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      ‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book says

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      ‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysFormer New York mayor’s ex-wife describes breakdown Trump helped hide, years before mutual White House drama Depressed and drinking to excess after the failure of his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Rudy Giuliani secretly recovered at the Florida home of a close friend and ally – Donald Trump.Trump stash retrieved from Mar-a-Lago runs to hundreds of classified filesRead more“We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Giuliani’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, says in a new book.Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, by Andrew Kirtzman, will be published in September. The Guardian obtained a copy.In 2018, Giuliani told the New York Times he “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing” after the primary a decade before. He has not otherwise discussed the period.Giuliani initially polled well in 2008 but won just one delegate and dropped out after placing fourth in Florida.The former mayor, Kirtzman writes, had “dreamed of becoming president from a young age, [but] blew his big moment when it arrived”.Judith Giuliani tells Kirtzman her husband fell into “what, I knew as a nurse, was a clinical depression”.“She said he started to drink more heavily,” Kirtzman writes. “While Giuliani was always fond of drinking scotch with his cigars while holding court at the Grand Havana or Club Mac, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Judith felt he was drinking to dull the pain.”Giuliani has repeatedly denied having a drinking problem. But reports of his drinking while fulfilling his late-career role as Trump’s personal attorney are legion, whether regarding his behavior around reporters or in his presence at the White House on election night in 2020, when he exhorted Trump to declare victory before all results were counted.In testimony to the House January 6 committee, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” that night.Kirtzman’s reporting of Giuliani’s little-known 2008 stay at Mar-a-Lago – a period when in Giuliani’s ex-wife’s words he was both speaking to therapists and “always falling shitfaced somewhere” – also prefigures Giuliani’s current role in American public life, as a chaotic, picaresque Trump booster seemingly impervious to personal or political embarrassment.Trump is a lifelong teetotaler but also a longtime Giuliani ally. In 2008, Kirtzman says, as Giuliani was struggling even to get out of bed, Trump came to his rescue.The former mayor and his wife, Kirtzman writes, moved into a bungalow across the street from Mar-a-Lago but connected by a tunnel underneath South Ocean Boulevard, one of many little known passages and rooms beneath the expansive resort. The secret route allowed the couple to come and go from Trump’s home without the media knowing.As Kirtzman’s book nears publication, underground rooms at Mar-a-Lago are in the news, after the FBI searched some for classified material taken from the White House at the end of Trump’s four years as president.Giuliani eventually emerged from seclusion to appear on Saturday Night Live. He made “self-deprecating jokes about the failure of his campaign”, Kirtzman writes, but “his makeup barely hid a large scar above his right eyebrow”. According to Judith Giuliani, the scar was the result of a fall when getting out of a car.Kirtzman writes that Giuliani’s third wife “was known to exaggerate, and the depth of his depression [during his secret spell at Mar-a-Lago] is something that only she and Giuliani knew for certain”. But the author also quotes friends, among them the 2013 Republican New York mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, as saying the Giulianis were out of touch at the time in question.Kirtzman recounts Giuliani’s career from his days as a hard-charging New York prosecutor to two terms as a controversial mayor, the 9/11 attacks and Giuliani’s widely praised leadership in the immediate aftermath.The author also covers Giuliani’s business deals after leaving office and his failed Senate run against Hillary Clinton in 2000.04:35In Giuliani’s meltdown after the primary in 2008, Kirtzman finds the seeds of a relationship which ultimately saw Giuliani contribute to Trump’s first impeachment, over approaches to Ukraine for political dirt, and to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts resulted in Trump’s second impeachment, over the Capitol riot, and extensive professional and legal jeopardy for Giuliani.Rudy Giuliani informed he is target of criminal investigation in GeorgiaRead moreAs reported by the New York Times, Kirtzman ultimately describes a Giuliani associate’s failed request that Trump pardon his ally in the aftermath of the Capitol attack – and give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he was at it.Giuliani and Trump had “a compelling kinship”, Kirtzman writes. “The former mayor and the famous developer were two New York colossuses, dinosaurs from another time and place.” Judith Giuliani tells Kirtzman Trump and his own third wife, Melania Trump, “kept a protective eye” on their friends.Judith, Kirtzman writes, “contends that, eight years before Washington began talking about Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump in the same breath, the future president took the failed candidate under his protective wing at a vulnerable moment.