Can friendship be bipartisan? Ask the Janets.
“I am prepared to give Trump the benefit of many doubts.”
It was Thanksgiving weekend 2016, and amid visiting with grandchildren at her lakeside New Hampshire home, Janet Breslin had just found a few quiet moments to reflect on the recent election in an email to Janet Nelson, one of her sorority sisters, in sun-christened California.
The two had met at the University of Southern California in the 1960s when some guys from a nearby town had recently launched the Beach Boys, “The Endless Summer” felt like a neighborhood documentary, and everything was looking up in the Golden State.
One an international relations major, the other studying art, they bonded over building a papier-mâché volcano for sorority pledge week. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would buoy them through personal crisis and political upheaval. They shared similar backgrounds: Each had roots in the Midwest, devout Christian parents, and similar arcs as young mothers. Yet their outlooks diverged dramatically as they settled on separate coasts.
So when the U.S. political scene erupted with the election of Donald Trump as president, the two Janets had much to discuss – and disagree about. Dr. Breslin, a Democrat who had lived through the 1973 military coup in Chile, taught at the National War College, and represented the United States alongside her husband when he was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President Barack Obama, was not immediately dismissive.
But she had a number of concerns that she laid out for Mrs. Nelson. “I can debate his policy positions ... but the chants and his own style and use of his wealth worry me,” she wrote in an email.
Mrs. Nelson, for her part, supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and still does today.
“A good time to be alive”A powerful bondTough conversations
