The Seeing of an American Family

Michael Kruse writes that he’s “never worked on a story like this.” Kruse is an award-winning journalist and a senior writer at POLITICO. In “The Breaking of an American Family,” he covers the Johnson family of Centralia, Illinois. He highlights Ted and Fred Johnson, who would vote for different candidates in the 2024 presidential election--and be willing to end their relationship over it. Kruse says “they are brothers who say they love each other but cannot talk to each other or won’t…who say they are no longer sure they even know each other.” The piece is remarkable, five chapters long, full of life, pain, and the questions we confront today in the United States. 

I encountered this article after it was assigned to me among several others, which I tried to rush through before discussing them in class. Yet I could not skim this one. It lured me in with its attention to detail and held me with its central focus: “the most important question for the Johnsons of Centralia is the most important question for us all. Can they talk again? Can we?”

I described my experience reading his story when I spoke with Kruse over the phone last week. Facing the most consequential election of my lifetime, particularly as a first-time voter, I have been searching my own life for an answer to Kruse's questions. How can I move forward knowing that my country–which includes my loved ones who are immigrants, children of immigrants, and women–has proven that its values are distant from my own? How can I forgive them? How can I understand them? 

I did not ask Kruse these questions. Instead, I asked how he could remain committed to objectivity when reporting on the most divisive topics we encounter today. This feels superhuman to me. But Kruse, who has written extensively on the Trump administration, was matter-of-fact about his answer. Listening, he said, is the only way. 

His keen eyes and ears were apparent to me on the page. I read about Ted and Fred’s parents-- their mother, Peggy, “was the last of six and had a lame left arm.” Their father, Fred, had a mom who ran “a small shop from which she sold fish sandwiches and beer” and, later, owned a liquor store. The article reveals details about Fred reciting “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” as a freshman in English class and the brothers’ dad “[tying] their right hands behind their backs with a belt so they could get better at dribbling with their left” for basketball. Kruse notes what Fred faced at war in Iraq–seeing ”bloated corpses in ditches” and learning “to write a letter to a parent of a person barely more than a boy who had died on his watch.” In these moments I felt most connected to Fred and Ted Johnson.

In fact, I felt so integrated into their lives that by the middle of the article I could no longer distinguish which brother was which--who would vote for Harris and who would vote for Trump, who had cancer and who was a high school teacher. Both were simply humans. And they were the product of “a messy mixture of love and the lack thereof.” 

I noticed a similar blurring of lines in Kruse’s role as a reporter. He was there to do his job but, at one moment, he wondered “how at this point [he] could say no” when Ted asked him for the video he’d taken at the end of Ted’s chemotherapy. Kruse “hadn’t made [the video] for him–[he’d] made it because [he] was there reporting.” But he shared it anyway. This strikes me as the same instinct that leads Kruse to use the brothers’ nicknames when asking Peggy “what’s the hurt inside of Teddy? What’s the hurt inside of J.R.?” This is the instinct that leads him to “give [Fred] a call” after receiving a text in which “it was clear he wanted to talk.”

To Kruse, the answer to what has happened in this country lies in what has happened in this family. In other words, he looks toward the “expectations set and met and not, by alcohol and depression and imperfect parents who are the children of the same, by pain passed down that comes out one way in one person or generation and another way in the next and the next after that” for answers. In our conversation, he refers to this idea as the telling of a complete story. Yet this sentiment seemed to blur the lines once more. Where did his writing advice end and his living advice begin? 

This journalist’s response to my initial question about writing–about maintaining objectivity–was really an answer about being human. The story of the Johnson family has been here all along. It exists in my own family, in the families of my friends, and in the country that has made clear its values through its vote. By helping us see the Johnsons– their past, their sickness, their hurt, their love– Kruse models the act of finding empathy by listening. And he shows us that, in the moments when we most struggle to understand each other, we must listen closer.