“What’s clear is the two men’s friendship survived when a hundred other Trump relationships died away like so many marriages of convenience. Giuliani would never turn his back on Trump, much to his detriment.”TopicsBooksRudy GiulianiUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansPolitics booksBiography booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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      BooksMaster of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neitherMartin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal Lloyd GreenSun 31 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTAs secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.Friendly Fire review: Israeli warrior Ami Ayalon makes his plea for peaceRead moreThe Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.For Kissinger, student and preacher of realpolitik, peace was seldom an end in itself. His pivot to China was about boxing in the USSR. To him, the cold war and existing nation states were what mattered most. The Viet Cong earned a seat at the table because US troops were bogged down. The Palestinians were not so high on Kissinger’s agenda.Now comes Martin Indyk with a 688-page, well-woven history fittingly subtitled “Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy”. The book reflects the author’s admiration for and access to his subject.Kissinger last granted Indyk an interview at the age of 97. Now he’s 98. Indyk’s wife, Gahl Burt, once worked on Kissinger’s staff. Indyk himself is a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His gigs included ambassador to Israel and Middle East envoy. A former Australian national, he volunteered on a kibbutz. He checks many boxes.Master of the Game does convey a sense that Indyk wishes his own attainments equaled those of his subject. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1998 Wye River Memorandum between the Israelis and Palestinians quickly degenerated into the second intifada, flareups in Gaza and Hamas vying with the Palestinian Authority for power on the ground.In the Obama years, Israel emerged as a partisan flashpoint in the US, like abortion and taxes, to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment and Israel’s diplomatic corps but to the delight of the Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister.In Master of the Game, Indyk lays out the run-up to the October war of 1973, the responses of the US and the USSR, and Kissinger’s nearly two-year hopscotch between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus.Indyk confirms what is widely known, that while Kissinger did not explicitly give Egypt the green light to attack Israeli-occupied Sinai, he was pleased with the outcome. The war and its aftermath presented the US with the opportunity to lure Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, even if Israel had to pay a price.The war Kissinger “had not expected at the moment”, writes Indyk, “would provide him with the opportunity to manipulate antagonisms”. Those, in turn, would help “begin the construction of what he intended to be a new, more stable American-led order in the Middle East”.Israeli combat deaths topped 2,600 – reportedly more than 1,000 in the war’s first five days. At the time, Kissinger noted that the latter figure would be proportionally equal to twice the number of US deaths in eight years in Vietnam. As a result, Kissinger coldly “assumed that when he needed Israel to accept a ceasefire it would have no choice but to do so”.Kissinger saw that a ceasefire would yield territorial concessions. He got that right but the pace was not necessarily to his liking. Disengagement arrived too quickly and then too slowly for him.In spring 1975, Gerald Ford announced the reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel. Months later, in early September, Egypt and Israel entered a second disengagement agreement, a precursor to the 1978 Camp David Accords hashed out by Jimmy Carter.While “Start-up Nation” has emerged as durable military power, Indyk yearns for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.After noting the Abraham Accords, agreements between Israel and Gulf states, Indyk contends that the “Trump administration actually made matters worse” by proposing a Palestinian entity “as a heavily circumscribed enclave within Israeli territory”. He also acknowledges that the accords took Israeli annexation of the West Bank off the table.As a Talmudic dictum goes, “avar zemano, batel korbano”. Loosely translated, the train has left the station. What applies to a sacrificial rite may pertain to politics. Even the peace process came with a sell-by date. Indyk admits that “the three presidents who succeeded Clinton” tried but failed to reach a lasting agreement, but while Jared Kushner failed to snag the deal of the century, his diplomatic achievement is tangible.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreIndyk also explores the competing tugs on Kissinger, a refugee, of loyalty, religion and ethnicity. Richard Nixon told Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, Kissinger was prone to “indulge Israel’s nationalist sentiments”. On the other hand, Israeli protestors outside Kissinger’s hotel once bellowed: “Jew boy go home.” The Jackson-Vanick amendment, which linked preferred trade status for the USSR to its performance on emigration, infuriated Kissinger.Kissinger has plenty of detractors. Against the backdrop of Nixon’s Vietnam policy, the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor and a coup and invasion in Cyprus, he has been called a war criminal.On the right, the late Phyllis Schlafly dangled Kissinger’s otherness in the face of Ford’s bid for the nomination in 1976. She said Kissinger did not understand “typical American values” and claimed that the loyalty of the German-born and accented diplomat rested with a “supranational” order.Indyk writes: “When it came to managing violent middle eastern passions and preserving peace, history’s judgment should surely be that Henry Kissinger did well.”Reasonable people will freely differ.
