's a coincidence that he's had more access to Clinton during the past six weeks than he had during the six years she was in the Obama administration. Both Clinton and Cruz appeared in phone interviews following the Belgium attacks.

"Trump's opponents fall into two camps: Those who complain and continue to get crushed by the media wave, or those who grab a surfboard and try to ride it," said Mark McKinnon, veteran Republican political operative and co-host of Showtime's political road show, "The Circus."

___

Associated Press writer Stephen Braun in Washington contributed to this report.

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday slammed rival Ted Cruz for the recent ad produced by an anti-Trump super-PAC featuring a photo of Trump's wife posing nude.

 "From what I hear, he and his campaign went out and bought the cover shoot.  Melania did a cover story for 'GQ,' a very strong modeling picture.  No big deal," Trump said on ABC's "This Week."

"But it was a cover story for 'GQ,' a big magazine.  And it was, you know, fine.  And from what I hear, somebody bought the rights to it and he was the one or his campaign bought the rights and they gave it to the super PAC."

Trump said Cruz knew about the ad, adding he started the latest fight between the two. Last week, Trump threatened to "spill the beans" on Cruz's wife in response to the ad featuring Melania Trump. He then shared a tweet featuring a photo of his wife next to a photo of Cruz's wife, stating, "A picture is worth a thousands words."

Cruz has denied knowing anything about the ad, and called it deplorable on Sunday.

But Trump said the super PAC that produced the ad is "very friendly to Ted Cruz."

"He knew all about it, 100 percent," he said.

"There's no way in a million years that super PAC did that without his absolute knowledge."

[ Rebecca Savransky/ The Hill ]