Book review Hold the Line – Michael Fanone and John Shiffman

Hold the Line – Michael Fanone and John Shiffman
Atria Books – 256 pp – $28

On the first Tuesday of this month, Michael Fanone sat in his mountaintop cabin, watching the presidential election results roll in on TV.

   Back on January 6, 2021, Fanone was one of the 850 D.C. Metropolitan cops who had risked life and limb by self-deploying to the United States Capitol to assist the Capitol police force in protecting the seat of American democracy from a violent takeover attempt. After outgoing President Donald Trump had repeatedly and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and that his loss to Joe Biden was “a hoax,” a mob of Trump supporters set out to storm the Capitol Building and disrupt the proceedings that would make the 2020 election results official.

   Thanks to Fanone and the rest of his brothers and sisters in blue, the illegal attempt was thwarted.

   But in the aftermath, the spin from right wing politicians soon became preposterously distorted: law enforcement heroes were deemed villains, while insurrectionists were characterized as martyrs, peaceful patriots or simply tourists who were visiting the Capitol that day, hugging and kissing the officers.

   Alarmed by this onslaught of “alternative facts” that ran completely counter to everything he had experienced during that terrible afternoon at the Capitol, Fanone agreed to testify about his experience before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

   His book, “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul,” is his further attempt to set the record straight. The book came out last year.

   Notoriety had been thrust upon Fanone after the January 6 debacle. Before then, he had relished being a behind-the-scenes guy, spending years as an undercover cop who served on the vice squad to stop public-order crimes. Working on the streets had shown him the worst of the human condition, but it also taught him about the need to view people who were down-and-out with empathy, and treat them with as much dignity as possible.

   But everything changed on January 6, when Fanone was dragged down the Capitol steps into the mob, beaten with the pole of a “Blue Lives Matter” flag, kicked, punched, spat upon, shocked multiple times with a taser, and threatened with execution by his own gun. He survived, but his life would never be the same.

   After he got out of the hospital, Fanone got together with Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and with Gladys Sicknick – she was the mom of Brian Sicknick, another Capitol cop who’d collapsed in the line of duty on January 6 and died the next day. This intrepid little group went to Capitol Hill to lobby for recognition of the role that law enforcement had played on that day of infamy. They tried to speak with the 21 Republican legislators who had actually voted against awarding  a Congressional Gold Medal to every police officer who’d been involved in defending the nation’s seat of democracy that day. Some of those Representatives went further, refusing even to shake hands with the officers who had protected them.

   Fanone and his colleagues also went to Capitol Hill to ask Republican leadership to tell its members to stop whitewashing a traumatic event that not only had impacted the blue line that prevented the disruption of the long-enshrined electoral process, but also had profoundly jolted the nation.

   Finally, Fanone and his colleagues were granted a meeting with Kevin McCarthy, who was then the Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. Recording the exchange, Fanone noted that “McCarthy filibustered, throwing out non sequiturs and bullshit platitudes.”

   The meeting with the Republican leader went nowhere, and Fanone, at one time a Trump supporter, became bitter.

   “Republicans claim to be the party of law enforcement,” he writes in his book, “… except when it’s politically inconvenient.”

   Fanone’s very first sentence in Chapter One of “Hold the Line,” is this: “My great-grandfather came to America to escape fascism.”

   His ancestor may have been an illiterate Italian shepherd, but he knew enough to see the threat of exalting a strongman leader and autocratic government to such a degree that individual liberties can be taken away – such as what religious beliefs you practice, what opportunities you have to express yourself, and – for those who can read – which books you will choose.

   Reading “Hold the Line” now – a year after it was published – is an eerie experience, given the statements issued by some of Donald Trump’s former top advisors a few weeks ago, shortly before the 2024 presidential election. Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly told a reporter for The New York Times that the former (and now future) president fits “into the general definition of fascist,” while Trump’s former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired U.S. Army General Mark Milley, called Trump “fascist to the core” in “War,” a new book by Bob Woodward.

   Fanone had already seen the handwriting on the wall, a year before the 2024 election was over and done, and Trump had won both the electoral and popular vote. With regard to the January 6 insurrection, he writes in his book, the GOP went “from condemning it to whitewashing it to legitimizing it.”

   Now retired from the Metropolitan D.C. police force, Fanone still has law enforcement on his mind. He has been engaged in policing from the level of the meanest streets, to the shiniest halls of power – and he has encountered shifty characters at all levels, along with some true stand-up individuals. (Either way, he is not afraid to name names.) So when Fanone delivers some carefully thought-out – and colorfully expressed – ideas on police reform, culture wars, racism, and the American justice system, remember that these are ideas from someone who has walked the talk for years. They deserve close consideration.

   In late July, 2021, six months after the attempted insurrection at the Capitol, Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson presided over the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol. He told the four police officers who had been summoned to present testimony, including Fanone – that they were heroes.

   “You have the gratitude of this committee and this country,” Thompson intoned. “You held the line that day. I can’t overstate what was on the line, our democracy.”

   Three years later, Washington Post reporter Kara Voght was sitting with Fanone as he watched election returns coming in. The retired cop cracked open beer after beer as the night went on and the results became plain. Trump won both the electoral and the popular vote.

   “I fought tooth and nail to prevent this day from f---ing coming,” Fanone told Voght.

   He has seen the chilling list, compiled by retired Green Beret and self-described “Secretary of Retribution” Ivan Raiklin, that contains some 300 names of Trump’s perceived “deep state” enemies. Fanone’s name is on it.

   But with “These Fools Don’t Own Me” tattooed on the back of his left hand, and “HOLD FAST” lettered across his knuckles, this hero intends to stick to his guns.

   Because for what it’s worth, America’s gratitude won’t even get you a cup of Caffè Americano.

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 Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.