      Master of the Game is published in the US by Knopf
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      The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s trauma

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      BooksThe Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaA revealing blend of family lore, history, policy and anger casts light on the background and legacy of Donald Trump Lloyd GreenSun 15 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast year, Mary Trump delivered a salacious and venomous takedown of her uncle, Donald J Trump. Too Much and Never Enough doubled as awesome beach reading and opposition research dump, before the party conventions. Timing was everything.Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book saysRead moreGoosed by the Trump family’s attempt to stop publication and by simple proximity to election day, the book sold more than 1.35m copies in in its first week. Mary Trump then launched a lawsuit of her own against her uncle and his siblings, alleging they swindled her out of millions. The action remains pending, in court in Manhattan.Too Much and Never Enough had a subtitle: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. A year later, it seems a flashing red light. On 6 January, when Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol, literary hyperbole acquired prescience.Now the Trump who doesn’t need a ghostwriter – and who is also a trained psychologist – is back with a second book, The Reckoning. It is a less lurid read but a darker one too. Under a slightly less alarming subtitle, Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, she delivers a bleak prognosis.The book is a mixture of family lore, history, policy and anger. As expected, Mary Trump’s disdain for her uncle is once again made clear. At her grandparents’ home, the N-word was bandied about. Her uncle, she says, grew up racist and antisemitic. If you’re wondering how such a man might have come to conquer a political party and win the White House, think on this: Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, has discounted antisemitism in his boss – but declined to deny Trump’s race-baiting.Then there is the bravado Trump showed last October, after contracting Covid-19. “Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability,” Mary Trump writes, of the moment the then president returned to the White House from hospital, supposedly indestructible. “He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.”Mary Trump is happy to wade into policy fights. Her diagnoses of America’s ills and policy prescriptions to tackle them place her squarely on the left. It is “almost impossible to grow up white in America”, she writes, “and not be racist”. Perhaps she is too pessimistic. Yes, many of the founders owned enslaved people. Yes, it took one century to end slavery and another to end official segregation. Yes, the effects linger. Inequality is baked in. Like a ghost, the past will always hover.But the US has undeniably progressed from where it stood 75 years ago, let alone 100 further back. Barack Obama won two terms as president. Kamala Harris is vice-president. Even in the Republican party, South Carolina, for so long a hotbed of sedition and segregation, racism and repression, is represented in the Senate by an African American, Tim Scott.Wading into stormy intellectual waters, Mary Trump embraces the 1619 Project, a proposal to center racism in American history, published by the New York Times. She does admit one of the project’s original claims, that the revolutionary war was fought to preserve slavery, was “a factual inaccuracy”. In doing so she joins leading historians including Sean Wilentz and James McPherson of Princeton as critics of the project.Mary Trump is also in favor of financial reparations to Black Americans in compensation for centuries of oppression, and a vocal opponent of “broken windows” policing. Under that theory, minor disorder is cracked down upon harshly, supposedly as a way of stopping more serious crime at source but disproportionately affecting minority communities.Looking at the impact of the policy on her own city, New York, Mary Trump goes full bore at Rudy Giuliani, once mayor, and Bill Bratton, Giuliani’s first police commissioner. She contends that the impact of “broken windows” policing was minimal at best, and that a reduction in crime in the 1990s was merely part of a larger “national trend”. Loathe Giuliani all you want but he deserves credit. His New York drove that trend.She continues: “In our cities and our schools, we all would have been better off if they’d just fixed the fucking windows.” Unfortunately, Bill de Blasio, the current mayor, can’t even be bothered with that. Parts of Fun City are not terribly fun.Mary Trump puts her positions passionately but perhaps she could pause to consider how such agendas play with voters. Even under the horrors of Covid, Joe Biden was the only Democrat who could have beaten her uncle. James Clyburn, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, has acknowledged that one slogan popular on the left, Defund the Police, nearly cost control of the House.Ohio Democratic primary election: Shontel Brown defeats progressive Nina TurnerRead moreMore recently, in Ohio, Shontel Brown won a House primary against Nina Turner – a harsh critic of Biden. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, leading national progressive voices, were in Turner’s corner. Clyburn had Brown’s back. At the ballot box, moderation matters. So do coalitions.According to Mary Trump, “we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history”. This week, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, made light of her uncle’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. There is reason for more than just concern. The past five years, the age of Donald Trump, have cast a harsh spotlight on America.Each of us will see what we will see. Our cold civil war continues. With her second book, Mary Trump offers food for thought – and grist for the mill.
