Widows who lost their homes.

Children who went without.

People who spent years believing they had done something wrong, filled out a form incorrectly, failed some test of worthiness — when the truth was that a Senator had simply decided, in an office they would never see, that their suffering was an acceptable cost of his career.

That is the particular evil of what my father was part of: it did not look like violence.

No one was struck.

It was all done with signatures and denials and polite form letters, at a clean distance, by men in good suits who never had to watch what their paperwork did to the people on the other end of it.