      The Reckoning is published in the US by St Martin’s Press ($28.99) and in the UK by Atlantic (£18.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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      Priscilla Johnson McMillan obituary

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      US newsPriscilla Johnson McMillan obituaryJournalist, author and historian who knew both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald Michael CarlsonMon 19 Jul 2021 04.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 05.38 EDTPriscilla Johnson McMillan, who has died aged 92 after a fall, was the only person who could claim to have known both President John F Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. As a young college graduate, Johnson was befriended by Senator Kennedy while she worked in his office; a few years later she interviewed the young Oswald soon after he showed up in Moscow wishing to defect to the Soviet Union.After the assassination, Johnson was given exclusive access to Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina, and her ensuing book, Marina and Lee (1977), became a key document in establishing Oswald as a lone disturbed assassin. It also prompted many researchers to point to Johnson’s close ties to the US intelligence community, not least when she received similarly exclusive access to Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defected to the US, and worked with her through translating her bestselling 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend.Johnson’s career grew from her unexpected interest in Russian language and culture. Her father, Stuart Johnson, a financier, was heir to a textile fortune; he was her mother, Mary Eunice Clapp’s, second husband. Patricia was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on the family’s estate, Kaintuck Farm, in Locust Valley, Long Island.She was educated at Brearley school in New York, then at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, one of the elite “seven sisters” female colleges, where she became the first graduate majoring in Russian studies and was active in the United World Federalists (UWF), dedicated to effective world cooperation, primarily to prevent nuclear war.After an MA at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University), in 1953 she joined the staff of the newly elected senator Kennedy, researching French Indochina. They became friends; he would call her regularly for chats. She denied any romance, “I didn’t love him; he was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew.” She was rejected when she applied to join the CIA, ostensibly because of her ties to the UWF. Oddly, her interviewer was Cord Meyer, who in 1947 had been the first president of the UWF; now he headed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, aimed at influencing media. She did translation work for a review of the Soviet press, spending much time in Russia. On Kennedy’s recommendation, she received a grant to study the Soviet legal system, and again did translation work at the US embassy. She met Truman Capote, travelling with a US production of Porgy and Bess, and is mentioned in his book The Muses Are Heard.In 1958 she joined the North American News Alliance (NANA), and in November 1959 arrived in Moscow just a day after Aline Mosby of United Press International had filed a story on Oswald’s defection. The US consul John McVickar, himself a CIA man, recommended she interview Oswald, who was at her hotel; her report on the four-hour session appeared in NANA-affiliated papers.Mosby noted that Johnson lived in the Metropol, unlike other press in their state-assigned office/residence, saying “she was a very nice person and had good connections”. Johnson was one of many journalists expelled from Russia in the wake of the Russians shooting down of an American U2 spy plane; Oswald had been a radar operator at the Atsugi, Japan base from which U2s flew.She became a visiting fellow at the Russian research centre at Harvard, returning to Russia in 1962 and writing a memorable piece for Harper’s magazine about the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak’s funeral. On her return she was interviewed by Donald Jameson, the head of the CIA’s Soviet Russia division, who described her in a memo as someone who could “be encouraged to write the articles we want … but it’s important to avoid making her think she’s being used as a propaganda tool.”Then, in November 1963, came the news of Kennedy’s assassination by Oswald; Johnson gasped as she realised: “I know that boy.” Her 1959 profile of Oswald was immediately reprinted, but with a few changes, including a final line that did not appear in the original: “This was the stuff of which fanatics are made.”In 1964, when Marina was being held incommunicado, under threat of deportation, Johnson moved in with her. With her Russian and knowledge of Lee, she won Marina’s trust, but her book did not appear until 1977. While researching it, Johnson co-edited a collection of essays, Khrushchev and The Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (1965). She returned to Kaintuck, where Alliluyeva lived while they worked on her memoir.Johnson married the journalist George McMillan in 1966; he covered the civil rights movement in the south, and published, in 1977, Making of an Assassin, showing how Martin Luther King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, acted alone. They divorced in 1980.Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F Kennedy finally appeared, coincidentally, just as the House select committee on assassinations reopened the case. Johnson testified in closed session; large sections of her HSCA testimony are redacted whenever she is asked about her intelligence connections. Her book was a major influence on Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale; Mailer blamed Oswald’s killing of the president on his sexual frustration with Marina, and jealousy of JFK. By this time Marina began to distance herself from Johnson’s conclusions, saying “it was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything”.In 1988, Johnson added another line to her Oswald interview, telling Dan Rather of CBS that Oswald had told her: “I want to give the people of the US something to think about.” Eventually, Marina would claim she was “misled by the ‘evidence’ presented to me by government authorities … I am now convinced Lee was an FBI informant and did not kill President Kennedy”.Priscilla’s obituary of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists led to her being asked to write about the hearings that declared J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb, a security risk when he opposed building an H-bomb.She received extensive access to the archives of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, but as with Marina and Lee, the research overwhelmed the writing. When The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race finally appeared in 2005, it was a year after a massive Oppenheimer biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin had won a Pulitzer prize. But her portrayal of the political shift that left Oppenheimer on the outside won praise.On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Marina and Lee was reissued. Johnson wrote of Oswald’s “unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head”. Oddly enough, the description also would suit a hapless someone who was, as Oswald himself claimed, a “patsy”.Johnson is survived by a niece, Holly-Katharine Johnson, who is working on her biography.TopicsUS newsUS politicsJohn F KennedyRussiaNew YorkCIATruman CapoteobituariesReuse this content More

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      Eleanor review: sensitive and superb biography of a true American giant

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      As the 2020 US presidential election winds toward a tortuous and dysfunctional certification, it is tempting to imagine that intrigue and machinations belong only to this particular heated moment in American life and history. That would be wrong.There is always intrigue in American politics, though nothing approaching the current state of near-sedition. We would be also be wrong if we dated the role of iconic first ladies only as far back as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, or even Jackie Kennedy. Before there was Jackie or Hillary or Michelle, there was Eleanor. Niece to one president, wife to another; activist, global citizen; mother of the Democratic party in the mid-20th century, when the mother of the party was still a thing.You will find all these identities in David Michaelis’s elegant new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, but the beauty of this robust volume is that there are so many more Eleanors to meet. Awkward girl; yearning and unappreciated wife; shy but committed romantic; resolute partner; distant mother. Michaelis, a veteran biographer, shows us all these many faces, rendering a complex and sensitive portrait of a woman who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, reimagining herself many times with both courage and resilience.Born into the strictures of upper-class white womanhood, Eleanor was conversant with and adjacent to political power from an early age. Born to a beautiful, critical mother and an affectionate, drug- and alcohol-addicted father, she might well have been identified in the 21st century as an adult child of an alcoholic, with all the needy and compliant behavior implied. Her mother, Anna, consumed with keeping up appearances, was no better than any other woman of her class; indeed, her constant mockery of the young Eleanor certainly compounded the child’s insecurity and desire to truly belong. Michaelis writes with great sensitivity, utilizing Eleanor’s own recollections and other research materials to set the backdrop for recurring themes in his young subject’s life, including her mother’s “ritualized humiliation … as often as not in front of company”, including her mocking nickname of “Granny”.With both parents and a brother dead by the time she was 10, Eleanor found herself introduced to tragedy – as well as to something steadfast within herself: “No matter what happened to one in this world, one had to adjust to it.” And adjust she did, to her grandmother’s strictures, her mother-in-law’s disdain, the ambitions of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This biography gives equal weight to Eleanor’s personal and political longings, her frustrations with her husband and her fury at his indiscretions; and her own loves, requited and otherwise.At the same time, however, Michaelis reveals, again and again, that Eleanor found her truest self through duty, hard work and sometimes punishing overachievement. She felt most loved in partnership and was misled by the illusion of it. Longing to be the center of one person’s love, she settled instead for the larger, public love of a generation as she wrote, traveled and agitated to change the world. What is especially refreshing about this biography are the ways in which Michaelis refuses to hide the fact that Eleanor’s struggles for justice had limits, drawn not only by her grudging acceptance of a political spouse’s role, but also through the limitations of her race and class.Impressively, the author does not sugarcoat or diminish the casual racism and xenophobia of the age, highlighting FDR’s use of the N-word and comfort with segregation, as well as the well-documented anti-Asian racism undergirding the internment of Japanese citizens during the second world war. Indeed, Michaelis’s framing of these deficiencies in American political life helps us to trace their provenance in our own era and allows us to see what Eleanor was up against in her bravest as well as her most timid moments.Her commitment to global citizenship and human rights served to mirror white activists in that period as well as this one: they find the courage to fight for human rights and dignity in the far corners of the globe yet choke at the exact moment when their courage could be most effective. She found herself in full command of the symbolic gesture – making it possible for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution but refusing to attend the concert herself, at a moment when such a symbolic gesture might have made a greater difference.These sections will not surprise many African or Japanese Americans. Such readers will likely have personal experience with the failures of white Americans who talk a good game about democracy and equal justice under law, but who can’t deliver when the chips are down. Indeed, Michaelis does such an excellent job of outlining Eleanor’s grueling work to bring to fruition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the country’s domestic deficiencies during and after FDR’s presidency are drawn in sharp relief. More

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      Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

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      More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”I did now. More